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Episode 53: Sam Newman Turns Up the Microservices Dial

In Episode 53 of DevOps Radio, host Andre Pino is joined by industry thought leader Sam Newman. Sam is an author, speaker, and independent consultant (previously at Thoughtworks) who specializes in cloud storage and microservices. In addition to sharing more than 20 years' worth of industry insight, Sam provides analogies and examples a plenty for listeners who may still be trying to grasp what a microservice is. Sam jokes that he's been stuck in an enjoyable rut for the last 15 years, working with interesting people like Jez Humble and building the Lego XP game that helped people learn Agile (like many of us, if there's an excuse to buy a Lego, Sam's up for it).

As the author of Building Microservices and an expert on the topic, Sam says organizations need to have a good reason for using microservices. For the listener's benefit, Sam compared microservices adoption to a dial — not a switch — where you steadily continue to turn it up all the time instead of fully committing and flipping the switch right off the bat. He also reiterates that developers need to have a clear understanding of what they're trying to accomplish with microservice adoption, otherwise it can be hard to justify the time it takes to implement.

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DevOps Radio: Taking a DevOps Journey Without Making Enemies

What does a DevOps transformation look like at a hardware company? That's the questions Harald Gottlicher, software architect at Bosch, answers in Episode 47 of DevOps Radio. Harald and host Brian Dawson dive right into the specifics of the process the team at Bosch underwent and the problems solved by implementing continuous integration/continuous delivery.

While Harald still feels the company is somewhere between Dev and Ops, utilizing DevOps processes has allowed Bosch to improve the legacy process with changes to a single build update to break down monolithic releases. (This was much easier than building and rebuilding these systems that were over one million files and 30 gigabytes!) Harald explains that as a result of moving processes towards continuous delivery (CD), Bosch has seen increased productivity, faster development cycles, and quicker feedback, setting the stage to impact the customer and the business.

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DevOps Radio: Seeking Progressive Delivery, Debunking DevOps Hogwash

James Governor, analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, sat with Sacha Labourey at DevOps World | Jenkins World to catch up on software development and deployment and discuss which companies were doing it well. Before they tackle the future of DevOps in Episode 44, they revisit the past (think: Sacha's JBoss days) and what James admits is not his finest moment as an industry analyst in regard to some "hogwash" on the decoupling of open source.

From there, they dive into a new-ish concept with a newer title — progressive delivery. James shares his perspective on the interaction between IT and the business if you decouple deploy from release. He notes one needs to look at the bridge between what an enterprise customer and what web companies are doing. His solution? Train the people in organizations first, or at least give IT the green light to keep deploying software and services, but let businesses decide when to activate it. It's not enough to just spin the IT wheel faster. If organizations want to have an impact loop, they need to involve the business stakeholders that understand the users of the service, and how they should be integrated into the process.

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DevOps Radio: A DevOps Transformation is Never “Done”

DevOps evangelist Brian Dawson is back in the host seat for Episode 42 of DevOps Radio, featuring Keith Pleas, DevOps architecture senior manager at Accenture and Stas Zvinyatskovsky, engineering leader, software architect and managing director at Accenture. With the entire software world changing, old practices have run their course and organizations are turning towards modern software engineering with DevOps.

This episode is all about defining the DevOps transformation. For Accenture, that means finding the sweet spot of continuous delivery (CD) that is DevOps and adding automated security to the process. In both Stas and Keith’s experience, organizations approach DevOps transformation as a checklist and expect to cross off each step and walk off into the sunset, when in fact they should be continuously adding capabilities so it’s never “done.” In order to achieve division of DevOps, organizations need to change the processes and practices to hit the speed, productivity and quality that cloud native companies are experiencing.

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DevOps Radio: State of DevOps Needs the Cloud, True Commitment [Podcast]

Host Andre Pino returns to the DevOps Radio mic to talk to Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and Chief Scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), during DevOps World | Jenkins World. Nicole brings strong developer content and amazing energy to the latest episode as she shares key stats from the 2018 Accelerate State of DevOps Report (of which CloudBees was a leading sponsor).

Before diving into the report, Dr. Forsgren describes her career path, from her start as a software engineer and acquiring her PhD, to joining Gene Kim and Jez Humble — both former Jenkins World keynotes and DevOps Radio alumnus — to launch DORA. The trio set out with the goal of sharing knowledge as a way for everyone to get better and to know what's possible when it comes to a DevOps transformation, which they've accomplished with the report, now in its fifth year.