 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special on the ground at the VTUG SummerSlam 2019. The keynote this morning is a lot of discussion about what's happening to IT operations people and all of the changes that are impacting their career. One of the keynote speakers is Josh Atwell, who's a senior technology advocate with Splunk. Josh, welcome back to the program. Thanks, Stu. Always good to be here. All right. So you waited till the final VTUG to show up, so better late than never. That's exactly the way I look at it. Thank you so much for joining, and yeah, I want to talk really here about community and jobs, and of course that's right in your sweet spot to talk about. I met you years ago through the virtualization community, a virtualization community always good at people sharing and contributing and learning with each other, and how have you seen that changing as we go into these new worlds of, we talk about new ops and cloud computing, and all of these new things that have been changing. Wow, so that uncovers a whole lot. I think one of the... And then we needed to do it in under five minutes. I don't think I've been ever to have any conversation under five minutes, but I think we could pull this off. I think that during the virtualization emergence, we required the bloggers and the contributors in the community in order for us as an industry to mature. Even the vendors weren't wholly prepared on everything that they were going to need to deliver to handle that change. I think we're seeing a similar type of scenario play out now as digital transformation is impacting so much of what IT and development does. We have a whole new crop of mechanisms for getting people on board and understanding these trends and these new mechanisms, and I think the biggest way that people have really gravitated toward recently from a community standpoint are around events, like your DevOps meetups, DevOps days events, those have been a huge, and then video. Video has been the other element that has been just completely exploding everywhere throughout this, and it used to be very focused on the written technical documentation. Now I'm going to show you step by step how to do all these things, and then the last bit that I think is really interesting is because of the changes that we face now, the cultural elements are vastly different, and so there's a lot more conversation as a community about the cultural impacts of more transparency, addressing burnout, how do you lead up and influence up in an organization? Lots of cool stuff. Yeah, Josh, did I see you were actually advocating reading books in your presentation this morning? Don't you know millennials, if I can't get it on TikTok or something like that in my daily newsletter, it's probably a little bit too long form for me. I jest, but maybe expand a little bit about what you were going at there. Well, I think one thing that's really important to note is that specifically within the IT space and with IT operations, and as we saw at the keynote today, most people have 10 plus years of experience, right? Most of the younger folks coming in into operations or doing operational roles kind of have a different perspective and view, and they will have more of a development background in what they're doing. And so it's still hyper-relevant to enterprise IT and IT operations as a whole for consumption through books, and there's some really high quality books that have been published in the last few years. Yeah, maybe if you could speak a little bit of that organizational dynamic, the IT people versus, hey, who are those developers? They used to just build their stuff and tell me to make it work out there. They dress a little bit different. I don't understand their language. Are we seeing IT and the developers coming together, at least working together? I think it's inevitable that we're going to continue to see more and more of that. As I talked about earlier today, when cloud was kind of emerging and we had rogue IT people, development teams in particular going out, looking for an easier option to get the IT resources they need, most IT departments were like, oof, we dodged a bullet. We're not going to have to deal with agile development and lean development practices. Well, then it turned out, well, we actually need to modernize all of our applications in various different ways. We need to rationalize where they need to go. There's a lot better cost models for some of these applications. Let's get out of the, you know, spending money on things that aren't differentiating to our business because we have to. And so, as such, those bridges have to be developed. And, you know, it is on operations to kind of change, like, the model at which they're developing or not developing, but helping developers. Alright, Josh, explain what this new ops thing is that you're talking about. I know you've got the new ops days. Yes. And, you know, so explain a little bit about that. Okay, new ops is a realization, frankly, that the way that we've operated IT and managed IT isn't going to work going forward with the addition of greater complexity, applications being broken out, microservices, various cloud platforms to you know, deploying out private cloud using software as a service. IT operations has a much more diverse and much more complex job ahead of them. And it's also increasing the scale at which what they need to operate. And so, new technologies, new frameworks for how they operate have to be deployed. There's a lot of talk about bimodal IT, but this isn't really about bimodal IT. It's about, here's what you need to do to operate the new. And you also then need to modernize everything that you've been doing to work within those same models. All right. And Josh, you're holding the mic so that our audience can't see the t-shirt. So maybe just show that for a second and explain that one. So, you know, it's like one of the things that we pride ourselves on are having really interesting t-shirts. And this is really just getting just having people get out of the way and let the systems work for you. Yeah, absolutely. But it's a good point is, you know, IT need can't be the group of no, or the blocker or the yell, we'll get that done in, you know, 12 to 18 months and send us a pile of money. We need to be able to move fast. The theme that I hear over and over again is it's the agility and tying things to the business. And I thought that was a great point in your presentation is, if you don't understand, you know, what the key business objectives are this quarter in this year, not saying you need to be, you know, drinking the Kool-Aid on everything. But if you're not aware of it, you might be running in the total wrong direction. And therefore, if things change, you can't be one of those, oh, geez, why am I out of a job? Oh, well, maybe I wasn't relevant to the business. Yeah, and I think what most IT organizations feel is that they don't get respected for their work they're doing. And it's primarily in large part because they can't show the work that they're doing is tying to a business value. And so until they start making that transition, and then becoming an organization that is a driver of business initiatives and business value and customer value, they're they're they're going to have to reconcile some of the things that they're doing. Okay, final thing, Josh. So are there any skill sets or jobs that you know, hate to see it's like, Oh, you know, the hot thing out there. But you know, as people kind of look at their career, especially those that have been in IT operation for a while. What are some areas that you recommend them to start with? Well, I think one area that well, two core areas I think people really need to invest, developing good discipline about being data driven data managed. So being able to look at data management platforms, be able to extract ask good questions of the data, and then act on that data, whether it's an automated response or developing a plan for remediation or improvement. And then the other is the adoption of automation framework, specifically, being able to have an understanding of some, some type of programming language, don't have to be a full on developer, but you should be able to look at work other people have done know how to dissect that manipulate and manage it to what you need to be able to do so that you can remove yourself from the workflow, get out of being ticket driven and allow the systems to work for you. All right, sounds great. Josh out. Well, always a pleasure to catch up with you on and off camera. So thanks so much for joining us. Thanks to all right. More coverage is always at the cube.net. I'm Stu Miniman. And thanks for watching.