>> Live, from San Francisco, it's The Cube! Covering DockerCon '18. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to The Cube. We are live at DockerCon 2018 on a beautiful day in San Francisco. We're glad you're not playing hooky though if you're in the city because it's important to be here watching John Troyer and myself, Lisa Martin, talk to some awesome, inspiring guests. We're excited to welcome two Docker captains, that's right, to The Cube. We've got Nirmal Mehta, you are the chief technologist of Booz Allen. Welcome back to The Cube. And, we've got Bret Fisher, the author of Docker Mastery. Both of you, Docker captains. Can't wait to dig into that. But you're both speakers here at the fifth annual DockerCon. So Bret, let's talk, you just came off the stage basically. So, thank you for carving out some time for us. Talk to us about your session. What did you talk about? What was some of the interaction with the attendees? >> Well the focus is on Docker Swarm and I'm a assist admin at heart so I focus on ops more than developer but I spend my life helping developers get their stuff into production. And so, that talk centers around the challenges of going in and doing real work that's for a business with containers and how do you get what seems like an incredible amount of new stuff into production all at the same time on a container ecosystem. So, kind of helping them build the tools they need, and what we call a stack, a stack of tools, that ultimately create a full production solution. >> What were some of the commentary you heard from attendees in terms of... Were these mostly community members, were there users of container technology, what was sort of the dynamic like? >> Well you have, there's all sorts of dynamics, right? I mean you have startups, I think I took a survey in the room because it was packed and like 20% of the people in the room about were a solo DevOps admin. So they were the only person responsible for their infrastructure and their needs are way different than a team that has 20 or 30 people all serving that responsibility. So, the talk was a little bit about how do they handle their job and do this stuff. You know, all this latest technology without being overwhelmed and, then, how does it grow in complexity to a larger team and how do they sustain that. So, yeah. >> Bret, it's nice that the technology is mature enough now that people are in production, but what are some of the barriers that people hit when they try to go into production the first time? >> Yeah, great question. I think the biggest barrier is trying to do too much new at the same time. And, I don't know why we keep relearning this lesson in IT, right? We've had that problem for decades of projects being over cost, over budget, over timed, and I think with so much exciting new stuff in containers it's susceptible to that level of, we need all these new things, but you actually don't, right? You can actually get by with very small amounts of change, incrementally. So, we try to teach that pattern of growing over time, and, yeah. >> You mentioned like the one person team versus the multi-person team kind of DevOps organization. Does that same problem of boiling the ocean, do you see that in both groups? >> Yeah, I mean you have fundamentally the same needs, the same problem that you have to solve, but different levels of complexity is really all it has to do with and different levels of budget, obviously, right? So, usually the solo admin doesn't have the million dollar budget for all the tools and bells and whistles, so they might have to do more on their own, but, then, they also have less time so it's a tough row to hoe, you know, to deal with, because you've got those two different fundamental problems of time and money and people are using the most expensive thing. So, no matter what the tool is you're trying to buy, it's usually your time that's the most valuable thing. So how do we get more of our time back? And that's really what containers were all about originally was just getting more of our time back out of it and so we can put back into the business instead of focusing on the tech itself. >> Nirmal, your talk tomorrow is on empathy. >> Yes. >> Very provocative, dig into that for us. >> Sure, so it was actually inspired by a conversation I had with John a couple years ago on Geek Whisperers podcast and he asked the folks on that show, yourself included, asked if there was an event in my past that I kind of regret or taught me a lot. And it was about basically neglecting someone on my team and just kind of shoving them away. And, that moment was a big change in how I felt about the IT industry. And, what I had done was pushed someone who probably needed that help and built up a lot of courage to talk to me and I kind of just dismissed him too quickly. And, from there, I was thinking more and more about game theory and behavioral economics and seeing a lot of our clients and organizations struggle to go through a digital transformation, a DevOps transformation, a cultural transformation. So, to me, culture is kind of the core of what's happening in the industry. And so, the idea of my talk is a little bit of behavioral economics, a little bit of game theory, to kind of set the stage for where your IT organization is probably kind of is right now and how to use empathy to get your organization to that DevOps and to a more efficient place and resolve those conflicts that happen inherently. And, somehow tie that all together with Docker. So, that's kind of what my talk is all about. >> Nice, I mean what's interesting to me, Lisa, is that we do Cubes and there are many Cubes actually all across the country during conference season, right? And we talk to CEOs and VPs of very large companies and even today, at DockerCon, the word 'culture' and the talking about culture and process and people has come up every single interview. So, it's not just from the techies up that this conversation is going... this DevOps and empathy conversation is going on, it seems to be from the top down as well. Everyone seems to recognize that, if you really are going to get this productivity gain, it's not just about the tech, you gotta have culture. >> Absolutely, a successful transformation of an organization is both grassroots and top down. Can't have it without either. And, I think we inherently want to have a... Like, we want to take a pill to solve that problem and there's lots of pills: Docker or cloud or CICD or something. But, those tools are the foundational safety net for a cultural transformation, that's all that it is. So, if you're implementing Docker or Jenkins or some CICD pipeline or automation, that's a safety blanket for providing trust in an organization to allow that change in the culture to happen. But, you still need that cultural change. Just adopting Docker isn't going to make you automatically a more effective organization. Sorry, but it's just one piece and it's an important piece but you have to have that top down understanding of where you are now as an organization and where you want to be in the future. And understanding that this kind of legacy, siloed team mindset is no longer how you can achieve that. >> You talked about trust earlier from a thematic perspective as something that comes up. You know we were at SAP Sapphire last week and trust came up a lot as really paramount. And that was in the context of a vendor/customer relationship. But, to your point, it's imperative that it's actually coming from within organizations. We talk a lot about, well stuff today: multi-cloud--multi-cloud, silos-- but, there's also silos with people and without that cultural shift and probably that empathy, how successful, how big of an impact can a technology make? Are you talking with folks that are at the executive level as well as the developer level in terms of how they each have a stake and need to contribute to this empathy? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the talk I'm doing is basically the ammunition a lower level person would need to go up to management and say, hey, you know this is where the organization is, this is what the IT department kind of looks like, these are the conflicts, and we have to change in order to succeed. And a lot of folks don't. They see the technology changes that they need. You know, adopting the new javascript framework or the new UX pattern. But, they might not have the ammunition to understand the business strategy, the organizational issues. But, they still need that evidence to actually convince a CTO or a CEO or a COO for the need to change. So, I've talked to both groups. From the C-level side, I think it comes from the inherent speed of the industry, the competitive landscape, those are all the pressures that they see and the disruptions that they are tackling. Maybe it's incumbent disruption or new startups that they may have to compete with in the future. The need for constant innovation is kind of the driver. And, IT is kind of where all that is, these days. >> That's great. Building on the concept of trust and this morning at the keynote, Matt Mckesson where they talked about trusting Docker, trusting Docker the company, trusting Docker the technology. Almost the very first words out of Steve Singh's mouth this morning were about community. And, I think community is one of the big reasons people do trust Docker and one of the things that brings them along. You guys are both Docker captains, part of a program of advocacy, community programs. I don't know, Bret, can you tell us a little bit about the program and what's involved in it? >> Yeah, sure. So, it's been around over two years now and it actually spawned out of Docker's pre-existing programs were focusing on speakers and bloggers and supporting them as well as community leaders that run meetups. And they kind of figured out that a key set of people were kind of doing two or three of those things all at once. And so, they were sort of deciding how do we make like super-groups of these people and they came up with the term Docker captain It really just means you know something about Docker, you share it constantly, something about a Docker toolset, something about the container tools. And that you're sort of... And you don't work for Docker. You're a community person that is, maybe you're working for someone that is a partner of Docker or maybe you're just a meetup volunteer that also blogs a lot about patterns and practices of Docker or new Docker features. And so, they kind of use the engineering teams at Docker to kind of pick through people on the internet and the people they see in the community that are sort of rising out of all the noise out there. And they ask them to be a part of the program and then, of course, we get nice jackets and lots of training. And, it's really just a great group of people, we're about 70 people now around the world. >> And yeah, this is global as well, right? >> Oh yeah, yep. It's one of my favorite aspects is the international aspect. I work for Booz Allen which is a more US government focused and I don't get to interact with the global community much. But, through the Docker captain program got friendships and connections almost on every continent and a lot of locations. I just saw a post of a Docker meetup in like, I think it was like Tunisia. Very, very out there kind of places. There was a Cuban one, recently, in Havana. The best connections to a global community that I've ever seen. I think one of the biggest drivers is the rapid adoption and kind of industry trend of containerization and the Docker brand and what it is basically gave rise to a ton of folks just beginners, just wanting to know what it's all about. And, we've been identified as folks that are approachable and have kind of a mandate to be people that can help answer those initial questions, help align folks that have questions with the right resources, and also just make it like a soft, warm, fuzzy kind of introduction to the community. And engage on all kinds of levels, advanced to beginner levels. >> It was interesting, again, this morning, I think about half the people raised their hands to the question, "is it their first year?" So, it still seems like the Docker, the inbound people interested in Docker is still growing and millions of developers all over the world, right? I don't know, Bret, you have a course, Docker Mastery, you also do meetups, and so I'm curious like what is the common pathway or drivers for new folks coming in, that you see and talk with? >> Yeah, what's the pathways? >> Yeah, the pathway, what's driving them? What are they trying to do? Again, are they these solo folks? >> Yeah, it's sort of a little bit of everything. We're very lucky in the course. We actually just crossed 55,000 students worldwide, 161 countries on a course that is only a year old. So, it kind of speaks to the volume of people around the world that really want to learn containers and all the tools around them. I think that the common theme there is I think we had the early adopters, right, and that was the first three or four years of Docker was people that were Silicon Valley, startups, people who were already on the bleeding edge of technology, whether it was hobbyist or enterprise. It was all people, but it was sort of the Linux people. Now, what we're getting is the true enterprise admins and developers, right. And that means, Microsoft, IBM mainframes, .Net, Java, you're getting all of these sort of traditional enterprise technologies but they all have the same passion, they're just coming in a few years later. So, what's funny is, you're meetups don't really change. They're just growing. Like what you see worldwide, the trend is we're still on the up-climb of all the groups, we have over 200 meetups worldwide now that meet once a month about Docker. It's just a crazy time right now. Everything's growing and it's like you wonder if it's ever going to stop, right How big are we gonna get, gonna take over the world with containers? >> Yeah, about 60% or more of all our meetups are completely new to Docker. And, it ranges from, you know, my boss told me about it so I gotta learn it or I found it and I want to convince other people in my organization to use it so I need to learn it more so I can make that case or, it's immediately solving a problem but I don't know how to take it to the next level, don't know where it's going, all that. It's a lot of new people. >> I get students a lot, college students that want to be more aggressive when they get in the marketplace and they hear the word 'DevOps' a lot and they think DevOps is a thing I need to learn in order to get a job. They don't really know what that is. And, of course, we don't even. At this point, it's so watered down, I don't know if anyone really knows what it is. But eventually, they search that and they come up with sort of key terms and I think one of those the come up right away is Docker. And they don't know what that is. But, I get asked the question a lot, If I go to this workshop or if I go the meetup or whatever, can I put that on my resume so I can get my first job out of school? They're always looking for something else beyond their schooling to make them a better first resume. So, it's cool to see even the people just stepping into the job market getting their feet wet with Docker even when they don't even know why they need it. >> It sounds like a symbiotic thought leadership community that you guys are part of and it sounds like the momentum we heard this morning in the general session is really carried out through the Docker captains and the communities. So, Nirmal, Bret, thanks so much for stopping by bringing your snazzy sweatshirts and sharing what you guys are doing as Docker captains. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. We're live at DockerCon 2018. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest.