Breaking in – Techstrong Research Review EP 27

Hey everybody. Mike Rothman here, general Manager of Text Run Research with another episode of Text Run Research Review. I am joined as always by Mitch Ashley.

Mitch, how are you? Good. Always good.

We've had a lot of great events here recently and looking forward to some more. We have some great projects on the books, so happy to do doing this work. You know, are Aren, you supposed to slow down over the summer, right?

Take a little bit of a break, a little bit of a holiday, do this, and it, it seems that, you know, we've kind of been a little bit on the pile on, you know, kind of of thing, and again, this is a first world problem for sure. Yeah. I am certainly not complaining about it.

No. Right. But it just, it does seem that, that this summer is, uh, uh, you know, pretty intense in terms of what we see coming down the pike and just the number of events that we have.

And, you know, for me, getting ready for Black Hat and, and getting ready to teach, uh, uh, the cloud security course that, that I'm gonna be teaching, once again, probably my seventh or eighth year doing that, uh, at this point. Um, so what do we wanna talk about today? So what you'll see by the time this hits techstrong tv, and you guys can all see it, we will have had the cloud native now show.

And one of the things that we did in the cloud native virtual conference was go through our cloud native trends and, you know, have some accountability and really talk about what worked, what didn't work, you know, where were we off, where were we on, and what made sense moving forward from a change standpoint. And one of the things that we kept getting around to was this skills gap, right? You know, we've got all these new technologies.

Obviously techstrong is focused around a lot of these new innovative technologies, starting with DevOps and then went into security and then what was containers. And now we've cloud native now to, you know, really talk about the much broader cloud native migration and, and where folks are moving from that standpoint. We recently launched ai, right?

ai is really focused on where artificial intelligence is playing in, in all of these things. And every so often, you know, I'd say it's probably once or twice a month I'll have somebody reach out who has more of a traditional IT background and says, you know, I listened to your thing, whether it's the research review or one of your, you know, virtual conference presentations or saw me speak somewhere. Uh, and I would love to break into this business and this business could be secured.

Right? That's where I get most of my questions. Mitch, I would imagine a bunch of folks approach you on cloud native and, and DevOps and a lot of these things.

So I thought this week we really wanna dig into, if you are a practitioner, if you are really trying to refresh your skills and try to move to where the puck is gonna be, right in the old Gretzky Gretzky mm-hmm. Um, you know, skate to where the puck is gonna be, not to where it is, um, how do we do that, right? How do we get towards it?

Uh, and and really put yourself on a trajectory to take advantage of some of these new technologies and new capabilities where we do have such a huge skills gap. You know, I think it's sometimes it's hard to pull out of the lane that you're in, right? You're you because that's the world you're working in and then, you know, so well, and also it pulls you back cuz you've got day-to-day and big responsibilities and things like that.

One of the things that has always helped me is, yes, I have to do my day-to-day job, but think about, so what is changing and why in our world, whether I it's in security or not, right? So to me it starts with software is now part of the business strategy. As a matter of fact, the business strategy is built on the organization's ability to deliver, operate in the cloud, uh, evolve, um, maybe even be more resilient around the software experiment with new products and ideas and features.

And a lot of the business just wants to be more agile and software is there because it's just not a back office function anymore. It's part of the strategy. Now, whether you're doing it all yourself, probably not, you're doing it with a lot of partners and such.

So if you're a security person, um, your world's already changed that way, right? How many, how many software do adss appliances are we using in a cloud provider, even in our own data centers, right? They aren't as many rack and stack boxes, uh, as there used to be had software modules that get turned on with orchestration.

So kinda think about what is so, so what's gonna happen in my world? I see this happening elsewhere. Is that that gonna happen in ours too?

And what would sort of set me up to be ready for that? Or maybe I can help make that change even better, be one of the people to help help that happen. No, that that's right.

So, so I think part of it is really understanding how these new technologies are impacting the business strategy and therefore the technology strategy. So there's part of it, which is just an understanding of your business, uh, and where things are going. But I I, you know, I I also, again, you know, a lot of folks just are trying to say, do I take a bootcamp, right?

Is that how I learned to DevOps? Do I open up a cloud account, just start playing around and doing, you know, some of this online workshopping, you know, type stuff? Do I try to volunteer with an organization and, and, you know, do some app dev, uh, on, on that front or, you know, try to help folks, you know, get a Kubernetes, uh, environment started up or, or spun up, right?

So that's kind of where I, I wanna poke a little bit too. Okay. Which is, you know, where do you develop these technical skills?

Again, you, you assume that you've got at least a little bit of a background. We're not talking about somebody coming out of, um, you know, a totally non-technical position and going, okay, I wanna be a DevOps sir. Right?

You know, this is somebody who's been, they're a traditional app dev, maybe they're a networking person, OnPrem, maybe they're a security admin, uh, maybe there's some type of IT ops person and, and they wanna start getting immersed in some of these new technologies, uh, that their business may not necessarily have embraced quite yet, or maybe has done it as part of a skunkworks, but they see that it's gonna become more general purpose over time. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Well, sort of, you, you, you've been, you've been to the, uh, you've logged onto the console before you've been to the dashboard. That's right. You know, you use some of those tools somewhere in your, in your history, if not today.

Uh, this is just, just for me. I'm, I am a tactile learner doing it. I learned so much more by, okay, I can theorize about it, talk about it, you know, pontificate about it, but I'd learn so much more just doing it.

That's why I've got Docker and Kubernetes and 80 other things running on my laptop, and it's so dang slow. I have to stop everything to do videos. Right?

And some of it is like real things that I'm working on for, for our business, but other is like, okay, what is this? How does it work? How I think I've told this story before, and probably about 2011 or so, I had my network.

I took over an IT group. I had my network engineer, senior most guy, excellent, awesome network engineer, come to me and say, what should I be learning? I'm getting ready to go to a Cisco now and kind of think about what should I, what should I be looking for?

And, and I told him, well, I don't know that you're gonna need to do this as your job every day, but you need to learn Python. Mean, like, gave me the four eye look. Of course I had my glasses on, so I had four eyes, but, but I said, because everything's moving to software, I think you're knowing a little bit about software, not, you may never write any code, just kind of get an idea of what this writing code is about.

And so you kind of relate to the software you're trying to manage and the, the scripts and all the stuff that you may be putting together in the future. And he came back from Cisco now, and he goes, yeah, it's exactly right. They just told us they're starting this bootcamp thing on, on Python.

So that, that's, again, it's, I don't think it's to learn Python for example, or go or Node or whatever you wanna learn. Yep. I think it's just understanding that world, right?

It's kind of putting someone else's shoes on for a little bit and just saying, okay, I see what this is about. Yeah. Agreed.

And, and I think one of the things that's been so, um, democratizing about the cloud is that you can get a free account, right? And, and, you know, Azure, if you do sign for Microsoft, then they'll give you $200 worth of credits that you get to use over six months or something like that. Um, AWS has a free tier that you can use for y you know, at least a year to do, do a a lot of different things and, and remember it.

And one of the things that came out of a, uh, recent pulse meter that we did, I don't know if it's launched yet, but it will be soon. Um, I think it was the one we did on backup and recovery, but we asked how many, uh, and what platform are they using for Kubernetes? And the leading two platforms were, and I got, this is gonna shock everybody, right?

Um, elastic Kubernetes service, that's an a w s service. And, uh, Azure Kubernetes service, which is obviously the Microsoft Azure service. So in, again, IT folks are doing Kubernetes in a lot of cases.

They're using the managed environment on the part of the cloud providers, and you can get a free account and start playing around with these technologies ahead of time, get each of these cloud providers has a number of different workshops that they provide as part of their training, things. You can find a lot of cool stuff on the internet. So I, I, I agree.

I mean, I think that that, you know, kind of the tactile piece of this is, is important. And obviously if it's part of your day job, they're going to make sure that you are trained in order to do that. But remember, they're looking at a whole mess of people and they're gonna go, well, which one do we wanna send through training?

Which one do we wanna put down and, and have walked this path towards a cloud native future or towards a DevOps, you know, type of future if you've done a little bit of work ahead of time, right? If you've started that process and you're, again, you're not gonna be a hundred percent there, but if you're 15%, 20, 25% of the way there, understanding these technologies starting to played with them, you look like a lot better candidate. You are showing that initiative to go and start to build out, you know, your personal skill sets and employers take note of that, right?

Mm-hmm. And if you were in a situation, I know it, and it's, it, it's been very tough for some folks, especially coming out of high tech, um, where there have been just a ton of layoffs. And if you're looking to, um, get into a new position and really kind of change the trajectory of your career that way, it becomes all the more important that you have that hands-on skill.

Now, folks are gonna be willing to train you if you have, you know, kind of the right outlook and, and kind of a learning mindset, but having some of that experience saying, Hey, I've been playing around with this stuff. Look at what I built. I I made this, you know, kind of again, demo application, whatever it is that again, gives them, gives an employer a sense that, one, you're a serious person and you're making an investment in yourself, right?

And two, the learning curve's not gonna be as steep as it's gonna be with some folks because again, you know, we just don't have enough folks that have these kind of capabilities that can step in and be productive on day one. Organizations know they're gonna have to train up, uh, a number of folks. But again, if you're starting from zero, that's one type of training.

If you're starting from 25 or 30%, that's a different kinda training. And I think that ladder is, is far more attractive to, uh, a number of employers. You know, one Of the questions I I used to ask security and network engineers when hiring folks for those teams is tell me about your home network.

Yeah. And the, the folks that would say, oh man, I've got four racks and I've got this and that and Cisco, that and, you know, whatever, uh, Palo Alto this and this firewall, and I'm trying this right now and I'm working with, uh, Linux a little bit more trying to figure it out. That's who I want to talk to right now.

It's like you, those answers are, well, actually I'm in Azure and I just started using That's right Kubernetes, and I'm not, I'm not sure about the, I kind of figuring out the, the, I got the container thing down and I downloaded a whole bunch of open source and I know how to build packages through the package manager and set up new, uh, containers. And okay, great. That's not gonna be your job, but that is what you're working in that I love that answer.

That's right. And, uh, you know, the folks that say, I have a router and a laptop. Okay, and so what do you do in the cloud?

And if it's not those things, then Probably I'm here, you know, I show up at the front door of the cloud provider. I'm here, you know, the router. Yep.

I can't tell you. And your and your serial cable. Yes.

Your console cable, nine pin cable's go in the back of the Cisco. I'm here, let's go the blue. Hold on, I got the time machine in the back.

So we'll, we'll be happy to send you, you know, to 1992. Uh, you'll be relevant, uh, at that point, right? Maybe even in into the eighties.

Uh, but, but you know, I think that whole learning mindset is really critical. Right. And that's always been how I've hired too.

Right? And, and, you know, for all positions, it's really not just about what you know now, it's about what you do to develop your own personal skillset. Mm-hmm.

What are you doing to invest in yourself, right? What are your interests? Uh, what kind of stuff do you read?

And, and listen, I mean, the reality is I don't necessarily expect everybody to read, you know, kind of wily textbooks, you know, all day that again, that'll make you old, uh, to begin with and your eyes will start bleeding, right? But, you know, it's just to find well-rounded individuals, you know, find folks with, with varied interests, find folks that wanna, you know, gain and, and build up their knowledge, uh, over time. Um, I think that's really y you know, kind of the important stuff.

And, and listen, that's not to say that there's not a position for folks that like to, I'll kind of say it, and this really isn't meant in a derogatory way, right? But they wanna punch the clock, right? They come in, they wanna come in at 9 0 1, right?

They want to be out at 5 0 1 and take their one hour lunch break. And that's okay, right? And, and when we went through this right, mean, you remember, you, you, you know, back when we had you, you know, and at the turn of the century, you know, we had a whole bunch of folks that were trained up on mainframes, and we could, everybody could see, yeah, we're gonna get through this Y2K thing, and then these big irons are, y you know, they're, they're going to not go away, right?

But they're gonna reduce in terms of, you know, kind of their importance with within, you know, kind of the systems, uh, environment. But those folks didn't wanna change, right? They didn't wanna learn new stuff.

They didn't, they knew what they knew. They, they did it very, very well. And, and they could be very consistent and predictable about what it was to do what they're doing.

And that's fine until it's not right. And you as an organization, you, you know, have to decide. Yeah.

You know, as long as we have those positions, that's great. You, you, you do, you, I'm not gonna tell you, you gotta grow. I'm not gonna tell you.

You need to, you know, go and learn new skills, but the minute I decommission that big iron, or I outsource it, or I do something else, then I've got an issue, right? Because you're either gonna move forward with where we're going or you're not. And again, that's a choice.

And I'm cool with whatever that choice is, right? This, there's not the point to say that y y you know, that's not a great choice, but that kind of resistance, you know, is there, and, and you know, we still see it. And as more folks move towards DevOps and as more folks move towards cloud native infrastructure, y you know, there's going to be that group of folks that again, do it ops for data center looking things, and their world is, is going to contract.

It has to, right? That's just where the trends are going. It, it, it's almost like it becomes its own, um, specialty, but very narrowly, right?

If, if you enjoy what you're doing, you like what you're doing, you know, like, Hey, I wanna sink in five years learning blah, right? I, I like what I'm doing. Maybe it's, maybe it's continued to stay down the lane, but how do you work with the people that are doing the new stuff?

Is there things that you can help? Cuz guess what? You know, we all said the main brains are going away, and no technology in my career has ever gone away.

There's a website. It's, it's hard to find. PDP elevens are Wangs at this point.

Well, Well, but I, there's a website you can run every version of the Mac operating system from the very first version of it and emulated version on this website and every, has, every, every release that they did. Yeah. And you can, it's like, yeah, that's what it was.

Like, you know, that's going back to 19, uh, what was it, 85? Yeah, that's right. Something like that.

Somewhere in that range for 84. Yeah, 84 cuz uh, um, so, but that stuff doesn't go away, but it's role. Well, we still need people that work on that stuff.

Um, we still need new apps, still need to talk to the mainframe or the data or transactions coordinated across those. It's not that they're, it's not that they're dead, it's just the investment in new apps and functionality is obviously gonna be in other environments along with what you need to do to keep, you know, what, you have an an older environment current, right? I think the worst thing is, worst thing is being in an environment where there's zero funding to do zero with it.

And all it is doing is getting older and more out of date and, you know, ready to fall over and you're keeping, you're keeping the alive with, you know, soldering irons, whatever you No, that's right. That's right. That's The hard part.

I mean, I've had, I've had that situation before where it's time to, we have to upgrade and, uh, people were thankful for it. But your point, I think your point's valid. Not everybody is on the hard right end of the learning curve.

Learner curve, right? We all do it differently. So leverate, and Again, we're not coming from a play of honor.

I don't speak for you, Mitch, I'm not coming from a place of judgment from that standpoint. But the reality is that is a choice, right? And, and, and managers and folks that run it shops have to look at the resource allocations that they have, where their technology's going and staff up accordingly.

So, great. You know, we want went through a bunch of that stuff. Are there good resources, Mitch, that you know of that folks should, you know, kind of pay attention to if they're interested in learning about DevOps or learning about cloud native infrastructure?

Where, where would you join them? I, I think a great place to start is whatever cloud that you're in, if it's Azure, if it's, um, you know, Google or you pick your favorite, maybe it's Oracle or it's, um, Akamai, even all of those, all of those, uh, organizations have great training resources for people both getting started and then more advanced things. So the nice thing about that is they're training on you on how to use containers in an AWS environment so you're not having to kind of put all the pieces together yourself.

Um, I would start there. I think that's a fantastic resource. And I, and of course I have to pitch, what we do is we share a lot of content, whether it's in video or in the written form.

My third suggestion is find somebody to partner up. This week I had an interview. No, actually I had, I had a call with somebody, uh, I was talking about, totally different subject.

And I asked him, by the way, are you doing, are you doing i d e in the cloud instead of on your local machines and all that? Cuz this is getting crazy for me. And he says, yeah, I am.

So, so I asked him, I said, that guy's, you know, well while younger than I am, I said, would you mentor me on how to do that? Cuz I've got some questions. I don't wanna, I don't wanna like burn cycles on problems I already solved.

So find somebody either online, a friend, do it together with somebody, find somebody that, that you can ask questions of and they'll help you. Guess what? Nobody says, no, I won't help you.

Everybody says, sure, I'm happy to help. Right? Yeah.

On, on the security side, I would, I would echo that I think that you, you know, for key areas of, of understanding like identity and access management, like networking, um, you know, some cases that the Kubernetes, you know, services and those things, uh, AWS and, and Azure and Google to, to that degree also have real good, again, both documentation as well as, you know, kind of training materials that are hands-on in nature and run you through scenarios so that you're playing around in the environment. Uh, I will plug, uh, if, if your organization, uh, will support that, uh, and you wanna learn about cloud security, we do our introduction to cloud security class called cloud security hands-on, uh, at Black hat. I I'm teaching that in in August.

That's a great, I mean, you basically, we build a WordPress stack in aws and we have an Azure version of it too. So we'll do the same thing, uh, in Azure, uh, and secure it. So you understand about how to set up I identity and access management policies.

You understand how to set up, you know, kind of firewall rules. They're called security groups or, uh, network, uh, rules, uh, on, on that. In, in Azure, you know, we, we kind of build out and, and encrypt data.

So there's just a, there were a number of resources that are out there so that you can get hands on. And that's really the big difference. Back in the old days, if you wanted to understand how to be a CIS admin on a spark station y yeah, you're probably not buying a Spark station to sit, you know, in your basement, you know, back in the day, right?

You just didn't do that. Nobody had the money to do that. It made no sense.

So you had to learn on the job. Now you've got these opportunities to learn, um, really, and, and get hands-on in a very inexpensive way. Uh, and I think that's to the betterment of, of everybody.

Now understand, there are also a bunch of organizations that I will, I don't wanna call them shysters, but y you, you know, there's a lot of training stuff out there that's total crap. And they say it's, you know, hands-on and all this, and you get somebody who really hasn't been there, done that, you know, they don't understand what they're doing, they're just following the manual, they're reading to you and, and they can charge you thousands of dollars for these courses. So buyer beware on that front.

And again, I just don't think if you've got that hacker mentality, if you like to play around with stuff, just get in there, right? Start doing some stuff, start breaking things, uh, start figuring out how how it works. Uh, and I think ultimately, not only will you be better off in your career, I think, you know, you'll, you'll have a lot more fun because the, this stuff is just, again, it's really cool, right?

It's just really cool that, you know, when we do our labs in the part of, uh, y you know, we've got our first, uh, instance going y you know, within the first two hours of class, right? And you've configured it and you've, you know, kind of locked it down, uh, and you just see people go, holy crap, you can like do that stuff. So, uh, I would say definitely get hands on, uh, look at your cloud providers as a great resource to uh, really facilitate some of that training.

Uh, but y you know, if you wanna be in this business for the next 10, 15 years, uh, that learner's mindset is, is going to be absolutely critical for you. Thank you. I'm glad you mentioned the workshops and, and especially at, at events.

Like you're talking about going to conferences, you know, and even I'll say the old trusted sources, and I don't mean old derogatively, but you know, like Sand's Institute, guess what, you know, they're keeping up because this is where this is going too. And so then that's just one right? That you can go to for, for work workshops and training and, and uh, things like that.

So you can go to some very familiar and known places. Just start looking for things you weren't looking for and saying, you know, I'd like to know a little bit about this. What's this generative AI stuff?

How do I secure it? Is that on there? Maybe them be all, find something like that on there.

Exactly. Exactly. So good.

So good. So I think, you know, again, folks have their marching orders. You do.

You you wanna stay in your box? No, no problem with that. We're not judging anything you wanna start to expand.

There are lots of different resources to do that. Um, and you know, obviously at Textron we have a number of different opportunities for you to, you know, get hands on and do some workshops and, and just look for tech strong learning. Uh, we do have, uh, events that happen, you know, pretty frequently that do give you the opportunity to, uh, go a little bit deeper from the technology and those are some of our more popular mm-hmm.

Events. So, so definitely keep a lookout for that. Mitch, what do we have coming up?

We've got cloud native now probably happened already. So the next one would be data ops. Data Ops Day.

Yep. Data ops day, right. I'm not, you know, Dave Beverly who runs our events would just have my head if I expanded it to a multiple Day and uh, just put a plug in, uh, November.

I don't know if we've released details yet. We'll be doing a, uh, SecOps conference. We, I wonder who would be driving that one?

Um, I don't know. We better find somebody quick. I think we know Too about SecOps.

We might, we might have somebody that we could do that with. com for up in September. And I wanted to offer, you know, maybe, you know, if if I, if get deluded with requests, that's okay.

Anybody wants to reach out, I'm happy to connect them with something. If you're looking for a resource of where do I learn this, how to, I, I don't, don't, there's a lot more I don't know, but I can certainly point you to some areas if I do know those. com and happy to reply to you and see if, if I can help.

Alright, good, good. So with that, we will wrap up. We will see you next week on the Textron Research Review where I'll come up with some wacky topic that we can talk about, which I just have no idea what it is quite yet, but we will figure it out between now.

No, by the time we hit record. All right, thank you much. Take care everybody.

See you soon.