 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. Welcome back, everyone. We're live here in San Francisco. theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My coach Peter Burris, general manager of Wikibon.com research. Next guest is Damian Edwards, co-founder of RunDeck. He's been on the crowd chats with DOZ, event DevOps in the Enterprise, the content chair, co-founder of RunDeck. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Great to meet you in person. We've been online chatting away. Good to be here. Quick thought from you of Cisco getting to DevOps. The conversation is pretty straightforward. We think it's awesome that they're doing this. Yeah. Good direction. Right in line with DevOps, things looking good. Middle of the fairway, what do they do next? Yeah, I mean. Let's just go take the ball from here and take it home. I think it's just more of the same. I think that you can't underestimate the split that's happened in the DevOps have and have nots. That sounds kind of odd, but a lot of we talk about the unicorns, the high flying special built organizations that really grew up with this in the last five to 10 years. And I think where Cisco really plays is in the other 99% of commerce of the world, which is the core classic enterprises. And DevOps really hasn't made that deep of a debt yet into that, that's what we call dark IT, right? The rest of the world, that people have to deal with 30 years of in some places, different technologies, skills, acquisitions, mismatches, all the legacy, all the bureaucracy of large organizations. And Cisco has a path into that and a voice of authority into that. So happy to see they're putting such emphasis on these DevOps and agile ideas and help to drive them into that. And they got the app dynamics thing going down to the big acquisition. Their slogan is where apps meet infrastructure. We always just talk about infrastructure as code. They're talking about programmable networking, which is the same thing we want more programmable. Right. So how do they make that transition to this new operational model? I mean, networks used to be very fragile, set in stone. Someone used to joke, hey, they're called no-offs because they would say no to everything from a developer standpoint. How do they transition from no-offs to a new operational model that's agile and adding value? Well, you know, the bigger, I think, issue here is that ops is getting squeezed, right? So it's an existential crisis for them. That the reason why they're always the no folks is because they're always spending their time protecting that capacity because they're overrun while they're always outnumbered, first of all. Then they're being overrun with just all these tickets and new stuff coming in, plus incidents happening in the middle. The capacity has always been an issue. Now with this new kind of DevOps and really digital transformation inspired pressure, it's go, go, go faster, open things up. At the same time, the same business folks are saying from the other direction, lock things down, don't be the next hack, don't be the next breach, don't be the next major outage, right? You know, and so- It's really a lot of pressure. It's a pressure cooker. Right, so they're squeezed. So the biggest issue of this crisis, how do we relieve that pressure? And the key technique is to be able to actually allow other people to participate in what traditionally was only operations tasks. And if you allow me to go kind of one step- It's a democratization of operations in a way. It is, and what they're doing is they're, you see the organizations that really kind of nailed this, they're dividing up the idea of an operations procedure. It used to be everything was in operations. You defined it, you ran it, and you had all security and management out of control over it. In these new ways, what they're doing is they're bringing it up in kind of three pieces to say the ability to define these automated procedures, the ability to execute them, and the ability to have that management control and oversight, let's make those in three discrete parts, and let's move that to where the labor capacity makes the most sense. And by doing that, operations can kind of free up those bottlenecks, start to decouple more, allow the rest of the organization to move a lot quicker, and not be in that horrible position of being squeezed to death, and having to tell everybody no. But there's a number of reasons why it's happening, sorry. And one of the key ones is that, and it brings it back to the Cisco conversation, I want to ask you about this, is that it used to be that operations was tied to a particular asset, the server, more often than not. And so a single individual could pull all those things together, because a single individual had, or a single group had control over, virtually all the resources that were part of that. Now we're talking about applications that are inherently distributed, and so we can't look at the process of operations in the same way. So this comes back to Cisco. Does the world need to think more discreetly about these new, highly distributed, deeply distributed applications differently, and is that going to catalyze the diffusion of more of these high quality DevOps principles? What do you think? Yeah, it has to. I mean, if you look at the business driver, which is this digital transformation, right? It's a lot of people kind of scoff at, because it's like, wait, this is 1999, you know, you need a website? What are we talking about, right? But you realize what it is, is saying all these disparate systems you used to have, right? I could get my cable bill, but it's just a online, it's just a PDF of what they send to the printers, right? But now everything I could do when I call up the customer service agent, I want to do it through my phone, or I want to do it on my laptop. And that means all of those formerly distinct systems that lived in different windows on a customer service agent's desktop, and if the little thing to check the router status blew up, just talk fasted, right? But now it's really going to matter in this digital. So the business is driving that integration, so where things don't live in isolation anymore. And because of that, you know, that the complexity and this distributed nature of these services is rising. And when that happens, you know, that makes operations inherently more difficult and just contributes to that squeeze even more, and you got to find a way to relieve that. Great point and great analysis that just picked off what we were talking about on our intro package, the redefinition of what a full stack developer is. Now, full stack implies, you're talking about a distributed application model where there's no isolation anymore, so you could almost argue that that's going to be obsolete. It's a horizontally, a full horizontal developer. Well, logically it'll still be full stack, but how they connect will be different. Well, it just kind of brings up the notion of, okay, things were in isolation, built to the database. Now I go down to the network, and now a whole new developer category potentially is emerging. Do you feel the same way? I mean, we're speculating, we don't actually know. Sure, I mean, if you are like a Netflix who prides itself on its ability to go out, pay top of market, which means they are the top of market, and you know, attract the best talent, the only one can win that game, right? So for everybody else in the world, this idea of we're going to have these polygot, you know, super human, I know everything engineers, it's never going to happen, right? So we have to find a way to use our systems and our processes to allow that kind of integration to happen and allow those people to define the control procedures and policies for the things that they know about, and then allow that all to integrate to where then we can have other folks operate it and run it. Again, it's that idea of moving those parts around to where we can best take advantage of the labor. Otherwise, you're just, you're never going to find it. I mean, go to any conference and ask the developer, DevOps conference and ask people, you know, how many LinkedIn spam, you know, messages you get a day because the word DevOps is in your profile and never just laughs because it's dozens, right? So you're never going to have that idea. So you have to build the systems to recreate that full stack capability. And have people have access to be one rather than that super human. It becomes democratized at that level. So it's interesting. So one of the things that you guys did at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, I know you were in the content chair, but I made a note here for my, make sure I get this question to you was, I like this thing you guys touched upon. Is DevOps best left to grow organically or is there a growing need slash desire for an agile manifesto? Yeah. The top down and do the manifesto or organic thoughts? Yeah, I'd say no, because I mean, what DevOps is, is a series of kind of problem statements, an umbrella over a bunch of problem statements and a bunch of solutions that keeps evolving. This is why the does conferences are so interesting because it's practitioners talking about what's worked for them. And I feel like, at the highest level, if you really need to have a definition, go ahead and read the Phoenix project or the DevOps handbook. It's done a great job of collating all that. But at the end of the day, it's not one thing. It's not a single practice, right? It's not a single thing. There's no single thing you can do to say I'm going to transform a major, global financial services company into a fast nimble operation. There is no one thing. It's a series of things you have to try over and over again. So look at DevOps as a movement and where you can learn from practitioners, apply it to your own organization, see what happens, report back, try some new stuff, and so on and so forth. So you can kind of basically have a manifesto but it's really just more of marching orders. Organically has to form on its own. That's basically what you're saying. I think there already is. I mean, you can say, hey, hand we have a manifesto but it's not like, this is the playbook. I mean, you can get the handbook to learn. Okay, cool. Well, appreciate the insight. Let's talk about your business. What do you guys do? What are some of the things that Rundec's doing that you're the co-founder of? Share a little bit about the company. Yeah, Rundec is at the kind of, what is it? It's an orchestration and scheduling platform that's used by operations organizations generally from high large startups but also a large kind of DevOps unicorns but also a lot of large enterprises. And what they're using it for is for defining and improving their operations procedures. What happens after deployment? Where do we define all of the procedures to manage all these disparate systems? All those islands of automation, right? We used to, you know, Chef and Puppet was the hottest thing around three years ago and now it's like, oh, now it's Docker and Kubernetes and everything else and now we still have our old PowerShell stuff our blade logic stuff over there, right, some Opsware stuff over there. So what are we going to do? We need a way to define the procedures that span all of those and allow people to participate in that operations world so they can relieve that crunch. So we see it a lot for automating the creating standard operating procedures kind of like, you know, classic run book automation with the next generation twist, we'll say. But we also see a lot of self-service operations meaning that let's let other people participate. Let's let developers define these procedures as run deck jobs and then let operations vet them. That's where you talk about the operational being relieved a bit. Yeah, you have to. You can't just say there's one little group here that's going to, you know, deploy and run all of these things in this world. We have to let other people participate in that not just for deployment, which is big in the DevOps world, but for what happens after deployment that nobody wants to talk about. All the escalations, all the interruptions, all the, you know, those problems, you know, run deck really plays in that area helping people to get that under control. David, thanks so much for sharing your insight. Congratulations on your startup and great to meet you in person. Yeah. We've had great chats on our crowd chat. You guys have been awesome with Gene Kim and the community that you're involved with, DevOps for the Enterprise Summit. Practitioners sharing. That's a great ethos. It really aligns with what's going on in the industry, so congratulations. More CUBE coverage here. Exclusive of Cisco's inaugural event called DevNet Create an extension of their DevNet core classic network and developer systems at Cisco. This is an open source one. This is out in the community, not all Cisco, all part of the community. And of course we're bringing it to you with live coverage. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Stay with us. Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the senior director.