On this episode of DevOps Dialogues: Insights & Innovations, I am joined by Alan Shimel, CEO and President of TechStrong Group, and Stephen Foskett, President of Tech Field Day, for a discussion on impacts of how CIOs are managing the cost of DevOps.
Our conversation covers:
- Past, present, and future applications
- 24% of organizations have a desire to release code on an hourly basis, but yet, only 8% are able to do so.
- Re-internalization of IT and managing the cost
These topics reflect ongoing discussions, challenges, and innovations within the DevOps community.
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this webcast. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this webcast.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Paul Nashawaty: Hello, and welcome to this episode of DevOps Dialogues. My name is Paul Nashawaty, and I’m the Practice Lead for the AppDev Practice at The Futurum Group. Today I’m joined by Alan and Stephen. Alan, would you like to introduce yourself?
Alan Shimel: Sure. Alan Shimel, CEO, founder of Techstrong Group, and we are the folks behind devops.com, Security Boulevard, Cloud Native Now, bunch of other places, Techstrong TV as well. And hopefully, well, joining up with the Futurum Group shortly.
Paul Nashawaty: Well, great to have you here. Great to have you on the session today. And Stephen.
Stephen Foskett: Yep. So I’m the founder of the Tech Field Day events, including AppDev Field Day, which we are enjoying here as of this recording. So I’ve been focusing on a lot of areas of IT, more coming from the operations and infrastructure side of things. But, of course, DevOps is real and I can’t wait to talk about how we make all this real.
Paul Nashawaty: So it really is an exciting time in the industry. We see that there’s a lot of change happening, a lot of initiatives happening, and money is being spent, right? I mean, we see this, it’s about the evolution of new initiatives happening. When I talk to folks in my practice, I often talk about the context of past, present, and future applications, that are heritage applications, that are looking to be modernized into maybe containerization and microservices, and maybe even thinking about technologies like serverless or web assembly.
But all of this comes in with the context of somebody has to have a budget, that has to buy this, whether it’s the tech stack. In a previous episode, we talked about people, process and technology, and that has a lot to play with it as well. Historically, we thought about, at least I thought about the DevOps persona and the senior IT leaderships as maybe the user and the buyer, historically.
But what we’re seeing in our research, we’re seeing that… Recently did a persona study that showed that there’s a pivot in the spending of IT senior leadership’s money. So the money’s still with the IT senior leadership, but the spending of that money is occurring at the, what I would call the OT level, the DevOps teams, the SREs, the platform engineering teams. Alan, let’s start with you. What are your thoughts on this?
Alan Shimel: So I think that was true until about a year and a half ago. Within the last year, year and a half, I think we’re seeing a return to sanity, normalcy, or before this. I think what we went through with the rise of DevOps, and DevOps maybe was the tip of the spear, but we also saw the rise of DevOps, the foundational era of open source software and open source becoming dominant. 75% of all the code in apps being part of open source. And COVID actually played a role into this, right?
Because we had all of these remote teams and how we were developing our software. The rise of the software factory. And an interesting thing happened with this rise of the software factory, tool vendors, IT tool vendors, DevOps tool vendors, got into the business of what I call delivering delight. They just wanted to get their software into the hands of the people who were going to use it, because those people were in such high demand, that they were getting as much money, in essence, as they wanted.
So money no longer was the key ingredient in why I went to work somewhere. I want to know who am I working with, what are my work conditions, what tools am I going to use? I want to have a say in what tools I’m going to use. So now, that swarthy enterprise sales guy who carries a bag and takes the CIO out for three martinis, he doesn’t do so well with this developer. Software, too, vendors realize this, they’ve hired DevRel people, developer relations people.
They wore funny hats or had purple hair, and all kinds, different things to stand out. And they befriended the developer, because they talked that language, and they made sure the developer can get the software in their hands. And then they basically helped that the software delivered delight. And the buying cycle became very much a bottom up. That developer would then go to his manager, who would then go to the VP or director, who would then go, eventually, all the way up to the CIO. This tool really works. It’s what we need. It’s what I want to work on.
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah, that makes sense. And I think to back that up with some research, what we see in a recent study of 870 respondents global study that we did at the Futurum intelligence Team, we did this study that showed that there was, organizations have a desire, 24% of respondents actually have a desire to release code on an hourly basis, but yet, only 8% are able to do so. And that sounds aggressive, but when you think about impacts-
Alan Shimel: Aggressive? Aggressive? Let’s… Stephen, when was the last time you worked at an organization that was releasing code hourly?
Stephen Foskett: Let’s say never.
Alan Shimel: Never.
Stephen Foskett: Yeah.
Paul Nashawaty: But here’s the thing, though, you have a cyber attack, what do you do?
Stephen Foskett: Yeah.
Alan Shimel: Well, you’ve got to respond right away. Yes. But let’s… So we talk about John Allspaw’s seminal presentation, 10x a day software, mean, that was aspirational. When you’re a company that released code once or twice a year and you move to monthly releases, that’s huge.
Stephen Foskett: It’s a revolution.
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah.
Alan Shimel: It’s a revolution.
Stephen Foskett: Yep.
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah.
Alan Shimel: Monthly to weekly. Crazy. You’re talking about hourly?
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah. We’ve seen this trend. I’ve been doing this trending report for since ’22. ’23, we’ve seen the trend moving closer and closer to that hourly release.
Alan Shimel: But you just said it, 8% of organizations-
Paul Nashawaty: Able to do so.
Alan Shimel: You got a long way to move.
Paul Nashawaty: Absolutely. And it’s not all applications should do that, but I guess, Stephen, when we think about it in the context of the spend, Alan was talking about the tool sets that are being used and why it’s important. So senior IT leaders are going back to their organization going, “Hey, we need to get this done. Say we do want to release code on an hourly basis. How do we get it done?” Are they the ones that senior IT leaders in there rolling up their sleeves, figuring it out? Or, are they going to their experts on their teams going, “Hey, this is what we need to do?” What are your thoughts?
Stephen Foskett: Yeah, I definitely think that there’s a normalization happening here. And to Alan’s point, I think that there was definitely too far of a pivot, too much of an embrace of these ideas. And I think that a lot of the folks that are involved, even those people that are pushing for their favorites and everything, I think a lot of those people would agree as well that things just got a little too crazy. And what we’re seeing now is a fallback to earth from that. And so, to your point, you said bottom-up sales? I have been talking about a middle-up sale, where, and I think this is reflected in this trend toward platform engineering, for example, that we talked about on the Tech Field Day podcast.
Platform engineering, to me, is a signal that everyone realizes that it’s completely untenable for every developer to use whatever the heck he wants to make his own thing work. Because there’s no chance that he’ll ever be able to put together a uniform, supportable, scalable stack if that developer’s expected to know everything. They have to have a return to standards, a return to experts. And I think that that’s what’s happening on the application tool set side as well. I think it’s happening everywhere, where there’s this idea that, wait a second, we pivoted too far toward the cult of making the developers happy and now we have to make things-
Alan Shimel: The alpha predator.
Stephen Foskett: … more-
Alan Shimel: That was the cult, the cult of the developer alpha predator.
Stephen Foskett: And now we have to make things more stable, more predictable, more repeatable. Got to get some maturity in here.
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah. And so there is that, this ebb and flow, right? So if you look at the last 10, 15 years, maybe even more, there was, IT owned everything. They stood up their own infrastructure, they built everything. Then all the budget was pulled out of IT and said, “Okay, we’re going to push that into lines of businesses,” which we realized that was a mistake. And then there was all the shadow IT that was occurring and all these things that were happening. And there was no governance, it was the wild west. So then there was this re-internalization of IT, which is where you’re going, right? Re-internalization, but IT morphed and changed to be more of a business manager, understanding the relationship between these SaaS vendors-
Alan Shimel: It had to.
Paul Nashawaty: Had to, right? Because times have changed.
Alan Shimel: Well no. The problem was, 15 years ago, most these non-IT executives thought of IT as a cost center. Now they think of IT as a profit generator, because good IT makes you more profitable. It’s not a cost center. So it’s a different mindset. Now you’re a moneymaker, you’re not a sinkhole. And that really changed the game.
Stephen Foskett: And IT was a sinkhole. So that’s, 20 years ago, I was one of the people in enterprise IT. And I’ll tell you, we were entirely, the stories are all true, we were disconnected completely from the developers. We were disconnected from the lines of business. We didn’t care. We’re going to build our infrastructure the way we want it, because that’s how we roll. And obviously, that was wrong too.
Paul Nashawaty: Right. And what we’re seeing actually, this to both your points, we’ve learned and what we’re seeing in our research is we see that this observability study I just fielded came back. We see that observability practices are young in their maturity within organizations, but they’re starting with internal applications first to make sure that things are working. So we see that actually 25% of these applications are being checked with observability practices internally before they roll them out externally.
Alan Shimel: But my question’s, what about the other 75%?
Paul Nashawaty: Correct. Well, that’s maturity, right? So it’s-
Alan Shimel: It’s like this. When does it go like that? I think the other thing we’re seeing, and this is what I said in the beginning, it was true up until maybe a year, a year and a half ago, is we’ve seen the pendulum swing back, and the rabbit now has the gun again. The developers are not quite the alpha predators, they’re not invincible. There are plenty of developers out there. I could hire more.
And if you don’t want to come work in my office and you want to work at home, that’s fine. I’ll find someone who will. And so, the leverage is changing and the tool vendors are seeing this. They’re getting rid of the DevRel people. They’re cutting back on DevRel and they’re hiring salespeople again, enterprise salespeople who are selling to IT leadership. You live long enough, it goes round and round and round this circle.
Stephen Foskett: But I think there’s something else happening here, too, that’s really interesting on the tool and software side. And that is, I’m seeing a lot more tools and software that have real value, real business value to the customers and are really targeted at challenging problems that need solving and can be solved and can make money.
And there again, I think that we saw an overshift on the vendor side to vendors who were just embracing open source and we’re not going to worry about making money and we’re not going to worry about solving problems. We’re going to do cool things, we’re going to do big things, exciting things. Observability and telemetry, doesn’t sound all that sexy, but it’s-
Paul Nashawaty: It’s required.
Stephen Foskett: … a big necessary thing that customers can get value from. Why do you think there’s so many companies that are making really interesting products in this space? That’s why.
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah, absolutely. And Alan, I do want to touch a little bit, actually. I’ve been attending KubeCon for many years and actually we are looking at doing our AppDev Field Day at KubeCon in the fall-
Alan Shimel: Salt Lake City.
Paul Nashawaty: … In Salt Lake City, we’re really excited about that. But one of the things I’ve noticed in a pivot, with the audience, is the sports coats versus hoodies. And there’s far more sports coats now-
Alan Shimel: Well, the three of us. I don’t wear sports coats that often.
Paul Nashawaty: I know, neither do I? But about 25% of the audience in Paris was wearing sports coats, and Detroit was the same way, just not-
Alan Shimel: I’ll tell you… Chicago was after Detroit, wasn’t it?
Paul Nashawaty: No, Chicago. I’m sorry.
Alan Shimel: Right, it was Chicago and Paris. More than how they were dressed is what were they talking about? They were talking about operations. When I first used, and I’ve been going to KubeCon since there was a KubeCon, and it was primarily a developer audience initially.
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah, it was.
Alan Shimel: Now, I would say, at best, it’s 50/50, if not more, ops to developers. KubeCon, Cloud Native is about ops, it’s about platform engineering, it’s about SRE. It’s about ops. And that needed to be done, too. Because, I think one of the things we’ve seen is this whole shift left, and I’m a fan of shift left, especially for security. But shift left doesn’t mean shift it onto the developer’s back.
And for too many people, and someone, look, I run devops.com, right? I’m a DevOps fan, but for too many people in DevOps, shift left became shift it onto the developer. And there’s only so many straws you could put on that camel’s back until it breaks. And so, again, a little bit of a return to normalcy, like Stephen said, with platform engineering, the SREs. It’s not that what they’re doing is so radically revolutionary. No, it’s the same ops stuff we were doing.
Paul Nashawaty: Right.
Stephen Foskett: And hopefully what they’re doing is learning that ops and devs really do need to get along. The thing about the DevOps concept that I love is because, is that ultimately, it could mean that we could finally stop the battle, stop the war, and start working together.
Paul Nashawaty: Absolutely.
Alan Shimel: Including security. Let me just make a quick plug for security too.
Paul Nashawaty: Absolutely. DevSecOps, too. Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you both. This has been great. I know we only touched on a couple of the topics here. It was really meant to understand where the money’s coming from, and how to overcome in your own organizations how you might think about spending those dollars that need to address those business initiatives. I want to thank you both for your time and your perspectives.
Alan Shimel: Thank you.
Paul Nashawaty: Think has been great.
Alan Shimel: Thank you, Paul.
Paul Nashawaty: And I want to thank the audience for attending our session today. To learn more information, please go to the futurumgroup.com and find out more about our research there. Thank you very much. Have a good day.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Application Development and Modernization
The Evolving Role of Developers in the AI Revolution
Market Insight Report: Navigating Innovation in AI, Application Development, and Observability
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.
