Gene Kim

Good morning. Morning. Welcome to the sixth US DevOps Enterprise Summit and our second year here in Las Vegas. I am so happy that you're here because we have an amazing three days prepared for you.

Over the next 18 minutes, what I'd like to do is describe the construction of this conference and tell you about what we hope to achieve over the next three days.

So, slide advance. All right. So why are we here? I think we're here because we all believe that DevOps is important, that we believe that DevOps creates business value and better societal outcomes, and that we believe that DevOps makes our work more humane.

In 2016, with my co-authors, we wrote The DevOps Handbook, and here's the definition that we put of what DevOps is. So this is our definition: it is the architectural practices, technical practices, and cultural norms that enable us to increase our ability to deliver applications and services quickly and safely, which enables rapid experimentation and innovation, as well as providing the fastest delivery of value to our customers while preserving world-class reliability, security, and stability.

Why is this important? So that we can survive and win in the marketplace. As much as I like that definition, because it doesn't actually say what DevOps is, it does describe the outcomes that we want.

I do like that, but I think there is actually a better definition out there, and that doesn't come from me. It comes from John Smart. Back when he was the head of Better Ways of Working at Barclays, now at Deloitte, his definition is, "Better value. Sooner. Safer. Happier." And I think that is such a wonderful definition, and it is actually my preferred definition. And it's very difficult to argue why that's not a good thing. So kudos to John Smart, who is also here.

Could I also get slide next as well? So one of the things that I loved about The Phoenix Project was this one line from Erik. He said, "I want to improve the lives of one million IT workers over the next five years." And looking back six years ago, I realize that one million technology workers is actually far from adequate. In fact, I think this is substantiated by the fact that there are, according to IDC, about 18 million developers on the planet.

And so I think what this DevOps Enterprise community has done so well is show what operations and infrastructure can do to enable developers to be productive. How do we elevate their productivity so they are as productive as if they were at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, or Microsoft?

So why are we here today? I think we all have a common goal and belief that we can genuinely transform our organizations. We are here to learn what we need to learn to make the changes that we want to make in our organizations. We meet the people, our fellow travelers that can help us on this journey. And something that I've heard over the years that I find very valuable to remind myself is that I'm here because I want to get re-energized to keep up the good fight. I just want to make it one more year and to get re-energized to do what I think is the right thing to do.

So specifically, the goals for the next three days. We're working with the program committee. Our goal is to make this the best DevOps Enterprise Summit ever. This is a goal that we've been carrying around for four conferences now, and it's actually surprisingly difficult and intimidating when we feel like we've pulled off the best programming.

However, over the years, I would claim that making this the best summit ever is actually easier than I would've thought. And I think it's because the aspirations of this community are so ambitious and grand that all we have to do is find the right experts to help us achieve those goals. It almost makes a phenomenal conference inevitable. So that is my hope I'm going to put out to the universe.

So I first want to acknowledge the help of this incredible programming committee, some who have been helping us throughout the very beginning from 2014. All of these people worked tirelessly to define the objectives, find the right speakers, and I'll describe what they do in terms of leveraging their network to find the speakers to help achieve the outcomes that I talked about.

So specifically, the talks that you'll be hearing over the next three days are primarily experience reports. So the first category of that is repeat experience reports. These are people who have presented in the past, and we wanted to hear how their journey's gone. In other words, it sounded good last year. Was it really good this year? Do we like what we're seeing? Is the path worth following? Or was this something that we definitely don't want to do in our own journey? And so we're going to hear from many repeat speakers.

This represents about 10% of the programming. Based on some feedback, we actually reduced the number of repeat experience talks. If you actually measure how many people have spoken before, that number has gone down from 45% last year down to 25% this year. One of the reasons we did that was to make room for new experience reports.

Specifically, the reason why experience reports are so valuable, one of them is that it's a fantastic way to show that DevOps is possible everywhere, regardless of industry verticals, regardless of organizational size, regardless of how old the organization is. Over the years, we've assembled over 250 case studies by technology leaders showing what they've done.

Jason Cox on the program committee, our friend from Disney, said, "I'm always looking for a new experience to bring back to show my leadership." Because it's so helpful to say even organization X or organization Y are doing DevOps. So I think that's also important, and we want experience reports to follow a very specific form, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. So we have many new experience reports, and these represent about 20% of programming.

So another type of experience report we're looking for are those experience reports that span the business and technology divide. Specifically, if you look at the obstacles that are in the way of this community succeeding, increasingly they are outside of the classic dev and ops value stream. And they are people in product leadership, business leadership, project management, information security, legal, and compliance.

And so we have been seeking over the last several years, driven primarily by Courtney Kissler from Nike: we want to have technology leaders presenting with their business counterparts. And we don't want just someone proximate to, or barely acknowledging the existence of. We want the business leaders who are rabid fans, who are genuinely grateful that their technology organization and their technology counterpart is helping them achieve all their grandest goals, dreams, and aspirations. These traditionally have been the toughest ones for us to find.

And I'm so delighted that, again, we are presenting more of these experience reports this year than any year prior. So this includes two executives from BMW, Christoph Brink and Ralph Waltram. They'll be presenting about what they are calling the biggest change to how business is conducted at BMW in 20 years.

Fernando Cornago and Benjamin Grimm from Adidas will be talking about how Benjamin Grimm represents the business side of dot-com, talking about the value that technology is bringing for them. We have the CEO and CFO from Compuware telling us, from the CFO's perspective, how does technology help and how do we talk to people like him? We have the team from Comcast, US Bank. And so titles aren't the most important thing, but I think the fact that we have such senior people speaking shows that our work matters to people who matter. And so I'm so delighted that we have this as part of the programming.

We have another part of the conferences, which is overcoming ways of working. I think so much of the stories told, the heroic journeys told by this community are ones of rebellion: a small group of rebels trying to overthrow a very powerful ancient order, who have very clear ideas of the way they want things done, which is the way we did it 20 years ago.

And so we have a whole bunch of talks, specifically with subject matter experts from InfoSec, compliance, ITIL, project management, and audit. And the goal is to better understand their world and better understand how we can get them on board, or in some cases, better compete with them.

One thing I'm really, really delighted about is something we're doing that you're going to see tomorrow on the plenary stage, which is the Big Four audit panel. Without a doubt, one of the top impediments voiced by this community is the biggest impediment in the way, the biggest obstacle, the people who are shutting the initiative down, is compliance, internal audit, maybe even external audit, and regulators.

And so, thanks to Sam Guckenheimer from Microsoft and Dr. Tapabrata Pal on our program committee, we are going to have representatives from all Big Four auditors on stage, essentially myth-busting how DevOps is unsafe, impossible to secure, impossible to audit. And these are not the consultants. These are actually people from the assurance and attestation side, showing how it's good for them, and because they still want customers over the next 50, 100 years, it's good for you.

So I'm so delighted that we're going to have that tomorrow. And for people who are interested in this, we're going to have another session in the breakouts called Ask an Auditor Anything. You can ask anything you want, take off your badges, do not tell what organization you are from, and here's a way for you to get some genuine help dealing with your auditors. Sam and Topo will be helping you achieve all your goals there, and we are so excited by that. Oh, applause for the auditors, right?

The last category of talks is bringing in the expertise we need. And this is drawing upon the bodies of knowledge that we need in order to achieve our goals. In previous years, we've brought in central figures from the Lean community, safety culture. We've brought in people who helped build the automated testing culture at Google, the person who helped drive the engineering of Amazon Prime Now, the astonishing transformation at Microsoft.

This year, our focus is on bringing in people from organizational learning. We have the chief people officer from Kronos, where for five years, their main goal was to make Kronos one of the best places to work at the highest levels of the company. Dr. Andre Martin was chief learning officer at Nike and Target. He's now VP of People Dev at Google, teaching us about employee engagement, about organizational learning, to teach us how we can leverage people like them. And of course, Dr. Nicole Forsgren will be sharing the latest State of DevOps report with Dr. Dustin Smith. Dr. Christina Maslach, famous for her burnout work, she'll be back on day three. And Dr. Mik Kersten on the continuation of the project to product journey.

We have next-generation operations. And what is amazing about these talks is, I think they truly show how the best days of operations and infrastructure are not behind us, but they are indeed ahead of us, all describing what they're doing to make developers productive.

So the last thing I'll talk about in terms of program goals is announcing the launch of The Unicorn Project that's coming out on November 26th. Thank goodness. And this book is really inspired by and dedicated to the achievements of the DevOps Enterprise community.

And I would describe what's the why behind this book. I think it's because you can do all the things in The Phoenix Project, but there's still the absence of understanding of all the invisible structures needed to truly enable developer productivity, that so many organizations are stuck in decades of technical debt. There's an orthogonal problem of how do we get data to where it needs to go. So just like how the DevOps community identified how do we get code to where it needs to go in production, there's this whole other universe of data that's stuck in electronic data warehouses and systems of record. How do we get that where it needs to be, which is in the hands of developers doing their daily work?

There's still such strong opposition to support these new ways of working, and I think there's ambiguity in terms of what behaviors we really need from leaders to support a transformation like you're doing. And so this is based on all the stories coming out of the DevOps Enterprise community.

And one of the things that really struck me, and one of the key learnings was, this is not just a technology problem, this is a business problem. One of the best evidence of this came from Risto Siilasmaa. He is now the chairman of Nokia. He joined in 2008. And there's this passage in this phenomenal book. This is one of the best books I've read in the last five years.

He said when he was a board director at Nokia in 2010, he learned that the Symbian OS that all their phones relied on to compete with Apple's iPhone took 48 hours to build. He said when he learned that from the VP of strategy, it felt like being hit in the head with a sledgehammer because he knew, because he was the founder of F-Secure, he's a technologist, he knew that if it took two days for a developer to know whether a change worked or would have to be redone, then there was a fundamental and fatal flaw in their architecture that doomed near-term profitability and long-term viability.

And this is why they abandoned Symbian OS and went to Windows Mobile. Because they knew there was no hope there. And so they didn't make it, but every one of the tech giants did.

So there's Microsoft, when after the Summer of Worms in 2002, after Nimda and Code Red, Bill Gates put out the famous memo that says, "If any developer has to choose between security or a feature, always choose security." That was the genesis of the year-long security standdown, a feature freeze that hit every product line across Microsoft. And this is what every tech giant has done, whether it's eBay, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Twitter, LinkedIn, Etsy. All of them understood that technical debt is a potential existential risk. And so that's what I think the core goal of The Phoenix Project is to help elevate that.

And so in The Phoenix Project, we had the Three Ways, the four types of work, and the five ideals are what we're using in The Unicorn Project. Locality and simplicity is the first ideal. The second ideal is focus, flow, and joy. The third is improvement of daily work. The fourth is psychological safety, and the fifth is customer focus. So I'll be bringing that up over the next three days.

And so maybe I'll just mention, as anyone who's created something, whether it's a product, a book, you can probably relate to the doubt and the remorse and the guilty feel of all the things you want to do but couldn't fit in. And I certainly went through that.

But I have to say, over the last couple of days, I've been listening to the audiobook version, listening for errors, so that we can ship it with the book. I love it. I'm very happy with the way it came out. I find myself laughing out loud at the absurdities that we all put up with in this community and the heroic acts required to get from here to there.

So Fernando Cornago, who will be speaking there this morning, said that he liked it 100 times better than The Phoenix Project, which I love. And then Chris O'Malley from Compuware, he said, "It is the Civil War novel that every technology and business trailblazer must read."

So thank you to this community. Our community gave me the courage to write this book and really target developers. So let me share with you my risky move. This is what your support gave me the confidence to do. My highest aspiration for the book is that it is read by developers and is good enough that it's read by technology leaders, and maybe it will be good enough to be read by business leaders.

And I think that's the community we need to activate to know how important our work is. And to support that, that's why I've decided to aim for the national bestseller list and have it listed alongside the books that they read. And I think it's within reach. Looking at the opening week of The DevOps Handbook, I think all we need is a 2X higher performance and this is possible. So over the next three days, you'll hear about all the things we're doing to help make it as compelling for you to make that possible.

So one of those is that I'll be doing a book signing, where all of you will be getting a Unicorn Project book, the first people to touch it, at 6:00 PM today. So thank you, CloudBees.

So before I turn it over to my friend Jeff, let me just tell you about something that is very important to me. I love conferences. In fact, if you look at the speaker community in the early years of this conference, almost every one of them I met at a conference. Almost all my co-authors I met at a conference. And so I think conferences have tremendous value if you can use the time well.

But there's some things that I have felt at a conference, such as the feeling that all the people you want to talk to are at the other side of a velvet rope that you cannot cross, or that you find yourself in situations where you look around a crowd of people, but you don't know who you should be talking to.

So our goal in the programming is to create as many ways for you to connect to who you need to get to. The first is every speaker should have as a last slide: here's what I don't know how to do, here's the help I'm looking for, and here's a way for you to help someone who's broadcasting help they're looking for. And you may find, like me, that that may lead to friendships and relationships that last for decades. So that's one thing that we're doing.

And we're doing a whole bunch of other things to make sure that we can create a community that already is so good at this, a community that is actively helping each other, mutually exothermic.

So to help make that happen, let me invite out Jeff Gallimore, a longtime friend of the DevOps Enterprise community. He's co-founder and CTIO, chief technology and innovation officer at Accela. So come on out and tell us what we've done.