DevOps World 2023 – Shawn Ahmed, CloudBees

This is Techstrong tv. Hi everyone. Welcome back to Techstrong tv.

You know, I'm really happy to have this next guest on. He's, he's, he's been on here many, many times, but we haven't had him on in a while. com, uh, November of 2013, so almost 10 years.

And I will tell you our, I think it was our first or our second, maybe our second sponsor was cloud base. And, uh, so cloud base is always, to me, synonymous with DevOps, right? And, and through the years, look, it's been a, a long, strange trip in 10 years, right?

And we've seen a lot of things happen in the market, but DevOps is still here and so is Cloud vs. And, and the fact is that when they, um, started, what, what, what was Jenkins days and then Jenkins World, then cloud these days, cloud, and then they changed the name to DevOps world. I don't know, it had to be seven years ago, six years ago.

It, to me, it defined the DevOps community, right? That was one of the pillars of, of what, you know, when you got together with that DevOps community was. And we had some great ones that, I think the last really big one was in the US was at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

And the last big one in Europe, I wanna say was nice France, which was an amazing event. Anyway, I reini this cuz I'm an old man and I do that, but, uh, or perhaps it was Lisbon, even as I'm thinking about it, I think Lisbon was after Nece even, and that was maybe right before, I think Covid Kaboshed everything. But anyway, this next guest is a good friend of mine.

His name's Shawn. Ed. Shawn, of course, is the chief product officer.

And he wear, he wears a lot of hats and he's worn a lot of hats at Cloud BS over the years. Sean, welcome back to techstrong tv. Thanks, Alan.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's great being back home again.

It's been a while. Yeah. I'm sorry for the long-winded intro, but I was reminiscing there for a while.

Uh, anyway, I was reminiscing right there with you Uhhuh. It's, it's been, it's been a bit. Um, anyway, Sean, you know what, let's start off with you.

For people who aren't familiar with Sean and Med, why don't you give 'em a little bit of your background? Yeah, sure. Absolutely.

Happy to do that. I, um, you know, have been with CloudBees now for the last, uh, I would say five years, a little bit more than five years. Um, I'm in various product roles here.

Uh, for a little while there. I also had the opportunity to, uh, run marketing here. Uh, prior to this I've been with companies like Splunk and sap, where I've also been in different types of, of, uh, product leadership roles.

And, and, and, uh, it's been a tremendous ride. And, uh, you know, I am, uh, getting old myself, but, you know, have had the opportunity to be a, be a part of, of, of a number of sort of transformations in the market, like Big Data. And then there was ML and now it's full G P T and, uh, and DevOps.

I mean, that's, uh, yeah, last 10 years have been exciting for DevOps. It's a fast moving industry. So to be a part of something that, you know, is fundamentally changing the way that people work and do things to generate, uh, mass value for customers is, is a great place to be.

And DevOps is, is right there at the center of it. So it's been a great ride so far. Absolutely.

And, and I think, Sean, you're being modest. You were also c e o of companies you've done Yes, that's true. You've been Acquired, did some acquiring, you know, you've, you've capped in the ship.

You've, you've swabbed the deck and everything in between, right, Alan, you're right. I have been, uh, c e o a couple of times before. You're right, I don't talk about it as much, but, uh, but yeah, a couple of times, you know, I had the opportunity to be founder, um, build companies and, uh, Bucky for me, I've had an opportunity to, uh, get the companies acquired as well.

So, uh, it was quite the experience. Um, but I did tell myself that the rest of my, uh, career, I'm gonna stick with what I love, uh, doing that building product. So, uh, don't, don't, don't, uh, no, no, no.

Uh, no plans to go back into that chair for anytime soon. Never say never my friend. You never know.

Um, but that being said, a absolutely, and, and you know what? For, for younger people out there who look at someone like Sean and over the course of his career, it, it helps make you a well-rounded individual cause you don't know what you like and particularly what you may not like until you actually do those things. So it's great experience.

And my, my advice to you all out there is, look, if you, if you feel the urge to go start a company or build something like that, go do it. If you, you know, you don't like it, you can always go back. Um, and there's, you know, the, the great thing about, especially in the tech world is there's so many paths to a successful career and to, and quite frankly to a happy career, right?

Anyway, Sean, I want to talk about cloud vs a little bit. Yeah, let's do it. com, but you know, when we first came in, Jenkins was DevOps, forget cloud vs.

Jenkins was DevOps, right? There was chef puppet and maybe Ansible for deploying stuff and then continuous integration. I don't know, it had to be 95% of the market.

I betcha was, was Jenkins, right? And, and KK who, you know, chief scientist, chief science officer at club, he's at the time, he, he started Jenkins, right? And, and CloudBees though, there was always a very clear delineation between the open source Jenkins and Jenkins community and a commercial company called CloudBees.

CloudBees was a very benevolent custodian, if you will, in some ways, or guardian, better is a good word of, of Jenkins and the Jenkins community. And then over time, and this is the natural course of things, right? Cloud BE'S concentrated on cloud B'S enterprise and cloud be's, you know, you've got investors, you gotta make a return on your investment and so forth.

But Jenkins was always closely entwined there with Cloud be's. If you don't mind give our audience an update on, on what's happening with cloud vis from, you know, maybe a product and market point where you are in the market and vis-a-vis, uh, the Jenkins community and, and, you know, developments in Jenkins. Yeah.

Well, well look, Jenkins is, has been, I would say foundational and a pillar for DevOps, like you said, right? And, and, uh, synonymous with continuous integration, continuous deployment, delivery. Um, and despite what my many folks might say in the market, it still is, the fact of the matter is it's still growing.

You know, you go, you look at the Jenkins IO stats and you look at, you know, the usage of Jenkins. And what's astonishing is that, you know, 10 year o 10 years on, and it's still growing and it's growing at a rapid pace and the, the, the usage. And I think that the core fundamentals that made, you know, uh, Jenkins the first choice for C I C D, for most developers, fundamentally, those principles still hold true.

And that is that it's open, it's extensible, it's flexible, and then there's plug-ins you can connect, you can build your software development lifecycle on this platform, and you have the most flexibility to sort of accommodate all the users that you have and all the methods of building software and delivering software that you have. So that those core principles are still there. And what's really exciting for us this year is that, uh, we are here at Cloud b's, you know, kind of, we're absolutely, uh, full on continuing to expand our investment in Jenkins as well for our existing customers and new customers and prospects that are building and using, uh, you know, uh, Jenkins.

Um, and we made some massive investments in the product this year as well. And, uh, uh, bringing this back a little bit to DevOps world that you were talking about, which is now coming up here in September, we'll start our series. We are going to be releasing, uh, something we call the greatest, biggest probably performance and scalability enhancement to Jenkins in over a decade.

And, uh, oh, you teased, I'm, Now we know Sean's a teaser. Alright, thanks. Now you got a reason to come back on right Before September.

Um, but so we're, we're very excited about DevOps world and, and, and, and you know, this year, you know, we're live, we're back in person as you know, the no thanks to, uh, in and, uh, uh, if a hurricane in Florida last year. Uh, so we're really excited about being Ben person and being able to go on the road and share this exciting news. And, uh, of course, uh, we always, as we do have, uh, as, as the great Steve Jobs would say.

One more thing more and one more. We do have one more thing this year as well, that's, uh, going to be super exciting. So, so yeah, That's, that's exciting stuff.

Let, let's focus in on DevOps world. Yep. So, You know, you mentioned Hurricane Ian.

For those maybe who don't know the, the reference there, uh, Cloudy's was hoping to go back to a kind of a single big DevOps world event moving, I think actually going before Ian, Sean, if you don't mind. Yeah. I think the, the next DevOps world was scheduled to be a big one in Vegas, and then Covid Covid just Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. Then last year everybody was kind of dipping their toes in the water and we said, okay, let's do it DevOps web, but we're gonna do it in Orlando. And Hurricane Ian comes outta nowhere.

We, you know, it was a late storm, I remember. And, and, and kind of puts the kibosh on that. So this year, sort of following a strategy of not putting all our eggs in one basket, right?

Yeah. We we're, we're, we're, we're a distributed DevOps world platform, right? And we're doing a, a series of DevOps world, truly global DevOps world with the emphasis on world, and That's Right.

Let's talk about some of the places that DevOps world's coming to. Oh, yeah. Um, so, so we are gonna have, uh, DevOps world, uh, kickoff.

Uh, we're gonna have it in the first kickoff on, uh, September. In September, mid-September. Uh, it's gonna hit the road, and we are gonna be in the New York metro area.

We're going to be in Chicago, we're gonna be in Silicon Valley. Uh, we're gonna be in Singapore as well. And, uh, we're gonna bring it to London.

Uh, excellent. And so as we go to these various location, we're, we're really excited about bringing this event to our constituencies and to the audiences that we know wanna be there. And you're right, I mean, um, you know, uh, COVID was definitely just decimated, uh, oh, most of the industry's plans and the whole world's plans in so many ways.

And, and the founding, you know, sort of the, the, the, the, the, the changes that we are now observing from that, uh, some of them are permanent changes to markets and economies and things like that. Travel has sort of come back again, and some of these events are, are also coming back and, and we're seeing sort of some of these, you know, events come back in person as a a again, and it's phenomenal. We love it.

And, and, and it's great to see that these types of events are still mainstays. People love attending them. Um, there's a networking effect that comes from them, um, coming there and learning be part of workshops, you know, kind of like, you know, in our, in our Santa Clara and New York, uh, you know, events, we're, we're actually gonna have a conference day, but proceeded by a workshop day.

So it gives people the ability to come and learn Jenkins, how to use it, cloud BCI products, be certified, meet new people, make those types of connections that are so important to, to sort of the career path that you take. Um, and, and it's grad, I'm, I'm so excited to just say that No, those things have not changed, even though many other things changed. I, um, I, I don't, you know what, I want to comment on that, but before we do, I just wanna reemphasize.

So we are three in the us. We've got New York, Chicago and Silicon Valley. We've got APAC region is Singapore, EMEA is London.

com is functional. com. But you can go there and get all this information.

Now, Sean, I will tell you, I've spent the last, uh, well, I guess starting with Amsterdam for CubeCon in March, so the last two, three months, going back to in-person. And, and you're right, that, that networking track, and I don't mean Cisco or that kind of network, right? The human, the human networking, the, the water cooler, the hallway track, whatever you want to call it, is the most exciting thing.

I think we forgot. I mean, this Zoom stuff is great, but it's not, it's not the same as being able to shake someone's hand, share a beer, talk about stuff, have other people. I mean, it's just, it's amazing.

And I saw this in Amsterdam, Cuan, Hey man, they had 10,000 people with a 2000 person waiting list. I went right from there to San Francisco to the R S A conference. And you know what?

San Francisco has issues right now. I, we all know, but there were over 40,000 people at RSA Conference, uh, CubeCon Chicago, which we'll be in, I think in November. They expect to sell out crowd.

Maybe 14,000 or more. 15,000 in person is back. People wanted come in person.

I think this is a great time to bring DevOps world to, to the people again. Um, you mentioned some of them, which was it, New York and Silicon Valley will have workshops the day before. That's right.

That's right. You know, for those of you who have not been to a, a DevOps world or a Jenkins world before, those workshops are great, right? It was hands-on training, there was certifications, I think you mentioned there's gonna Bes, right?

And then quite frankly, usually at night there's a community get together and, and stuff like that. You guys doing anything like that? Yes, absolutely.

We'll have, uh, we'll have some get togethers there for, for, for folks that are attending and are live, and, and we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll have some fun as well. There'll be lots of learning. You know, uh, there's some great speakers that we have lined up.

There's, they're, they're as always right experts on every topic that, uh, relative to Jenkins, relative to DevOps this year is no different than previous years. Um, so we're excited, uh, about the line of, of speakers that we have. And, you know, as you go to the website and you check out the agenda, you'll see the powerful set of speakers that are there and the topics that we're covering.

Everything from, uh, you know, really exciting topics in, uh, and John Jenkins to things about digital transformations and journeys to how DevOps is being applied to digital twins and, you know, yeah. And so on and so forth. So we have this little industrial flavor going on in, in each one of these different locations that I think is gonna be real excited for the audience.

Sean, is it the same kind of set of speakers from location and location, or is each loca location sort of bespoke, bespoke in Terms of it's a little bit bespoke speakers? Yeah, it's a little bit bespoke, but you know, there are some core sessions that, you know, we'll repeat in every single one of them that, you know, you're, you're going to have, you're gonna have a Jenkins sessions, uh, that will be the same in every location, but each location has a little bit of, of, of flavor associated with that particular region and industries that are very popular there. Um, so we've tried to sort of give a mix of content that's gonna be a little bit specific to the location, but at the same time, a core of content of will always be the same, no matter which part, uh, which kind city we're in.

Let me ask you a question. For our big Jenkins users, our big Cloud V customers out there, does it pay to maybe hit New York and Chicago or New York and London, or do you think just getting one of these is, it might be too much overlap? I think, I think for us, I think, um, you know, we try to keep the core of the sessions such that, you know, it'd be most valuable to hit up one session, but we always welcome people to come to any one of them if you wanna go to multiple ones and see some of the other adjunct.

But you know what, we'll always have all of the sessions on syndication runs and things like that afterwards. That's true. As well as presentations, right?

So, uh, you know, you'll have that available, uh, if you're a registered user, uh, you know, you'll be able to go back and take a look at those sessions if you want to. But, but generally speaking, I'd say the core sessions are all the same. And, and, and so if you're attended one, you'll get, you know, tremendous amount of value out of those ones, that's for sure.

Sure. Last question, and then I, I had some other comments is, okay, so DevOps world is back. Do you think we'll see sort of a mega DevOps world?

Not this year. Obviously we got five DevOps worlds this year, but maybe in the, in the near next year or the year after, it's back to this kinda mega event. You know what, those mega events, they are still popular, aren't they?

Yeah. And we might go back to that. We might go back to that next year as well.

We might, we might do that. I mean, this year we really wanted to test and try taking, you know, the events to, you know, our constituents and, and attendees and really try that out. You know, we last three years, we, we haven't had a live event and we tried last year and, you know, got really slammed because of the hurricane prior to that covid.

So our approach was let's make it easy for folks. Um, yeah, and, and let's try to bring the event there. Um, but next year we might just be back in, in one big event again, or we'll see how this one goes.

Um, maybe we do a combination, well, hybrid, we're, DevOps is always changing. It's hybrid. So the principle underneath us of DevOps applies.

We, we apply it to DevOps world as well. So, you know, we'll see how this goes and, and if we want to go back, we, we can do that. I, excellent.

com. You, as Sean mentioned, you could get speaker info, uh, agendas, um, venue and everything else, dates and registrations. Um, also just a quick plug.

com. And we're gonna have a lot of pre pre-show kind of coverage, kind of highlighting some of the speakers in sessions, so you could catch it there. We'll be doing a bunch of text drunk tv, uh, interviews on to them as well with some of the speakers and the coming weeks.

So stay tuned for that. But hey, the big news DevOps world is back. If you're in a DevOps, don't miss it.

Sean, thanks for coming on today and, and, and telling us all about this. Very exciting. We are gonna hold your feet to the fire on these product announcements though, so.

Oh, it's gotta be exciting. We'll, we'll Have you back here. Okay.

All right. Thanks for having me, Alan. I appreciate it.

And, uh, to everybody, see you at DevOps world. Absolutely. Shammed Chief Product officer at Cloud vs.

Here on Textron tv. We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back in a moment.