 Ryan Gracely with Wikibon. We're here at the CUBE DevOps Enterprise Summit here in San Francisco. And excited to have a guest right now, Paula Thrasher, Application Delivery Lead for CSC. Paula, thanks for being on. Ah, thanks for having me. So you work in the federal government space. You've been here speaking, you're helping federal government customers transform. The government has a tendency to want to do big things. Big, broad things that help them get elected or help get funding. A lot of the DevOps talks are, start small, do a lighthouse. How does that sort of contradiction work? How well does that work? Well, I think that is actually a really big challenge in the federal space. I think all organizations sort of have like the IT model that matches their organization and we get, in the federal government, you get funded to do big things. You get your money is to accomplish things and very big blocks of money and programs are designed to do that. And so convincing an organization that you can do things incrementally is actually very hard. And I think the challenge is being able to convince people that you can still do the big thing but to get to the big thing, you're gonna take a lot of small steps to get there. And I think when you can do that and say it's okay that we're gonna do a few things incrementally and then at the end, we'll get to the big thing. If you can accomplish that from a motivational standpoint, you can still do the thing that was intended. And actually with better outcomes because we have systems that we report to congressmen on how it's going and being able to say, I'm not giving you a report, I want to actually give you a demo. The leadership really likes that because that makes them look good. It's not fictional. They can actually see how we're spending their taxpayer dollars. And so there's ways to do it but it's definitely a cultural challenge. I think it's one of the largest ones we have. You know, it's cliche but a lot of people want to say, well, Washington is bureaucracy and it moves slow and so forth. How do you get across this idea of being agile? It's, you know, they're not for-profit companies so sometimes, you know, we heard a lot of people this week talking about, you know, we're driving profitability. What sort of metrics and terms do you talk about to the agencies to get them to go, okay, that applies to me, that motivates me? Yeah, I think, you know, the funny thing is early in my career, I was doing a lot of agile but I wouldn't call it agile because that was not an accepted thing to do. So I would just be like, we just have a methodology that goes really fast. You know, nobody wants to go slow. That sounds great. But as we've actually talked agile, for us it's a lot about the mission and I especially found a real audience in the military domain but it was true in the civilian side as well in that being able to respond very quickly to mission needs is very motivating. More so a lot of times in profit because in profit is somebody else's money. And a mission, a lot of these people, you know, they've been the one who's lives on the line and I think it's actually a really cool opportunity when you work for federal government because you can literally work on systems that save lives. And there's not a lot of other people that do jobs where you get to say that. So I think that's one of the things I like the most about the kinds of things we do is that we do actually do missions that really matter. Yeah, one of the things that I know Jean talked about, you know, some of the speakers, you know, Target was talking and one of the women's speakers had just gotten promoted. Jean talked about some other people. How do they deal with sort of the rock star and visibility that goes along with doing things different and fast? How does that work in the federal space where maybe that hasn't been the culture so much? You know, I think the interesting thing is that the federal space doesn't, I think you can actually be really successful without being a rock star. I do think there's a lot of people that do public speaking in that space, a lot of the leadership, and they see it as a way to motivate their own, you know, employees and the contractors, I think, to do great things. I mean, I think it's an interesting challenge because it's not an industry that rewards sort of public accolades, but at the same time it does. I mean, I think all industries sort of reward people who share a good story about something they did that was successful and that encourages somebody else to do that same thing. So I think a lot of it is more about evangelizing and it's a really nice community in the federal government. I think people really share a common purpose and they're really willing to tell, you know, which a lot of times companies won't want to do. They don't want to tell you, this is my proprietary thing and I don't want to tell you how I did it. But in the federal government, they're really open to actually sharing. This is what I learned and this is what worked and this is what didn't. And actually that's kind of a nice community. Yeah, so this week is a lot of community. Lots of sharing, lots of... Washington DC, that whole area is as dense in terms of companies and technology as here out in the Silicon Valley area. How well does the sharing sort of community piece work there? Do you see a lot of sharing? I mean, I know there's obviously in some cases you talked about military where there's restrictions that are legal restrictions, but in general, is it a sharing culture? Do you see people moving between agencies or how does that work? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of actually, I mean, it is really a community of people that work in the federal government and there is a lot of people changing agencies and come not as much maybe. I mean, I don't know how that compares actually to commercial, but I do feel like there's a really good community there and a good technology community and there is a lot of sharing, although it's definitely challenging because I think sometimes the political environment makes it a lot harder for us to sort of geek out that's the thing that a lot of it is more mission oriented. When you actually wanna talk about something under the hood about technology, they go, whoa, that could be a security problem. I don't know about that. So I think we want to share, but sometimes the politics of it make it a little bit harder for us to share than maybe it should. We've heard a lot of stories this week where some groups within the organization will sort of start out as gets grass root. They'll get some successes, some lighthouses and then they go find executive support. They'll find leadership support. Do you find the same thing happens in the federal space just because of the way they're budgeted or are there patterns in terms of how they go from old ways of doing things to starting new ways to doing all the new things? Yeah, I mean, I think the story of transformation in the federal government is the story in any large enterprise, right? It comes both directions. Sometimes it comes because it's top down, right? There is a new leader and they say, look, this is gonna happen, right? It's not very effective in the federal government, I think because the leadership is more transient than the employees. Unfortunately, it's kind of a short timer, short of roll sometimes. So top down doesn't work very well and the employees can't be fired easily as they can in the public sector. So that's a hard way to do it. So I think most of the transformation has been very grass roots. And I think actually there's some people doing this in the federal government for a lot longer than people realize. It's just that we're finally starting to get to a critical mass where we're actually doing things that are really making a difference. We see all the way up to the president. I mean, Obama at one point, he's got a CIO, he's bringing in people from Silicon Valley. How much of that is trickling down to the work that you do? I mean, is it making a lot of changes or is it just bringing awareness that we need science and technology to be more forefront? How much is the culture or maybe the temperature around Washington DC and how much we wanna be innovative changing in your space? Actually, so this is a little bit what I'm gonna talk about. I think there's nothing better to get a conversation going like a crisis. And in a weird, weird way, I think healthcare.gov was the crisis we needed to have DevOps in the federal government. I think without that, it was a side project that there were a lot of people very interested in doing and there were a lot of companies that were interested in doing it, but it wasn't the compelling call to action. And that made people realize that like, we can't do things the way we used to and we really do actually have to take this seriously. This is not just a side project. So if there is a positive outcome of that, I think is that it actually has, I think, changed the conversation. And I'm looking forward to actually seeing that go somewhere. Good, good. So one of the things that I know from your bio, you've done some work with the AWS.gov cloud. You've helped some agencies transfer some applications. That in and of itself working with the public cloud is its own change, its own culture. And then you've got the, like how are those two things intertwined in terms of Agile and the public cloud or how are you helping customers feel comfortable dealing with that? Yeah, I mean, there's twofold. There's a technology revolution and there's a culture revolution. And the technology pieces, I think are really, Amazon, they've got a great solution and I've certainly helped in that regard. We're CSE, we're partners with Amazon and we've done some good work with them. And I think the most interesting piece is it actually changes both because it's both a technology change, obviously we're using a new platform to deploy your software and all that stuff, but it's a cultural change too. The idea that infrastructure is code, the idea that you're just gonna automate, I mean, both deployments that we've done to Amazon fully automate everything from dev to production and that's like a culture change in terms of thinking, like maybe I don't, not quite know ops, but a different way of thinking about how we do ops and that cultural piece is actually harder. Like a funny story is that I was actually internally, we were doing some stuff with Cloud and I was talking to somebody, I said, look, this other team over here, they really want to test your thing and they, can you spin up an instance for them? And the project manager instantly said, well that'll be two weeks. And while he was saying that to me, his lead engineer in the background was like, I got it, who am I giving access to? Who do I send the IP addresses to? And it's like the mentality that this takes two weeks is harder to fix than the actual technology of it. The technology piece was easy. The mind shift of now we can actually go faster, that's the hard part, and that's probably true. I mean, that's true for us in the government, but I'm sure that's actually true in a lot of organizations. No, and that's exciting. I mean, it gives people hope when they're seeing the government doing things faster, they're doing things more nimble, it gives people hope. Paul, with that, thank you very much. It's great to see so many different industries, so many different segments of not only here in the States, but around the world, making this shift, going faster, taking advantage of new technology. We're gonna wrap up with that here at DevOps Enterprise 7, here in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.