DevOps, Jenkins and GenAI – DevOps Chats Podcast EP 1

Welcome to DevOps Chats, the industry leading podcast for DevOps, digital transformation, cloud native, and cybersecurity. If it's happening, it's happening on DevOps Chats. Hey everyone, I'm Alan Shimel, and this is Mitch Ashley.

And you're listening and watching now DevOps Chats. Yeah, Mitchell, it feels like, uh, wow, it's been a while. It's been a minute.

As they say, the cool kids say, I feel like we're Jake and Ed in the Blues Mobile. You know? Absolutely.

Maybe we should be wearing dark sunglasses, I don't know. But, but seriously, I mean, for those of you who may be tuning in for the first time, Mitchell, Ashley and I, I've heard Mitchell and I have been doing podcasting No s**t since maybe 2004. Four, yeah.

Yep. Yeah. And so it's 20 years, 20 years of doing podcasting.

Of course, we didn't have video podcasts then, did we mention? Oh, no, we didn't. And we just did it wherever we were on the road, you know, hop on Skype and record with Amela, or I think Yes.

Do you remember that? Unless you were losing the, the podcast equipment, which we won't get into that, that, that happens in San Francisco, I hear. Yeah.

A lot. Yeah. Um, but anyway, look, and, you know, for a long time it was originally still secure after all these years.

Mm-Hmm. Podcast, and then it was Security Boulevard and DevOps Chats, which this is, so this is probably the fourth or fifth iteration of podcast series that Mitch and I have done together over the years. And, you know, you, you'll get a flavor for what we're gonna do.

We try to have a good time. We try to keep it casual, but we try to keep it real and, and interesting. Mm-Hmm.

And, and that's what we're going to be doing here today on, uh, this iteration of DevOps Chat. And, uh, Mitch, we're gonna try to do this what, every week? Yeah, we are.

We are. And by the way, you know, this demo chat is proof that you can't keep a good podcast down. You know, that's one way of looking at it.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Um, you know, and it is available as a video podcast, but we, we know only about 40% of podcasts are listened or watched as videos.

So if you're listening to this as an audio file, that's cool too. We're gonna try not to do anything that, you know, you're gonna have less of an experience because you're listening to audio versus video. It's not like Mitchell and I are, uh, two male models here, you know, and you're missing some eye candy.

A face made face is made for audio podcast Exactly. To adapt for. So we'll go from there.

But, but that being said, you know, here on DevOps Chats, in addition, you know, to Mitchell and I benter, we're gonna try to cover what we think are the big, the big stories around DevOps. com Mm-Hmm. You know, our tech strong, uh, flagship site, uh, as well as Techstrong tv, which, uh, we do three days a week, about three, three and a half hours a day of programming.

So we'll be referencing, uh, content from there. And we will keep in the show notes any, uh, URLs or links to Yep. To these.

We, we may even be able to throw up some QR codes if you are watching it on video for you to check the, that content out. Um, so diving right into it, Mitch, where do you wanna start off? It's, it's January still 20, 24 New Year.

Where, where would you like to start in this new year? com, do you, what do you know about DevOps? And I said, well, not much yet, but let me go fi figure it out.

You know, one of the first things that I implemented, uh, where I was at the time was Hudson, and which turns into Jenkins, of course. com about that. I absolutely, absolutely.

I think Jenkins, I think some people are, are still Mitchell a little surprised when they hear that Jenkins still commands. I, the latest number I saw was from the, uh, CD foundation did a survey, I think last November, Hmm. Or October.

And it said, according to their survey, and believe it or not, 43% of CICD is still done via Jenkins, which is astonishing, astonishing. But I, but Mitch, before we jump into the two articles, and I do look forward to jumping into them because they're good. I think that whole kinda revelation that Jenkins is still as big as it is, goes to something deeper and bigger.

And that is how big DevOps is. Mm-Hmm. You know, in, in 2023, and maybe even a little in 2022, you know, there were rumblings and grumblings in the market platform.

Engineering's the new DevOps. DevOps is dead. That's marketing stuff.

But a lot of people were saying, you know, we're not getting the DevOps we hope for, we're not getting the ROI, we're not getting the, the magic that we wanted. And maybe it's not, you know, all this kumbaya and maybe the tools and, and everything else. com, we have a, a responsibility, right?

This is our cross to bear, so to speak. This is our thing to, to champion. DevOps is alive and well by almost any metric you wanna look at, use of Jenkins being one of them.

But go look, you know, Google searches around DevOps topics, they haven't fallen off at all. They've grown. com had one of the best years they've had in years.

We've had, you know, in terms of readership and views and everything. com, and it's not anymore. Right.

DevOps has, has been catching up. So I, I don't buy into the DevOps is dead thing at all. I I, I do think what we're seeing though is like every other technology and framework, and, you know, you and I have been around the block.

You, you have that hype cycle. Mm-Hmm. It went, it was overly hyped.

It went into the trial of disillusionment. Now it comes out the other side into whatever was called the plateau of plateau of something. I remember.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I've seen the same thing.

Yep. And I, I think that's, that's what we are, are experiencing. com, but you know, I've, I've had a chance to talk to some DevOps leaders.

Spoke to Jody Bonai, who's the CEO at harness, and was the founder, CEO of AppDynamics, also founder, CEO of traceable ai, spoken to KK KoSA. K the founder of Jenkins. Yeah.

Yep. Spoke up to Sasha Re the found co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloudy, spoken to, uh, David DeSanto from GitLab and, and Ashley Kramer from GitLab mm-hmm. Uh, Shlomi, my friend Shlomi Ben Hay from Jfr and Steven Chin from Jfr.

And they all, I mean, these are, these are public and big companies, and they all say the same thing. DevOps ain't going anywhere. No.

As a matter of fact, they think we've entered a new era of DevOps, right? Where call what happened before Gen one, and I hate to use the term DevOps two, oh, that's an overused kind of paradigm. But, you know, in, in the, in the first phase of DevOps, we, as Jody says, Jody Barnack, we car cobbled together tools to make sort of a coherent DevOps platform or, you know, an end-to-end DevOps story.

But now we're in a new era where we have purpose-built, that's a word from still secure, right? Purpose-built appliances. Mm-Hmm.

We, we have purpose-built DevOps tools that are, were designed from the ground up to do that whole job from A to Z, not just the ICD or testing or an IDE or, or, or Git or, or something like that, a repository. Um, and I think the other thing is where people used to kind of poo p the, the, uh, cultural aspect of DevOps. I think it's, it's taken for granted now that yes, cross-functional teams aren't a bad idea.

They're not a bad thing. And we see cross. And that's really when you get down to the cultural aspects of DevOps, those cross-functional teams working together in harmony.

Not to sound too kumbaya, um, that's what DevOps is about. Tear was forming in my eye, but Yeah, I got you right there, Mitch. Yeah.

You have me at Harmony. Yeah. But, um, you know, like three dog night.

But anyway, um, I mean, what do you think Mitchell? Y you know, it's, I, I'm just kinda reaching back when I first started talking to people out about DevOps, once I kind of felt like I had a handle on it, um, I would always say, you know, yes, there's DevOps tools and there's technologies and a lot of things that kind of are, are kinda go in place to have a, a tool chain and a pipeline workflow, all that kind of stuff. Um, but if you step back for a minute, it's kinda like agile.

You could say Agile is sprints. Well, yeah. That's just the mechanism.

What it's, what it is about is deciding how you're gonna build what you're gonna build, doing, uh, resource constrained, time, resource constrained, uh, development and, and pushing out releases more quickly. Well, DevOps has its flavor of that, right? It's, yes, it's cross-functional teams, just like Agile was.

It's about how do we create software in smaller increments, smaller bys, whether you deploy 'em, you know, fast or not, but being able to automate how often they get, uh, checked in and built, you know, the CICD process, which is kind the heart of DevOps, right? So where most, if not all, people start implementing DevOps. But suffice it to say DevOps is about how you create software, not the tools you use to create software.

Yes, it's the tools too. But it's changing how you think about creating software. And some of it is, is, uh, culture.

Yeah. It's, it's not the silos and the pipes and the, you know, monolithic organizations as well as monolithic applications, but it's also software architectures and, and automating things so that you create flow through the process. So what I was thinking about when you were talking, Alan, is it does remind me of agile.

Agile hasn't gone away. We still use Agile. We use a lot of agile principles in, in DevOps where you technically, you know, do scrums and all that kind of thing.

And DevOps hit that has hit that sort of mainstream place where, you know, pretty much everybody is doing it, at least in some form. Mm-Hmm. And I think it's real strength is how it's adaptable, right?

Not every organization's gonna behave like a greenfield. Let's start out, you know, we'll set this up like we wanna do it the right way. You know, a lot of folks are living in mainframes or living with legacy applications or live in this bifurcated world of some of everything.

And yet have to adapt to, to what your environment is and also what your organization can, can do. How much change and how do they work and can, and how fast. So I agree.

I think it's adaptability is its real strength. Yeah. And, and again, it goes back to the look, there was never a manifesto.

It was hard to pin down a definition of what it is. Exactly. And I think, you know, the, the upside of that is it gives it this adaptability that it could be anything you want it to be.

Mm-Hmm. Absolutely. And you Don't get, and that's interesting, DevOps, religious wars, you know, like we're used to back in the Nah, yeah.

We, the methodology We much of that, God knows. Yes. Um, but, but let, so, you know, so that's the good news on DevOps today from, uh, pastor Mitchell and, uh, rabbi Allen over here, the high priest of DevOps.

But there We go. You know, the other thing is, I, we, you and I, both Mitch, have had a chance to stay in touch with a lot of the people who helped kind of found the DevOps movement. Like our friend John Willis and Damon Edwards.

And, and Patrick Dewa, the guy that godfather DevOps himself. Wayne Coin is here in our offices just in August for this AI hackathon We did. And we spoke about some of this stuff.

And yes, DevOps isn't new anymore. It's 10, 12 years old. Mm-Hmm.

But it's still relevant. And, and to sit and start trying to fight about is it real? And, and some of the religious stuff that when, you know, we, we fought about early on, that's not relevant either, right?

It's, it's full speed ahead. Let's, let's build software and deploy it as fast as we can and best quality that we can. com recently.

One was actually in December, and it was, um, I, I actually have it here and I'll bring it up. It's the future of Jenkins in 2024. And it was by Gilead, David Mayan.

And it, it's a great article. I I highly, highly recommend it. Um, and it laid out a really, I think, valid point of view of what you're doing with DevOps, um, or excuse me, with what you're doing with Jenkins.

Yeah. And look, for me, the real kind of crux of the issue with Jenkins is where does it fit in, in a cloud native world where Cloud native has become the kind of defacto compute standard? Does Jenkins have a place there?

Much like years ago we asked, does Puppet have a place there? Does Chef have a place there? Ansible, you know, and I think the markets answered those questions, but yet Jenkins holds on, as we said, 43% market share.

So maybe it does have a place there. I remember. We see, I'm sorry, go ahead.

No, I think a couple things is, it has longevity and momentum, right? You're not just gonna rip and replace Jenkins tomorrow 'cause you're on a whim, right? There's something looks a little shinier than what you've got.

It, it, it really runs the roads. I mean, it runs the pipelines of CIU. You said that to be a good reason to either supplement it or replace it.

I, I think that one of the points of the article was, um, things have moved to declarative GI ops, um, YAML files, things that we use to, to configure, uh, you know, helm files in, in, uh, in Kubernetes land. And, and is, is, uh, Jenkins or the kind of the old approach, if we will, to CICD, uh, too, uh, stiff, too rigid, gonna be flexible enough. Can it be adapted to Cloud Native?

And if it's gonna be adaptable to cloud native, do you have to be using cloud native technologies? Now you can dig into the Jenkins code and find out how much of that kind of thing that they've adopted in. And I know they've worked on that.

Um, but it's a good question to ask, is that the right way to do it? Or do we need continue to evolve? And what do we evolve to?

Well, to me, it was sort of a ham comes to the mountain, or the mountain comes to Hamed kind of thing. And in that, I think at some point, some of the folks in the Jenkins community said, no, Jenkins isn't right for Cloud native. And they, and we spun up Jenkins X, which was in my mind, always Jenkins for Kubernetes.

Yep. Um, but I don't know, as, as we sit here today, what the support for Jenkins X is at this point. It, it's, um, relatively young project.

Right. It just got promoted. Yeah.

But I don't know if it's getting the support of the Jenkins community. I mean, the Jenkins look, the Jenkins community is the reason why Jenkins still has 40% of market. Absolutely.

It's a strong independent community. Well managed, well run for the most part. And, you know, Jenkins X was different, yet not, and you know, I, I think at some point, the smart thing was to somehow subsume it in the Jenkins, but at some point, maybe we'll get some folks from the Jenkins community on here and talk about that.

Yeah. Yep. But I, you know, after that article ran, I remember getting on in a discus, a discuss comment.

Someone said, you know, they had, they thought differently Around this whole issue of Jenkins' future. And I said, Hey, if you feel this strongly, you should write an article about it. Mm-Hmm.

And, and they did. And, and that was the second article I wanted to, uh, bring up. And it's Jenkins and Jenkins X in 2024.

And it's by, uh, Tiziano Ano, who I, I think is out in, in Italy. I'm not a hundred percent sure. But, um, he wrote a beautiful article here.

It's a little long, but it's well worth the read. And again, we'll have the, uh, URLs either on a QR code here for you if you're watching video, or in the show notes if you're not with links. But again, I, I would really urge you to read that art.

I would read both articles taken as a a, an A and a B. And between the both of them, you're going to get as much Jenkins as you can stand Part one and a part two. 'cause he refers to the first article that Yeah, no, it, it definitely, right.

It's a, I would think it's an op-ed to the first article. That's a good way to look at it. Yeah.

Right. And, um, or a rebuttal. And, and I, you know, but you need to read them both, I think, to really get a great handle on it.

I want to, and by the way, both of these articles are not written by paid tech strong writers. com. We thank you for that.

We, you know, we encourage people watching and listening to this show. If you feel strongly about something DevOps related, you two can submit Yep. com will, will get you there for that.

But those are, those are two really good articles, Mitch, that I wanted to, to bring up. And they're specifically the Jenkins, but they, I think they go to the whole DevOps thing. Mm-Hmm.

Yep. Absolutely. Good stuff.

Thank you. Next up, people that wrote those. Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you to both of them. Next up, I wanted to go kind of from the old to the new, so talking about, is Jenkins still relevant?

And let's jump ahead to what's the deal with AI and DevOps. Right? Right.

Is there, is there, I mean, DevOps, are we going to see a copilot for DevOps kind of thing? Right. com that's gotten some attention is, uh, using LLMs to automate pipeline conversions from Legacy to Teon.

And it's by Siva, oh, I'm gonna mess this one up. Siva Guan. And the idea here is Look Ton, which was a Google, uh, project.

Right. I, it's not CNCF, I'm pretty sure though. Yeah.

Um, it's very popular. It's a popular, popular tool here. Um, how can we use LLMs in that generative AI to make it better?

And, and, and I, you know, the gist of the article, if you haven't read it, is Percy does a really good job of laying out why you want to me migrate to Teton if you're on Jenkins or spinnaker, or, or some harness or some other CICD tool. And that's, I guess, a personal choice, the pros and cons. And then if you are gonna do that though, here's how you could use LLMs and AI to kinda supercharge it.

Mm-Hmm. And, you know, it, it, as I mentioned, it got a lot of hits up on the site, but I think it's, it's a reminder again, we're in this next evolutionary phase of DevOps, and DevOps is staying current with what's going on out there, but it's adaptable. And, and I think this is kind of living proof of it, Mitch Is, and you know, it goes right to what you were talking about before of okay, it is Kubernetes based.

It's doing Kubernetes automation, it's declarative, you know, that's, you know, and, and it's also kind of working in a stateless type of environment. So a lot of the modern principles of software design that we apply to our applications today, it's, it's rebuilt the idea of CICD pipelines and the tools and the platform technology that, that run that. And it was interesting, you know, you think of LLMs and ai, what's the next great thing it's gonna give us, you know, I think a deep thought back to, uh, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

You know, what's the, what's the question, right? mm-hmm. 42 is the answer.

Um, you know, where do you, what's the great wonderful thing that AI's gonna perform? Well, this article talks about using LLMs to help you kind of merge and converge your pipelines that are, that you've already created in Jenkins, and you've already created in, um, uh, Azure DevOps and, and, uh, GitLab, I believe. And, and basically transition that.

So now you can do, take that information and transform it into what you could use inside Techon instead of you rewriting all that. So it's kind of a transitionary, you don't have to throw that away. You can use that to help create the next environment and maybe run both, I guess.

So it's, it's an, it is a transitionary type use of ai. It isn't a rip and replace, you know, this is gonna change everything. We don't need developers anymore, whatever kind of, you know, crazy things get said.

Absolutely. Cool stuff. And again, we'll, we'll have the URL and QR code up for that one here.

Um, hey, Mitch, the next thing I wanted to bring up was back to this, you know, DevOps evolution and DevOps Healthy, and it's a, it's actually something that comes off our tech drunk TV channel. Mm-Hmm. And you can grab this video on Tech Drunk TV, as well as like 6,000 other videos we've recorded over the years.

Mm-Hmm. Um, and it's with our friend Gene Kim, who, you know, to many, he was the introduction to DevOps to many, right. The Phoenix Project.

He was including myself. Yeah. And, um, for those who don't know, right.

Gene has renamed his DevOps Enterprise Summit to, and I, I hope I don't mess this up, uh, IT Executive Leadership Summit or something to that effect. Yeah. Um, and a lot of people said, ha, I told you DevOps is dead leaving Gene Kim changed the name of it, you know, and, uh, I, I had a chance to talk to, well, I was talking to Gina about his great new book out with Dr.

Steven Spear about wiring, uh, excuse me, wiring the winning organization. Yeah. Which is a great book, highly recommended.

But I asked Gene why he did it. And, you know, Gene's enthusiasm and support of DevOps is not faltered one iota. Mm-Hmm.

I think what the name change, which was, you know, supported by a lot of folks in the DevOps world was that Genes, uh, both the books that it Rev publishes and the subsequent conference, which, you know, has a lot to do around the books, was, was much was growing, you know, with topics that weren't really DevOps related. They were related to leading winning teams, which is and high performing IT teams, which is kind of right out the door of stuff that Gene and, and Jazz Humble and Nicole Forsgren started. And so he wanted to reflect that and not like, you know, bring people in under the guise of DevOps and then discuss all these things that weren't DevOps and, and, uh, but he is, you know, still a hundred percent behind DevOps.

And if you listen to the interview there, uh, you, you can hear it for yourself. I'm not putting words in his mouth. So look for those who were pointing to that as evidence of something, again, you know, fake news, Fake news.

You know, I, I have not read the book yet. I, I'm excited to, to take a look at it when I think back to the Phoenix project, right. The whole part of the story is taking these things from manufacturing, right.

That, that he Right. From the Gulfs. Yeah, exactly.

And if you think about the evolution of DevOps that's happened from DevOps out now, of course, you know, we're like, how do we do security? How do we do governance? Everybody's taken some of the ideas of DevOps and trying to apply it within their job function, their organization, right?

It's really permeated a lot of how companies work, almost like Agile has, right? Same kind of an idea. It, it seems like Gene Genes changing the name is to kind of recognize that, that we're, we have to talk about it in the context of the enterprise when we talk about solving these really tough problems.

And there's a lot of DevOps things that can, you know, we won't call it DevOps when we talk about wiring the organization, but I would imagine some of those are pretty similar, if not the same that we've been using in DevOps. Is that, am I close or am I off base on that? Yeah, I, no, I, I think I, I think you're on on point, you know, but hey, we could do a quick poll.

No, we can't. Um, That's, we'll do a webinar, do a quick poll. Yeah, I was gonna say, maybe we could do a pulse meter outta this one, but, uh, but you know, certainly Mitch, it, it's, it's a good interview.

I I highly do. Highly, I it's a long one. It was one of the, you know, I usually aim for those to be 15 minutes.

I think it came out twice that, but anyway, do check it out. It's a good interview. And you could get Genes take on on that issue.

Mitch, that's all I had on the, uh, docket to go over for today, but I wanted to take just maybe another three to five minutes and, and give people an idea of what to expect going forward on DevOps chats, because we're gonna be doing these weekly. Um, we'll try to keep them, you know, around this time in terms of length. But I wanted very much for this first show to be you and I Mm-Hmm.

Just you and I, you know, establishing sort of a rhythm. com, and we'll try to fit you in there. Um, we'll be featuring more videos we've done as well as articles and, you know, text Drunk Gang members, right?

And I mean that in a good way. Not, not like Crips and Bloods, but you know, friends of Text Drunk. So, um, it'll be every week and we, we encourage you to subscribe to it on, whether you're listening to this on, on Apple or Spotify or a Stitcher or some other Amazon or some other platform, please subscribe and follow.

So you'll stay up to date on the latest ones. We're gonna do our best to bring you the very best of DevOps. We will, uh, Content And we'd love to hear from you.

You know, if you have a question or you have an idea for a topic or, you know, yeah, I think that thing M**k said is full of hooey. Here's my opinion about it. You know, we wanna hear from you or, you know, that was really great.

Thanks for covering that. Actually, we have an email set up for that Mitchell. com.

And, uh, any comments, suggestions, or you wanna speak or whatever you could send to there as well, that'd be perfect. Well, Mitchell, it's good to be back in the saddle again, man. I can't believe we just sat here and rifled off like a 35 minute podcast, kind of just chit-chatting, but we did.

It's like riding a bike. It's just an e-bike now. Yeah.

I don't have an e-bike. No, you do. All right.

Well, that's gonna, that's gonna call a wrap on this episode of DevOps Chat. Thanks for listening or watching or however you're doing this. I'm Alan Shimmel, and this is Mitch Ashley, and you just listened to DevOps Chats.

There we go. Bye-Bye. We'll see you next week.

Bye-Bye.