Brad Maltz, Dell Technologies | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone. We're back here live on the floor at kubecon.

You know, I love it when it quiets down a little bit because it's it's this is a noisy rockest crowd very loud in here, you know having the guys kick in soccer balls over there don't help but luckily you you're not hearing that at home and you're not seeing that so you can't tell but there's a booth across from us where they kick soccer balls on a Target. But it gets filtered out with our mics. So it's all good.

Anyway, hey, I want to introduce you to Brad Moss. Who's Brad Maltz? You say well all all week.

We've had our new background here powered by Dell Technologies. Brad works, I would say he is dealt Technologies, but no, he just works there Michael. He's not Michael.

It's not Michael but he's Brad and a pleasure to have you on though and thank you for the sponsorship. Right? You're welcome anytime, you know, we've enjoyed working with the all the Dell folks down here that we've had a chance to interact with but Brad, why don't we tell people a little bit about what you do?

Yeah, totally so nice to me everyone. I am the senior director of the devops portfolio and develop a relations ecosystems. So I kind of have two roles Adele for about the past year.

I have the roadmaps in the portfolio around our infrastructure as code our kubernetes containers type of a road maps as well. I'm building on a developer relations team to help Dell kind of drive more Community oriented Outreach open source, social media platforms these types of interviews. All that stuff is tied into my role.

Well, this is a great place to be doing it. It's it's my homes my home base. Yeah, so good for you.

So, you know, I over my career. I've had several opportunities interact with Doug. I wanted the things I learned about Dell is very often.

They're almost exclusively. They're never the first person in To a market. Yep, they don't go into a market until that market has reached a critical mass where it can move the needle.

Yes. So the fact that we have Dell here at cubecon Cloud nativecon signifies to me that we've reached that critical mass where we can move that needle. What?

Now you've been doing devops open source sort of for a while. Right? What for you was the kind of Telltale?

You know markers that said hey we need to be in here. Yeah, it's good question. So it was kind of this inflection point that happened the beginning of last year which was leadership Adele realized the shift from more the traditional Ops to Cloud native devops operating models and all that was obviously been going on for a long time, but our customers now are starting to realize The problems in a more scale that way that started impacting what Dell needed to provide them.

So they're coming to us and saying hey, yes your storage your server your data protection your hyper conversions. Those are all great. They've helped us for decades.

But what we're looking at right now is how can you help us shift towards the automation side of the house. How can you help us bring Cloud experiences on premises? How can you help us scale out with less people?

Yeah, when we heard all those problems that triggered an internal strategy that said we need to go focus more on the devops outcomes. Yep. That's when my team was put together.

That's when we already had so many things moving in the company. We kind of hyper focus them. com in 2013.

Oh, you're going around forever. Yeah. What you know and during that time I've seen devops evolved.

Yeah, and one of the things we've seen in the last year and a half, let's call it. It's sort of the rise of platform platform engineering which is not killing devops in spite of what some people might say out there. It's not right but it's part of it's It's a now and now jealous, it's it's It's all part of the same movement of let's do more faster better more securely.

Let's talk about what that means for Dell. Yeah, so into your point for me devops it really now finally means the operating model. It is not we used to have devops engineers and devops tools what it finally made its way into is it's it operations done an agile fashion.

To enable their end users which are application developers application owners and other people. Well, if you play off of that concept, it's an operating model. That means there's cultural level changes.

Yeah, the business has to go through but if the tooling ecosystems and the Technologies are not mature enough or the country all the cultural can happen, but you're gonna need so many people doing manual things. It won't matter. Enter platform engineering.

So I think what's happened recently is as people have learned kubernetes and and the kubernetes ecosystem here has grown and automation platforms like ansible and terraform and all the other things that become more mature. Now you can actually start to build the platform. Now what's happening is our end users are getting to a point where they're like, do we want to DIY all of that?

You can only do that if you hire enough people, so can you find the talent to DIY it or do we want to finally build our platform internally with the you know guardrails the golden path all the all that stuff that's where platform engineering is emerging now. It's becoming the standard way of building things and that's from Adel perspective. We love it because for us that means you got standardized compute and servers and kubernetes distributions and operating systems and virtualization language.

You literally have to standardize everything up to the pipeline. Yeah. So that is the new compute stack is what the clouds back which is brought on from.

Yep. And that's where we are today what I find interesting. Right?

What devops first started a lot of a very common complaint I heard was it's all about the developers, right? It's it's a developer-led model. It's DevOps.

Yep emphasis on the dev and and it's so funny, right? It's it's turned like that the same thing here a coupon. Yeah, if you want to keep calm three years ago four years ago five years ago.

It was all about the developers and how we multi-thread applications, you know, using containers and kubernetes and it was about after it's what it was. But when we're here at this kubecon, it's not the same thing. It's not it's it is about it's about the sres it's about the platform Engineers from a role perspective, but from a technology perspective observability the outside of the house, it's Ops because the Ops dominate application developers will work within whatever medium.

They're allowed to work with them. Yeah. They go to AWS.

They go to Azure. They Google they'll work with the native tools though. They'll be polyglots and work across languages.

Yes, the people that have to make sure that stuff stays up and running and is secure and compliant and protected and resilience and all that good stuff the Ops people They were never able to keep up with the developers. And finally the businesses have said we need to make sure that we're delivering that same level of experience the clouds have done but we have to do at the corporate level. Enter where devops really kind of got its stride.

Yeah, the developer side of devops is not application developers. The developer side is actually more of the tooling level. The infrastructure automation folks the platform Engineers actually are developers in their own, right?

Yeah that becomes a major part of the dev side of a devops. You know, what it's the same thing. We do a in addition where I text drug TV interviews, we do longer form videos one of which is like a series when we call devops some down.

It's sponsorship. I tried sentence, right? Now they're into continuous testing.

They're big into testing. Obviously. It's the same gig.

It's the same deal in testing. Yeah, right these tests. Today to be a good test engineer and their Engineers.

Oh 100 do they got to be able to write their own scripts their own tests, you know a functions they got to be developers and I get even better yet security people today. Oh, yeah. They have to have some chops.

Because so much of what's happening in security is taking place. Pre-deployment. Yes, right if they're not able to you know, I'm not they don't have to know rust perhaps or you know some of the latest languages but if they can't do basic python scripting and stuff like this.

It's a tough. It's a tough road. Well, I think I I learned a lot from the pivotal Labs mentality.

Yeah, I came from what the MC VMware World. Okay. So for the past four years, I've been running dojos at Dells running Advanced development, which they practice lean agile extreme programming test driven development all the buzzwords, right?

Yeah. And I mean it's a very serious extreme way of living which almost nobody can ever achieve that level of extremes but it teaches you a lot of best practices that now finally we're able to bring those into the devops world. Are you gonna go do pair programming?

No, most people are not going to do are you going to do extreme programming? Probably not because it's very close to that. But you know, what test driven development very real and if you want to get into well how real agile right there was a joke that I think came Ramsey at creative the water scrum fall conversation back in the day, right?

That's still reality. So many people use the word agile, but they don't even know Nation. There's still waterfall.

It's that's what and you have to get the operations people not to think in a waterfall mentality. So when they're building their automations, are they putting the test up front of the ansible and the terraform automation their building. It's it's embedded in everything we do as an Ops group, but you got to train the office people on how to be devs, even the test automation qualification validation all those things.

all part of a Dev mentality Let me pivot our conversation a little bit now. So you're down? Dell Technologies.

Yes, and Dell Technologies is more than servers or Hardware. Switches Etc. It's services and software and everything all of these things.

How do you help where does the rubber meet the road and you helping? Ops people here platform Engineers. Whoever it is.

How did they how do you interact with them to make their life better? Yeah, so I'll I'll give three examples. Okay one example at kubecon here.

com. com out. Two things happen to it was a little bit of a marketing kind of place to go to meet one of the devops stuff and as we got feedback just like any good agile shop.

You got to keep on tweaking iterated reader and we said, you know what they're asked for more and different. com and they can go just click without even logging in and start learning kubernetes and ansible and terraform and how to use rest apis and all that goodness. What you're gonna learn is we said education is the foundation of making devops real for almost every organization.

So we said Hands-On labs and how do you get all the how-to videos and all the YouTube and podcast stuff and the training stuff. How do you get the apis from our portfolio presented out? So we basically made sure that it becomes an education and collaboration platform going forward.

That's number one. Number two when a shop comes in and says, okay, we we're already in the kubernetes space. We now need help to basically make it easy.

How do you make this easy? That's our job working with all of our Partnerships. So the Red Hats and the Microsoft's and the VMware is in the suicide and everybody else out there.

We want to make sure that people can consume full stack Cloud platforms going forward with our server and storage and data protection and all the goodness staff. And then if you're a DIY shop, we have all the DIY components. You got to bring persistent storage management and data protection into your kubernetes cluster environment.

We have software. It's actually help you do that. You name it we can help you to wear whatever you are in that world and the last piece Services humongous Services organization.

It's out there enabling people manage services Consulting Services teaching you things fully automating things or even taking over management of it Dell can help you all the way up and down the stack not just with the hardware and Storage. Love it. I want you to repeat that URL into the camera.

Definitely if I want people to that's that's it to me. That's the on-ramp it is. com go there.

You'll learn a lot. You'll stay up to date on things on a continuous basis. It's gonna be the place that you're gonna get data.

I love it man. Fantastic Brad. I want to thank you visible for the sponsorship here at cubecon, but more important.

I mean, you know, and I mean that sincerely, thank you. More importantly. I think it's important that Dell is in the game.

That's why I have my job. That's why I'm here. You're gonna see a lot more of us from Dell tech World in May through the next kubecon on the in Chicago.

We're gonna be very much part of the community. All right, man. We look forward to seeing you.

Thank you. Thank you. All right.

com if that's the only thing you got out of this whole interview go there. Thanks. Hey, we're gonna take a break.

We'll be back next year at UConn live in Amsterdam. Stay tuned.