 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2016. Brought to you by Red Hat. Here's your host, Brian Graceley. Welcome back, we're here at Red Hat Summit here in San Francisco. Almost 5,500 people, a ton of energy, you can see it around us here. Very excited, one of the really rocket ship technologies that are helping Red Hat grow, they're taking off is Ansible. And today, we're very excited, we've got Oscar Gonzalez, who's Principal Software Engineer with Sawyer Effect. And Sawyer Effect has been helping Jay Crew to improve their retail experience, their online experience, so welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Nice to be here. Give us a little bit of background, just your background, we were talking earlier. Background is a software developer as trying to help companies have a better mobile experience, better web experience. Yes, I'm a software engineer by education. I went to computer science school and I've been working for, I think the last 10 years in the e-commerce space, helping retailers improve their e-commerce solutions. We usually work with certain platforms, but in this case, we're helping by using Ansible to improve the mobile experience of Jay Crew. Okay, so before we dive into the Ansible part, give us a sense, what's the challenge as a retailer these days that something like Ansible is going to help? What's the business challenge? What's the user experience challenges that are really top of mind for them? If you think about the retailers, they usually tend to stay a little behind the times in terms of adult and new technologies. So usually it's more traditional. You tend to do things the old way in terms of manual deployments, manual testing, and that, combined with the explosion that mobile sites had a couple of years ago, that put a lot of pressure on them. So what you need to do is to quickly help them bring better mobile experience that can help them capture almost 50% of their users that those are the metrics that we are seeing right now. So it's very important for any retailer to improve the mobile experience to capture these users. Yeah, and what we're seeing more and more, I mean, retail obviously is a seasonal thing. Everybody wants to have whatever's new and cool. Jay Crew's obviously on the cutting edge, but we're seeing people, there's other sites that are starting off where you can design your own clothes, you can get specifications. That's got to be pushing them as well. It's just the always-on, always-responsiveness and fashion is always moving quickly. Yeah, and you need to create a mobile strategy around that. Some clients want to just create one particular experience in mobile, and that's fine. But it's also important that you don't give two different experiences to your users. If you're looking for something in your phone and then you go to the website, you should be able to have a seamless experience to find the same product. Otherwise, yourselves are going to suffer. Right, but you never know who you're shopping with. By yourself, you might want to show somebody something. Yeah, you're right. You've got to have that seamless experience or consistency so you can point to something. Let's talk a little bit. Where does Ansible play a role in this, trying to help them? What have you been using it for? What's the technology doing to help Jay Crew and give us a broader sense of what you've been working on? I think that it allows you to go faster. If you think about it, a project like these requires you to change a dozens of servers, deploy to dozens of applications. And if you do that manually, it's going to be very slow for you. So it helps you go faster. It also allows you to have a secure way to repeat the same deployment. And that's important because you want to know which particular version of your software you have in each one of these machines so you can rely on your developers to deploy all the time. Right, but there's a lot of automation tools that are out there today in the marketplace. What drew you to Ansible? What do you like about the platform suite? And more importantly, what's it do to solve problems? For me, it was the simplicity. In the past, I used Chef. And even while I'm a software developer, it was difficult for me to get around all the different features they had. And I'm pretty sure they are great, but for me, I needed a simplest way to start doing automation. And Ansible gave that to me. Yeah. You know, one of the things that happens when you start automating things, you know, the technology moves fast and then you've got to kind of get the culture to be in lockstep. Give us some sense of as you're helping J.Crew, how are you also helping their culture to say, oh, it's okay to make changes during the day or, you know, this is how we can take feedback based on, you know, A.B. testing. How does all that play together? You know, the automation piece and then helping their business and culture go faster. I think it's very important that we realize that this allows us to be one team. That this allows the program managers, developers, operations, and QA engineers to be able to work together and deploy one single solution. In the past, you will do that by silos. You will create one silo that will test the application and then two days later, you will realize that it's something needed to change. I think that it's important that we help them see the organization as one team with a single goal. Okay, and are they using Ansible throughout the life cycle in dev, in test, in staging, and then into production as well? We do, and we have the same set of scripts for developers, for QA, and for production. So I think that our biggest win was to be able to do one solution that handles all the different scenarios. Okay, so you're really combining automation, infrastructure as code, if the developers and the operators are checking that into a common code base, and then obviously sort of a combined DevOps type of culture to make this work. Yeah, and that's because it all depends on having a common goal. If we decided to do it by allowing the QA team to do it in one way and the operations department to do it in a different way, then you will start seeing differences and clashes between different opinions. I think that the fact that we did it in a single way helped the organization as a whole. Okay, let's shift gears. Let's get away from the technology. Let's talk numbers. What's the output? What's the benefit been to J.Crew and how do you start to measure going faster and the benefit of going faster? I think there are many benefits of it. The first one is that it used to take us hours to do a deployment. And now we can do it under five minutes. And it's not a set of tasks. It's a single click that allows us to go to production in five minutes. And that's huge for everyone that doesn't have to stay at night. For everyone, we can do that during the middle of the day. And that's one of the greatest wins. And also, it saves time. In the past, these hours that we will dedicate to give you a virtual environment we will dedicate to give you a QA instance or to upgrade the version of an QA instance will take hours. And now it takes a minute. So we calculated that we are saving up to 25% of the operations time that used to take us. Yeah, and I can imagine. I mean, you mentioned you can do updates during the day. That's got to make a lot of people in operations happy that they're not there on Friday night, Saturday night, two in the morning doing updates. They can do them in the course of their regular day. Exactly, because I think that one of the metrics that it's difficult to measure is how much is affecting the climate of your organization as a whole. If people stays on a Friday night, they usually, their family is going to start suffering the pain. And that will represent in people living, and then you need to incur in cost to hire new people. And I think that this way, what you are doing is to save in every part of your organization in your hiring process, you are sharing more knowledge, you are improving the happiness of the entire team. Yeah, you talked a little bit, you talked about benefits. Sometimes automation has a hard time, you know, kind of gaining traction because people go, well, it's going to take us time to do the automation. It's going to, you know, it's work to get, what was the thing that kind of got the management team over the hump or the development operations teams, kind of over to say, you know what, that this makes sense, we have to do this. Was there a moment or a way that you went about kind of getting them to engage in this? I think it was a combination of two things. One, the organization already started looking at the agile methodology, and these provide a tool to make that happen. You know, Ansible finally gave them the ability to do it. And it's also that you grew as an organization, how it's always looking for ways to incorporate new techniques. And during the last couple of years, we have seen more and more people embrace the DevOps philosophy because what we want to do is to work together to make things go faster. Yeah, one of the big things for online, people don't think as much about security, they feel fairly comfortable with it, but as a retailer, you've got credit card transactions, you've got to protect, you've got personal information. Does Ansible play a role in helping you secure the environments as well? It does because there are certain features of Ansible that allow you to give permissions to developers to do the deployment, but not necessarily to see the keys to the servers. We also have a common user that we use for deployments, and that user has certain restrictions and allows us to trust that everyone can manage these tools without giving them the keys to the kingdom. Yeah, but you guys obviously focus on retail, but a lot of what you're doing technology-wise is applicable to potentially a lot of people here at the event, and what sort of things would you pass along to them, maybe other Sawyer clients that you say, look, what we learned at J-Crew, we could help somebody else with what you could learn. What are those really good common learnings that you could pass along to people? Usually it's simplified into two tasks. One is what we want to do is to avoid repeating tasks that can be automated. We don't want to be copying files over and over again because that's boring for every engineer. Exactly, and that's one, that we are going to automate whatever we can so we can focus on solving problems. And the other part is that we can help them to realize how to work as a team. Every organization that creates a common goal is going to have a better chance to succeed than if you try to do it in different ways across the board. Yeah, so ultimately it's driving better collaboration, it's driving better security, you're obviously getting results that are going to help drive the business. Sounds like it's been a really good fit. How long are you going to take the team to kind of get comfortable with the technology and learn it? You start seeing benefits after two months, and I would say that our organization can be proficient using Ansible in a period between three and six months, depending on the size of your team. Yeah, and you're able to leverage some of the local meetups. I know they have meetups all around the world. You've been able to gain experience from those teams as well. Yeah, I think that one of the things I like the most about Ansible is the community they created. There is free examples and code online. There is always a meetup nearby. So I think that that's one of the reasons why we trust that it's going to continue, because it's not only a product, it's also a community that's trying to make it better. Yeah, Oscar, thank you very much for sharing your story. Any last words for anybody here in attendance or anybody watching about what Ansible's done to help you in your job or sort of helping you be successful? I think that I was given a talk this morning and one of the comments was it is possible to change. It is possible to do small changes that get you there, and there is no reason not to start tomorrow. Yeah, Oscar, thank you very much. Oscar Gonzalez from Sawyer Effect, helping J.Crew's website, their mobile experience be much better. Folks, we'll be right back here from Red Hat Summit here in San Francisco. Keep watching, this is theCUBE.