cdCon Sneak Peek – The CD Pipeline EP 6

Hey everyone, welcome to CD pipelines CD pipelines is a monthly sometimes more frequently, but at least monthly video series brought to you by us here at techstrong group. I'm Alan shiml CEO of tech strong and the Linux found or the Linux Foundation CDF CD Foundation. I we do this together and our representative from the CD Foundation is my co-host.

I'm going to introduce her first this show we usually introduce our last but I want to get her right in there first. Let me introduce you to Laurie Lewis. So besides being CDF, she's oh she's got a lot of other stuff Laurie.

Tell us welcome. Well, thank you Alan and thank you again Tech strong for partnering with the CDF. We value our partnership and the ability to bring continuous delivery to the broader scope of the Tech Community through this show.

So again, thank you for the CD pipeline. So yeah, so I happen to be in Atlanta today. I think I have not been in the same spot for any one of these recordings.

I'm at Dev Nexus, which is a Java User Group conference. It's jug leader Summit today. So in addition to being a marketing Outreach person for the CDF and the cncf, I'm also a virtual jug co-organizer so all about community.

And so this happens to be the largest Java conference in the US. I'm excited to be here and they're very excited to learn more about what we're doing with the CDF. So it all works out.

Absolutely. Hey for the people who are accurate named challenge, what's jug stand for? Java User Group Right cool.

Thank you, Laurie. And thank you for joining us no matter where you are. And this is like the Carmen Sandiego show but where's Laurie today?

Thank you. Let me introduce you next to our two guests today. They're both men.

Well, I'm gonna let them tell their story. Let me first introduce you to Andrew Fong Andrew. If you wouldn't mind kind of sharing kind of your story a little bit with our audience.

Thanks Alan. So my name is Andrew falling like Allen said right now, I am the co-founder and CEO of a startup called Pravana where we're focusing on building a Next Generation delivery platform that doesn't intelligently in with zero overhead prior to that. I was vice president of infrastructure at Dropbox where I spent almost a decade and before that it was at YouTube during the hyper growth period and started my career early at AOL in the early 2000s so been an infrastructure about 20 years.

I remember those AOL did we had taken over an AOL data center in Tyson's Corner and it was quite a it was I worked in I used to work in Virginia in the oh, so you probably know the building. I know the building center. Yep.

Next well, thank you. Andrew for joining us. Next up is Adam Kaplan Adam?

If you wouldn't mind giving us a little bit of your story. Well, thank you Alan. My name is Adam Kaplan.

I'm a software engineer at Red Hat. I've been at red hat for a little over five years. Now.

I started with the openshift team openshift is Red Hats distribution of kubernetes aimed at a working across all clouds. I was part of the developer experience group when I started and so we maintain the bits that helped you really just build and deploy applications on top of openshift. I've then moved on.

I'm doing more things around. Application development and secure application development and we've got a few things coming soon in the coming months. I can't really say it here, but hopefully soon you will see some news out of red hat at Summit.

So that's a little bit of a Shameless plug to see what's coming in in a few weeks. And yes before then. I was at a startup where we did a remote data collection and we're we were using kubernetes one of the earlier versions and before that.

I was at a logistics focused Tech consulting company where we helped companies ship among other things actual Freight containers as opposed to the containers that I am shipping today. So, you know, it's funny for the first three years. We rank container journal every article had a picture of those stupid shipping containers until I think people were so disgusted with the analogy of you know containers like you software containers looking like those big red boxes with the numbers on them.

I'm so glad we got away from that but that you might be the only person I've ever met that actually has a Nexus between those two Adam. So that's that's pretty darn cool. And to be honest some of the math and algorithms that you use to manage kubernetes and schedule pods on nodes.

It's not that different from the ones that you're actually using to put a shipping container on a ship or put it on a airplane truck. You name it? So absolutely interesting overlapse.

Very cool. So look the thread that kind of weaves through this and binds us here. Today is big event coming up right in early.

May I believe I want to say, it's May 8th and 9th floor is that the correct date it is and in addition to all of the accolades these two gentlemen have told you I am very happy to say that they were on the cdcon program committee, and that's why we're here today to talk about city con. Absolutely. So CD com.

And is it combined with the git Ops con or is the two separate events? So CD econ and get Ops con are two individual conferences that are combined with our keynote sessions the first day and the second day, but we're not like limiting the audience to either go to a ccon session or get Ops concession. It's more like topic focused and in that we're embedded within open source Summit North America, so it's five full days of learning and community and networking, but we just happen to be kicking it off May 8th and 9th.

Absolutely and that is in Vancouver. Right, Canada. Yeah, British Columbia.

And I'm happy to report Lori. I don't know if you know this yet but Tech strong TV will be there streaming live all week with Mike vizard and our one of our TV crew one of our it's not really TV one of our video Crews and and so, you know, hopefully we'll be doing some great cdcon and get Ops con coverage there and interviewing a bunch of the speakers and maybe even Andrew and Adam if we can get you down there. Okay, so let's start with this before we get into the speakers and the committee and all of that.

Lori if you don't mind I'm gonna ask you to describe to our audience. Kind of what? What is cdcon?

What is it? What are its goals right kind of because before you get to speakers you got to have an idea of a topics. You can have an idea of what what you want this event to be who's the attendee, right?

What's the persona? Right. So this year we really took care in how we selected the program committee for those specific reasons like we wanted to make sure that we had the right personas attracted to attend.

The event So Adam is the founder of one of the projects at the CDF and Andrew is one of our newest members and when we looked at the people that submitted to be a part of the program committee, we wanted to make sure that the projects were represented as well as like end users and community members in general. So when we think about cdcon continuous delivery conference, we wanted to have the full scope of what the continuous delivery process is from start to finish and so we were very thoughtful and and I can say that the 100% the entire committee was very thoughtful and how they selected tracks to give an attendee and we didn't really go for intro users. We went more for like sort of intermediate to Advanced users.

There are some intro sessions but we wanted to give them the meat right if you're going to go to a conference this year and you want to know about continuous delivery. You want to go to cdcon because we have the best speakers the best well thought out track the the best sort of overall encompassing of what it is to do CD. Excellent.

I'm so over speaking. Am I guys? Okay.

No, that's what I actually, so Andrew Adam, I'm gonna throw both at you and you both of you can answer not at the same time. Let's talk about your experiences being on this community. Well, I guess we should have you ever been on a speaker selection committee before like like this and let's hear a little bit about what the experience was.

I mean, I know there was a tremendous response with speaker submissions like hundreds of people. Submitted session. I think we had net over 200 submissions, right Lori.

Wow, across citycon and get UPS Khan and there were plenty of submissions that covered both. So just the Not just the testing and of the applications, but also delivering it and deploying it using gitops Technologies. So is your a exciting to see but also was very daunting going through each one of the absolutely so just a good idea how many out of the 200 some odd submissions how many actually are selected to to present at CD Larry.

Do you know the number off the top of your head? I think the Blank Stare on my face would let you know you. 30 maybe 30 I think 35 to 3500 you might have a better chance of applying to Harvard.

But anyway guys talk to me what you know, what what was your experience in going through these 200 odd sessions? And what made you pick who you pick? for me I Spell it automatic answer in a second here.

But I had I had been lucky enough to start a conference s Recon back in the day about 10 years ago and the and we really struggled for submissions early on and my understanding is this is not like this is one of the earlier CD cons and just a passion that people put into the number of submissions and the amount of care around developer experience the amounts of empathy people wanted to talk about in terms of developer experience. Also sort of just the raw technical came through in this there was there it talks for highly technical but at the same time is tied everything back together until terms of like workflow and business value. It didn't feel like these were just sort of off the wall as a former googler.

I really dislike talks that are just like oh this is what we did at ex company and it never will work for you because it's you have to be at this scale to get it these talks actually felt like they were usable by people in the wild and they weren't going to be these esoteric sort of Concepts that just make no sense outside of you know, this the hik colors interesting Adam. What about you? I would have to agree with that sentiment there were a lot of very strong talks and I found myself as I was going through them all just like trying to trying to picking the sort of best ones.

tended to be challenged because there were a lot of just good solid content from the community in general and to Andrew's point it some of it was not just about things that work for a Google for a red hat for someone who is operating at the scale of thousands and thousands and thousands of servers with like thousands of Engineers. There were plenty of things that were about just general best practices that can help just a startup that wants to deploy a mobile app or a regular kind of your typical like three-tier application all old school three three tier application. And so I think what we hooked when we put it all together is that there's something for everyone here not big companies small companies companies that are growing and another thing that we talked about too as we were coming together in the committee is in our current climate.

Talking about how teams can do more with less since so many so much of the tech industry right now is encountering headwinds or looking at either Workforce reductions layoffs or hiring freezes. So we wanted to make sure that teams or people when they come to the conference if they're looking for something that will help them do more and be more productive with what they have that they can find something that will help them out. Absolutely, and I think you know Laurie touching a little bit before right?

You're Aimee get an intermediate. User audience and above not necessarily the Newbie, so there is some newbie. kind of thing, but what do people want they to Adams why they don't want to hear fluff about how 800 pound gorilla hyperscaler right round there.

com Hearing about unicorns can be inspirational but it's not necessarily. Jermaine to my life or to my experience or to my needs. I want to not hear from the unicorns.

I want to hear from the horses. Right because there's a lot more horses than there are unicorns and most of us. You know are part of the the horses if you will and and so, you know, it's important.

I think to have that kind of mindset when you're picking these kinds of sessions. So we we've danced around a lot Lori. I sense you want to say something I do and it kind of goes back to the idea of inspiration.

So our second day of talks and Adam, you can correct me if I if I misspeak but we we're We found sessions that were submitted that we thought. Oh, no, this needs to be a keynote session. Like this is something that we want the entire audience to hear and there's one that is based on developer empathy and we sat down with krishnal and we're like listen your talk is supposed to be 30 minutes.

We're scrunching you down to 20 minutes. Is that something you can do and then he went through his presentation with us and it was like taking a session and making it into a keynote is really shifting things and following his story and and hearing like how he grew as an individual how he's mentoring people how he's doing all these things like you never know in this climate like what job you're gonna end up with right? Like are you laid off today?

Are you switching positions is your company like downsizing so you're taking on more roles and this idea of developer empathy and making sure that you pay it forward and that you are looking at the bigger picture along the way, you know, that is something that we thought was crucial and critical to include in our lineup and Everyone know we are all in this together and you can't you can't deny that like two people away from you have just gotten laid off or like you look at Twitter. And so to Adam's point and to Andrew's Point like we wanted to make sure that this wasn't fluffy but it was real world usable. You're gonna go home knowing something feeling connected and having some tips to hopefully make you more productive, but also a better like colleague a better co-worker.

I think one one thing to add on to that is that when I think about why delivery is so important. It's the core of engineering processes in a lot of ways, right? Like we think of like writing code as something that you know developers do all day long, but you know where it gets brought to the real world and where it actually materializes is through delivery.

And so almost every single developer is going to touch it in some way and so for me the to build on what Lori's saying the empathy and just it's the Nexus of all the engineering processes they all meet at that point. And so it's just very important that everyone understands exactly how people are feeling as they go through and deliver software to the end user. a great a great so guys look we're 20 plus minutes in here.

It's time. Let's start hearing about some of these Keynotes and speakers. Who did you pick who wants to go first?

I can tell a story about why I think Fatima from Yelp why this one is really important to me personally. Okay, and the keynote is the survival guide to being a junior engineer. And for me this really tugged at a heart string.

I when I used to run infrastructure for a large company We run into this problem where interns were crying and there were really afraid of not getting return offers because they couldn't get their software into production because development environment wasn't working deployment systems just didn't weren't put together correctly at least for the for junior Engineers. Right like you think about the mid-cur and senior people they always find workarounds. Right?

Like we've all been in organizations that all works but that you know, you're there for three months and your job is to ship a small piece of software and actually get it, you know, and this is what you're evaluated on and that's how you get your return offer. And for me this talk really goes to the heart of that. Right?

Like we don't talk enough about what it's like to be there on day one or day two is a junior engineer or an intern and so I think it's really important that that this group and you know, the engineering World At Large understands what those Engineers go through on a day-to-day basis. It's very different from us that have built 10 15 20 30 year careers. And so I'm really excited to see Fatima talk about this and actually, you know talk about from her perspective.

So all of us that are building things can actually think about what it's like to be a junior engineer on day Zero again and actually work on removing some of the complexity frankly that's there in the world of cloud computing today. Excellent. So that that that's a good one Adam.

Look what's your favorite? What was your big one? So I would have to go with kunal's talk which I Lori alluded to earlier about developer empathy.

I have been a fan of kunal's work for a while now, he he's at sivo but for years now he has been making content on YouTube all typically about Cloud native developer experience how to be a great developer in the modern world and to get back to what Lori was saying that the big thing that I think folks will get out of it is about the message of like paying things forward and leaving things better than when you found them and it's it's so important particularly as someone like myself who is a more senior engineer being more of an engineering leader in an organization. having that empathy and mindset of what your teammates your Juniors new people are experiencing being able to understand what their pain points are and then As someone who is might be more senior more prominent in the organization being able to know what you can do to make it better and how to level up everyone around you. So I'm very excited for for that one on day two day.

I do want to call out day one as well. We've I also really like the one that's going to come from the New York Times. the difference between screwing around in science That was a that was a fantastic proposal that came in and when we saw it, we just said it screamed that this needs a bigger stage than just a session.

So I want to plug that one as well. Can you give us more information on that one other it's from The New York Times, but anybody have a speaker or the exact title or? Yes, so the title is the the difference between screwing around devops and science gitops is writing it down.

It's from Eve Ben Ezra New York Times and Luke Phillips, and they are going to talk about their it's part of their journey to get ups with from their sort of dub UPS mindset and How they are trying to do what they're doing at the New York Times at at their level of scale, which if you think about it, you know the New York Times. In terms of Manpower people for the technology team might not be so large, but in terms of the number of people who they serve. They are operating at probably one of the largest scales that you can think of.

Household name that's who's yeah. Hey Laura. I've got a couple.

Yeah Okay, so we've hidden on some key notes, but I'm gonna talk about some sessions. So there's one and I think it goes to this whole idea of what we've been talking about and it's by Robert Reeves and it's called continuous delivery dealers value. And so do you how to get the budget build your case and be the hero so it's really like making a play for why you want to do what you want to do why this tool is more important why your company should switch platforms or not have a platform why you should like and how to how to State your case in a way that makes sense.

I think a lot of times we get stuck in our silos and we don't know how to ask for money. We don't know how to ask for Budget. We don't know how to sell up to our sea sweet level, you know, we just talk to our manager, but maybe we're not talking in the right language so that I think that one's really good in terms of like just general like knowledge that you need at any level of your organization to be able to get your point across and to show Value I think sometimes we really get stuck on that part, you know, like we all have metrics and kpis and this that and the other but like how do you talk we cross talk?

Right? We don't talk the same language. Is that Robert Reeves from liquid base?

Yes, so he's a great presenter too. Hi Robert. It's a good friend of mine.

And yeah, he's a great person to get up there. He's a it's quite a character and man. I would have come out just to listen to him.

I didn't know he was talking. All right, so that's one And then there's another one that Fidelity is doing and it sort of shows their journey and how they're using two projects and coming up with the POC. That's all about interoperability and using CD events and how they're taking this idea of having all these different orgs with infidelity all these different like old school infrastructure that they just have been trying to build upon, you know, talk about global organization.

They have pods everywhere and what they're doing to try and bring everything together under the same roof and notice when events happen so they can automatically, you know, make the changes that they need moving forward. So I think that one's gonna be really cool Fidelity always has really good talk. Yeah, they do very happy.

Yeah to have them there. big big yes Can I plug one from I think this this talk from Intel Smart Control plan for ci/cd pipelines for me. We talked it this encapsulates sort of the state of the world or where we need to move for for the state of CD at this point, you know, they touch on topics where they basically cover sort of the history of how we got to where we are which is very static if you think about how deployments evolved and then they talk about sort of the evolution of the org in the org structure and how so many more stakeholders are actually involved in deployment now and that the existing processes in technology are a little bit falling behind when it comes to what is a modern software practice look like and I think their Intel seems to have touched on some some forward looking ideas around how you know, you have everyone from security to compliance and it's no longer a static system.

It needs to be a much more Dynamic when you start when you think about how deployments work in a cloud native world, and so I'm super excited for this one certain Year to my heart. A great that sounds like a good one, too. Everyone did too you only did one.

I guess you're next. so I've got two sessions that I'm going to plug that are more technically oriented for folks who do want to have that kind of like more technical meat first is a Shameless plug for my own talk, which is a save your pipelines and clusters with techton results checked on results is a project that I'm now maintainer of along with a debio at Google. So we're going to be presenting this new come.

Well, I guess it's not it necessarily a new component, but it's been reinvigorated and we're now getting it more Progressive production grade. So that folks who are running tecton not just at scale but also are just running tecton for a very long time for their cicd. This is a tool that I think folks will find useful that will maintain the health of their entire cicd system and help developers over time being able to like see their data for in a stable archive.

The other talk that I want to highlight that really caught my attention in. The program committee was the is from Dwayne McDaniel at gate Guardian called security does not need to be fun ignoring oauth oauth to have a terrible time. This is all about adding o wasp tooling to your CID cicd pipeline so that you can ensure that you're deploying a secured safe application to your end users and production and catch those easy kind of top 10 kind of dangers before you go to production versus having to deal with the consequences after Very cool.

I like that one as well. I always love a good security one anyway, but so guys it sounds like we've got some really fantastic sessions it is two days and one day Lori is sort of. You know going where no person has gone before kind of thing really kind of interesting Innovation sort of Cutting Edge and that's day two day one is more.

you know Stand and Deliver if you will, right the the tradition. Yeah, and our last so the key. So these are kind of how we framed out the the Keynotes right like have a strong sort of standard delivery day and then the next day like let's leave people with some inspiration for the rest of the week.

And the last keynote of the first day is the panel and it's a panel with graduated projects. So really just kind of hearing their story on how they got to graduation stage like how they're currently working and you know, all of the cool things that happened along the way and what they're innovating on now, so we wanted to make sure that you know, we we covered all the bases and as you can see from Adam and Andrew like how they're getting so excited when they talk about not just the the empathy developer empathy, but then when they get really into the nitty-gritty into like the tech topics like this is what it has been like the entire program committee. We've had multiple long sessions going back and forth over one session to another to make sure that we were hitting all of the checkboxes.

So I just want to give a shout out to everybody. That was on the program committee that this by far was amazing. And anybody that's looking to add people to a program committee.

Look at our roster and go ahead and snag those names because very thoughtful insightful and full of energy and care for for the audience and for for the program. They're committing creating. excellent guys If you don't mind, I want to take a little time to kind of help educate the audience for people who may want to participate here.

Lori if I'm not mistaken you do you need a separate registration for CD can't get UPS Khan or just registering for the LF open source. Summit is enough. You can combine the two so you they're definitely they're separate registrations, but you can add on so if you're already going to open source Summit North America and you're like, oh my gosh I missed the first two days.

You can go back and add cdcon get up Contour your registration and the same thing if you're going to citycon and get UPS Connie didn't realize it was co-located with open source Summit North America you can add that on as well. and I don't know if anyone knows this. Is there a charge how much is it?

So people can kind of get an idea. to attend these I think our early bird rate and April 14th. So there's still time there's still time and that's it's the standard Lori early bird expired earlier this month.

Oh, okay. So April 14 to get it in at the current rates to help save some dollars. Yeah.

Thanks Adam and it is in Vancouver. And does anybody remember the venue? Was it like a Convention Center or hotel or It's the convention center right there on the Harbor.

I've never been this is gonna be my first time going to Vancouver since I was in high school. Yeah. I know the the planes do still fly in and out.

And if you have nothing to do one afternoon, and you want to sit and drink what you know, they call it a Bloody Caesar which is kind of like a bloody mary but it's with Clamato juice instead of tomato juice and it's celery salt around the rim. And it's delicious. Now.

I may not be on a program committee, but you want to know drinks. I'm your man. Anyway, yes it a lot Vancouver's a lot of fun.

It's a great town. It's a great place to go to a conference and and we should mention this is only two days of five days of Open Source learning and Linux Foundation activities here. I believe the the open ssf gonna be there too Lori with something.

I'm yes, so Wednesday they have open ssf day and I think it's just like another add-on but it's very like minimal fees. And so they have a full like day of security session. So yeah, like the Linux Foundation really I think did everyone a service by putting five you together or technical days together in a variety of Open Source vendor neutral everybody's high-fiving and yeah, so get upon city con open source open ssf and then open source Summit North America just boom Absolutely, that's great.

And of course, this comes a little less than a month after kubecon's Cloud nativecon over a European Amsterdam, so it is a busy time of year. For Linux Foundation folks out there, right? Yes good.

All right. I'm gonna give each of you one last. I mean say you want to talk about another session or you just want to talk about your experience or tell people why they should come.

Right why this is the I can't miss event. And and then we'll wrap it up Adam if it's okay, I'll start with you and then we'll go to Andrew and we'll give Lori the last word. Sure first Alan.

I want to thank you for giving us this forum to Hype up cdcon and get UPS Khan and talk about the event. I also want to really shout out to Lori who as like head of has the as the Outreach chair for us CDF and kind of the chair of our program committee. She did a phenomenal job keeping us organize on track motivating us helping drive those conversations that we had on the committee when we were selecting those talks.

I also want to thank Andrew and everyone else who is on that program committee we I think we we did a phenomenal job. I love the conversation that we had some very deep honest conversation of the state of where the industry is and the art is in terms of delivering software the challenges that we have in the places that we need to go and I certainly learned a lot as this is I think the first time I've ever been on something like this, so I just want to say thank you to all of you. This was wonderful.

I would be happy to do anything with you guys again. period cool Thank you, and thank you for your time and efforts on Anatomy. I could tell how much you put into it.

Andrew how about you? Um, so for me first, I want to Echo everything Adam said this was a lot of fun to put this together first and foremost. I think that anytime you put an event together.

It has to be fun and I always think that it starts from the the leadership the program committee. It just it was a fun time. So for me that tells me that the conference is gonna be a fun time and the topics are going to be interesting.

There's gonna be spirited debate. I Like I said earlier delivery is such a part of an Engineering Process that I just fundamentally think that if you're not there you're not you're going to miss out on something critical about how to do engineering and there's it's becoming the Nexus point in sort of a mucks or of all things that are about software it all goes through delivery. And if you're an engineering leader and you're thinking about efficiencies or you're thinking about how to run streamline organizations, it's going to come down to delivery at some point.

I saw great quote from somebody. I can't remember the person but they're talking about Ai and delivery might be the one part that of that one part that I may not be able to actually make great headwinds in because it does require human judgment and requires a level of thought that is just different than the rest of the engineering processes that can be automated and so I think that being here and understanding sort of where delivery is going and what's the state of the art today is like critical to any engineering leader. So that that's my plug for why I should come it's just it's the heart of engineering processes.

Love it good stuff. Lori take us home. Okay.

So again, thank you to textronk for letting us do the CD pipeline. Thank you to the program Committee in all of the speakers that are going to be at citycon and everyone that's submitted we have plenty of things to do throughout the year. So don't feel like just because you didn't get in doesn't mean we don't want to hear from you and I think Andrew like said it best like this is the human part of of what devops what CD is like is coming up with this sort of content having the people tell you how they're making their machines work how everything is trying to work together, and I think cdcon is gonna be a great place for you to network to find peers to be able to find support systems outside of your own organization to have more Innovation more thought leadership and would love for you to be there May 8th and 9th in Vancouver.

foundation to find out more about it. You can just Google cdcon 2023 to get the link and again, you know Alan it's always fun working with you on these. So I appreciate Keeping me around and yeah Foundation CD pipeline text on TV.

We love it all. Yeah, we love you bringing the energy Larry. We need the energy.

Hey, enjoy Atlanta. Enjoy that jug. Right conference for those of you who are paying attention in the beginning of the show.

There it is the ATL. We're gonna wrap up this event this episode of CD pipe pipeline. We'll be back on next month with another show.

And actually I think my next month we will be in Vancouver live. So you do check that out on Tech strong TV Adam Andrew Laurie. Thanks so much for joining us many thanks to our executive producer Jody actually Who Behind the Scenes kind of lose this all together for us.

Thanks Jody and to our our av team and everyone else this Alan Shimmel for Tech strong. Have a great day everyone.