 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, presenting, Cube on Cloud, brought to you by SiliconANGLE. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome back to theCUBE on Cloud. We're talking about developers. And while so many people remember the meme from 2010, if Steve Ballmer jumping around on stage, developers, developers and developers, many people know what really important is really important about developers. They probably read the 2013 book called The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady. And I'm really happy to welcome to the program Rachel Stevens, who's an industry analyst with Red Monk, who was co-founded by the aforementioned, Stephen O'Grady. Rachel, great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Well, I've had the opportunity to read some of what you've done. We've interacted on social media. We've gotten to talk at events back when we used to do those in people. In person, I'm so glad that you get to come on the program, especially you were the ones I reached out when we had this developer track. If you could just give our audience a little bit about your background, that developer cred that you have, because as I joke, I've got a closet full of hoodies, but I'm an infrastructure guy by training. I've been learning about containers and serverless and all this stuff for years, but I'm not myself much a developer. I've touched a thing or two in the years. Yeah, so happy to be here. Red Monk has been around since 2002 and have been beating that developer drum ever since then, kind of as the company, the founder, Stephen James, noticed that the decision making that developers was really a driver for what was actually ending up in the enterprise. And as even more true as cloud came onto the scene, as open source exploded, and I think it's become a lot more of a common view now, but in those early days, it was probably a little bit more of a controversial opinion. But I have been with the firm for coming up on five years now. My work is an industry analyst. We kind of help people understand bottoms up technology adoption trends. So that's where I spend my time focusing is what's getting used in the enterprise, why kind of trends are happening. And so yeah, that's where we all come from. That's the history of Red Monk in 30 seconds. Awesome. Rachel, you talk about the enterprise in developers. For the longest time, I just said there was this huge gap. You talk about bottoms up. It's like, well, developers use the tools that they want. If they don't have to, they don't pay for anything. And the general IT and the business sides of the house were like, we don't know what those people in the corner are doing. It's important and things like that. But today it feels like that's closed a bunch. Where are we in your estimation? Are developers, do they have a clear seat at the table? The title we had for this is wither the enterprise developer. Is enterprise developer an option moron in 2020 and 2021? I think enterprise developers have a lot more practical authority than people give them credit for. Especially if you're kind of looking at that old view of the world where everything is driven by a buyer decision or kind of this top-down purchasing motion. And we've really seen that authority of what is getting used and why change a lot in the last decade even more of people who are able to choose the tools that meet the job and bring in tools regardless of whether they maybe have that official approval through the right channels because of the convenience of trying to get things up and running. We are asking developers to do so much right now and to go faster and to shifting things left. And so the things that they are responsible for incorporating into the way they are building apps is growing. And so as we are asking developers to do more and to do more quickly, the tools that they need to do those tasks to get these apps built is the decision making has fallen to them. This is what I need. This is what needs to come in. And so we are seeing basically the tools that enterprise is are using are the tools that developers want to be using and they kind of just find their way into the enterprise. Now I want to key off what you were talking about. Just developers are being asked to do more and more. We see these pendulum swings in technology. There was a time where it was like, well, I'll outsource it because that'll be easier and maybe it'll be less expensive and number one, we found it wasn't necessarily cheaper. Number two, I couldn't make changes and I didn't understand what was happening. So when I talk to enterprises today, absolutely I need to have skill sets internally. I need to be able to respond to things fast and therefore I need skills and I need people that can build what they have. What do you see? What are those skill sets that are so important today? You know, we've talked so many times over the years as to, you know, there's the skills gap. We don't have enough data scientists. We don't have enough developers. We don't have any of these things. So what do we have and where are things trending? Yeah, it's one of those things for developers where they both have probably the most full toolset that we've seen in this industry in terms of things that are available to them. But it's also really hard because it also indicates that there's just this fragmentation at every level of the stack and there's this explosion of choice and decisions that is happening up and down the stack of how are we going to build things? And so it's really tricky to be a developer these days in that you are making a lot of decisions and you are wiring a lot of things together and you have to be able to navigate a lot of things. And I think one of the things that is interesting here is that we have seen the phrase like full stack developer really carried a lot of panache maybe earlier this decade and has kind of fallen away just because we've realized that it's impossible for anybody to be able to span this whole broad spectrum of all of the things we are asking people to do. So we're seeing this explosion of choice which is meaning that there is a little bit more focus in where developers are trying to actually figure out what is my niche? What is it that I'm supposed to focus on? And so it's really just this balancing of active trying to see this big picture of how to get this all put together and also have this focused area realizing that you have to specialize at some point. Rachel, it's such a great point there. We've actually seen that Cambrian explosion of developer tools that are out there. If you go to the CNCF landscape and look at everything out there or go to any of your public cloud providers, there's no way that anybody even working for those companies know a good portion of the tools that are out there. So nobody can be a master of everything. How about from a cloud standpoint, there's the discussion of what do I shift left? What's, can I just say, oh, okay, this piece of it, it can be a managed service. I don't need to think about it versus what skills that I need to have in-house. What is it that's important? And obviously, as analysts, we know it varies greatly across companies. But what are some of those top things that we need to make sure that enterprises have skill set and the tools in-house that they should understand and what can they push off to their platform of choice? Yeah, I think your comment about managed services is really pressing it because one of the trends that we are watching closely is just this rise of managed services. And it kind of ties back into the concept you had before about like, what in IT medicine, you have like the Nicholas Carr IT doesn't matter and we're pushing this all the way. And then we realized, oh, we got to bring that all back. But we also realized that we really want, as enterprises, want to be spending our time doing differentiated work and wiring together your entire infrastructure isn't necessarily differentiated for a lot of companies. And so it's trying to find this mix of where can I push my abstraction higher or to find a managed service that can do something for me? And we're seeing that happen in all levels of the stack. And so what we're seeing is this rise of composite apps where we're gonna say, okay, I'm gonna pull in backend APIs from a whole bunch of tools like Twilio or Stripe or Al Zero or Algolia. All of those things are great tools that I can incorporate into my app and I can have this great user interface that I can use. And then I don't have to worry quite so much about building it all myself, but I am responsible for wiring it all together. So I think it's that wire together set of interests that is happening for developers as the tool set that they are spending a lot of time with. So we see the managed services being important, played an important role in how apps are composed and it's the composition of that apps that is happening internally. You know, one of the regular research items that I see out of Red Monk is, you know, what language is, you know, where are the trends going? There's been some relative stability, but then some things change. You know, I look at the tool set, you mentioned full stack developer. I talked to a full stack developer a couple of years ago and he's like, like, oh, like Terraform is my life and I love everything and I've used it forever. And that was 18 months. And I kind of laugh because it's like, okay, I manage, I measure a lot of the technologies that I use in the decades, not that, oh wait, this came out six months ago and it's kind of mature. And of course, you know, CICD, come on, if it's six weeks old, it's probably gone through a lot of iterations. So what do you see, do you have any research that you can share as to looking forward? What are the, you know, what are the skill sets we need? How should we be training our force? What do we need to be looking at in this kind of next decade of cloud? Yeah, so when you spoke about languages, we do a semi-annual review of language usage as seen on GitHub and discussion as seen on Stack Overflow, which we fully recognize is not a perfect representation of how these languages are used in the broader world, but those are data sets that we have access to that are relatively large and open. So just before anyone writes me angry letters, said that's not the way that we should be doing it. But one of the things that we've seen over time is that there is a lot of relative stability in those top tier languages in terms of how they are used. And there's some movement at the bottom, but the trends we're seeing where the languages are moving is type safety and having a safer language and the communities that are building upon other communities. So things like we're seeing Kotlin that is able to kind of piggyback off of being a JVM based language and having that support from Google or we're seeing TypeScript where it can piggyback off of the breadth of deployment of JavaScript, things like that. So those things where we're combining together multiple trends that developers are interested in the same time combined with an ecosystem that's already rich and full. And so we're seeing that there's definitely still movement in languages that people are interested in, but also language on its own is probably pretty stable. So like as you start to make language choices as a developer, that's not where we're seeing a ton of like turnover language frameworks on the other hand. Like if you're a JavaScript developer and all of a sudden there's just explosion of frameworks that you need to choose from. That's maybe a different story, a lot more turnover there and harder to predict but language trends are a little bit more stable over time. Changing over time, you know, boy, I got to dig into, you know, relatively recently I went down like the gem stack ecosystem. I've been digging into serverless for a number of years. What's your take on that? There's certain people I talk to and they're like, I don't even need to be a coder. I can be a marketing person and I can get things done. When I talk to some developers, they're like, ah, citizen developers, they're not developers. Come on, you know, I really need to be able to do this. So I'll give you your choices to, you know, serverless and some of these trends to kind of expand, you know, who can, you know, code and develop. Yeah, so for both trends like gem stack and serverless, one of the things that we see kind of early in the iteration of a technology is that it is definitely not going to be the right tool for every app. And the number of apps that the approach will fit for will grow as the tool develops and you add more functionality over time and all of these platforms expand the capability. But definitely not the correct tool choice in every case. That said, we do watch both of those areas with extreme interest in terms of what this next generation of apps can look like and probably will look like in a lot of cases. And I think that it is super interesting to think about who gets to build these apps because I think one of the things that we probably haven't landed on the right language yet is what we should call these people because I don't think anyone associates themselves as a low code person. Like if you're someone from marketing and all of a sudden you can build something technical that's really cool and you're excited about that nobody else on your team can build, you're not walking around saying, I am a low code marketing person. Like that's demeaning. You're like, no, I'm a technical marketer. Look what I just did. And if you're someone who codes professionally for a living and you use a low code tool to get something out the door quickly and you don't want to demean and say, that was, I did a low code that and it's like, everybody is just trying to solve problems and everybody is trying to figure out how to do things in the most effective way possible and making trade-offs all the time. And so I don't think that the language of low code really is anything that resonates with any of the actual users of low code tools. And so I think that's something that we as an industry need to work on finding the correct language there because it doesn't feel like we've landed there yet. Yeah, great, Rachel. What wanna get your take on just careers for developers now too? Think about in 2020, everyone has distributed lots of conversations about where do we work? Can we breathe remote? Many of the developers I talked to already were remote. I had the chance to interview the head of remote for GitLab. There were 1,000 people and they're fully remote. So remote absolutely a thing for developers but if you talk about careers, it's no longer, oh, hey, here's my CV, I'm on GitHub. You can see the code I've done. We haven't talked about open source yet. So give us your take on kind of developers today, career paths and kind of the online community there. Yeah, oh, this could be a total conversation while trying to figure out my point. So I think one of the things that we are trying to figure out in terms of balance is how much are we expecting people to have done on the side? It's like a side project hustle versus doing exclusively getting your job done and not worrying too much about how many green squares you have on your GitHub profile. And I think it's a really emotional and fraught discussion in a lot of quarters because it can be exclusionary for people saying that you need to be spending your time on the side working on this open source project because there are people who have very different life circumstances. Like if you're someone who already has kids or you're doing elder care or you are working another job and trying to transition into becoming a developer, it's a lot to ask these people to also have a side hustle. That said, it is probably working on open source, having an understanding of how tools are done, having this experience and skills that you can point to and contributions you can point to is probably one of the cleaner ways that you can start to move in the industry and break through to the industry because you can show your skills to other employers. You can kind of maybe make your way in as a junior developer because you've worked on a project and you make those connections. And so it's really still, again, it's one of those balancing act things where there's not a perfect answer because there really is two correct sides of this argument and both of the things are true at the same time where it's hard to figure out what that early career path maybe looks like or even advancing in a career path if you're already a developer, it's tricky. Well, I wanna get your take on something too. I think back to, I go back a decade or two, I started working with Linux about 20 years ago back in the crazy days where it was just kernel.org and patches everywhere and lots of different companies trying to figure out what they would be doing. And most of the people contributing to the free software before we even were calling it open source most of the time, it was their side hustle was the thing they're doing or was their passion project. I've seen some research in the last year or so that says the majority of people that are contributing to open source are doing it for their day job. Obviously, there's lots of big companies. There's plenty of small companies. When I go to the Linux Foundation shows, I mean, you've got whole companies that are, that's their whole business. So I wanna get your take on governance, contribution from the individual versus companies. There's a lot of change going on there. Heck, the public cloud, their impact on what's happening in open source. What are you seeing there and what's good, what's bad? What do we need to do better as a community? Yeah, I think the governance of open source projects is definitely a live conversation that we're having right now about what does this need to look like? What role do companies need to be having and how things are put together? Is a contribution or leadership position in the name of the individual or the name of the company? Like all of these are live conversations that are ongoing in a lot of communities. I think one of the things that is interesting overall though is just watching if you're taking a really zoomed out view of what open source looks like where it was at one point deemed a cancer by one of the vendors in the space. And now it is something that is just absolutely an inherent part of most both tech vendors and end users is an important part of how they are building and using software today. Like open source is really an integral tool and what is happening in the enterprise and what's being built in the enterprise. And so I think that it is a natural thing that this conversation is evolving in terms of what is the enterprise's role here and how are we supposed to govern for that? And I don't think that we have landed on all the correct answers yet but I think that just looking at that long view it makes sense that this is an area where we are spending some time focusing. So, Rachel, without giving away state secrets we know Red Monk, you do lots of consulting out there. What advice did you give to the industry? We said, we're making progress. There's good things there. But if we say, okay, I want to at 2030 look back and say, boy, this is wonderful for developers. Everything's going good. What things have we done along the way? Where have we made progress? Yeah, so I think it kind of ties back to the earlier discussion we were having around composite apps and thinking about what that developer experience looks like. I think that right now it is incredibly difficult for developers to be wiring everything together and there's just so much for developers to do to actually get all of these apps from source to production. So when we talk with our customers a lot of our time is spent thinking, how can you not only solve this individual piece of the puzzle but how can you figure out how to fit it into this broader picture of what it is that developers are trying to accomplish? How can you think about where your tool or your project, whatever it is that you are working on? How does this fit not only in terms of your one unique problem space but where does this problem space fit in the broader landscape? Because I think that's going to be a really key element of what the developer experience looks like in the next decade is trying to help people actually get everything wired together in a coherent way. Rachel, no shortage of work to do there. Really appreciate you joining us. I'm thrilled to have you finally as a CUBE alumni. Thanks so much for joining. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. All right, thank you for joining us. This is the developer content for the CUBE on cloud. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.