 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. Good morning, everyone. You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite 2019 here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Donovan Brown. He is the Principal Cloud Advocate Manager of Methods and Practices Organization at Microsoft, a mouthful of a title. We are thrilled to welcome you on. You are the man in the black shirt. I have been dubbed the man in the black shirt. Tell us what that's all about. You're absolutely famous whenever we were saying, Donovan Brown's going to be here, the man in the black shirt. So what's that about? So it was interesting. The first time I ever got to keynote an event was in New York 2015 for Scott Guthrie, the guy who only wears a red shirt. And I remember, I was literally, and this is no exaggeration, wearing this exact black shirt, right? Because I bring it with me and I can tell because the tag in the back is worn more than the other black shirts I have just like this one. And I bring this one out for big events because I was in a keynote yesterday and I knew I was going to be on your show today. And I wore it and it looked good on camera. I felt really good. I'm an ex-athlete, we're very superstitious. I'm like, I have to wear that shirt in every keynote that I do from now on. Because if you look further back, you'll see me in blue shirts and all other quarter shirts. But from that day forward, it's going to be hard pressed for you to find me on camera, on stage, without this black shirt on, or a black shirt of some type. And there's a really cool story about the black shirt that was, this is when I knew it was a thing. So I pack about six or seven black shirts in every luggage. I'm flying overseas to Germany to go do a keynote for, I think it was Azure Saturday. Flights were really messed up. They had to check my bag, which makes me very uncomfortable because they lose stuff. I'm not worried about it, it'll be okay. Check my bag, get to Europe. They have been advertising that the black shirt is coming for months and they lose my luggage. And I am now heart pounding out of my chest. We go to the airport. I'm shopping in the airport because I don't even have luggage. I cannot find a black shirt. And I am just thinking, this is devastating. How am I going to go to a conference who's been promoting the black shirts coming, not wearing a black shirt? And my luggage does not show up. I show up at the event and I'm thinking, okay, maybe I'll get lucky and the actual conference shirt will be black and then we're all good. I walk in and all I see are white shirts. I'm like, this could not be worse. And then the speakers show up. They're wearing blue shirts. I'm like, this cannot be happening. So I'm depressed, I'm walking to the back and everyone starts saying, Donovan's here, Donovan's here. And I'm looking to find my polo, my blue polo I'm going to put on. Like, no, no, no, Donovan. They printed one black shirt just for me. I was like, oh my goodness, this is so awesome. So I put the black shirt on, then I put a jacket on over it and I go out and I tell the story of how hard it was to get here. That they lost my luggage. I'm not myself without a black shirt but this team had my back. And when I unzip my shirt, the whole place just starts clapping because I'm wearing a black shirt. Oh, I love it. Exactly, so now to be seen without a black shirt is weird. Jessica Dean works for me. We were in Singapore together and it was an off day. So I just wore a normal shirt. She had to take a double take on it. Is that Donovan my manager? Because he's not wearing a black shirt. I'm like, I don't wear them all the time but if I'm on camera on stage you're going to see me in a black shirt. All right, I like it. Well, Donovan, great story. Your team, methods and practices, makes up a broad spectrum of activities and was relatively recently rebranded. So we've talked to some of your team members on theCUBE before. So tell our audience a little bit about, you know, the Bridges Microsofts building. To keep up. Perfect, no, so that's been great. Originally I built a team called the league, right? There's a really small group of just DevOps focused diehards. And we still exist. As a matter of fact, we're doing a meet and greet tonight at 430 where you can come and meet all five of the original league members. Eventually I got tasked with a much bigger team. I tell the story, I was in Norway. I went to sleep. I had four direct reports. I literally woke up and I had 20 people reporting to me. I'm like, what just happened? And the teams spanned a lot more than just DevOps. So having a branded as the DevOps guy doesn't really yield very well for people who aren't diehard DevOps people. And what we feared was, Donovan, there's people who are afraid of DevOps who now report to you. You can't be that DevOps guy anymore. You have to broaden what you do so that you can actually focus on the IT pros in the world. The modern operations people, the lift and shift with Jeremy, what Jeremiah is doing for me, right? With the lift and shift workloads. And you still have to own DevOps. So what I did is I pulled back, reduced my direct reports to four, and now I have teams underneath me. Able Wang now runs DevOps. He's going to be the new DevOps guy for me. Jeremiah runs our lift and shift. Rick Klaus, you know that the hat, he runs all my IT pro. And then Emily, who's just an amazing speaker for us, runs all of my modern operations. So we spend those four big areas, right? Modern operations, which is sort of like the upside of DevOps. IT pros, which are the low level infrastructure, diehard, Windows server admins. And then we have DevOps run by Able, which is still the majority of the league is over there. And then we have obviously the IT pros, modern ops, DevOps, and then the lift and shift with Jeremiah. I'd like to speak a little bit as to, you know, why you've got these different groups. You know, how do you share information across the teams, but you know, really meet customers where they are and help them along. Cause right, you know, my background's infrastructure, you know, and you know, that DevOps was, you know, like that religion pounding at you, that absolutely, I mean, I've got a closet full of hoodies, but I'm not a developer. I understand. I understand. It's interesting because when you look at where our customers are today, get into the cloud is not something you do overnight. It takes lots of steps. You might start with a lift and shift, right? You might start with just adding some Azure in a hybrid scenario to your on-prem scenario. So my IT pros are looking after that group of people that they're still on-prem majority. They're trying to dip their toe into the cloud. They want to start using things like file shares or backups or something that they can have disaster recovery off site while they're still running the majority of what they're doing on-prem. So there's always an Azure pool to offer the teams that I actually run, but I need them to take care of where our customers are today and start just force them to be where we want them tomorrow and they're not ready to go there. So it's kind of interesting that my teams kind of have every one of those stages of migration from I'm on-prem, do I need to lift and shift? Do I need to do modern operations? Do I need to be doing full blown DevOps, full all up? So I think it's a nice group of people that kind of fit the spectrum of where our customers are going to be taking that journey from where they are to into the cloud. So I love it. One of the things you said was getting to the cloud doesn't happen overnight and you can say that again because there is still a lot of skepticism and reluctance and nervousness. How do you, we talk so much about this digital transformation and technology is not the hard part. It's the people that pose the biggest challenges to actually making it happen. So how do you, we're talking about meeting customers where they are in terms of the tools they need but where do you meet them are in terms of where they are just in their approach and their mindset in terms of their cloud readiness? You listen, believe it or not. You can't just go in and tell people something. You need to listen to them, find out what hurts and then start with that one thing is what I tell people. Focus on what hurts most first. Don't do a big bang change of any type. I think that's a recipe for disaster. There's too many variables that could go wrong but when I sit down with a customer and it's like, tell me where you are. Tell me what hurts. Like what are you afraid of? Is it compliances? Let me go get you in contact with someone who can tell you about all the, we have over 90 certifications on Azure. Like let me, whatever your fear is, I bet you I can get you in touch with someone that's going to help you get past that fear but I don't say just lift, shift, move it all. Like stop wasting, like no, let's focus on that one thing and what you're going to do is you're going to start to build confidence and trust with that customer and they know that I'm not there just trying to rip and replace you and get a high levels of ACR. I'm trying to succeed with you, right? Empower every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more. You do that by teaching them first, by helping them first. You can sell them last, right? You shouldn't have to sell them at all once they trust that what we're trying to do together is partner with you. I look at every customer more as a partner than a customer. Like how can I come with you and we do better things together than either one of us could have done apart? So, meet them here. You're a cloud psychologist. I'll most, right? Because I always put myself in their position. If I was a customer, what would I want that vendor to do for me? How would they make me feel comfortable? And that's the way that I lead, right? I don't want you going in there selling anything, right? We're here to educate them and if we're doing our job on the product side, the answer is going to be obvious that you need to be coming with us to Azure. So, Donovan, you mentioned you used to be an athlete. Yes. According to your bio, you're still a bit of an athlete. A little bit, a little bit. So, there's the professional air hockey thing which has a tie to something going on at the show. Gives a little bit of background. I've got an air hockey table in my basement. Any tips for those of us that aren't, you know? You were ranked 11th in the world. At one point, yeah. I went to the World Championships and it was interesting because at World Championships I wasn't prepared. My wife plays as well. We're like, we're just going to go. We're going to support the tournament. We had no expectations whatsoever. Next thing you know, I'm in the round playing for the top 10 in the world. And that's when it got too serious for me and I lost, right? Because I started taking it too serious. I put too much pressure on myself. But professional air hockey is like professional foosball or pool. It's grown men taking this sport way too seriously is the way I describe it. It is not what you see at Chuck E. Cheese. And what was interesting is Damien Brady who works for me, found that there is an AI operated air hockey table here on the floor and my wife was like, oh my gosh, we have to find this machine. Someone taped Donovan playing it. Six seconds later, my first shot, I scored it. And I just looked at the poor people who built it. I'm like, yeah, I'm a professional air hockey player. This thing is so not ready for a professional time. But they took down all my information and said, we'd love to consult with you. I said, I'd love to consult with you too because this could be a lot of fun. It would be also a great way for professionals to practice because you don't always have someone who's willing to play hours and hours which it takes to get at the professional level but to have an AI system that I could even teach at my attack. Forcing me to play outside of my comfort zone to try something other than a left wall under or right wall over but have to do more cuts because it knows to search for that. I can see a lot of great applications for the professionalized player with this type of AI. It just has to get a lot better. Literally, someone behind me started laughing like, that didn't take long because in six seconds I had scored on it already. I'm like, okay, let's hope it was going to be harder than this. I'm thinking back to our Dave Cahill interview with AI for everyone. And this is AI for professional air hockey players. It is, and even in one of my demos, Kendra Havens showed AI inside of your IDE. And I remember, I tell the story that I started writing software back in the 90s. I remember driving to a software store. You remember we used just to drive and you'd buy a box and the box would be really heavy because the manuals were in there. And not to mention a stack of floppy disks that you're going to spend hours putting into your computer. And I bought Visual C++ 1.52 as my first compiler. And I remember going home so excited and it had like syntax highlighting and that was like this cool new thing and it had all these great break points and line numbers. And now Kendra's on stage typing this repetitive task. And then the editor stops her and says, it looks like you need to do this a little bit more. You want me to do this for you. I'm like, what just happened? This is not syntax highlighting. This is literally watching what you do, identifying a repetitive task, seeing the pattern in your code and suggesting that I can finish writing this code for you. It's unbelievable. You bring up a great point, you know, back when I used to write, it was programming. Yes. I said programming was you learn the structure, you learn the logic and you write all the lines of what's going to be there. Coding, on the other hand, usually is taking something that is there, pulling in the pieces, making the modification. Sounds like we're talking about even the next generation where the intelligence is going to take over even more. It's built right inside of your IDE, which is amazing. And we were talking about artificial intelligence, not only for the air hockey, but I love the fact that in Azure, we have so many cognitive services and you just like pick these off the shelf. When I wanted to learn artificial intelligence when I was in the university, you had to learn another language called Lisp. That scared half of us away from artificial intelligence because you had to learn another language just to go do this cool thing that back then was very difficult to do and you could barely get it to play chess, let alone play air hockey. But today, cognitive services, search, decision-making, chatbots, they're so easy. Anyone, even a non-developer, can start adding the power of AI into their products thanks to the stuff that we're doing in Azure and there's just lighting up all these new possibilities for us, air hockey, drones that are able to put out fires. I've just seen amazing stuff where they're able to use AI and add it with as little as two lines of code and all of a sudden your app is so much more powerful than it was before. Yeah, Donovan, one of the things that really struck me over the last couple of years, looking at Microsoft, is it used to be you think about the Microsoft stack? When I think about developers, it's like, oh wait, are you a.NET person? Well, there you're going to be there. The keynote this morning, one of your team members was on stage Scott Hanselman and it was, choose your language, choose your tools and you're going to have all of them out there. So talk to us a little bit about that transition inside Microsoft. Sure, one of the mantras that I've been saying for a while is any language, any platform, no one believes me. So I had to start proving it. So I got on stage one year, it was interesting and this was a really rough year because I flew with three laptops. One had macOS on it, one of them had Linux on it and one of them had Windows. And what I did is I created a voting app and what I would do is I get on stage and say, okay everyone that's in this session, go to this URL and start voting. They got to pick what computer I use, they got to pick what language I programmed in and they got to pick where in Azure I deployed it to. Was it app service, was it to Docker? I'm like, I'm going to prove to you I can do any language and any platform. So I honestly did not know what demo I was going to do. 20 minutes later after showing them some slides, I would go back to the app and say, what did you pick? And I would move that computer in front of me and write there on stage, completely create a complete CI CD pipeline for the language that audience chose to whatever resources that they wanted on whatever platform that they wanted to be. Like, have I proven this to you or enough or not? And I did that demo for an entire year. Any language that you want me to program in and any platform you want me to target, I'm going to do that right now. And I don't even know what it's going to be. You're going to choose it for me. We do, I can't remember the last time I did a .NET demo on stage. I did Python this week when I was on stage with Jason Zander. I saw a lot of Python and Go and other demos this year. We love .NET, don't get us wrong. But everyone knows we can do .NET. What we're trying to prove right now is that we can do a lot of other things. It does not matter what language you program in. It does not matter where you want to deploy. Microsoft is here to help you. It's a company created by developers and we're still obsessed with developers, not just .NET developers, all developers. Even the citizen developer, right? Which is a developer who doesn't have to see the code anymore, but wants to be able to add that value to what they're doing in their organization. So if you're a developer, Microsoft is here to help, full stop. It's a powerful mission and a powerful message that you are really empowering everyone here. Excellent. And how many developers only program in one language now? Right? I mean, I saw, I remember I used to be a C++ programmer and I thought that was it. I knew the best language. I knew the fastest language. And then all of a sudden I knew C-Sharp and I knew Java and I knew JavaScript. And I write a lot of PowerShell right now and I write a lot of nodes. It's like, wow, no one knows one language but I never leave Visual Studio Code. I deploy all my workloads into Azure. I didn't have to change my infrastructure or my tools to switch languages. I just switched languages that fit whatever the problem was that I was trying to solve. So I live the mantra that we tell our customers. I don't just do .NET development, although I love .NET and this is my go-to language if I'm starting from scratch. But sometimes I'm going to go help in an open source project that's written in some other language and I want to be able to help them. With Visual Studio Online, we made that extremely easy. I don't even have to set up my development machine anymore. I can literally click a link in a GitHub repository and the environment I need will be provisioned for me. I'll use it, check in my commits and then throw it away when I'm done. It's the world of being a developer now and I always giggle because I'm thinking I had to drive to a store and buy my first compiler and now I can have an entire environment in minutes that is ready to rock and roll. It's just, I wish I would have learned how to program now and not when I was on bulletin boards asking for help and waiting three days for someone to respond. I didn't have Stack Overflow or Search Engine and things like that. It's just an amazing time to be a developer. Yes, indeed, indeed it is. Donovan Brown, the man of the black shirt. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really fun. Thank you, take care. I'm Rebecca Knight, first two minimums. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite.