Gene Kim and the Rise and Fall of DevOps | Conversations From DevOps Enterprise Summit

Dev Interrupted takes a detour to Vegas!

As a first for the show, we took the podcast on the road to attend the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas.

While at DOES, we had the pleasure of interviewing Gene Kim, famed researcher and author of "The Phoenix Project" and "Accelerate."

Also attending DOES were friends of the podcast Bryan and Dana Finster, whose presentation on the Rise and Fall of DevOps inspired us to invite them onto the pod.

Listen to this two-part episode as Gene breaks down all things DevOps past, present, and future while the Finsters present their case for platform teams, project ownership, and how to win the trust that binds good dev teams. 

Gene Kim Episode Highlights

• (2:12) Improvements Gene is most proud of
• (4:49) Current industry trends
• (6:36) What developer experience (DX) means to Gene
• (8:40) Changing merging behavior
• (11:09) Enabling enterprise transformations
• (14:06) Best of DevOps Enterprise Summit

Rise and Fall of DevOps Episode Highlights

• (15:50) Episode start
• (17:59) Defining DevOps
• (23:46) Mission
• (26:43) Structure
• (33:04) Ownership
• (37:48) Platform
• (40:55) Learning
• (45:10) Trust

Episode Excerpts

Gene Kim

Dan: Where I wanted to start with you is what are you most proud of that you've seen our industry, you know, improving with CI and CD? What comes to mind for you?

Gene: Yeah, you know, so that's a great question. So I think it's really what you're witnessing here. I mean, so this is our 15th conference, and nothing excites me as much as this because it's the technology leadership community, right, mostly from large, complex organizations. So, you know, I've been saying high-performing technology organizations for 23 years. So, you know, that took me into the middle of the DevOps movement, and you know, back in 2009, 2010, right, that was Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, right? And so there's no doubt that they pioneered the principles and the practices. And you know, they were shocking the world doing 10 deploys a day, you know?

Dan: At least.

Gene: Yes, right. So that was 2009, and that frightened everybody. And then, you know, by the time Amazon announced that they were doing 136,000 deployments a day, right, I was like, that's amazing. But you know, I think my real passion is seeing how those same principles, same practices are being used by large complex organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries across almost every industry vertical. So this morning, we saw American Airlines present; it's not just technology leadership, but with their business partner, right? Mattel, the same business partner who's responsible for, you know, the direct-to-consumer strategy, right, with that technology leader who's making that happen. So these are organizations that are 80, 90, or 100 years old, right? Where from the Navy with, you know, almost 300 years old, you know, so it's just, I have so much pride in the fact that here's a community that is driving, you know, amazing, now with principles practice, but you know, helping their organizations win in the marketplace.

Bryan and Dana Finster

Dan: Why did you pick that title? Or, like, Where does it even come from?

Dana: We actually had a different original title. I think it was The Missing Link. It was kind of a cool title but didn't really speak to what we were talking about, and after we proposed what we wanted to talk about, we had some conversations with some of the IT web folks. They kind of suggested we go down a more interesting, more catchy title.

Bryan: We're seeing a trend, and we've both lived this trend and multiple organizations; we're seeing it elsewhere, where even if they define DevOps correctly, where it's not a tool, or it's not a team, or it's not a role, they define it as improving how the organization delivers, and they get all this excitement built up, and they get better at delivering better delivery, they build out all these good things to get it done. And then complacency sets in, one of those links breaks, it all falls apart, and you wind up going from hey, we can release all the time to hey, it takes five days of lead time and three levels of CAB to get in production.

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