 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCube at IBM Interconnect 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsor, IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. We here live in Las Vegas for IBM Interconnect. This is theCube, our flagship program. Go out to the events and extract a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante and with wikibond.org. Our next guest is Adam Archer. DevOps core services lead at IBM. Welcome to theCube. Thank you, great to see you. So, Bluemix is trending this morning on Twitter. Obviously, a lot of developer focus. We set it up in a row with Bluemix is really moving fast. I mean, almost to the fast way, like you can't pass faster. I get to make it up, get ready to talk for a lot of cool stuff coming in. Modern agile, cool stuff in the cloud. Obviously, DevOps is awesome. We're pretty fast. What are you working on here? What's your story? What's going on with the labs? What's some of the sound bites on the floor? What are you seeing? What's the vibe? People deer in the headlights. They engage or give us the scoop? What's going on? Sorry. What I'm working on is what's called Bluemix DevOps services. So, what we're really trying to do is improve the way that developers can actually work with the Bluemix platform. So, like you said, that's really cool. People can join it or really, really engage with it. But one of the sort of gaps that we're seeing in Bluemix, really trying to close, is that it helps you really figure out how to develop for the platform. It does a great job of running your application and a great job of really helping you. For the Bluemix platform. I didn't ask the general. For the Bluemix platform, right? So, what we're trying to do is bring the DevOps workflows and DevOps capabilities to developers trying to develop for the Bluemix platform to really help facilitate how they manage their applications and how they manage their development. And you do this through a set of cloud services that you're responsible for. Exactly, yeah. What's more about that? So, the history of the offering actually is, we started setting out to bring a cloud offering of one of our flagship, our flagship task tracking and project management tool, that was the, originally what we know of today as Bluemix DevOps Services was, that's where it came from. It was the SaaS offering of our SaaS product line. And what we really realized is, as it evolved and cloud really became the industry standard and if you couldn't host people's applications, development tool in and tracking, you really didn't have anything with just those capabilities, right? So, really the sort of perfect pairing between Bluemix and DevOps Services to allow us to be able to really improve greatly how people with our tool also facilitate how people can develop for the Bluemix. Robert, this morning in his keynote gave some stats on the percentage of large organizations that are doing agile and DevOps. It was like 75%, who's not doing it, right? Yeah. And we were talking off camera, one of the challenges that you guys attracting in young people, young developers, we had some VCs on and they all talk about how everybody develops in the public cloud. You guys relate to that game. Talk about what you're doing there to attract those young people. Yeah, yeah, so that's it. And the reality is, and one of the realities that we've really been realizing is that the history of IBM and how we've delivered Bluemix really has historically been focused on the big enterprise and the big business and on really helping foster hundreds or even thousands of developers to work together. And what you miss there is that when you get a young college graduate or even a developer that is in an enterprise situation, but is trying to figure out what tools they want to use on their own, you can't have that same, they're coming in with a whole different set of expectations. They want to be successful in seconds or minutes or not have a whole bunch of setup time and a big roadmap to their project setup before they're successful. So what we're really focusing on DevOps, as much as we're trying to support some of those large collaboration flows, we're also really heavily focusing on making a single developer or a small team of developers productive as quickly as possible. And our goal is to get people to be able to come to our site and with no prior knowledge be developing their application on the Bluemix platform. And so how do you do that? How do you compress that cycle, Adam? It's the product itself and the services around that? Can you describe that in a little bit? Yeah, so the way that we're really impressed that is by essentially taking some of the barriers down to the setup of the environment, with cloud have the advantage of being able to avoid a huge local development environment setup for our users by facilitating them actually being able to develop right on the platform rather than locally. They're able to immediately start working without having to configure everything. It also means that when they're developing an environment, when they're developing for the platform where they're actually going to run the thing, it avoids that sort of leap between the local develop and the gap between that local development setup and what you're actually going to be doing with the tool once you're, with your application once you're looking to go further with it. So by giving them samples to start with, getting them straight from creating their first project or creating their app straight into, we got a Web IDE that they can edit their codes. They can use whatever local they want, but within this Web IDE, it allows us to get into the code, meet their making changes, and immediately see those changes run in live. Talk about the old new ways. You guys are really talking about, this is the new developer model, right? I mean, obviously the cloud is where local hosts to the cloud, and then obviously the data center is a big part of IBM's existence. So, you know, you got to be relevant on both sides. It's not about ripping replays. Talk about how you guys are bridging that. And what is the developer mindset? I'm old enough to know that 15, 20 years of development, very in-house oriented. We used to do code days, right? Slow workflows, stable operations. Is DevOps selling in the enterprise, or is it just cloud ops? I mean, what's the market enterprise like? I mean, it's a mix. I see it as an evolution, right? I think there are still a lot of enterprises that aren't embracing it, and I think that that's, I think it's a mistake, quite frankly. I know too, totally. So the reality is, like the historical means of delivering software was, at the end of the day, what you're shipping is, that's great, you've got... So I got to ask you, I got to ask you, if I'm your best friend, I'm a CIO, and I got this big enterprise, and I say, Adam, bottom line me. What should I do with DevOps? What's your advice? How would you see the straight, like the head-out, bigger pitch for DevOps? Yeah, just like hard... It's about user feedback. It's about user feedback and shortening the different cycles, right? So what I was about to just get into is the true means of delivering software is you've got your golden master disk at the end of your release cycle, right? And that goes out, and your next isn't coming out for a year, for however long. So you can't deliver fixes to your users. You can't actually rev that product. Naturally, the development cycles that you would use to develop in that environment were tailored around making sure that that thing you get to, it's got to be perfect, right? It's got to be the end goal. And it means that your feedback loops with your customers are... You spend 12, 18 months developing that thing, and you have to actually go and work really hard to get feedback and make sure you're in the right way. With the DevOps, what you can do is you're pushing features out. You can dark launch things. You can invite close friends and allies, or people who are just interested in helping you evolve, and get things out quickly and then rev them. That's agile, right? That's kind of the model. That's what you're saying. The new model is focus on the business problem. So it's a business model problem, and a mindset, cultural mindset, and then development life cycle. Okay, cool. Now let's go into the hood. So BlueMix, I've heard in the hallways here, is really making progress on this auto update. So when you have a code update, integrated stacks, it's not that trivial. So the gold disk assumes a waterfall. It's all about the life cycle. But now in your life, I might have other code bases. So auto configuration, the provision, the orchestration, the versioning control. Talk about what's going on with that with DevOps. Is there new stuff that you could talk about that? Like with the... Sorry, I'm having trouble following that. If I update code, BlueMix code, it's going to have side effects in other parts of the stack. In other parts of my application. Other code bases, other tools. Right. So I mean, one of the principles of DevOps is baking test automation right into your process, right? Like if you're using a delivery pipeline where developer commits are going straight out to your application, if you don't have automated tests around that, you're flying blind, right? Yeah. When a developer commits, and you don't have an event that you're not regressing yourself or your stakeholders that your API layer isn't regressing, then it's chaos, right? So that's one of the fundamental tenants of DevOps is that that test automation and that process is baked right in. So... That's fundamental because you're on a feedback cycle, you're listening to customers, you got a feedback cycle that's shorter, so that automation is critical, right? That automation is critical, yeah, absolutely. And the other thing about it is that test automation is great, but test automation doesn't catch everything, right? So one of the things that you have to get used to, and I think this is one of the things that Enterprise is really struggling with is that with DevOps practices, when you're rolling out the latest features on a daily, hourly basis, you're going to see problems, right? Things are going to get by and things are, you're going to have regressions and you're going to have break. The thing that I like to talk about is that the metric that really matters when you really are developing with DevOps principles, it's not mean time to failure, right? Like that's the way of thinking, right? You know, uptime of 300 days without a second of death, like that's... We did good, yeah, you know. And you know, that's... So the metrics are changing. That's still important, but what's really important now is not failure, it's mean time to worry, right? If I introduce a problem to my site, you know, that sucks, but if I can fix that problem in two minutes, you know, how much trouble has really been caused. So if a percent of organizations are doing DevOps and Agile, what percent in your opinion are doing it well? And what... Do it... You know, I actually think that the entire industry is still figuring out what doing it well means, right? So, what percentage are doing it well? I think that number is close to zero. Well, how should we think about doing it well? What does that mean? And you know, what's your vision as to how to get people there? I mean, the way to do it well is to really embrace what I was... It's really to embrace those shorter feedback loops and to not be afraid to test on your users, right? That's the whole value of the thing, right? You know how of an immediate line to your users. You're connected to them constantly. And if you're not leveraging that feedback loop and if you're not, you know, properly instrumenting your apps to see what you behave when you roll out the new feature and if that actually did improve the experience and improve the metrics you're trying to improve, right? You know, when I roll out this new feature, are people using it? Do the people who use it immediately fall off and leave my site and never come back? Do they love it, right? Is it immediately successful? You need to be able to tell that stuff immediately and you need to be able to react to that because with the power of a DevOps pipeline, if I do see that, you know, the outcome of the change that I delivered is not what I wanted, it is not what I expected. I need to be able to, with a push of a button, just turn that off, right? And maybe we go back to the drawing board, we figure out what was wrong and what we can do better and if our apps are properly instrumented, even with having that out there for a short period of time or with having that out there and released to only, you know, 1% of our user base or something, we have a wealth to figure out how to get it right next time. And then you immediately start working on that again and again you roll it out right away and again you use that tight feedback loop to get it right. I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. I want you to just end the segment by just sharing the perspective of the vibe at the show and what you got going on in this lab later today. So if someone's watching, what's the vibe, what's it like here? So the vibe, everyone's really, really excited about cloud. I mean, everyone's talking about Bluemix, everyone's talking about how they can embrace some of these DevOps principles, embrace the cloud. Hybrid cloud is a really hot topic, how enterprises can, you know, keep their conform to the requirements that they have either from their business or even from their country or their business sector, keep their data local, but really still be able to leverage things like containers and DevOps principles to hit that those tight feedback loops and get, you know, make quick rapid progress but without compromising stuff. So the vibe is just really about embracing change and modernizing. It's so great on us, this is awesome. I really like it. I mean, I just love the vibe. The big data event has that too. The big data force is like, it's very intoxicating. It's like, it's got something from a geek standpoint but also the outcomes on the business side are significant. We'll be coming back live in Las Vegas. We'll be right back with our next segment after this short break.