Platform Engineering and Enterprise Software Development with Digital.ai’s Wing To

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. We're back here on Textron tv.

I'm really happy to have week two with me. If you guys don't know, wait, he's the general manager for Intelligent DevOps over at Digital ai. And, uh, we're gonna talk about digital ai, we're gonna talk about platform engineering, but before we talk about any of that, let's talk about Wayne.

Hey Wayne, welcome to Techstrong tv. It's great to see you. Hey, it is great to be here.

Fantastic. So, Wayne, you know, I mentioned your general manager for intelligent DevOps, but beyond that, if you don't mind, share with our audience a little bit of your own story. Yeah, so I run the product and development teams across digital ai.

We're a global company serving some of our, our largest customers in the financial space insurance space, some manufacturing. And what we focus on is how can we help organizations optimize the value of software they're delivering. And we provide tooling from planning at scale to release orchestration across a diverse ecostructure and testing in special specialized spaces like mobile, as well as app security, again, for specialized areas.

So, um, really focusing on how do we do optimization into, um, software delivery. ai. We also provide AI technology that leverages the data we collect across that software delivery lifecycle to help do predictions for optimizations, reduce risk, and as you can imagine, uh, help the, um, help the developers and DevOps teams do their jobs better.

Absolutely. Thank you for that. Wing.

What about you personally? What it was your background? Uh, so History, Very, um, very, very, very mixed.

So, um, I've had spent time, um, of course in the, um, DevOps space, but I've been worked in, uh, mid-size companies, um, including some of the spaces around this. So, um, in the, uh, IT service management space, the IT operations space, um, in mid-size companies, also worked in large sized companies like IBM, where I've been running development teams, um, product teams and strategy teams, um, both in the DevOps space and the IT service management space. So all of my career has really been around delivering software and operating software.

And it's actually interesting, um, when I started my, um, career, uh, more on the, um, how do we help our, the, uh, operations sort observability space now, um, how it's actually become much tighter with the development space. So it's great to see how the industry has completely evolved. Um, yeah.

But all my, um, all my life has been really focused around delivering software for, um, to help, uh, deliver and produce software. Absolutely. You know, it's interesting.

Observability went from being almost exclusively on post-deployment Yes. To now having a strong focus on pre-deployment in that CI/CD process as well. So it, and I think that's been part of this big explosion around it.

You know, wing, another topic that has kind of come up over the last three, four years is platform engineer. Oh yeah. You know, it first kind of burst on the scene and people were saying, you know, DevOps is dead.

It's all about platform. And that was all hype and marketing. DevOps isn't going anywhere, but over the preceding couple years, you know, I, I think there is a need for something that we've labeled platform engineering.

Is it just ops by another name? Is it DevOps by another name? Is it, you know, I don't know if it's entirely new.

I think it's maybe a new way of looking at it with a new name, but nevertheless, it's real. I, my feeling. But I'm interested in your opinion on this, on platform engineering.

Give us, give us wing's view. Yeah. Uh, and it's, I I completely agree with you how it's kind of germinated and it kind of exploded just over the past year, year and a half, two year timeframe.

And I think there's, um, there's a lot of excitement around it. And of course one of the questions is, um, is it really gonna live up to kind of its expectations? Um, and is it really different from DevOps?

Is it the same? So what I'm ki what I'm ki I'm kind of seeing is first of all, first of all, straight up, I think it will provide huge benefits. Um, but it may not provide the benefits in the way people may be first anticipating.

And in fact, I think it's gonna be, um, the benefits gonna provide is actually broader. So a lot of the focus at the moment is, um, uh, how can we, um, make the developer experience better? And I think sometimes that gets a bit carried away.

People think about developer happiness, it's like, no, it's gonna make developers' lives better. But things that make developers happy is innovative, interesting work. Yeah.

Right. But making their lives easier, reduce them onerous fast is always a good thing. Um, and we talk about productivity, and I think this is where it touches upon the DevOps.

Um, it's this idea that, um, it will then help remove some of the onerous tasks, a bit more automation. And I think one of the shifts is platform engineering is talking about how can we capture the best practice so that we repeat some of the DevOps instead of every team building their pipelines, that we capture some of that best practice, interact with the developers to find out which ones, which workflows, which pipelines can be reused for the bulk of the developers, not the super, um, out there, uh, smaller part of the community, but some for like 80% of the company. The only thing is people might be thinking, well, I'm already kind of doing that.

Because some of the more mature DevOps organizations, because DevOps doesn't say you do it one way or another, is a, is a, is a methodology. What this is doing is saying, take the best practice, repeat it. Some of the DevOps companies, umm, sorry, DevOps companies using DevOps, they're already kind of capturing best practice and decentralizing and reusing templates.

We see a number of our, um, more, um, sophisticated customers doing that already. So what's different about platform engineering? I think this is where the real additional value will come from platform engineering.

'cause I think what's, what is coming, uh, becoming is a nucleus or a place where people are enabling more technology to be rolled out to the development community. So I'm seeing organizations saying that this is going to be our central place for enabling, for example, generative ai. Because people said, we can't just let people randomly use generative AI because we need control over it, but we want to enable our, our, our organization to do it so well.

We're dealing with, um, customers saying, well actually, why don't we use the idea of guardrails, paved path, including generative ai, because there'll be best practice in, um, governance built into the workflows and enabled that. So suddenly we'll enabling generative AI to the developer community that both balances the developer needs as well as an organization called Client's Needs Security. That's another area I'm hearing, which is, um, you, we did the right thing.

We said security should be shifted, left should be part of the whole development process, not an after thought. So then developers are now tasked with understanding security and when to apply security checks. The best DevOps practices have already been building that into the pipeline.

So the developers don't think about platform engineering is really kind of like encapsulating that. So I'm seeing a number of technologies and, um, industry trends being enabled by building that into a platform that enables developers to have access to it without them having to have the cognitive load or having to learn all these technologies. Um, and then on top of that, because there's a centralized place where people are using tools, laying out pipelines, it's also been a way where people can start, um, accessing data.

So are people really sort and say, oh, we need to use data to understand what of the pipelines, what of the tools are most used by developers? What's gonna be really interesting to 'em? But our data can also be used for other things as well.

Sure. Can we think about insights into productivity, insights into what things are working well? Where are the blocks?

And I think that's where we platform engineering can really live up to its expectations because it's almost encapsulating the next generation where devs wanted to be, which is something that rigor scale bringing in together other technologies that are solar satellite technologies around DevOps. Absolutely. 2, 2, 2 thoughts I want to throw in there.

First of all, in some ways it's a bit ironic that when we talk about platform engineering and it's a, you know, it's ops focus and everything else, but a lot of what you're doing is actually making it better, easier for developers. Yes. Right?

So in case where OPS is helping developers Yes. Which is, you know, core DevOps, right? Yeah.

So it it, it's that. The second thing is, I mentioned earlier about the whole observability thing moving pre-deployment. Well if you, that's part of this platform engineering thing, right?

Because if we set it up right, and we, and we're getting those feedback loops and, and making it better ongoing, you know, continuously, it's a great thing. And so I I, you know, I I agree with what you're, the whole premise here is around platform engineering. I, I think, I think there's a little bit on both sides of this though though, of people like two dogs circling the same bone, if you will.

You know, where the platform engineering saying, well, we are the new kid on the block and we're not gonna replace you, as I said early on, but we, you know, we're better and, and we don't wanna be, you know, we're gonna try to fix the problems, the DevOps side or whatever DevOps is saying, look, same, same, same dog, different different name, but it's, you know, same old symbol and it's ops and it's working dev and ops, and that's why we call it DevOps. But I do think that they are learning to coexist and leverage each other to make not only developers' lives better, because not all of us go to sleep at night saying, how can I make developers' lives better? Right.

Or easier. But we all go to sleep saying, how can my business be better? How can we be more profitable?

How can we deliver faster, higher quality product to customers? And I think if that's your goal, then you gotta acknowledge that this is real. You gotta acknowledge it, you gotta work together, right?

Because working together is gonna be the key piece of this. I, I think you're absolutely right that I'm, I'm so, um, I looked in, uh, you know, about how people feel about the difference between these and it really gets into, um, definitions that are get so extreme. Whereas I think you, you know, if we think about the, the premise of DevOps in the first place, it was really around how can we deliver software more effectively, more rapidly?

And it's all about value to the, uh, to the business. In some ways. One might say this is, um, a, um, a boon to DevOps.

'cause this helps DevOps scale and being more effective. It's almost taking DevOps and allowing it to be, uh, applied in a best practice way in. In fact, it helps adoption of DevOps and the, from the platform engineering perspective, there is no platform engineering without the principles of DevOps, which is, you know, automation bringing the disparate functions together.

So I do, I I see them as being really symbiotic. Um, I think the, in, in, in some ways, the platform engineering initiative should also learn from the DevOps, um, DevOps initiatives experience. Sure.

Yes. Because if we think about where DevOps has not been successful is where DevOps treats itself as an isolated, um, discipline and forgets that actually you're supposed to be serving dev ad ops, and I'm checking that the, the tooling they provide, the templates, the workflows are really being used. And I think that's something that platform engineering can come UNM stuck on.

If it's focused on the platform rather than the purpose of the platform, then I think it's gonna go the same way. Won't live up to expect expectations. So I think yeah, Roro rather than soft freshs, the platform engineering and DevOps need to kind of like bring the best of themselves together.

Well, and, and by that token, look, they don't exist in the vacuum either. You've got Agile Yes. Right.

Would you have DevOps without Agile Was a question. Exactly. You, you've got, you still have the ITSM.

Yes. Right. A lot of people say, oh, that's old.

It's old, but there's a reason why it's been so popular. It, it works. Yes.

Yes. And, and so all of these kind of frameworks, if you will, need to coexist. Mm-hmm.

Right. And then, you know, you throw in ai of course, right? 'cause that's kind of changing the game across The board.

Yes. Um, it, it's an exciting time to be alive and, and watching all this play out, Wayne, isn't it? I think it, it really is because it's almost the next inflection point.

Um, and it's interesting how this all happened around the same time. Um, because, uh, only one of these movements would been interesting because we have the platform engineering, um, we have, um, generative ai, which has made people think about MLOps, data ops. Then of course we have the whole idea of how we gonna take a, a, um, advantage of the data.

So this whole idea of, you know, engineering insights and I see these all interrelated. Um, and the other thing I would also say is, um, of course, cloud native plays in, I I Was just gonna say, you bring that into the mix. Yep.

Yes. Because people are saying cloud native stacks are complicated. But when I, when we talk to, um, customers, we realize that for especially large organizations, they're bridging the gap of I've got cloud native, but I've got a huge amount of existing virtualized systems, uh, monolithic systems.

And platform engineering also touches upon that. 'cause it doesn't have to be just type of cloud native. In fact, one of, of its benefits is if that's a tooling, you can mix tooling, um, in with all these, um, almost hybrid composite applications.

So I see all these trends and I'm thinking we're on a cusp of a new movement, but they need to work together. They, I think they really enable each other. You know what, what's the saying?

Innovation. No, uh, I forgot to say forget it. But what I, they have to work together.

Yes. Or they won't work at all. Yes.

Is the bottom line. Right. And, and, uh, they'll succeed together or they'll fail individual.

Yes. That, that's maybe another way of putting it. Anyway, we, thanks for coming on.

We're about outta time here, but it's fascinating. I'm glad to hear you and, and digital ai are, are thinking along these lines. 'cause I do think it's important, as we spoke about off camera, we'll be doing more with platform engineering in the very near future.

And I'd love to have you contribute to that. So thanks and keep up the great work. No, thank you for having us on.

And it really is an exciting area which, uh, we see enabling so much ca um, capabilities within organizations. Yeah. No fun times ahead.

All right. ai here on Techstrong tv. We're gonna take a break.

We'll be back with more tech, strong TV in just a moment.