Olivier Jacques

Hello? Hello. All right, good morning. I'm Olivier, a senior DevOps architect at AWS Professional Services. I have been doing DevOps transformation and sharing my journey multiple times here at DevOps Enterprise Summit with Gene, and I think we are going to give it another go, this time with a different angle. Looking forward to that.

Claude Ampigny

Good morning, everyone. My name is Claude. I'm also a senior consultant at AWS. I'm with AWS for more than six years now, and I'm basically helping customers design solutions, and I lead the implementation of solutions for our large customers.

During my career at AWS, I've been fortunate enough to meet very smart people, customer executives, AWS top executives, consultants, account managers, solution architects, and also developers and DevOps consultants like Olivier.

When Olivier joined AWS two years back, I found out that there was one drawback about Olivier, sorry to say, one big thing about Olivier that he could not control: the fact that Olivier joined during COVID. Joining during COVID, no matter how smart Olivier is, he could not be exposed to the people that I had been exposed to in the past. He could not share his ideas and get the light that he deserved. So we decided to act upon this and try to find a very programmatic solution, because we are developers and consultants, to really try to get the light that he deserved, helping Olivier build his internal network as well as influencing the DevOps community within AWS.

This talk is not about being the next YouTuber or Twitch influencer. This deck is about how you can build influence with your peers, your team, within your company, and eventually within your customers as well.

Olivier Jacques

Maybe we'll start with a definition, like every good consultant.

Claude Ampigny

We found a very good and interesting definition: influence is to have an effect on the way that someone behaves or thinks, especially by giving them an example to follow. That's a very good definition and a very broad definition.

We are not going to pursue all the different aspects of influence and how you can build that. We are going to narrow the topic a bit on video-based influence and how we can influence using video. There are several ways: you can use conferences, you can write books, there are several things, but now the topic is video-based.

Olivier Jacques

This talk is going to have three parts. The first one is some data points in terms of how we build influence and the type of medium that we can use. The second part is more about an experience report and how we have been doing that with ourselves, within our enterprise, within AWS, and with our customers. The third part is more hands-on: how you can replicate that yourself with two examples and three formats. So let's jump into the first part.

Claude Ampigny

The first question is: why does video-based influence matter in the first place? The very first reason is because it is the major platform. Like 95% of teens use YouTube, and it is not only teens. You, me, everybody uses YouTube to get some knowledge. Our first go-to action when you try to get some knowledge is, okay, let me see if I can find something on YouTube, on a video-based kind of platform.

The next thing is, if we really want to influence people, we need to influence them with something that matters to them. What are the top three reasons why people choose the organization? We looked after that, and what we found was that the number one reason was work-life balance. The second reason was learning and development. The third reason was salary and benefits. So I'm not going to help on the salary; it's above our pay grade. The first one, work-life balance, is something that you find a lot on platforms like YouTube, Twitch, or stuff like that, so we don't focus on that. But we really focus on the second topic for Gen Z or millennials: how they can develop themselves or learn new skills.

One thing to read about this data point is also that Gen Z or millennials value training and learning more than salary and benefits. It is very important for every one of us to really get that data point in mind. We find topics that interest people, because if we want to influence them, we have to find the right vehicle.

Olivier Jacques

And also, Claude, influence cannot be accidental. You can influence by accident or just if you are kind of lucky, but in the way that we think and work at AWS, we need to create mechanisms. In our case, we need to create a mechanism to be influential. I think this is the next piece of the talk.

Claude Ampigny

The point of not being accidental is that influence is the combination of intention, strategy, and execution. To influence people well, you have to have those three things. Otherwise you are not influencing, and you won't be able to influence anyone. This is the right combination. Today I will speak more about intention. We find out what is the topic. Now let's discuss the strategy. I will focus on the strategy, and Olivier will focus on the execution and sharing tips with you on how you can start.

We are in the city of Amsterdam. This is basically a three-step approach. The way we see it is like a city. We take the Amsterdam map and we created some very interesting districts. The four districts that we wanted to conquer are the individual district, the team district, the enterprise district, and customer district. We have our Dutch fisherman that will go and try to fish out there and try to fish for influence.

The first step is initiate. We start and we try to conquer these four districts. In the individual space, look for and try to be specific about what interests people, what value we can bring, and skills. In the team district, try to build mechanisms that are repeatable within the team so the team can leverage that and others can do it. In the enterprise district, try to focus on the outcome. What is the outcome for the company? What does that bring for your company? For us, what does that bring for AWS to build an influential mechanism? And the fourth one is inspire. For your customer, you need to inspire them so they get attracted by the culture, by the product, or whatever you have to propose, and then they embrace it. This is the initiate phase.

What about the second phase, which is the buzz?

Olivier Jacques

Buzzing is what everyone wants to do. When you want to buzz, what we found out is that you have to really focus on something, and when you want to buzz, the accelerator, I would say the big fish, is in the enterprise district. The way we see it is we want to buzz and we want to personalize what we will be doing. When I say personalize, it is personalize the content, but also personalize and build your personal brand. People identify the topic and they identify you as a vehicle for this topic.

In a matter of months, Olivier has been identified as the DevOps guru in France for AWS Professional Services because he shares this topic, and this is part of his personal branding. Personalize, be what you want, and share what you want to do. Build your brand.

Claude Ampigny

Now we want to scale, and now we want to go out and conquer a lot of big fish out there. For this, there are also specific mechanisms that you can do. If we go to the next slide, you will see that what we do there is build product: productize, productize, and productize.

What we mean by productizing is building a product out of what you have done, so that gives you a repeatable mechanism that people can easily consume and that you can easily market as well. You see we discuss addressing the different areas. One area that we don't address in this scale mechanism is the team district. Why? Because at AWS we are builders, so we want to keep our feet on the ground. We want to stick with the people and really speak to developers and people that do things, builders as well. We want to get our hands dirty with the technical aspects. But still, we want to help the enterprise and help the customer with the product that we've built.

We'll share our journey on this. You will see that by starting and by buzzing and explaining what you are doing, we also attract customers. I don't want to disclose what is coming.

Olivier Jacques

But Claude, I think if we get that many fish, we're going to need a bigger boat, right? A reference to Jaws, a very nice movie. In my experience, looking at the different districts, the first district for me as we initiate is the individual level. How do I influence individuals? In the format that I'm using in the videos, I'm going to share the different formats. I'm going to use presentations, demos, and transparent whiteboarding, being able to tell the story for those individuals.

Then I want to share with the teams, the people in my own team. For example, we created a channel with some videos. I get them to record what they are doing and do a show and tell, demos, and presentations. So far they have been doing nine videos. We have collected 350 views and 45 subscribers. The size of my team is much smaller than 45, so already within the team I start to influence outside in my company, just because we are making videos. Those videos are hands-on, really hands-on, like troubleshooting EKS and IAM types of aspects. We start to influence not only within the team, but also outside of my team.

The other aspect, now if we go to the enterprise district, is: do we influence within my company, within the enterprise? To do that, for example, I've organized fireside chats. They are video formats, and you will see some of that. So far we have been accumulating seven videos only, with a total of 550 views and 75 subscribers. I will mention that these are French-speaking videos, so it is not for everyone in the company. But I do that also for a purpose, because there is so much English-speaking content that having personalized content in a native language is also very interesting.

Last but not least, as we were influencing that and we are talking to our customers as consultants, they were interested in replicating this strategy and those mechanisms. What we have put together are enablement sessions so that they can influence within their own company. For example, one thing that we are doing right now is a one-day enablement session. In the morning we talk about DevOps. We have a serious game about DevOps. It is DevOps with Legos and candies, a very nice way to see and touch and feel DevOps and see how it is different from the rest. At the end we have resources we point to. In the afternoon we have hands-on labs.

I think there was a very interesting talk earlier today with Jenny from Google, from SRE, where she explained that to create an educational program, people need to be really hands-on and not just share content like this. That's what we do in this second part of the day with hands-on labs so people can experience.

Claude Ampigny

If we stop there for a minute, what is interesting is that Olivier just started this journey. I helped him just a bit, but Olivier just started this journey about video-based content. We share that with our customers, and now we are going to do that for customers that have more than 20 internal companies, meaning business lines, and try to scale that to more than thousands of people within their company. They like the format. They like the video-based aspect. They like the serious game. So they're asking us to help them and scale using this.

At the end of the day, it's probably going to change a bit what we are going to do. We are going to experiment in June, so we are going to tweak it, probably change it. But what is interesting is that a personal initiative finally becomes a customer thing that we can sell and help customers grow and adopt.

Olivier Jacques

I guess the next piece of this talk is: how can you be, because if we say we want to influence, we also say that video is a perfect medium for that. So how can you be a DevOps YouTuber or influencer?

It all starts with having a place to host your videos. Maybe you are already equipped with that, but you need to have a place to host your videos. Here, in the QR code, you are going to have a reference blog where we share how you can do that within AWS. It is hosting your channels, having subscribers, and being able to share the content over and over.

Now I'm going to show you three use cases. I talked about presentations, demos, and whiteboarding. Let me show you how I do that. The first thing that you need to do is mix sources when you create videos. Sources can be applications, your microphone, the webcam, an application window, or maybe GIFs so that you can make it a little more attractive. You can also have live chats, for people who interact in the video live. Then you need to assemble all those sources and use software to do that.

I like to do it live because I don't have lots of time, obviously. I cannot really spend the time to produce my video after it has been recorded. So I do that live, and I use software called OBS, Open Broadcaster Software, which is open source software where I assemble my scenes and control them live. It's actually very simple. I control them with the keyboard. You can use tablets to do that. You can even use an HTTP API if you get fancy, so you can synchronize your PowerPoint with your controls and eventually create outputs. Those outputs are videos that are recorded, and you can stream live as well.

Streaming video live is interesting because you have feedback from others, like a Twitch-like experience. You can create a virtual camera, or you can just share your screen and present with Zoom, Teams, Chime, or any enterprise tool that you use. That's the overall workflow. Let's watch a five-minute video on how this looks in real life.

We'll start with the presentation format. In presentation format, I have PowerPoint and a webcam in different sizes. You saw in the first slide there was a big size, and in the second slide it was smaller. I have my PowerPoint presentation there, and I'm going to open OBS, Open Broadcaster Software. What I will do there is create scenes. Scenes are layouts for the content. The first scene is about the slides. I choose a source, and the source is PowerPoint. I select PowerPoint, and now I have this in my software. I can resize it, crop it, and adjust it to where I want it and how I want it to look. Here, I'm just going to make it full screen. The next thing is being able to start recording or stream it right now.

Let's create another scene. This other scene is going to have my webcam on the side, so you control fully the layout. To do that, I'm just adding another source, which is the webcam itself. Selecting the correct webcam, here it is. It appears square, and I can crop the video, make it larger, resize it essentially, and make it the way I want it to look. I like the round format, a circle around it. On top of videos, I can add filters. This is a source where I add the filter, and the filter here is a mask. The mask is extremely simple. It's essentially a shape that is white where you want it to be transparent and black where you don't want it to be transparent, opaque. Here it is: I have my camera laid out.

Let's create another scene, this time just my face, but very small in the top right, for example, so I don't hide the content. Now I have three scenes: slides only, the second scene with webcam big size, and the third scene with the webcam smaller size. To be able to control that, now I am going to use shortcuts. Those are keyboard shortcuts, but you can have an HTTP API. I'm just going to use the keyboard, a numeric keyboard with one, two, three, just to change the scene as I talk, and adapt it.

Another example is transparent whiteboarding. This is an extremely powerful way to share a story, share an evolution. Here you just see me, like full webcam, but on top of me or on top of the video explaining things, you have transparent whiteboarding.

The trick here is actually quite simple. It is to use an old green-screen cinema technique. I go into PowerPoint, I'm going to use PowerPoint for that, and I'm going to create a full green background, RGB full green. Here is my PowerPoint slide, which is all green. Now what I'm going to do is add this PowerPoint as a source and add it on top of my camera. Here is my PowerPoint. I'm going to take that as a source. Actually I'm going to crop the source and eventually resize it. I'm taking the green-screen part of it and putting that on top of the entire full screen. Then I'm going to add a filter, which is called a chroma key filter. Essentially it's a cinema green-screen filter, and everything that's green is going to disappear. Everything that is not green is going to stay there.

Here, this is just me, but in fact, on top of it, you have the green screen. If you see on the left side, I take my pen, just a small tablet, a 40-euro tablet, and I can draw on top of it. Everything that's green has disappeared, but then I can start to tell a story. When I tell a story, I don't want to always start from scratch, so I create slides that already have icons pre-readied, and now I can draw on top of the icon. You can initially have a totally blank screen, then have icons that you lay out on top, and then continue to draw your story and create, okay, this is the story of a developer committing code to Git and pushing to dev, test, and production.

Those are two types of formats, and most of you will imagine what this is, but it's pretty classical, just going back on that. For presentations, they are really good for sharing PowerPoint slides. They are really good to engage the audience, like we are doing here. They are ready to share, and you can record and produce them live and stream live, whether it's on Microsoft Teams, YouTube, Twitch, multiple formats. There is an AWS service called IVS, Interactive Video Service. There is a transcript, which is very inclusive also, so you can have a text version and you can replay it at multiple speeds.

One trick that is extremely important is that you need to focus. I focus videos on one topic and one topic only, and I try to make them short. Maximum length should be 15 minutes. The source of the data here is the state of video in education, where they prove that five to 10 minutes is ideal, and you can go up to 10 to 30 minutes, but keep it short.

You can raise the bar by using a pen on top of your presentation. Extremely powerful. The other thing that I've been using is to add comments. Here, this is a fireside chat that we had, and while people were engaging with us in the chat, in that case it was Slack, I could lay over the chat of the people sharing their thoughts and asking questions, which is extremely powerful. I give you the links to all of this at the end.

Another format is technical demonstrations. Tech demos are like sharing your screen with whatever you want to present. It can be Visual Studio Code, your IDE. You can add camera also on top and animated GIFs. It's good for tools, techniques, and patterns presentations. You want them to have big fonts, as big as it can be on the screen, and be beautiful.

Because it's the DevOps Enterprise Summit, and I am a DevOps consultant, I like to do everything as code. Raising the bar here is actually to create videos of presentations as code, and in this case doing demos with a script. There is a tool on GitHub called VHS, open source as well, where you create a script of what you want to do, and this script is going to generate an MP4 or a GIF file. What is really cool about that is, first, your presentation is going to always be fresh. Every time you refresh your automated pipeline, it's going to generate a new GIF, and the GIF is going to have the new version of the CLI or the tool that you are demonstrating. It's a script, and then you can manage the script and have pull requests, for example, if someone wants to change the script. Extremely handy.

The third format that I've been using is transparent whiteboarding. As I was sharing, it's an extremely powerful way to share a story. I've been inspired a lot by those types of videos. It is a powerful way to explain and tell a story. You don't need to know how to draw. You just need a pen, and it's actually very cheap to get a tablet for that. What is really interesting is that you can mix the live drawing with prepared slides and icons, and you can draw on top of that and have a story that makes a lot of sense within those 10-minute, 15-minute types of video. You just use the green screen for that.

Now, I don't think we figured out everything. Definitely, definitely. We need help. One thing we need help with: I think we figured out how to have as-code videos for terminal-based demos, but can we do the same thing for GUI demos? One of the challenges with videos is that they are hard to change and hard to update. Either you re-record the video from scratch, or maybe if we manage it as code, we can automatically re-record, change the script a little, and have a new version of it. Should we use Selenium for that, or some kind of automation tool?

The other thing, because this is the Generative AI Enterprise Summit conference, I think it is called now: how will generative AI help us to create videos? For example, you don't have to show your face in the morning in pajamas. What you can do is create avatars and have the avatar talk. I've seen people use multiple avatars to have different characters, for example Dan the developer and Tim the tester. It was just using different types of avatars to have a scripted scenario this way. You can do that, I guess, with animations, but could we do that with generative AI? I think it would be really interesting.

Last but not least, all of the references are there. If you want to scan this code, it's going to send you to a gist, and the gist will have all of the resources of the talk.

Q&A

Audience: There is a question: why difficult? Discord or Twitch?

Olivier Jacques: The question is why did we choose the most difficult way, which is actually using videos, and not using Discord or Twitch? One of the constraints that we have internally and also with our customers is that we need to have private types of media. We need to embed ourselves and fit in the tooling that is used by the customer. Privacy is actually very important. Indeed, we have to recreate some kind of an environment. Of course, if you can choose your own medium, you definitely could use Twitch, which is awesome for that.

Any other question?

Audience: I saw during the presentation you were using Windows. Would this work online as well, or with a different model of software?

Olivier Jacques: The question is, we are using Windows, can this work on Mac as well? Yes, OBS actually works on Mac and Linux. It's a very nice open source software that is very portable. I use OBS for that. It's my way to do that live because I don't have lots of time to do editing afterwards. I also like the live format, and OBS is one of the most popular tools to do that.

Okay. Thank you everyone. Thank you for joining. I really hope you get something out of it and that you're now ready to influence others with videos. Thank you.