A DevOps CEO Panel: DevOps Beyond Digital Transformation

First of all, I’d like to introduce Dave McJanet. Dave, why don’t you take it? Thanks, Alan. Yeah, just quickly, introducing myself, Dave McCann at CEO of hashicorp. We make a series of products in DevOps tool chain terraform, vault console, Nomad, Packer, vagrant, and a couple more, all of which are pretty broadly used by many of the folks here. Thank you, Dave, and hashey corpse course. Next up, I want to introduce you to Oliver Pomel. Olivia, why don’t you introduce yourself? Hi, I’m Oliver Pomel, and the CEO and co founder at data dog. And we are an observability platform for cloud applications and infrastructure. And I’m an engineer so I’m really excited about what’s going on in the market today. Thank you. We all are Olivier. Thank you very much. Next, I’d like to introduce Jennifer Tahada. Jennifer, with a couple of words about you and your company.

Hi, everybody. I’m Jenn Tahada. I’m the CEO of pager duty, we developed a platform that helps developers manage unplanned unstructured, mission critical work, which is increasingly being leveraged by mid market and enterprise customers in their digital transformation in their cloud transformation as well. Thank you and welcome, Jennifer. Next up, coming to us from Tel Aviv, Shai, why don’t you introduce yourself? Hi, everybody. My name is Shai Bennett, I’m the CEO of elastic and one of the founders of the company. I also wrote the first few lines of code of Elasticsearch about 10-11 years ago or so. Absolutely, thank you very much. And then last but not least, our host here for JFrog SwampUP.

My friend, the CEO, co founder and JFrog. I am Shlomi. Welcome. Hey, Alan. Hey everyone, guys. My name is Tommy bentheim, CEO, co founder of JFrog. I’m insanely excited and honored to have you guys on SwampUP stage, thank you very much for joining us. Amazing to see you all. Welcome. Thank you. Okay, guys, let’s, let’s jump into our questions into our panel today.

The first subject I wanted to bring up to each of you is, look, this is certainly been a year, like any unlike any other year we’ve seen in our lifetimes, right? But it’s also been a year where we think digital transformation really accelerate out of necessity, probably more than, you know, anything else. And it’s had an extreme impact on the adoption of DevOps. How is this manifesting itself? What do you think, you know, of this acceleration? And how was DevOps a precursor to it? Was DevOps with them? So because of DevOps, or because of digital transformation, we have DevOps. And if you don’t mind, Dave,

I’d like you to maybe kick us off, and we’ll go into free form from there. It’s pretty clear that that those organizations that are good at having digital relationships with their customers have benefited over the last 12 to 15 months. And that lesson has not been lost on anybody. So, so think about what DevOps is, it’s about the industrialization of the application delivery process that allows you to modify applications quickly and repeatedly.

So it’s not surprising that yeah, as an industry, you’ve seen an acceleration and uptick in the idea of how to do that. I think I think the flip side of it is while there’s tremendous interest from the biggest companies on the planet, I think that there’s just there’s a scarcity of skill still, in terms of how exactly to do that. How do you build a system to allow you to deliver applications 12 times per day? I think that’s where the market is.

It’s being pulled forward in terms of interest, but the reality of adoption, it will lag that to some degree as the skills gap is closed. I wouldn’t do it. Alan, as you remember last year, it’s one Bob we said that every company will become a DevOps company. And I think that what we see, like look at the evolution, every company became a DevOps company and every developer became a transformer.

And every developer is now having this sense of ownership from everything from from build to creation of software, to build to distribution of software, developing to secure software, this sense of ownership, this full accountability on the full pipeline, also demonstrate the change did DevOps, both to the world, not just in terms of technology, not just in terms of the ecosystem integration between tools, and the selection of the best of breed tools for each part on the DevOps pipeline, but also the transformations that developers are now experiencing, we are now facing the second wave of digital transformation. And if you want your organization to be digital, you have to ride this wave.

I think I want to second that scene is a lot of success stories over the years was a very difficult time. We all have in mind, you know what happened with all these companies and had to scale up like crazy during the pandemic, I mean, everybody was on zoom, all of a sudden, and everyone’s kids have been on Disney plus all day long. And all that scale, you know, in a way that they couldn’t have had, they had to build data centers, and, you know, ship software in six months, things like that, right?

The thing we see less is the companies that had to completely reorganize their businesses, you think of the travel industry, for example, they had to switch from running all those different bookings to actually running everybody’s cancellations at the same time. And then they had to retool their businesses change their business models a little bit and retool the applications that have to support that. And thanks to DevOps sync to the cloud, they’ve actually been able to change their minds and ship all of that in pretty short timeframes. And that’s the successful, you will see that now the everybody sees that it’s very clear to the rest of the industry that the destination is there, and we just need to make it happen.

I love that Shlomi referred to developers as Transformers because I think digital transformation has accelerated in an unprecedented way, the cloud being a huge enabling platform for that. But with cloud comes complexity, you know, as we’ve moved to distributed architectures, as we’ve moved to everybody bringing their own devices, multiple devices, there’s increasingly complex ecosystem to manage. And that puts a lot of pressure on development teams. And it’s often invisible pressure that maybe leadership can’t see, we surveyed several several 100 developers last year at the end of the year, and 80% of organizations we talked to said they experienced an increase in pressure, like mental pressure on the mental health environment.

Since the pandemic began, they also cited a 47% increase in the number of daily incidents, that’s that complexity is starting to play a role in your operational environment. And we also heard that DevOps teams were spending an average of an extra 10 to 15 extra hours a week resolving issues, right. So the great news is cloud migration transformation, it’s empowering, developers are playing a leading role, but they’re also taking the hit. You know, as incidents increased, the volume of incidents increased up to 11 times for some regions, imagine if you were a development and owner, a service owner at Zoo last year, right.

So you know how we need to think about how we support the developer community in this leadership transition, that they’re a big part of, in looking at not just the structured work that they have to do in the building, but the unstructured work that’s coming their way as they support that perfect customer experience. I have to admit that now, I can’t get Optimus Prime out of my head during transformers, but I actually tend to agree that it is a transformation that is happening. And you know, I think last year has been very interesting that something virtual like digital transformation is driven by something so physical, as you know, suddenly, all your employees are working from home.

Suddenly, the amount of people that go online and maybe learn how to shop for the first time versus going to their local store or something along those lines. Suddenly everybody became millennials to a degree right and now they know how to use computers and know how to use zoom and know how to use video and start to interact and and I think that that made a big difference. And if anything, I think it first of all, just train our whole society to just learn how to engage in a digital way whether it’s within our workforce or whether it’s on our online life. And hopefully when things go back and we all see each other face to face and you know vaccination starts to to get more common that we’ll start to see each other and things we’re relaxed a bit.

But all of that training that we had over the last year is not going to go away. The other part, I think that is important is that this year has stretch our imagination around what’s possible when it comes to being fully to dissolve. And I’m beyond just talking about, for example, workplaces at elastic, we’ve been distributed from the start. But, you know, you no longer have to ask a question of saying something like, what happens if all my workforce are online and not in the office, and someone will go and say, Well, that’s a silly thought it will never happen. And now a company needs to go and address it and build the you know, all the infrastructure and everything that is needed in order to be able to support the employees in such a situation.

So I find it fascinating that some of the things that we used to think that will not happen are becoming more common, and then obviously, companies will have to go and address it. I would just say, Alan, that was not a fair question to five CEOs, the drives DevOps, it almost sound like we enjoyed the last year. You know what, let me let me come in, no one enjoyed the last year, too many people, we’ve lost in too much suffering and heartache. But but let’s also be realistic, and be fair, for companies that were already moving along their digital transformation for companies in the DevOps space.

Economically, at least, it was not a bad year, you all had fantastic years. You know, and a little bit of the rich get richer, people, high performing teams, performed highly low performing teams did it. But I’ll throw one other point out on this, and I’m gonna ask each of you to talk about it. You know, I was always taught and I’ve always preached DevOps is never done. Yeah, we learned some lessons these 12 months.

But those lessons will only help us to continue growing, continue innovating, continue iterating, over the next 12 months. So without asking anyone to pull out a crystal ball, how do we, where do we go from here? Right? How do we continue this? DevOps isn’t done? What does that mean? Show me I’m gonna ask you, if you don’t mind to talk about that a second. I think Alan, first of all, I agree with the, with what he said about where DevOps is taking the world and how it’s kind of supported, you know, funny enough. JFrog went public last year, we decided in our old meeting with the analyst to build the demo, because how can you tell the world about binaries and artifact management without becoming too technical, right?

So we decided to build the demo that was early March 2020, we decided to build the demo that on a real time basis, update the infection curve, very beginning of the pandemic, update the infect infection curve. While while, you know, things are being discovered all over the world. And, and, you know, we all had a tough here, but but software was really a catalyst in in the way the world recover.

And hopefully soon everybody will be back to business. But putting this aside, coming back to your question, what we should look for next? I think that it’s clear. And what we see in JFrog, is that developers and organizations are bullish about software, artifact distribution, and not just do the, you know, data centers anymore, but all the way to the edge.

We heard Gartner and Forrester and IDC and different analysts speaking about a new term, calling it edge Ops, calling it managing the edge and on what we see in JFrog is that artifact distribution software distribution become a big part of the success of the DevOps pipeline. It’s not any more about building your software. It’s also about securing and deploying the release bundle that you have on the edge. Whatever the edges, one of the greatest example that blew my mind away, was one of our customers from a very famous fast food chain in North America.

That told us that in the 2000, restaurants, they are counting the potatoes, as they make french fries with software. And every time that there is an order coming in, they are kind of managing inventory. That’s amazing. That blew my mind away. Finally, I managed to put the dots together between binaries and french fries. So that’s very exciting. Kudos to you. Next Next step for DevOps is managing the edge, make sure that it’s efficient, that it’s not too expensive, and that you can move faster with what you’ve created that the DevOps pipeline at the at the back.

So as jobs what’s really interesting is that you know, despite Without without going to all the way to French fries, which I will stay neutral on the, we’ve seen pretty much every single company learned a lot like a lot of our customers are cloud native companies that started their, their journey directly in the cloud in the last 10 years. And we are a cloud native company to a dead dog. And we learned a lot like we were we considered ourselves further along than many of our other customers, enterprise customers, for example, indefinitely to the cloud, into DevOps.

And we’ve learned a lot. So I think there’s a lot more for everybody to still learn over the next couple of years. Absolutely. Let’s talk about the challenges around edge Ops, though and about the edge. Because the edge to me is the new frontier, it’s a new battle front that’s opened. Right? And what worked before may not work there. What what are some of the challenges that you see, especially around security and web security, Dave will probably lead with you and Shai, what is some of these challenges at the edge that you think we need to be cognizant of?

So I say, I think I think what the cloud transition has taught us is that, you know, the DevOps is just sort of the native way of how you deliver applications on cloud, it’s sort of this highly iterative, drop your application artifact into this new environment, kind of a world, I think the funky part about it is you think about the dev side, and the ops side, the dev side is about the provenance of the application, or artifact of the management of the ops side of it is, hey, when I dropped this artifact into this environment, you know, is my ops security and networking team, okay with it.

So I think what happened is you went to cloud, all of a sudden, we were all accepting the Wait a second, this is a new environment, I’m dropping this artifact in here that has no network perimeter, zero trust, and all the things we understand about it, that was fundamentally different from what we were doing previously, to me, like the extension to edge actually is all part of that same domain, you’re now dropping an application artifact outside of your environment. So it actually has the same challenges of cloud? How do I think about security? How do I think about connectivity? And it turns out, I think our observation is, is it is actually just a single continuum. And it’s the same problem.

So you know, to get your security team, okay, with the application being deployed, you have to use identity as the basis of authentication, you have to use service connectivity as the basis of how you do networking. And I think like that is that is exactly how you think about it in cloud. So actually, I’m super optimistic about edge infrastructure being being adopted as a target endpoint, because the technical elements have already been solved. And I think we like we certainly see that in, in a lot of our customers, you know, whether it’s sort of the edge IoT type endpoint, or whether it’s a car that checks in every once in a while, that’s an edge problem, that’s actually super well solved. So I think we’ll see a ton of innovation of applications at the edge.

Now. Sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I think it reinforces the importance of service ownership as well, because again, you know, with the edge complexity is going to proliferate. And yet we’re doing all of these things, we’re advancing all of this technology in service of the digital customer experience. And, you know, customers spent the last consumers spent the last year living working learning online, they’re not going to return back to offices in schools and give up the conveniences that they gained, as all of you know, the the brands they engaged with, move to fully digital models.

And so that means that we’re going to be under more pressure to deliver these perfect experiences, regardless of how the architecture evolves, regardless of how complex the ecosystem gets. And that puts tons of pressure on people. And so how you help people automate, detecting, managing, orchestrating work against these issues, to empower them to deliver those experience becomes, you know, more and more important. And you know, that’s, that’s really exciting to us at pager duty. But I think also, it is what makes the partnership of these companies together.

So incredible like this, this is such an incredible panel to be a part of. And I think when this is all over, we need to get together for dinner, because I haven’t seen any of you in like 15 months at dinner at my house. I want to add, to echo, Dave and Jennifer, but also to suggest kind of a slightly different perspective, cloud accelerated everything we so in the past 10 years in software, but the majority of the market still look for a hybrid solution.

We see tons of organizations that are saying thank you very much, Mr. J. Frog. But we still need to manage the legacy from 10 years ago, we will transform to the cloud, we will use the cloud, but we want to find a way also to get to the edge within the internal CDN for our software, make sure that you can build a hybrid, make sure that you can build a bridge between my on prem software solutions and the cloud deployment environment. So I think that in the next 10 years, we will still see a need for a hybrid solution and it’s not going to be all cloud Hey, if I can add, I think edge is an interesting concept.

Because, you know, as Dave mentioned, in Shlomi as well, it’s like it’s, there’s a continuation going on here, right? Like there’s a, there’s a, there’s a line or a scale between a server running in a, in a data center in the basement, running your shopping or ecommerce site or something like that. And then all the way to something running on your washing machine, being scared of it being part of a DDoS attack, or mining Bitcoin or something along those lines, then like everything in between, right. And I think that companies need to think about it as a as a progression. And, and, and, you know, you don’t have like, in the edge and not in the edge, and then think about how do you manage things straight.

I’ll give you an example of how we think about an elastic. You know, we think about a bar ourself as a search company. So we enable search experiences, and searches driven by data. So obviously, if you have a single server running, and it’s, you know, you can search your data, then then, you know, hopefully, that’s easy. But then what happens if you’re, you have your infrastructure, your trading application, your security deployments are running on five different regions across the world, you can ship all of that data into a central location.

So you need to think about how do I go and for example, go and search across all of these location in a distributed manner, and being able to get back the responses, and do it in an efficient manner without having to go and move data around. So that’s one way for us to think about, I don’t know, layer three or layer four, I’m not going to go for like IP TCP here or something but it’s like, of how you go towards the edge. ` And then beyond that is I think it gets more and more like data as data becomes maybe smaller, and you need to think about how you shift the data from the edge. But then security becomes as important as well, and you need to think about how you secure those aspects. And, you know, obviously, show me, JFrog are experts at being able to take all of the software that ends up doing it shipping the data, collecting the data, or securing it, and, you know, being able to go and distribute it to all of these locations where it’s a server somewhere running in a data center, because that’s part of the requirements or because someone forgot that it’s there. And, or, or, you know, all the way to run to, you know, to the extreme edge.

That example is the one mentioned. That, to me the idea, the idea is basically like the constraint to the DevOps thing is actually the fact that you’re not applying outside your data center. And the security implications are extreme. Alright, guys, I need to pull us back from the edge, no pun intended. But I want to pull us back into the main the main stream here, and that is, you know, as we’ve all mentioned, it’s been it’s been a crazy year, it’s been a highly unusual year, there’s been tremendous suffering, there’s been tremendous success in certain areas, new learnings, but God willing, we’re coming into what I call a new normal, this COVID will be in our rearview mirror. And we are going to go forward.

Excuse me. Now, with that there will be more opportunities, new opportunities. And these opportunities will be around how you know what kind of products we deliver, what do I what’s our customer experiences? What about our own companies? We’re all growing, we’re facing skill gaps, right? And shortages of hiring great people. But yet, we’re in a position now where maybe we can hire people anywhere, right? Makes no difference if they’re in the valley, or Austin or New York or what have you. What What is this mean? I’m gonna ask you now personally, for each of your companies, not just society in general, but for each of you. What What does this mean? Shot you? Oh, he’s like to go less?

So I’m going to ask you first, to lead us off on this if it’s okay. Yeah, we do. So I think first of all, if for our company, you mentioned working in a distributed fashion. So we we started then we’ve been working in a distributed fashion since we started at elastic we we have employees in 40 different countries, and probably every state in the US if I remember correctly. And we’ve learned how to go and run and manage a distributed distributed company, we knew how to mute zoom before the pandemic hits.

And that was like a required skill probably immediately how to kill immediately afterwards. I what I find is that, first of all, and I mentioned it before, it’s just the the fact that the imagination is less of a constraint now, right? It’s like what happens when your whole workflow workforce works from home works remotely? That’s no longer a ridiculous question.

What happens if everybody go and shop online or most of the people shop online, what happens if whole generations that didn’t know how to use video or didn’t know how to go in and work and do things online are now doing that, how do you serve them, those things are now the norm to a degree because it’s more expected. So I think it’s kind of like fast forward the future and pull for the future that would have happened 5-6-7-8 years from now more naturally and you know, companies have to adapt to be able to do that.

The other thing that I would say like we as a society, we kind of like, like the thinking extremes. It’s either like everybody are in the office. And then I remember a few months afterwards, people were saying, oh, we’re gonna close all the offices, because we don’t need officers. But Yay, we’re all work from home. That’s great. And now it’s like, everybody got to pay, but we miss everybody. And we love to see everybody.

Okay, so everybody got to go back to the office. And and what we found is that there’s a really interesting balance of, of thinking about how do you strike that balance? How do you go and manage your workforce right now in a distributed company. So together with the fact for example, they were distributed first company, I believe we have 26, or 27 offices. Now they’re much smaller than your typical office, and things are those nice, but the need to go and see each other, the ability to escape from the office back to home and vice versa, escape, maybe it’s the wrong word. Like that’s important.

And the thing that changed is the flexibility and the freedom that you give to your employees in this case, and the ability to do it, and mentioned that they have this system to support it. So even if someone goes to the office, you still work as if it’s a distributed company, so nobody feels like they’re being left behind. And your system is there to support it.

And I’ll take it all the way back to for example, security. Even if your software is running within the data center, you should probably implement zero trust security, because it’s just like good, plain, you know, implementation that also future proof you when things become more remote when people move around. And that’s the same thing, when I think when it comes to running distributed companies, you need to work as a district company, even if people coming to the office. And, and during that, and, and yeah, and I think beyond that, maybe tying it back to DevOps.

Again, I think DevOps, like anything has been part of the tools in the tool set when it comes to trying to deal with the fact that, you know, suddenly, the future clashes in your face a few years from now, and you have to go and deal with it today. I think DevOps, a lot of it to me is around autonomy and trusting teams and being able to make sure that you create teams that have autonomy and trust and let them run forward. And those are the best ways that you want to set up teams within your company, to be able to go and deal with a situation where something that might have happened five years from now will go and happen now and today.

What I would add to that is, I think it’s never been more important to align people around your mission and the purpose associated with serving your customers. Because I mean, pager duty was about 20%, remote when before the pandemic happened. So we look a little bit more like the hybrid environment that I think we’re gonna see a lot of our customers moving to post pandemic, and we may be 40%, remote, maybe 50? Who knows? And I don’t think it’s a one way door, I think, to sheis point, like, we’re gonna run some experiments like will people rush back to the office because they want that sense of connectivity, but then really turned back to the flexibility of not having to commute and being able to have dinner with their children?

Will we’ll be traveling again to see the customers, you know, 50% of our time? Or have we learned that we can actually build strategic partnerships online? And how much of that will we pull forward? I think those are all questions that will that will be answered over time. But what I do know is creating a sense of connectivity, a sense of being part of something and inclusion and engagement for employees is harder when you’re remote and you don’t see each other I have my team together for the first time in over a year.

And we had to take a lot of precautions to do it. Get Everybody vaccinated, testing, social distancing, like you name it, but just the the sense of connection and being part of something bigger than you and feeling empathy is so important. It’s hard to do that in a video square. Right. And so I think I’ve always said this, the technical problems are easy, the people problems are hard. And what happens to employee loyalty and employee retention when the barriers to change are lower? Right?

Like how do we think about leadership and what leadership needs to look like and how that looks different based on what we learn? I think these are all really important questions for us. And equally, like what can we do as partners to our customers to help them through this transition because one thing I’ve learned is that every person is a affected differently by this pandemic, every company is in a different place on the continuum, there’s no one size fits all solution. So you have to develop a much more empathetic, you know, kind of active listening relationship with your customers in order to figure out where they’re starting from and where they’re trying to go.

And that destination may change over the next four quarters or eight quarters because of what’s going on in their region. I mean, look at you look at this sort of awfulness that we’re seeing in India right now. And the fact that in North America, 50% of adults are vaccinated, like there’s the, you couldn’t have a more contrasting sort of environment to work in. And yet we have customers in both of those locations.

So being agile, being able to leverage technology, automation, to create capacity to deal with this learning curve to deal with this ongoing transformation, I think is so important. And I think that’s why these companies are sitting at the center of that transformation, why developers are the new leaders of modern companies, you know, which is a as a, as an engineer, CEO, it’s very interesting to me actually very exciting to see that there’s going to be many, many different ways to build and run a company.

Now, it used to be very constrained in who you could run an office and get people to work together. And now it’s completely open ended. And we can pretty much pick and choose, you know, how we’re going to run everything. I think the risk there, though, is that it’s going to take quite a while to know what’s a good idea? What’s a bad idea? I mean, in the short term, we have an idea of what works and what doesn’t work. In the longer term, though, there can be the law of unintended consequences.

And so for example, if you run you should study stability, everything and have various levels of hybrid, is it a good thing or a bad thing for diversity? Actually, you will take a few years before we get the word on that. Fantastic. I’ve got one last topic question I’m gonna throw out at you and again, being mindful of the time help work with me guys. And ladies. Or lady as the case may be, what what’s the next big thing in DevOps here? What’s the next move? What you know, we, we have, you know, DevOps isn’t done. But what, what’s next? What do we what do we see going next? Shlomi?

I don’t think you got a chance to get in on the last round. So I’m gonna ask you to kick this one off. I’m just sitting here enjoying the view? Like, look at us, you guys. For me, this is the crystal ball of software, we have five CEOs from from the leading companies representing what is it like $100 billion on one stage? That’s Don’t blame me for sitting and enjoying what what the the guys are saying that that’s amazing. But to your question, Alan, and, you know, I, I’m maybe I’m very excited about the fact that we are starting to come back to the swamps, to our offices office in Tel Aviv, is already worrying and we are enjoying the togetherness I missed that I missed my team.

And me know what flexibility or not I want to spend more time with them at the office then remotely. But DevOps, it’s very clear to me, and you just have to look at, at the adoption of what we call the best of breed the developers are bringing into the organization, it’s very clear to me that there’s now about security, and distribution, and being driven by data, and being able to automate whatever you can automate.

Now, JFrog now support few programs in the academia, where computer science students are learning what it means to become a developer. Five years ago, the syllabus was different today, they are producing different developers, they are not afraid to get their hand into automation. It’s not any more about just my code, but also about the collaboration. It’s not just about coding and building my, my code, it’s also about securing it, and making sure that I can become faster and make more my organization more fast and secure. So to cut it into few bullets, you need to be agile, as Jennifer amanat mentioned, you have to be focused on security, not just writing the quick and dirty.

You have to automate everything you can and you have to distribute your software all the way to the edge and own your destiny and not trust the ops of the SEC, or whatever side of the company that you used. Great, that’s a powerful closing. Don’t feel obligated. Anybody else though, want to closing thought on this? Now, Shlomi, we gave you the last word, Mazal Tov. All right. First of all, look, all five of you. Thank you so much for putting up with me here is Yoast and coming in to SwampUP and sharing your thoughts. It’s been an amazing experience. I think our audience will agree with that. I want to wish you all the best of health and wellness, but good luck in your businesses to and to everyone out there watching it. We’re coming. We’re coming to a new normal. We’re coming to the end of the road. So that’s going to wrap up our CEO panel. Again, thank you all very much. This is Alan Shambo for DevOps comm here at JFrog SwampUP 2021. Have a great day.