 Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage day two here in Vancouver. Beautiful Vancouver, the weather's great, theCUBE is here at Open Source Summit, part of the Linux Foundation. I'm John Furrier, host of Rob Stretch 8, analyzing all the action, and we have a very exciting guest here, CUBE alumni who changed his jerseys on another team, Angel Diaz, vice president of technology, David Bills at Innovation at Discover, financial services. Angel, thanks for coming on, appreciate the time, great to see you. Nice to see you both again. Looking good as usual, big smile. And what a fantastic view, I know you can't see it. No, the camera's on it right now, take a look at it, and you got the boats out there, you got the cruise ships, just the planes landing, I mean it's beautiful. We're together again here. IBM has a storied career there, Open Source, back here at Open Source, Discover, financial services. We just talked about Finn Oss before with the executive director. Kind of a vertical cloud, to me a really relevant trend where expertise in a vertical can get to kind of scale, and Linux Foundation endorsing a project that's a vertical focus, this is fascinating, I think this is going to be a thing. You guys are leading it with them in there, what's going on with Discover, take a minute to explain your new role. And what's going on at Discover, and we'll jump into the vertical. Well look, first of all, at Discover financial services, we have a card, we also have a bank, and a payments network, we should start with that. And you know, we spend our days trying to help us all achieve a brighter and brighter financial future. That sounds fantastic, but how do you do that? Well there's a lot of technology involved, and that's about becoming digital. So the time that I spend is I lead the engineering teams around our technology, our innovation teams, and it's about improving our processes, so how we actually build software, our people, helping our people level up, and of course the technology that supports all of that. And what is amazing, because you kind of hinted at this in this intro, is that this horizontal vertical thing is kind of blending, right? This concept of end user versus builder, it's all kind of the same, right? And it's a cyclic, and many of the open source principles that we've done over the years, we apply internally in how we do business at Discover. It's super valuable. Your role here in open source is really notable. Love that end user, they call it an end user, but you're a customer, and also a contributor back in, so really fascinating model. I love that vertical focus, and we've been saying on theCUBE, I think we might've talked about it way back in the day, but the best thing about the cloud is it's horizontally scalable. But when you talk about vertical specialization, that's where AI comes in, you start looking at the data. Data that's unique to say the application or the audience or whatever, that's kind of in the vertical. You got the scale, so it got this new horizontal, huge cloud next-gen happening, and then vertical specialization at scale. How do you look at that as a leader, and as you go into an organization, you got to be fast, you got to be agile, so all DevOps kicks in. What's the North Star for you when you lead that organization? Well look, so I'm going to start from the top, right? And so, although I would love to start from the top, but let's start from the top because it is about connecting the day in the life of our customer. So the customer journey, how do you empathize? How do you understand, as you've heard of techniques like design thinking, doing empathy maps, that kind of stuff, but when you truly are able to iteratively quickly understand the customer, you can then line up our product teams to those journeys. People talk about the journey, you know the transition from feature factories to proxen tricy. Well, we've done that like most folks, but then once you've lined up the customer journey to the product teams, then you get into the technology, our platforms. And we are way knee deep into our platform centric journey. So yes, looking at our applications, building microservices, et cetera, so we can have teams that are aligned to actual services so they can kind of build independently, plug in and out, et cetera. But when you have that thread, right, going from the customer journey through a six to eight person team, through a particular microservice that they're implementing on the cloud, then you can move quickly and then take advantage of that vertical scalability, the stuff that we do specifically for our customers. I love that. That reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote, where he's like, don't worry about the technology, look at the customer, and then figure out what technology will work, and that is exactly what's here. And that's state of the art right now, that's, people want that. And the teams want that too, because product market fit kicks in too. From the engineers like to see that, the product managers see it. Yeah, and I think it's interesting that, you don't hear that a lot around here, right, at the open source summit. There's not a lot of, you know what I mean, other than the people in the corner with their working backwards from the customer that used to be there, so I know all those principles, but when you start to look at it, how are you bringing the, how is yourself and your teams bringing that? I saw your keynote, and definitely it was very team-oriented keynote. Right, right. But how do you bring the customer to that, to the platform, and to open source in general? Yeah, so let me give you a small use case, and then I'll kind of try to unpack kind of our approach, which by the way is an open source approach to doing exactly that. So, say you're an engineer, right, and you're out and you're doing some performance tuning, and you want to get the response time of clicking a button under a second. You would love that engineer, that team, to understand that if they do that, we can actually increase our ability to do kind of refer a friend by 10%, a real business impact, and a real impact to the customer, because they get benefit from that as well, right? So that thread, how do you go from response time on a server somewhere to an actual customer, customer impacting type of thing? Well, the way you do that is through aligning your processes and being really deliberate on what you're trying to do. So we took an inner open source approach to how we define how we work, by discover, for discover. So a community, a plus one, guilds, we have the Discover Technology Academy, that's where we host all of our knowledge, our blogs, articles, videos, tutorials, those things come together through an inner open source process where we define our business processes, our technology processes, we implement them, we define how we work within the teams, right? Whether it's application, engineering, infrastructure, security, et cetera. That's kind of how we did it. So it's the concepts of not just code, you know, the open source principle of code, but that of contribution and community. And that's how, now, when you do it that way, it's a lot more fun than being told what to do and how to do it, right? There's different ways, right? You can go from the top and say, this is how you're going to work. Everyone lines up or not line up, right? Yeah, exactly, and then you never make progress, or we can say, hey, let's do it together, right? Let's figure out how we want to work and then iteratively and continuously improve. That's called the Discover Tech Academy? Yes, the Discover Technology Academy, and that's kind of our watering hole, our mechanism. We've got over 10,000 engineers, product owners, those are business folks in this academy, contributing content every day, learning, et cetera. And it's not just a place to throw the ideas in and agree on the ideas. It's also a place where we teach, we actually teach. So we have the concept of a dojo. I mean, that's not a old term, everybody knows that, but we have a dojo team that goes in pairs and helps the teams get better at what they do, whether it's refining a backlog or doing performance tuning, going back to that example. Now, we recently actually took that and externalized it. So we did an announcement a couple months ago, the technology.discovered.com, because it's great to learn and share and as an individual get better by succeeding together, working together, but it's even more fun when you do it on the outside. And that's when we joined FinNOS. That's why we're here at the Open Source Summit. It's externalizing and being much more deliberate and focused on how we're partnering. The FinNOS, we were talking about with Gabriel, who's executive director, how banking and financial services, it's a system. And we talked about the Silicon Valley Bank was a node and it failed and it impacts everything around it. So there's a need for connectedness in the community, which is kind of like an operating system, when you think about it. So like in that FinNOS, I'm very bullish on that direction. I think this idea of an open source financial services, open tech environment is a winning hand. It's early, but having that foundation, what's your view? Because you guys are participating. What's the vision there? What's the connective tissue between discover your work? I'll say open sources, it's a connection. But where do you guys see that linkage connecting? Where's that transfer of IP and community? So I think there's two dimensions. First of all, all tech companies, financial services is no different, use 67% of their software is open source based. Like whether it's package, you get it from something, but literally the world is used, so that question's over, right? So we're like any other company we're using open source. And to your point around end users, when you have an ability to get together as a community of practice, right? You use the technology a specific way, right? There's specific workload types, specific way. When you have the ability to really talk about those use cases, those patterns, et cetera of how you use it and then bring that back into anywhere in your stack. So cloud native computing foundation, wherever your technology, then that technology can be built to serve you better and ultimately your customer's better, right? So I think the primary kind of usage of, benefit of, of our involvement in FinNOS is around that, is around being really explicit on how we're using it and how we can help evolve. You talked about the time I spent in open source, right? I got a couple gray hairs, right? Still early back to the days of standards. I actually participated in a lot of the original web standards with Tim Berners-Lee. The design point for HTML, when I was working on HTML or CSS or DOM, was the dissemination of math and science information. That's great, I was passionate about that, right? But guess what? That's not quite how it was used in the end, right? So use cases can really, really influence the design of systems, of standards, of software, et cetera. So I think that is a fundamental. We had fidelity investments on earlier in the show yesterday and they talked about apps and platform engineering. Yes. So it's the hottest thing, we've been talking about platform engineering for a while now, but it's going mainstream, now more in open source. I kind of equated to the non-old definition, which was like SRE, Google SRE kind of moral. It's evolved now into being more like IT, like a platform, sit guard, rail, support people. How do you view, look at that whole platform dev ops extension, platform engineering as a discipline? Because apps have platform features and dependencies. So we were riffing on this idea of you can't have too many platforms. You can have a lot of apps. Yes. What's your vision, your view on platform engineering as a thing? It is such a, it's, well, you know, when I think of the pillars of our digital transformation, there's three pillars, right? How we look at the customers or talk about techniques like design thinking, how teams or the app teams are organized, right? And then the third is platform centricity. And I've learned, you know, I've been on that journey for a while and I can tell you a pattern that does not work, which is design it and build it. In other words, thinking, you know, thinking that you really understand what are the platforms you need up front, you're always going to get it wrong, right? So I find that an opportunistic approach, as you are building applications, looking at areas of reuse and having that discussion in your processes and say, hey, guess what? I'm building a component to do consent. I consent to these legal terms. Hmm, maybe 20 of our other products do that too and it needs to be auditable and stored, et cetera. That's a great example of a shared component or a shared platform component that we can use across. So that's kind of the approach that we've taken. We've been building out our, now there's some core things, obviously, that you have that every organization has, developer services, application services, security. Yes, we have those. But as you start moving up the mazal hierarchy of platform, you know, beyond the obvious, you know, authentication to more, you know, application semantic type of pieces, then we take an opportunistic approach to build out our platform, even at the business service level, like money movement or something like that. That's a very DevOps approach. I mean, if you do it three times, automated kind of philosophy. So you're saying more of, don't design the Immaculate Conception. Exactly. And then get use cases out there, apps that serve your customers. You're in a market where you have direct correlation to the app's benefit, to money and customers that's actually out there using the app. It's critical to your business. It's interesting. There's a lot of dogma in platforms, too, that you're in, Rob. Yeah, and I think that's what I was going to go into, is that you talked about kind of your three different pillars that you have inside Discover. How does it work? Because there's definitely different regulatory and different control mechanisms they have to have in place. And sometimes almost like firewalls in between the different organizations. So how does that work with the fact that you are trying to have that platform and how do you get that reuse? Yeah, yeah. Well, so first of all, the pillars that I talked about aren't organizational. They're more constructs that we share across organizations. So we've got a card area, a bank area, and a payments area. We're all one team. These pillars of how we define the customer journey, how we define our product teams, that is common across. And in fact, and what's great about that is that when you have common ways of working, our engineers can grow faster. They can build their craft, right? You can say, hey, you know what? I spent some time in payments. I want to go do the card. I want to move to card and learn something new. And they don't have to like those skills. They don't have to relearn something different, right? So they can progress their career faster, which is fantastic. But let's talk about the regulation stuff. Yeah. You know, clearly there is, it is super important, right? That we build software in a way that complies to whatever regulations they are, but more importantly, that is robust, traceable, et cetera. So as part of having that discipline, you can build in the discipline of those policies into software and automation, right? And that's what we do. So it's not any more difficult than any other environments, just having that rigor in place that you can always go back and check and make sure you're doing the right thing. One of the things I want to ask you is, we ask all the guests, the main question of this event for us at theCUBE is, the velocity of change and momentum since February in AI has been phenomenal. And I've read more academic papers. They're coming out, great contents coming out from engineers on AI, open AI, spawned a revolution. There's some leaked stuff that's come out of Meta and some other great machine learning. The time has come for the AI revolution. Everything's lining up, the compute, the storage, the infrastructure, machine learning, the large language models. AI is going to shake, we don't think it's going to crumble open source because it's going to rock the world for sure in a positive way, but also potentially there's some things to watch and monitor, code pollution, misinformation, all that stuff's going to happen. AI is a good thing. It's going to change. What's your view on AI as you look at opportunities? I mean, I'm sure you've brought detection to customer satisfaction. How do you look at the AI wave that's coming into open source and what should people be prepared for? Yeah, you know, it's, you know, AI is an AI techniques to something that I've been working on in my entire career. Like, you know, we talked about my time at IBM. I used to have the speech group, right? So, and back then, we didn't have the same compute power we had now. So, you had a lot of if then else statements in your code, right? So, we've come a long way with models, but when you look at AI, applied in technology, I'll go to the Maslow hierarchy of needs kind of thing, right? You know, there's just obvious things that you can use, right, whether it's fraud, creating great models, to better serve the customer, know your customer, all those type of things. We're using those techniques and we're evolving them and doing great research in the communities, right? To improve our way of doing that. I'm really excited about AI in the app dev world, right? AI in pipelines, you know, AI in code consumption, right? Those type of things. That ability of being able to do your job smarter, faster, better together is very, very exciting because just like open source, it's a democratization of knowledge, right? So, to the degree that you can kind of build on the shoulders, you know, the right shoulders of the right giants, you can do things faster, better, better, better. AI scales intellect. That's right. It gets your ideas. Yes. It takes the human potential. Right, yeah. So, that's exciting. So, that's kind of where we're looking at it, right? We're trying to embed it in the right places and improve ultimately the lives of our customers. Well, it's been great to see you and at the time it couldn't have been better. We were looking out on the ocean there and a container ship is here. So, I have to ask you about containers and Kubernetes as you look at cloud native, how active are you on the cloud native side? What's there, quick commercial for what you guys got going on in cloud native? Oh, absolutely. Well, first of all, the next cloud native computing foundation summit is in Chicago, and that's our house. Discover headquarters. Home territory. So, we're good. Home field advantage. Top sponsor there. We're going to be there in fours. A lot of orange. I can't wait. You know, I actually helped kick off the cloud native computing foundation with Jim Zemlin and Craig and Google. So, I have a soft spot for that. We use Kubernetes and containers all over the place. In fact, for most of what's called our non-mainframe type workloads, we're pretty much microservice based everywhere. Now, that doesn't mean that there's an areas for improvement, right? Because containerizing a monolith, I don't know if that's really containers, right? So, like most organizations- It's a container already. It's a monolith container. It's a big one. It's a big container. It's a big container, like that shit about shit, right? So, like my- We're actually on camera right now. There's the container ship going through- As it's going by. With the camera. Love these remote cameras. They're awesome. So, although I would say we're pretty mature in that aspect of our platforms, like most organizations, going through platform centricity discussions, we are untangling and parsing out what exactly are the microservices that we want to build, right? And then, more importantly, or equally important, how do they align to the team? So, you have the autonomous, independent team, autonomous, independent, you know, my- And then, how does that map to the other pillar, right? Which is the customer journey, and what they're trying to do. And that's where we're at in our journey. Well, great call out on the KubeCon early days. We were there, present creation as well. That's right. That's right. Because we all moved from the open stack, as that moved over. We saw that playing out so far has come. It's been such great to see that industry just really kind of grow and great work. Angel, great to see you again. And you've been a real leader, pioneer, leader and pioneer. It's hard to do. You could be a pioneer and not think arrows on the back. Oh, you got a few. We all got a few. But I mean, you've been there. Thanks for being part of the Kube. Thank you. And we really appreciate you coming on the Kube and being part of our community and you're a great spokesperson as well. Thank you. You guys do an awesome work. I'm proud to be here. Thank you. Thanks for all your support. Okay, Kube coverage here. As the container ships are going by here, the moment of DevOps infrastructure's code happening in the water. It's an unbelievable time. Kube, day two coverage. We'll be right back after this short break.