 From Hell's Kitchen in New York City, it's theCUBE on the ground at Serverless Con, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE here at Serverless Conference in Hell's Kitchen in New York City. Happy to welcome back to the program, keynote speaker here at the event and a guest that we've had on a couple of times before, John Willis, who's the Vice President of DevOps and Digital Practices, SJ Technologies. John? In Hell's Kitchen and Go Yankees. Yeah, man. I was at the game last night, the other night. Yeah, we'll see, tonight. Yeah. Thank you. Glad to be here. Great to see you. So, look, you've been talking to audiences about DevOps for, you know, as long as I can remember, as long as I've known you, definitely. Tell us, you know, what's, you know, so important about Serverless and how that fits into kind of the world of the developer these days? Yeah, I mean, my interest, you know, I was invited to do a keynote. And my interest is this to break down the tribal nature of new things. And I sound like Evercrit, because I'm the DevOps tribe. But like, I prefer to just stop calling it DevOps because there are super patterns that exist. And as I watched Serverless, I spent a lot of time having these conversations around that, yeah, we don't need that DevOps anymore because we got Serverless. It was the same reason, like we didn't need any of the infrastructure stuff because we got cloud. And like we keep throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And my presentation this morning was like, it's not about the technology, stupid. It, you know, like the principles of business value, how you understand value stream, how you inject the governance, the policy, the security, the values and the outcomes that you want. I know they sound like platitudes. Like, I get a sense that we're making the same mistake over again. I hate, sorry folks, Serverless is just another form of compute. Sorry to get you all wound up and then let you down. It's just compute folks. And so all the core principles that we've really learned about high performance organizations apply. They apply differently. Monitoring is differently. How do we deliver? But the principles stay the same. And that was my core message today. No, very, very passionate. Definitely came through in the keynote. I got to ask you, just on the tech for a second. I mean, you were heavily involved in containers. You were, you know, part of company that got acquired by Docker. You were big proponent of Unicernals. Now Serverless, how do you kind of paint that picture? I think it's an amazing tech. And more, you know, these days, so I left Docker and I'm going back to something I did 10 years ago, which is kind of consulting, but transformation type consulting. And sounds platitude-ish. But like I'm back in the mode of like looking at things at bigger scale. How do you change an organization to think differently about things? So I've kind of taken a little bit of my tech hat off. I mean, I love containers and immutable delivery, right? I've been yacking about that for like the last two or three years, right? About how immutable and literally models work. And Serverless is like amazing too. Like Unicernals was an interesting model of function as a service. I think Serverless will eat up a good portion. You know, I've said this, and I don't know, maybe I'll have to modify it. You know, I'd say four years ago, three years ago, you guys bit a big part of this discussion. The world went to, most companies would say we're a cloud-first organization. I've been saying for the last couple of years, I think most organizations should now thinking that they're a container-first organization. So that doesn't like say everything. It just means, and I think the world now should be kind of still container-first. And I know that might sound horrible to Serverless people, but then look at service functions as a place where it fits in the architecture, repeatability in containers. And there's actually kind of a... Is that just from a maturity standpoint? Container's a little bit more mature than Serverless? I don't know. I think there are models of architecture, right? And I don't know that. I mean, I know there's a lot of successful startups and certain value streams in enterprises that are all Serverless. I know a couple of friends that have built complete infrastructure on Amazon Lambda. It works. I just don't know that all value stream delivery of services will go complete Serverless. I'm pretty certain that today almost all applications can run on containers. So I'm not creating a division of war. I'm just saying that I think, and I could be dead wrong on this, but I think in this future placeholder where container-first, it's going to be give me an exception of why it can't be containers left. Like it has to be cloud or it has to be bare metal. It has virtualism. And the right side is about mapping reusable functionality in function. So I think you have, like a container-first world assumes that smart architecture mandates repeatable functions in a function-like world. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. So, you know, I think back in my career, and there's so many times we've said like, oh, we've got this new way to really simplify the environment and get rid of things you don't need to worry about. You know, I lived through the whole virtualization. Oh wait, networking storage took us a decade to fix that. Containers, oh, we're going to just focus on the application. Oh wait, networking really important. You worked on a whole company, you know, focus specifically on that. DevOps and network, yeah. Serverless, the question is, you know, what's the role of operations when it comes to serverless? Again, that's my thoughts on serverless and today's right. Like that's secondary to my real passion right now, which is like when I hear the word no ops for serverless, I cringe. Like this idea that you don't, I mean, it's different. Do you need observability and telemetry in a serverless world? I ask you, of course you do. Do you need to have repeatable patterns of delivery to make sure you don't have vulnerabilities in your code? Of course you do. That's ops, folks. And it's about supply chain and building repeatable, structured delivery with all the gates and the checks and the units. And none of that I believe goes away with serverless. Just like it didn't go away with cloud. Just the way it didn't go with virtualization, right? So I think we make a big mistake to think serverless means we don't need operations. Now, does it mean that our providers, we have a different relationship with our providers? We don't own the server anymore. So we can't run detrace or those kind of things in that environment, but we still own the service. So who's the site reliability engineer for the service that's running on Lambda? Or functions or serverless, right? If it ain't, if you don't have that one, like you're going to have a bad service. Yeah, what are you hearing organizationally? What's happening in companies that you're talking to? Was that a show recently? No, I think it was Kelsey Hightower. I think it was like DevOps is a given at this point. So do you see that? Where's the line, what are you seeing? The curse and the blessing of DevOps, the curse is we've never had a clear definition of it. I say we, you know, everybody, but then the blessing is we've never had a clear definition. Like it's always emerged. And the problem is, you know, I will tell you what my definition of DevOps is, it has really very little to do with technology. It has to do with human capital and how you create high-performing organizations and the principles and practices that lead to that. The DevOps handbook, if you will, is a lot about the, that I co-authored with Gene and Patrick and Jess. Those things, that's my definition of DevOps. But the problem is, when you hear people have discussion about DevOps, in lieu of a good definition, you can't really get upset when somebody thinks DevOps is like Jenkins and Chef or Puppet and Ansible, and like, oh no, you're wrong, right? Like that's their, like view. So the problem that you run into then is, if your definition is that it's pure technology and it's tied to kind of cloud and like something like infrastructure as code, then like in your world and your definition, serverless is going to make all that absolute, or a good portion absolute. But if your definition is more about how you create patterns and practices around humans who deliver services a certain way, then nothing about serverless, absolute, makes that any of that absolute. All right, John, want to give you the final word. You know, what do you think people that, you know, just hearing about serverless the first time, where do they start? What kind of things should they look at? Or, you know, there's other things you think they should probably look at first. I, you know, I think you're asking the wrong guy for that really. I think there's far better people that you've interviewed to give that. I mean, I would go with Peter's book, the founder of this conference. That was a book I read. He gave me a copy. It made sense to me. I was able to do some labs. And then, you know, as they say, the rest, Bob's your uncle. You know, there's a ton of stuff out there to figure out how to navigate. Yeah, anything, any comments you'd make on the community for here? I've had a couple of people just, you know, it's new but very vibrant. Reminds me a lot of the emerging tech, you know, where, you know, a lot of help from the community. It's pretty easy to get started. I was, so yes, on the technology, yes. A lot of vendors, a lot of good stuff, great conversations. And I was actually pleasantly surprised there was less discussion about no ops or you don't need operations. And I got like kind of a little bit of a cheer when I mentioned that this morning that, like, so it seems like there are some good lessons learned that, like, I think that, I think the message, a lot of clear is that operations still exist. It just has to be thought about. The keynote yesterday, the gentleman in the keynote yesterday said, day one, closing keynote, said, service things are different, in some case, easier, but harder and other things. And that was true of cloud. Cloud was much easier from, like, getting infrastructure, but we ran it a whole lot of operational issues around how to match this cloud at scale. Also, serverless is easy to create a function, get it set up, cost effective, but we're starting to learn all of the complex operational issues of, you know, MTTR, how do you restore stuff? How do you, what does SRE look like? I mean, again, this is why we get paid a big bucks there, man. All right, John Willis, always a pleasure to catch up with you. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you so much for watching theCUBE.