Kyle Herrmann

Hello, my name is Kyle Herrmann. I'm a systems and, most recently, cloud architect with Macy's Technology, focusing on the IT space.

First off, I'd like to thank everyone for this opportunity to share our story. We've been on a journey over the last year with Red Hat and the OpenShift Container Platform, which is built on top of and fleshes out the excellent Kubernetes core. Our quest with containers is just beginning, but for me, it started a couple of years ago.

That's when I attended Container World in Santa Clara. I distinctly remember a presenter describing the eternal battle between developers and IT, and he really wanted to see IT banished to another dimension. And I get it. IT is seen as slow, sometimes lacking in understanding of the developers' challenges, and highly bureaucratic. I definitely remember cringing more than once, requesting a developer to file a ticket.

Of course, on the other hand, we in IT see developers unchecked as creating technical sprawl by implementing whatever technology they need to meet their demands without fully understanding the overall impact on the greater ecosystem.

Sure, it's hard to fault their determination and focus. They are truly trying to meet business and customer needs. But that continuing sprawl, unfortunately, leaves IT forever in catch-up mode.

Now, in our defense, IT does bring certain benefits through stability and resiliency, such as backups and 24/7 support and change control, and also sleep.

So we wanted to see how we could bridge the gap between developers and IT, because at the end of the day, we all want the same thing, and that's to get out of the developers' way and let them enable our business.

The OpenShift Container Platform provides a rich suite of functionality for both developers and IT. It provides security, resiliency, and scalability, and what I like, simplified patching, all on a common platform. And the common platform is key since we're facing public cloud sprawl and cloud vendor lock-in.

While many clouds provide similar services, their proprietary nature effectively makes them apples and oranges when it comes to support. So we wanted to dig deeper on these concepts and explore these technologies, so we partnered with Red Hat through their Open Innovation Labs.

I was really excited to partner with developers to prove out a concept. Red Hat brings the pieces and the expertise and immerses you in the technology. They don't just feed you, they teach you how to hunt, clean, and cook.

Our goal in the lab was to try and take one of our existing services and port it into the OpenShift platform, as well as tie it into our greater SDLC. We also then wanted to take those containers and port them into another different container provider.

It wasn't all just hard work and intense learning. Beyond the exposure to new ideas, technologies, and methodologies, we also had a great time with the Red Hat crew, many times staying late into the night for fun, food, and board games.

Yet, as the lab came to a close, we were left with a quandary. Our management was still hesitant to embrace the technology, and we had a pretty mature continuous integration and configuration management process. So we looked to explore other ways in which we could embrace this technology and see success with it.

First, we built out our own POC to explore this space within the IT world. We also continued meeting with our developers and DevOps teams, who were also exploring containers and other proprietary clouds. We wanted to emphasize how OpenShift could provide everything they needed out of the box. In addition, it also worked with all of the existing cloud providers we were already using.

I was also excited about how we could extend the SDLC beyond the developers to the application and integration teams. How, coming together on a common platform, we could understand and overcome our challenges as one.

I'd like to thank Red Hat for their help as we continue going forward with the OpenShift Container Platform, as well as our business partners and colleagues who have taken the time to join us on this adventure.

Why the chimp?

Oh, sorry, out of time.

All right, if anybody's had any issues with this presentation, please do not hesitate to file a ticket. Thank you. Good night.

Thank you, Kyle.