>>Live from San Diego, California It's the Q Covering Koopa and Cloud Native Cot Brought to you by Red Cloud. Native Computing Pounding and its ecosystem >>Welcome back, toe Gorgeous. SAN Diego, California This is Q Khan Cloud Native Khan. 29 years. I'm still minimum. My co host is John Troyer, and this is the end of three days water wall coverage over 12,000 and 10 d Having a welcome to the program. Cassie, Who's the executive director at the national headquarters for v. American Red Cross. Matt. Thank you, American Red Cross. And thank you so much for joining us. >>Yeah. Thanks for having me. Uh, it's been a great conference so far. Uh, you know, we're here to share our story where as an end user on our journey with Cloud native with kubernetes Andi how that helps Red Cross do what we do, which is help people in need a cz best we can every day. >>Eso no matter what industry I talked to, everybody's dealing with change. There's always more things happening. American Red Cross. I mean, you know, it feels like I hear American Red Cross mentioned Maur a cz Time goes on because you know everything from, you know, things related to climate through, you know, global events and the like. So maybe before we get into some of the tech, just give us, you know, you know your role there and how kind of the changing world impact your organization. >>Sure. So my role is to support a few different business units. One is biomedical marketing. We try to recruit blood donors, too. Give blood at Red Cross Blood Dot or GE and other channels. That's obviously a significant part of what we d'oh were major player in the blood supply market in the US we provide service is to the armed forces, you know, in that regard as well. So that's part of it. Part of it is I work with humanitarian service is group as well to recruit financial donors on recruit volunteers. That's primarily through Red Cross. That or GE a T least as faras my group goes on, then corporate brand marketing and chapter related marketing and communications. So all that happens through Red Cross that Oregon Red Cross blood dot organ some related platforms on those our flagship brand products. >>Okay, And what led to the American Red Cross being part of this cloud. Native computing, Yeah, system. >>Our journey is a lot like, you know, a lot of other folks. We had a very, you know, monolithic type of architecture. We had all of these different business units with the different priorities, different timelines, different needs wrapped up into one big monster of a platform that, you know, kind of bundled up risk for everybody in this one platform. And, uh, you know, we'd always have collisions of priorities, mostly not to mention the resource issues of who's gonna work, you know, on what? At what time. And so a few years ago, we started talking about breaking that down. And, um, we've been lucky to have some technical leaders that are very aware of and welcoming to new cloud native technologies. We decided at that time to pursue, you know, a cloud native architecture. And what we have today in a few years later, is two years worth of being in production with a platform that runs on Amazon. We take advantage of a lot of the native orchestration tools there for running our clusters. And we've been able to service, you know, those different needs in a much more nimble way. We can release something for a Red Cross blood dot or without risking much on the financial donation side or on the volunteer recruitment side. And likewise, you know, for those other groups, we can kind of separate out the risks for each of those groups. And that's that's been a great, great benefit. >>You've been on the the vendor side. The for profit side is I t very different at the non profit. If you're looking, people are looking down, you get >>higher. Yeah, You know, I have been doing it a long time, a lot of different perspectives. But I think you know what I tried to do. And I would. I think I've seen work best is when I t is not the ticket taker, you know, integrated with the business. I'm very fortunate to have some business partners at Red Cross that collaborate. You know, every day we're having conversations every day. We have some people on our team that feel as though they're accountable for business outcomes, not just, you know, doing cool technology things, you know, For example, you know, multiyear evolution of process related to being more agile. We've got so much more integration and communication with business teams have gone from, you know, something like one release every five months now due to a weak, you know, and I think we could do more. It's just we don't have the need to do more. Um, and that's a huge, huge, big lift. You know, there's a lot of conversations that need to happen. Should make that work. >>Yeah, it's all a journey, right? We're all we're all improved. Continuous improvement, but so follow up there. So as a 90 leader for a very large organization, you know, they're one of the things people are saying this year. Wow. The conference is big. So many new technologies. So many new company somebody open source projects. You know, you're in the middle of this journey. You can't screw it up, right? That would be disastrous. So how do you How do you How did you and your organization look at new technologies and pick out which do technologies to try and incorporate them into your stack and your portfolio? >>Right. So we wanted to be a cloud native. We wanted a do, um, you know, focus on projects that where we knew there were skills in the marketplace, uh, that we could acquire at our price point. You know, we try to be good stewards of donor dollars at the end of the day, you know, all the money we have comes from folks like you and you guys who support Red Cross, you know, and thank you very much for all that generous support. And so we try to spend that money, uh, you know, very carefully. Way have some people who are, uh, you know, employees on our team made about 25 or so. But one of the great things we've been able to do with some of these technologies now is we have a program called Code for Good. It's a volunteer work force where we're here recruiting volunteers with the skill set that you know, they have a day job, but they have an interest in supporting Red Cross. Uh, maybe not financially. Maybe not with their blood, but they can give us some time on their skills, and we run it like an open source project. We set out a road map of features for six months or so. We have planning sessions, we say. Listen, you know if you can sign up for a feature that because you have two hours this week to work. Great. You have six hours. Great. You just had a baby, and you're not available for three months. Fine. You know, we we wanna have a, you know, a bench of people that can self select based on their time commitment, what to work on. And somehow it's been been working Great. You know, we started this in June. We have about 30 volunteers now on. We've already delivered an app for slack. That is kind of a workplace app where you can, you know, if your organization works with us, you can donate right from slack. You can give a schedule of blood donation, appointment, do things like that. >>I love that model. It's something that, you know we've looked at years ago. That kind of micro participation, if you will. You know, You think it's like, you know, Wikipedia wouldn't have been built if it wasn't for everybody. Just spending a little bit of time on it. Uh, I'm curious. Does something like participating with you know, this ecosystem I have generalized tools that people know and can plug in with, as opposed to, you know, having to know your direct stack Is that helpful To kind of be able to recruit people into that environment? What? What are the kind of most needed skills on dhe usages that you're recruiting? >>It is. You are learning. Curve at this point is much smaller than it was on our previous platform Because of the fact that we're using technologies people are familiar with, um, you know, things like Docker we use a lot. We just started evaluating Prometheus, another C N C F project for monitoring some non proud systems. Hopefully that'll graduate into production systems. So from a technology standpoint, yes, yes, we find that, you know, the people we talked with can walk in and be productive sooner. You know, there's still the Red Cross specific things they need to know about how we do business. But, um, you know, at least at this point, is that and not some proprietary system that they also have to learn >>any learnings that you've had participating in the c m. D. F. With the rollout of the technologies that you share with your peers, >>you know, I love the sea. NCF is very maintainer driven, You know, uh, and and user driven. I heard today at one of the analyst panels. I did. I think maybe 30% of people here are end users. >>That's a pretty >>large number. Um, you know, the fact that we can come here and learn about technologies meet people, meat vendors meet some of the people contributing code. Um, it's a lot different than you know, maybe some some summit sponsored by a for profit vendor that wants to, uh, you know, generate leads and sell you things. It feels much more community driven here and open to lots of different perspectives. >>So now what you looking forward to in the next few years? Both in terms of your stack and maybe coming back >>to Cuba? Yeah, way. It's funny. We've started to see other parts of Red Cross come to us toe, learn about kubernetes because the vendors they work with are mentioning these things. And and we have been early adopters, as far as you know, where across goes our group. Um and I think it's great if we can expand usage of, um, cloud native technologies to other parts of the organization on really get some economies of scale. So that's part of what we're trying to do is kind of internal, uh, consulting knowledge sharing collaboration on then, as far as what we're doing on our team way. Just really want to focus on. We're on a stable point in the platform, and then we want to do some things around monitoring and alerting that. Reduce those incident outages, too. Nothing. Hopefully, um, and work on that. >>You're working on a few projects that are that are being worked on here for That >>s So you have this Prometheus project. Like I said, we're piloting that, uh, you know, I would say in four or five months time, we'll know if that's going to be something we can, you know, put some more investment into >>All right, that want to give you the final word. Red cross dot org's code for good. I believe. The web. >>Yes, yes. >>What else? >>Your code for the number four. Good on. You know, if you're interested in volunteering, we need technical skills. We need team leadership skills, product owner skills, eh? So it's not just about you know, developing features and ops engineers as well. So thanks for your time. I want to say hi to my daughter, Peyton. It's late on the East Coast, so go to bed now, but thanks, folks. >>All right. What? Well, Matt, and actually, that is the final word for our day one of coverage for John Troyer. I'm stupid. And be sure to join us tomorrow. We've got two more days water wall coverage here. Lots of great speakers. Really appreciate. We've got the end users on. And, Matt, thank you so much. And, you know, great mission. The code for good. We definitely hope that the community here, you know, reaches out in connection Participates s Oh, that's it for today. Fixes all for watching.