On this episode of the Six Five Webcast, host Paul Nashawaty is joined by Jen Aspesi, Sr. Consultant DevOps and Automation Marketing for ISG at Dell Technologies. Jen shares her profound insights on the pivotal role of Infrastructure as Code, the emerging trends in Platform Engineering, and the transformative impact of Generative AI in advancing DevOps practices.
Their discussion covers:
- The evolution and growing importance of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in DevOps.
- Key strategies and best practices for implementing effective Platform Engineering.
- The integration and influence of Generative AI technologies in DevOps workflows.
- The future outlook of DevOps with the rise of Generative AI and automation technologies.
- Insights into how organizations can adapt to these changes to enhance their DevOps capabilities.
Learn more at Dell Technologies and Dell Technologies Developer.
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Transcript:
Paul Nashawaty: Hello and welcome to today’s session on advancing DevOps and the impact of infrastructure as code and platform engineering as well as Gen AI. My name is Paul Nashawaty and I’m the Practice Lead at The Futurum Group, and I covered the Application and Infrastructure Modernization Group. I’m joined by Jen at Dell. Jen, would you like to introduce yourself?
Jennifer Aspesi: Yeah, sure. Hey Paul, how are you doing? I’m Jen Aspesi. I’m a Senior Consultant for Global Marketing on DevOps and Automation.
Paul Nashawaty: Thanks, Jen. And this is a great topic to get into. There’s a lot happening in this space. There’s a lot going on with maturity in companies, whether it’s efficiencies and self-service generated by infrastructure as code. But really what we’re seeing from the research side of it is there’s skill gap issues, there’s automation issues, there’s maturity issues. We see that there’s so much happening in this modernization perspective that organizations are really trying to find the right tech stack in order to move forward. What we see from an automation perspective is organizations are really trying to take that human out of the loop.
In fact, we see in our latest research that 24% of organizations are looking to release code on an hourly basis, yet only 8% are able to do so. We also see a tremendous amount of increase for using AI in production workloads. We see that nine months ago I ran a study and 18% of organizations are running AI in their production workloads. Ran that same study recently, and 54% of organizations are running AI in your production workloads. So Jen, what does Dell have to say to this? I mean, there’s a lot happening here and there’s a lot that is going with this maturity and advancements with automation. And I know that Dell has been doing a lot with Ansible modules and Terraform. What are your thoughts?
Jennifer Aspesi: Yeah, that’s a lot to cover and we’ll do our best to get there, but there’s many, many layers to this. There’s just so many layers and they keep compounding on IT operations and DevOps. And if we step back and look at DevOps and where it’s come, it has just been a 10-year journey for organizations to cultivate this type of environment where you have frictionless and seamless operations, that developers can really benefit from. They want to get past the silos that the cloud has brought into the picture. Now they’re learning how to create multi-site environments that, still with a cloud first mentality, but now a data first mentality, where is the data going to live? And part of that, if you think about what Dell has to offer, where an infrastructure company, end to end from servers to network to storage, data protection, and we have, as you mentioned, the automation tools, which some of our new end users may not even be aware.
And people watching this webinar, that we’ve had an API first mentality for well before we started thinking about putting automation tools at work in some of our offerings, starting with Chef and Puppet Power Shell, any type of scripting that could help get DevOps to a place where making any type of process that is, whether it’s replication or whether it’s expanding a volume for persistent storage and even containerization now, those predominant tools, Ansible and Terraform, and leveraging GitHub as the open source repository so that end users can easily get those scripts.
And then you talked about some of the challenges of getting to a mature DevOps model are skill gaps, cost, complexity, and we could go on, but those continue over the years. When we do our surveys, whether it’s with… We just did with one with Techstrong, we did a pulse meter that’s available now and we can talk a little bit more about those findings, but it’s still the same culprits. It’s still those same issues. The cloud first mentality, it was costly. Repatriation is really important. All of these functions that I mentioned, building a multi-site experience, part of building that experience really relies on automation and infrastructure as code.
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah, Jen, I couldn’t agree more. When I look at our research, I think about the context of these organizations that are trying to move faster and they have these business KPIs, their objective is to move faster. But there’s a lot of challenges in the way, and when I think about it, I like to make the analogy between Stonehenge and creating applications, and I don’t know how these rocks were put on top of other rocks at Stonehenge. It seems like a big monumental task that happened, but my thought is no matter how many hands you put underneath those rocks, you still can’t lift that rock up. It’s really that big of a rock. I don’t know how they did it, but I kind of look at it the same way as I think about application development. You just can’t keep throwing hands at it to create the volume of applications that organizations are looking to put out the door.
And part of it, you mentioned a couple of things. You mentioned skill gap issues, and a lot of organizations are looking at the appropriate tech tools, tech stack in order to overcome some of these skill gap issues as well. And part of that is, well, I’ll just say in our research we see that 67% of organizations are looking at hiring generalists over specialists, and they’re really looking at the vendor to remove that complexity from the deployment and having the generalist of the deployment. And that’s largely due to the fact that there’s not a lot of resources available that can do those specialist type roles. So automation is key, driving towards that.
I think that when we look at the other challenges that organizations run into the days of submitting a help desk ticket and waiting three days for something to change are long since gone. But in order to use infrastructure risk code, that helps with templatizing the deployments, so you can get those fast to rapid deployments out the door, and also you can remove human error, as an example. And that also allows for the DevOps teams to be focused on innovation rather than maintenance. When we think about this, what is the crossover between the manual automation and self-service platforms for platform engineering? How does Dell see that?
Jennifer Aspesi: Yeah, so you said a lot there. I’m still on Stonehenge right now, so I’m trying to figure out how many hands does it really take to lift a stone at Stonehenge? Well, we don’t really need to quantify that anymore, right? Because we have all the tools that we need to envision how that works. It can be simply, it doesn’t have to be a physical lift, and we can compare that to the manual versus automation type of scenario. And I think it’s really important. Some of the surveys, as you know, we’ve done year over year. We continue to see that there’s a 60% middle, more or less middle ground where organizations are getting to a place where they’re adopting a DevOps culture. What that DevOps culture looks like, nobody really knows unless we dig in a couple layers deeper. We know that they’re doing containerization.
We know that Kubernetes is really important to them, and that adds a whole different level of complexity, how to manage Kubernetes. And we know that we have offers, Dell has offers of trying to put complex management type tasks onto a platform like Apex Cloud platforms or as you know, Apex Navigator, are two examples of how to make manual tasks easier, but underlying that is still a skill need. And when you talk about generalists, I really think about SREs. I think about SREs that are growing up and or maybe calling themselves platform engineers. They have a lot on their plate, that includes things like compliance, regulations. To achieve compliance and security regulations, you need automated task that are dependable, reliable and repeatable as well as able to be broken down quickly. And in order to do that, they really need to know and understand how to build those processes.
Scripting makes it easier. Learning how to script, writing those playbooks and plans. We can help do those things through our services and consultancy team. Again, another area in which some of our end users or just people that have purchased our storage systems that don’t realize that we have this other side of the business that I think when customers think about buying a service, they say, “Oh, it’s going to cost me money. Oh, it’s an investment.” And it is an investment. However, you are going to be able to teach your IT operations, team members, your resources, how to grow up and become SREs and platform engineers pretty quickly. And we also get them from a day zero to day two very quickly so that they can start realizing the benefits. For example, if a developer wants to access storage in less than five minutes versus hours of waiting for a claim ticket, as you mentioned earlier, to be concluded by someone in IT operations across the hall, those days are gone and they’re going fast.
But now what if I wanted to, instead of opening a ticket to get something or having to leverage somebody else in the organization, we have platform engineers that are now creating self-service directories for those customers or for their end users. And those end users being application developers, they want to deploy a volume somewhere or they want to move a VM to a container. That’s the hot topic of the day. How do I do this? How do I move this A from A to B, C to A, or however you want to look at it, right? That level, multilayered cake of complexity is now being broken down and being put into a simple UI that people can go on, click and get. Now, someone listening to this conversation may say, “Well, duh, that’s been around for a while. We’ve been doing that. It’s called AWS and I can build a catalog.”
Well, a lot of people do it yourself as well, right? They want to do it themselves. They want to have their own internal developer catalog. We also, without pitching too much, we also have a managed cloud developer offering that along with services and consultancy is kind of a build your own but with a platform that’s available to you. We have a lot of areas in which platform engineers can quickly tie into what we have as an infrastructure provider, and we do that alongside our partners as well. I already mentioned Apex Cloud platforms. Well, Apex Cloud Platforms for Red Hat OpenShift is a really good example as well as Microsoft Azure. So if you’re already an OpenShift or an Azure user, you can create catalogs and do a little bit more with some of the tools already at hand.
Paul Nashawaty: Jen, you bring up a lot of great points here, and it’s funny, when I think about walking the show floor and of any of these conferences, and I’ll give you a nice shiny quarter if you can find me, somebody that identifies themselves as a storage admin or a virtualization admin or a network admin. Everyone wants to be the platform engineer. That’s the buzzword of the day and they want… But kind of joking aside, that’s really where organizations are kind of pivoting towards. The other thing you mentioned, Jen, was really the ability to accelerate those applications, those initiatives that happen. And one of the things I think that Dell has in its kind of tool chest here is the ability to work with a partner ecosystem.
If the organization doesn’t have the skill on their bench, working with service delivery partners to execute is definitely a way to get there as well. And I like what you were talking about. It’s like get this up and running, get it built, and then transfer that knowledge over to your team so you can actually deliver. And then you have that point and clickability to do whatever it is going from past to present to future. Like you were talking about moving from virtual machines to containerization as an example. That’s really where the tool set is more automated and can be automated and built around those workflows. So really powerful message there for the audience to take away that there’s tools in place that can do this, whether or not you have the skill on your bench to get it done, it can be done pretty rapidly. And that’s what I’m hearing from a lot of CIOs is modernization is key.
They have to move forward and they don’t know how to do it with the bench they have. So that’s, I think, a powerful statement. Jen, I want to pivot the conversation to talking about AI a little bit here. At the beginning of the top of the session, I was talking about the adoption of AI. We were talking about 18% of workloads running AI in their production workloads nine months ago. In that same study, 54% of workloads are now running production AI in their production environments. That’s a big move, and when you look at that, it’s not just about monitoring an observation of tedious tasks, now it’s actually moving up stack and that maturity is kind of growing. I’d like to hear your perspective and Dell’s perspective about how AI is really enhancing the platform and helping customers and the audience here get to their goals.
Jennifer Aspesi: Of course. Yeah, so it’s funny. AI has really consumed us in so many ways, and I really look at this as a two part story. If you think about what we were just talking about infrastructure as code, now imagine that we’ve already helped a few of our SREs platform engineers, IT admins, whatever they’re called, get the skills that they need to write and execute a playbook, for example. And they have end-to-end workflows that are working really well for them. Imagine now that they have that in place and end-to-end from, like I said before, from servers, whether it’s Power Edge, and that’s where your ingress of data comes into for AI. And then you have a Power Flex, a Power Store, a Power Scale, different types of data crossing the infrastructure and yeah, I’m naming a lot of Dell infrastructure components, but those are the components that I know.
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah, that makes sense.
Jennifer Aspesi: Wouldn’t be able to name others very clearly. Yeah. Your data is traversing the environment and training and inference is so critical to that. When you think about AI data itself, who are the people working on that data? They want it to be clean, they want it to be fast. They want all of these things to happen so that when they get to generative AI, like I said, it’s clean, it’s useful. Data and infrastructure as code is a critical component to that. The faster and the more scalable that things are, the easier it is for an organization to build Gen AI into their environment and for their external customers as well. So that’s one part of it. The second part is skills, right? We’ve talked a lot about upskilling, but even on the call, like I said, we just did this great webinar with Kat Cosgrove and Mitch Ashley from Pulse Meter, Techstrong, your colleagues today.
And what they talked about, what Kat talked about was skills. She’s one of the leaders for Kubernetes releases and she says it day in and day out. What she’s seeing is the lack of skills to adopt, and we want our end users to be skillful and not to oversimplify, but one of the things that’s going to help them do that is using Gen AI to write those playbooks and plans. So not only do we have an infrastructure now built on automation, but you can use that Gen AI to build better plans and playbooks. Where they’re using them today, not necessarily in production, but of kind of the scaffolding of the code that’s going to be in production. And that’s great because not only are they getting early looks at how the code is going to be run and they can see how it’s going to work before it gets to a level where something could break. That’s where you may have a resource or two that understands it very well.
And or if you’re working with a consultancy team like our team at Dell, they may be able to tell you where things can look better, behave better. It’s coming full circle on the benefits of AI in examples like this. And it’s not just automation tools and IT ops that are using Gen AI to code. It’s also the application developers, and they’re using it in a very similar way, even if they’re using different tools to do it. I just see so much more coming out of this, including I’m going to mention another solution, which is our Apex AI Ops. The ability to look across the environment and learn from the environment is another area that can really compliment the platform engineer and help them to learn how their platforms can be engineered to be suited for their end users.
Paul Nashawaty: Jen, this is great. I do want you to emphasize one point here. I think when I hear you talk, there’s a lot here, a lot of ways to solve the problems that organizations are running into, but I also know that when we’ve had our briefings offline and such, we talked about the ease of use and meeting the client where they are in their journey, stepping them through. So if you’re a very mature organization or if you’re just getting started, that’s something that many organizations have to think about, especially the audience looking at this session today. They may want to know, well, I’m just new to this. How do I get started? Or, I’m very mature, I’ve already know a lot of this. How do I use this to my next capabilities? What are your thoughts for sharing that from a Dell perspective?
Jennifer Aspesi: You know Paul, it’s all about meeting our customers where they’re at today. We know the more mature customers are going to be taking advantage of some of our newer offerings, such as Apex Cloud Platforms for Red Hat, OpenShift and Azure, as well as Apex Navigator for Kubernetes and multi-cloud. Those are definitely more advanced and better to take advantage of once you have the infrastructure as code in place. But like I said, services and consultancy, they’ve been doing this for over five years now, much longer than I’ve been talking about it. They are just awesome at sitting with the customer and being able to really sketch out how to get them from A to Z across the infrastructure with automation.
Paul Nashawaty: That’s great. I think the thing that, my takeaway from this whole thing is this is really just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much to think about and talk about, but it really does vary based on your business needs and your objectives. When we talk to the audience here, Jen, where should the audience get started in this? Because there’s a lot here to think about, a lot to consume.
Jennifer Aspesi: Absolutely. I think you mentioned business outputs and we really kind of glossed over a lot of the challenges that customers have and the outputs themselves, being able to grow faster, being able to innovate faster, less maintenance and less pressure on the application developers to create their own environment. I mean, they can still depend on DevOps to be there for them, and I’m pretty confident that our customers are getting there as well as the new ones that are going to find us over the next years to come. How do they find us and get more information on this particular space? Well, they want to go to developer.dell.com. That is where everything we’ve just talked about lives, also videos. We have a number of videos that our developer advocates have done. There’s over 53 of them on YouTube, and we have links to those as well. There’s also an area where anyone can blog and ask questions of their engineers, so we teach for free through developer.dell.com, so check it out.
Paul Nashawaty: Very cool. Jen, it’s always a pleasure talking to you, very insightful. I love the perspective that you bring to the table. I want to thank you for your time today. This has been great. I want to thank the audience as well. As you heard Jen mention where to go. You can go to developer.dell.com to find, get the information, lots of great resources and tools there. You can also go to the futurumgroup.com to learn more about our research as well. And with that, I’d like to thank you and have a great day.
Jennifer Aspesi: Thanks. Take care.
Author Information
At The Futurum Group, Paul Nashawaty, Practice Leader and Lead Principal Analyst, specializes in application modernization across build, release and operations. With a wealth of expertise in digital transformation initiatives spanning front-end and back-end systems, he also possesses comprehensive knowledge of the underlying infrastructure ecosystem crucial for supporting modernization endeavors. With over 25 years of experience, Paul has a proven track record in implementing effective go-to-market strategies, including the identification of new market channels, the growth and cultivation of partner ecosystems, and the successful execution of strategic plans resulting in positive business outcomes for his clients.
