 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Jared Shockley. He is the Senior Service Reliability Engineer Azure DevOps at Microsoft. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Jared. Thank you very much, I'm glad to be here. And you're here with the backdrop of a roaring crowd who just tucking into their first beer or sips of wine. Exactly, it's the happy hour here, which is a great time to be here. Exactly, and it's happy hour here on theCUBE too. Exactly. So SRE, it's really kind of a, the idea is not new, but the title, the term is kind of new. It's nice, talk a little bit about what you do. Well, a lot of it, the SRE title has been around for a long time. It's for Site Reliability Engineering. And it's new to the Microsoft world though. That's the big key. It's been heavily something that's utilized in a lot of other larger companies, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Etsy, are some of the big ones that have been utilizing Site Reliability Engineering. Microsoft is pretty new to us, so we're trying to get our heads wrapped around it because they're all around some basic services. They have their basic services. At Microsoft, we have a variety. It could be a platform, it could be a legacy application. But what we're finding out is the same problem we're having defining SRE is what all enterprises are going to have. So if we can figure it out, we can help bring them into this modern world. Oh my God, Jared, it's so much. When we talked about it, it's like, oh, those hyperscale guys, they have it kind of easy. What do they have? Five, 10, 20 applications. What's the enterprise have? Oh, how many hundreds or thousands of applications we have? So Microsoft, as we said, is always in the middle. They're bridging between, you know, been around for quite a while, but working on all the new stuff. So it sounds like you're right in the middle of that big challenge. We are, and luckily, I've been in Microsoft IT before, now called CSE, Core Services Engineering. And when we were taking a look at moving to the cloud, we had 2,500 applications to look at moving to the cloud. And we all went, oh? And we found out there was actually more like 6,000. Only 2,500 were known. It's like, it's a classic problem that you have in IT. And so how do we get that kind of mindset change? And the biggest thing is changing the mindset. Because when we're talking about the service engineering to site reliability engineering, it is a big change in mindset from the old IT operations. And maybe explain for us a little bit, IT, SRE, how do they interact as SRE in a rule in IT listens? You know, what's that dynamic? Well, the big change for, especially service engineers or IT operations people, they move to site reliability engineer is you're a part of the whole system. You're not just the operations team that gets abused by the software developers or the vendors. You're actually developing with them. You're actually stepping in. That's one of the biggest things I've had to learn was I'm coding again. I started out coding and I got away from it to operate. Now I'm going back, I've got to learn how to code again. Oh my goodness. And it's been actually a good journey for me. Because one of the things I'm allowed and I'm empowered as an SRE, I can go into our code base and change it. I don't have to wait for a dev to do the work. If there's a break situation, I can make a change. I can have a dev review my pull request and boom, it goes straight into our production environment. Well, this really gets back to what we were talking about in the morning, this morning, talking about Satya Nadella's keynote where he talked about empowerment. Empowerment is such a key theme of what he does at Microsoft and the kind of culture he wants to create. Yeah, culture changes the biggest part of everything about this. It's trying to get people out of the mindset that I'm stuck with this on-prem world. The biggest thing, it was an aha moment for me when I started moving to the cloud and moving my services to cloud. I was doing SharePoint custom portals for Microsoft IT back when I first started. And we were trying to figure out how we could move SharePoint onto Azure and what would this give us? One of the first things it gave us was flexibility. We could have these small, tight SharePoint farms but Man-O-Man, if HR submitted to us saying, hey, we're going to put out an email to all 140,000 employees, we could grow our farm to handle all that web traffic and not have to spend weeks trying to figure it out. We could do it in a matter of minutes. And that kind of response is amazing. All right, so, Jared, you've worked for some end users also in between your stints at Microsoft. Tell us, how do you bridge between what Microsoft's doing internally and educate customers and collaborate back and forth? Well, the first thing, obviously, is being able to come to events like this and be able to talk at conferences. Ignite has been one of the premier conferences for the Microsoft ecosystem and I'm so happy to be here to be able to talk about it. But I also talk at other events. I talk at events for SharePoint called SharePoint Saturdays. I'm actually speaking at a SharePoint conference in Europe this coming November and I'm also talking at where I can to user groups and trying to help people long and trying to get them to get their mindset changed and start thinking that the cloud is not the enemy, it's actually your friend. Too many IT pros really focus on, oh, I'm going to lose my job because of the cloud and I'm, no, your job's going to become better by being in the cloud. Be it on Office 365 or Azure or whatever. What sort of user groups are there? So, these DevOps meetups, are they, you know, Windows user groups, everything in between? Everything in between. I've talked at, in Seattle, we have an Office 365 user group. There's a Power BI user group. I've also talked at a DevOps user group so there's a wide variety and people can normally find them on sites like Meetup or in forums or even on Twitter or LinkedIn. Or Facebook. Yeah, Venprite's always good for that kind of stuff too. Exactly, yeah. So, when you were talking about convincing people, persuading people that the cloud is not the enemy. I mean, and you've talked a lot about how it really is a mindset shift. What is it that brings people to your side? Is it use cases? Is it, how do you get them to see the light? Well, part of it is use cases. Part of it is finding out that little thing that they don't like to do. When I was in Microsoft IT, we were moving from our on-prem to IaaS, infrastructure as a service. So it was basically the same thing. It was virtual machines in the cloud. But I was trying to get my team to stop thinking about IaaS and start thinking about PaaS, platform as a service, where they would build a web app and build it on the web app platform instead of actually building a IIS server to host it. And the way I always sold it to them was, do you want to patch servers? Oh no, you don't, guess what? I can give you a platform where you don't have to patch a server ever again. And they're like, tell me more. And so I would find out what really triggered them. You know, I talk with both, when I talk with, I actually talk a lot with our customers, external customers, via team meetings with the customers. And I would find out what is their biggest trigger? What's the biggest thing driving them? And then show them how the cloud can help them there instead of hindering. And a lot of times they really see those use cases to themselves. And I could show them use cases of either Microsoft or other use cases I know of. And they're like, wow, I want that. And all of a sudden, now they're on my side and it's like, okay, how do we do this? Now that you got at least them on your side, now it's like, okay, we got to change the mindset here. Here's what you need to do, that kind of thing. We heard that there are a few sessions here at the show, first time like there's designated tag in the app and everything that you can look for SRE. But for those people that didn't come to the show, well, hopefully they can go watch some of the replays. But are there other kind of industry tools that you mentioned, some of the meetups? You know, how can people learn more? Well, one of the biggest ways people can learn more is biggest thing is there's a book that I've personally utilized. It's called The Phoenix Project. We've had Gene Kim on our program. We talked about the DevOps survey that Nicole has led. We've had her on the program, so we love the door. Those are some great starting points. In fact, I just reread The Phoenix Project, prepped myself for my slot here at Ignite. Reminding myself, I can tell you, I can go back, there's a character in the book, his name is Brent that everybody relies on. I can tell you all the Brents on all my teams, all my life. And it not always was me. There have been a couple of times it was me, but now, since then, I can identify every single one of my Brents. It's like, how do we get that person out of the, being the, being the, the hold up, being the, the- Model Nick. Model Nick, if you will, yep. Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Jared. It was a pleasure having you. It was my pleasure too. I mean, SRE is a brand new thing in the Microsoft stack, and we're trying to get the word out that it's not a scary thing. And in fact, a lot of folks, what I hope to show a lot of folks is this is the best way to go. This is the ultimate freedom for an IT pro. So really try and get them going in this direction. Great. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from the Cube's live coverage in just a little bit.