>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone. We're live here in San Francisco, The Cube's exclusive coverage of Cisco's inaugural event DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My cohost Peter Burris, general manager of wikibon.com research. Next guest is Damon Edwards, co-founder of Rundeck. He's been on the crowd chats and does event DevOps and the enterprise, the content chair, co-founder of Rundeck, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Great to meet you. >> First and we've >> Good to be here. been in line chatting away. Quick though from you, Cisco getting into DevOps, the conversation's pretty straight forward. We think it's awesome that they're doing this. >> Damon: Yeah. >> Good direction, right in line with DevOps, things looking good, middle of the fairway. What do you do next? >> Damon: Yeah, I mean ... >> Where does Cisco take the ball from here and take it home? >> You know, I think it's just more of the same. I think that you can't underestimate the split that's happened in the DevOps have and have nots, that sounds kind of odd, but a lot that we talk about are the unicorns, the high flying special built organizations that really grew up with this in the last five to 10 years. I think where Cisco really plays is in the other 99% of commerce of the world, which is the core classic enterprises. DevOps really hasn't made that deep of a dent yet into that, I guess we call it dark IT, right? The rest of the world the people have to deal with 30 years of, in some places, different technology, skills, acquisitions, mismatches, all the legacy, all the bureaucracy of large organizations, and Cisco has a path into that and a voice of authority into that. So happy to see they're putting such emphasis on these DevOps and Agile ideas and help to drive them into that. >> And they got the app dynamics things going down too, that big acquisition. Their slogan is Where Apps Meet Infrastructure. We always just talk about infrastructure as code. They're talking about programmable networking, which is the same thing. We want more programmable. >> Damon: Right. So how do they make that transition to this new operational model? I mean, networks used to be very fragile, set in stone. >> Damon: Yeah. Someone used to joke, "Hey, they're called NoOps," because they would say no to everything from a developer standpoint. >> Damon: Sure. >> How do they transition from NoOps to a new operational model that's agile and adding value? >> The bigger issue here is that Ops is getting squeezed, right, so it's an existential crisis for them. The reason why they were always the no folks is because they're always spending their time protecting that capacity because they're overrun, they're always outnumbered, first of all, then they're being overrun with all these tickets of new stuff coming in plus incidents happening in the middle, the capacity has always been an issue. Now with this new DevOps, and really digital transformation inspired pressure, it's go, go, go faster, open things up. At the same time the same business folks are saying from the other direction lock things down, don't be the next hack. Don't be the next breach. Don't be the next major outage, right? >> John: It's really a lot of pressure It's a pressure cooker. >> Right. >> So they're squeezed. So the biggest with crisis, how do we relieve that, how do we relieve that pressure? And the key technique is to be able to actually allow other people to participate in what traditionally was only operations tasks. If you allow me to go one step ... >> John: Democratization of operations in a way. >> It is, and what they're doing, you see the organizations that really nailed this, they're dividing up the idea of an operations procedure. It used to be everything was in operations. You defined it, you ran it, and you have all security and management audit control over it. In these new ways what they're doing is they're breaking it up into three pieces to say the ability to define these automated procedures, the ability to execute them, and the ability to have that management control and oversight, let's make those in three discrete parts and let's move that to where the labor capacity makes the most sense. By doing that, operations can free up those bottlenecks, start to decouple more, allow the rest of the organization to move a lot quicker and not be in that horrible position of being squeezed to death and having to tell everybody no. >> There's a number of reasons why it's happening. Sorry. One of the key ones is that, and it brings us back to the Cisco conversation we're asking about this, is that is used to be that operations was tied to a particular asset. The server more often than not. And so a single individual could pool all those things together because a single individual, or single group, had control over virtually all the resources >> Damon: Right. >> that were a part of that. Now we're talking about applications that are inherently distributed, and so we can't look at the process of operations in the same way. This comes back to Cisco. Does the world need to think more discreetly about these new highly distributed, deeply distributed, applications differently, and is that going to catalyze the diffusion of more of these high quality DevOps principals? What do you think? >> Yeah, it has to. If you look at the business driver, which is this digital transformation, a lot of people scoff at because it's like wait, is this 1999? You need a website? What are we talking about, right? But you realize what it is is saying all these disparate systems we used to have, right. I could get my cable bill, but it's just online, it's just a PDF of what they send to the printers, right. But now on it, everything I could do when I call up the customer service agent, I want to do it through my phone or I want to do it on my laptop, and that means all those formerly distinct systems that lived in different windows on a customer service agents desktop and after the little things to check the router status blew up, well I'll just talk past it, right. But now it's really going to matter in this digital world. The business is driving that integration, so where things don't live in isolation anymore, and because of that the complexity and this distributed nature of these services is rising. >> John: Yeah. >> And when that that happens, that makes the operations inherently more difficult and just contributes to that squeeze even more and we got to find a way to relieve that. >> Great point and great analysis. That just picked off what we were talking about on our intro package of the redefinition of what a full stacked developer is. >> Damon: Yeah. >> Now full stack implies you're talking about a distributed application model where there's no isolation anymore so you could almost argue that that's going to be obsolete. It's a full horizontal developer. >> Well logic used to be full stack, but how they connect will be different. >> Which just brings up the notion of, okay, things were in isolation >> Right. >> built to the database, now I go down the network, now a whole new developer category potentially is emerging. Do you feel the same way? >> Damon: Yeah. >> I mean, we're speculating. We don't actually know. >> Sure. I mean, if you are Netflix, who prides itself on it's ability to go out, pay top of market, which means they are the top of market, and attract the best talent, only one can win that game. For everybody else in the world, this idea of we're going to have these polyglot, super human, I-know-everything engineers, it's never going to happen. We have to find a way to use our systems and our processes to allow that kind of integration to happen, and allow those people to define the control procedures and policies for the things that they know about, and then allow that all to integrate to where then we can have other folks operate it and run it. Again, that idea of moving those part around to where we can best take advantage of the labor, otherwise you're just ... You're never going to find it. Go to any conference, NASA DevOps Conference, and ask people how many LinkedIn spam messages do you get a day because the word DevOps is in your profile? >> Yeah. >> Everybody just laughs because it's dozens. You're never going to have that idea so you have to build the systems to recreate that full stack capability. >> And have people that have access to be one, rather than super human that becomes democratized at that level. >> Damon: Yeah. >> It's interesting. One of the things that you guys did at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, I know you were in the content chair. >> Damon: Sure. >> I made a note here for my ... Make sure I get this question to you, was I like this thing you guys touched upon. Is DevOps best left to grow organically or is there a growing need slash desire for an agile manifesto? (laughs) The top down, do the manifesto, or organic ... Thoughts? >> Yeah, I'd say no, because what DevOps is is a series of problem state- It's an umbrella over a bunch of problem statements and a bunch of solutions that keeps evolving. This is why the Devs conferences are so interesting because it's practitioners talking about what's worked for them. I feel like at the highest level, if you really need to have a definition, go ahead and read the Phoenix project or the DevOps handbook. They've done a great job of collating all of that, but at the end of the day it's not one thing. It's not a single practice. There's no single thing you can do to say I'm going to transform a major global financial services company into a fast, nimble operation. There is no one thing. It's a series of things that you have to try over and over again. Look at DevOps as a movement where you can learn from practitioners, apply it to your own organization, see what happens, report back, try some new stuff, and so on and so forth. >> So you could basically have a manifesto, but it's really just more of marching orders. Organically, it has to form on its own. That's basically the same. >> I think there already is. >> You could say hey we have a manifesto, but it's not like this is the playbook. You can get >> Damon: There is >> the handbook to learn. >> no playbook. >> Exactly. Okay, cool. Well, appreciate the insight. Let's talk about your business. What do you guys do? >> Damon: Sure. >> What are some of the things that Rundeck's doing that you're the co-founder of? Share a little bit about the company. >> Yeah, Rundeck is at the what is it, it's an orchestration and scheduling platform and it's used by operations organizations. Generally from large startups, but also large DevBox unicorns, but also a lot of large enterprises. What they're using it for is for defining and improving their operations procedures. What happens after deployment? Where do we define all the procedures to manage all these disparate systems, all these islands of automation. Chef and Puppet was the hottest thing around three years ago and now it's Docker and Kubernetes and everything else, and now we still have our old power shelf stuff, our late logic over there, some OpSquare stuff over there, so what are we going to do? We need a way to define the procedures, expand all those and allow people to participate in that operations world so they can relieve that crunch. We see a lot for automating the creative standard operating procedures like classic Runbook automation, with a next generation twist, we'll say, but we also see a lot of self service operations, meaning that let's let other people participate. Let's let developers define these procedures as Rundeck jobs, and then let operations vet them ... >> That's where you're talking about the operational being relieved a bit. >> Yeah, you have to. You can't just say there's one little group here that's going to deploy and run all of these things in this world. We have to let other people participate in that. Not just for deployment, which is big in the DevOps world, but for what happens after deployment that nobody wants to talk about. All the escalations, all the interruptions, all those problems, Rundeck really plays in that area help people to get that under control. >> Damon, thanks so much for sharing your insight. Congratulations on your startup and great to meet you in person. >> Yeah. >> We've had great chats in our crowd chat. You guys have been awesome with Gene Kim and the community that you're involved with with DevOps for the Enterprise Summit, practitioners sharing. That's a great ethos >> Damon: It's a pretty >> That really aligns >> awesome bet, yeah. >> with what's going on in the industry. Congratulations. More Cube coverage here exclusive of Cisco's inaugural event called DevNet Create, an extension of their DevNet core classic network and developer systems at Cisco. This is an open source one. This is out in the community. Not all Cisco, all part of the community. And of course we're bringing it to you with live coverage. I'm John for Peter Burris. Stay with us. (upbeat music) >> Hi. I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director ...