 Live from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.next 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are joined by Gene Kim. He is an author, researcher, entrepreneur, and founder of IT Revolution. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE, Gene. Oh, thanks so much, Rebecca, and always great seeing you and John. So, you are a prolific author. You've written many books, including The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, you have a new one coming out, but this is the latest one we have here, The DevOps Handbook. Yeah, that was 2016, and we came up with another book called Accelerate, based on the State of DevOps Report, and yeah, it's been a fun ride, just what a great space to be writing about. DevOps has been obviously covered going back years. Now it's mainstream, and you're starting to see the impact of people who have taken a DevOps mentality, put products into place. We see all the web scalers from Facebook, you name them, but now the enterprise is now really looking at agility. So, Nair, you've been working a lot on, you host the DevOps Enterprise Summit. What's that bid like? I mean, it seems to be taking it longer than some of the hardcore cloud guys. So, what's the State of the Union, if you will, for the enterprise from a DevOps standpoint? Yeah, what a great question. I mean, I think there's no doubt that the DevOps principles and practices were pioneered in the tech giants, the Facebooks, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, but I've long believed with a certain level of certainty that as much economic value as they've created, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The real value will be created when the largest, most complex organization on the planet adopt the same principles and patterns, and when you have, I think IDC said there's 18 million developers on the planet, of which at maximum a half million are at the tech giants. The rest are in the largest brands across every industry vertical, and if we can get those 17 and a half million developers as productive as if they were at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, I mean, that generates trillions of dollars of economic value per year, and with that much economic value being created, I mean, that will have, you know, undoubtedly incredible societal improvement outcomes as well. So, it's been such a treat to help chronicle that journey. One of the things I want to ask Eugene is that those are impressive numbers, but also you factor in net new developers, younger generation, re-skilled workers. I used to be a network guy, now I'm a developer. You're seeing developers really at the infrastructure level now, especially like this, where Nutanix was a hardware company, they're now a software company. So they are at the heart of DevOps in terms of their target audience, they're implementing this stuff. So this is a refreshing change. So I got to ask you, when you walk into an enterprise, what is the current temperature of our IQ of DevOps? Are there a percentage that's, you know, there, some are learning? Take us through kind of the progress. Yeah, if I were to guess, right? This is as much as I love statistics and, you know, comprehensive benchmarking. Yeah, I think we're 3% of the way there, right? 3%. Yeah, I just, you know, we're in the earliest stages of it, which means the best is yet to come. I think DevOps is an aspiration for many. And, you know, but having to change the, you know, I think DevOps is often a group rebelling against an ancient powerful order, right? You know, forces far beyond their control, conservative groups, you know, protecting their territory. I think that's kind of the, that probably the typical situation. And so, you know, we're a long way away from DevOps being the dominant orthodoxy. So, if that's the case, just probably some people who have adopted it had success, we're seeing in these new innovative shifts, the early adopters have massive value extraction from that. So, and that's an advantage, competitive advantage. Can you give us some examples of people who did that, took the rebellion, went to DevOps, were successful and then doubled down on it? Yeah, I think the ones that come to mind immediately are like Capital One. You know, they went from 80% outsourcing to now almost 100% insourced. Same with Target, where they really started off as a bottom-up movement and then gained the support of the highest levels of leadership. And it has been so exciting to see these stories not just told by, you know, technology leaders, but increasingly shared and being told by both the technology leader and the business counterpart. Where the business leader is saying, I am wholly reliant upon my technology peer to achieve all the goals, dreams and aspirations of our organization. And that's, you know, what a treat to be able to see that kind of recognition and appreciation. It's an operational shift too. They have to buy into changing how they operate as a company. Yes. And IT, believe me, they're like clutching on to the old ways. And that's just the way it is, enterprise. It was a wonderful phrase from the Nutanix CEO that I loved is that we often characterize the developers as the builders. But, you know, operations infrastructure, they are builders too. In fact, you know, developers cannot be productive if they are mired in infrastructure, right? And so, you know, you get peak productivity, focus, flow and joy when you don't have to deal with concerns outside of the business feature and the business problem you want to solve. And I know that from a personal experience where the frustration you have when you just want to do one thing and you've just carved out, you know, eight or 10 things that you just can't do because, or you have to puzzle, these are puzzles that you have to solve. I'd love to get your reaction to some of the trends that I'm seeing because DevOps has been such an important movement, at least from my standpoint, because people can get lost in what the word means. At the end of the day, programmability, making infrastructure as code, which was the original ethos, making the infrastructure programmable and invisible, which is one of the themes of Nutanix, was the dream. That kind of is the objective, right? I mean, to make it programmable, so you don't have to stand up all these services and prep and provision, hard infrastructure stuff. Yeah, in November, the Unicorn project is coming out, so that's a follow-on to the Phoenix project. And what I'm really trying to do is capture how great it feels when you can be productive and all of infrastructure is taken care of for you, buy your friends and infrastructure, right? It allows you to have your best energy focusing on solving the business problem, not on how to connect A to B, which needs to be connected to C in the YAML files and configuring all these things that you don't really care about, but you're forced to, right? And I think that allows a level of productivity and joy, but also it's the ideal working relationship between development and infrastructure where developers are constantly thanking their infrastructure peers for making their life easy. We were joking, Rebecca and I were joking about how we use Siri. Hey, Siri, what's the weather at Bello Alto? This should be an app for the enterprise that says, hey, Cube or whatever, Nutanix or whatever, give me some more storage. Why isn't it happening? But that's kind of a joke, but it's kind of a goal. Oh, and increasingly, right? That's just available on demand, right? And you certainly don't have to open up 30 tickets these days like what was so typical 10 years ago. That's a modern miracle. My question for you is why books? I mean, so here we have, we're in this very fast changing technological environment and landscape. And as you said, the DevOps is still relatively new. There's, it's not, it's a 3% really who understand it. Why use a bunch of dead trees to get your message across? I like writing. In fact, I'm in an ideal month. I mean, I get to spend half the time writing and half the time hanging out with the best in the game, studying the greatest in the field. And I think even in this day and age, there's still no more effective and viral mechanism to spread ideas in books. You know, when people, someone says, hey, I love the Phoenix project. I loved reading it. It says a couple of things, right? They probably spent eight hours reading it. And, you know, that's a serious commitment. And so I think imagine how many impression minutes, you know, it takes to purchase eight minutes, eight hours of someone's time. And so for things like this, I really do think that, you know, the written form is still one of the most effective ways to communicate ideas. You get the dream job. You're writing and hanging out with the best people. What did you, what have you learned from these people? Oh my goodness. You could write a book. Yeah. For 20 years, I self-identified as an operations person. Even though I was formally trained as a developer, I got my graduate degree in compiler design in 1995. And so for 20 years, I just loved operations because that's where the action was. That's where the saves happened. But something changed. About four years ago, I learned a programming language called Closure. It's a functional programming language. It's a list. So very alien to me. The hardest thing I've ever learned. I mean, I must have read and watched 80 hours of videos before I wrote one line of code, but it has been the most rewarding thing. And it's actually brought the joy of development and coding back into my daily life. So I guess I should amend my answer. I would say it's half the time writing, half the time hanging out with the best in the game and 20% coding just because I love to solve problems, right? My own problems. So I would thank the people I've been able to hang out with and had the privilege to watch because if it weren't for that, I think I would have been happy just saying that coding was a thing of the past, right? So for that, I'm so grateful. How do you use what you learn about in terms of your writing and in your coding and vice versa? I mean, so how are they different and how are they the same? Oh, that's a great question. You know, I think what's really nice about coding is that it's very formal. I mean, in fact, at the extreme, it's all mathematics, right? Books are just a pile of words that may or may not have order and structure. And so in the worst days, I felt like with the Unicorn Project, I wrote 150,000 words. Target word count is 100,000. And I was telling friends, I wrote 150,000 words that say nothing of significance, right? What have I done? Yeah, the best days, and I think that's because you have to impose upon it a structure and a point, right? So on the best days, it's very much like coding. Everything has a spot, right? And you know what to get rid of. So yeah, I think the fact that coding has structure, I think makes it in some ways an easier form to work with. And what brings you to Nutanix next this week? What's the story? What's the story? Oh, I had the privilege and was delighted to take part in what they call Dev Days. So they were gathering developers to learn about, to educate everyone on how to use the Nutanix capabilities through APIs. Just like you said, right? To help enable automation. And I just found that very rewarding and fulfilling, just because even though I think Nutanix as a community is known for being the innovators and the, so the rebellion, right? As productive as that technology has made them to turn into an automatable platform. Yeah, I think that's another order of magnitude gain in terms of value they can create for their organization. So that was a truth. They've transformed from an operations oriented box company years ago and now officially subscription based software, they're going all software. Yeah, right, right, right. I mean, they're flipping their model upside down too. And it was just a delight to see the developers who are attracted to that one day thing. I would recommend to anyone who's interested in development and just being on the cutting edge of what can be done with, for example, if you had cameras in every store, is there a way to automate the analysis of that to compute dwell times and, you know, cue abandonment rates? I mean, it's like a crash course in modern business practices that I thought was absolutely amazing. Well, Jean, you do great work. I've been following you for years. I know you're very humble as well. But give a plug, take a minute to explain the things you're working on. You got a great event, you run, you got the books. What are the things you got going on? Share with the audience. Oh, just those two things. Just everything is about the book right now. The Unicorn Project is coming in November. And so excerpts will be available at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London. So that's a conference for technology leaders from large complex organizations. And over the years, we've now chronicled over 250 case studies by technology leaders from almost every brand across every industry vertical. And there's been such a privilege to see, hear the stories and to see how they're being rewarded for their achievements. I mean, they're being promoted and being given more responsibility. So that is a treat beyond words. And it's a revolution. It's a shift that's definitely happening. You're in the, been doing it for years and we're documenting it. So, and you are as well. And looking forward to seeing you there. Awesome. I just have one final question. And this is about something you were saying about how Nutanix is the insurgent and the rebel, the rebel in all of this. How does it, how do you recommend it as a researcher, as an entrepreneur yourself and as someone who's really in this mindset? How do you recommend it stay feisty and scrappy and with that mentality at it especially as it grows and becomes more and more of a behemoth itself. There was some statements made about like how 10 years ago virtualization was the one key certification that was kind of guaranteed you relevance forever in the future. And yeah, I think there's some basis to say that, you know, that alone is not enough to guarantee lifetime employment. And I think the big lesson is, you know, we all have to be continual learners and every year that goes by, there are more miracles being created for us to be able to use to solve problems. And boy, if that doesn't, I think the lesson is, if we're not always focused on being a continual learner, there's great joy that comes with it and great peril if we choose to forego it. Great. Well, that's a great note to end on. Thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE, Gene. Thank you so much and now a great seeing you both. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have much more from .next just after this.