 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Always excited when we get to talk to some of the users. And joining me for this segment is Adam Furtado, who is the Chief of Product with Kessel Run at US Air Force. Adam, you were saying, you're not a big Star Wars guy, but was the name come from the derivation of the famous Millennium Falcon Kessel Run? Yes, I am a Star Wars geek. It certainly was. And the rest of our team are Star Wars nuts, so I've had to pick up things along the way to like the joke that we're delivering capability to our users in 12 parsecs or quicker. Yeah, and if you're not a, whether you are or aren't a Star Wars fan, you look at it and say, parsecs is a measure of distance, not time, so that's still infuriating for us to watch. But Adam, tell us a little bit about your background and what your group does at the US Air Force. I think we don't need to explain the US Air Force. So my background is actually as an intelligence professional, I was a warfighter enlisted in the Air Force for 10 years. From there, I started working in IT systems when I got out of the Air Force and really was on the acquisition side of the house where we were the provider for capabilities for our warfighters, and so over that time learned a lot about how we struggled in getting capability to our users with any kind of speed or quality, so Kessel Run is an effort to revolutionize the way that we build and deliver software to our warfighters, and we are well on our way. That sounds like an awesome project, so can you give us just roughly like, how do you get your arms around how big this is, how many applications or people involved in it, or the scope of what you're doing? Sure, so we set out to modernize the Air and Space Operations Center, so we have AOCs all around the world that basically are where all the planning for Air Warfare takes place, so there's a large legacy system that is underlined to that, so they've really struggled in modernizing that baseline system. We've been designing a brand new system to modernize for about 10 years and we just haven't been able to get it to the field for a ton of DoD bureaucratic and acquisitions reasons, so basically Congress told us to figure something new out, so we have a small team that was tired of working this way and tired of not being able to provide this capability to the warfighters, got together, and we looked at industry to be quite frank, and we found that the other bureaucratic, regulated industries were able to take steps to move closer towards their digital transformation, so we kind of followed along and took some practices that we learned from them and tried to apply it to the government. Yeah, fascinating space. Government's big focus this week at the show, there was the announcement about cloud.gov, there is a whole track on government here, but I want you to talk about your cloud founder usage, but in general, how's the thinking of modernization, digitization, there was a big cloud-first initiative from the federal government for a while, how do those forces play together? Sure, yeah, I mean there's a ton of innovation type of activities taking place throughout the government and the DOD, with cloud foundry we just found that because of our, we frankly have a lack of software development engineering talent that's inherent to the Air Force, we have actually a career field for software developer that's been dwindling over the years, so being able to find that talent has been really hard, so with cloud foundry and commercial platform, being able to abstract the technical complexity that it does allows us to grow our software developers in a different way, focusing on identifying the character traits and the empathy and learning mindset that we can take and grow them from by having that platform as a backbone to be our foundation, I guess is really was the impetus of us going in this direction and it's really worked out so far. Yeah, going through my head are all these discussions we've had for years about we need to go from monolithic hierarchical to distributed architectures and that's been happening in the military a lot too. Very much so, yeah, what we're trying to replace is that massive monolithic system that takes us 10 years to design and develop with no meaningful user input and at the end of the day, if we even get it out to the field, it's not the right thing, so 96% of federal IT projects are over budget or over schedule and 40% of them never see a user at all and never get fielded, so there's a lot of room for improvement in this space so we've been able to tackle some of the easier things but also tackle some more complex things, not only the technology, but the policy and the testing, the security behind that as well that we've been focusing on to move the entire DOD, entire Air Force forward. Yeah, so security I would think is a major concern. How does that fit into your thinking and how does security fit into your architecture? We're always thinking about security, cyber security is obviously really important to the DOD in our space, but we feel that with being able to automate more of the security, with utilizing a platform and the pipelines that we have gets us in a better place, we're more secure today than we were yesterday, we're always learning too, right? So we were more secure today than we were literally yesterday, we're gonna be more secure tomorrow by learning how to kind of move forward and learn more about cyber security, but it's always something on our mind and we feel like we're in a good place with it. Yeah, the majority of Cloud Foundry users are doing really their private or private hosted kind of environment. Can you share, do you leverage public clouds at all? Is it all kind of in-house data centers? How does that fit into the mix? So our unclassified developments is the AWS Gov cloud. And then we have hybrid solutions that we use on other networks. Okay, yeah, AWS just launched, I believe it's their secret region too, so that they're capable, but I guess your team or you can't talk about isn't leveraging it yet. Rather not go there. No worries, so you're speaking at the show, you know, what's your experience? What kind of things are you sharing and working on? Really heavily relying on culture. So we had a couple of our team members speak this morning, giving more of an overview of our effort and what we've been able to achieve so far. And now I'm focusing on how we can overcome some of the challenges that are inherent to the DOD, like I mentioned earlier, native engineering and development talent. How we can change the way that we do organizational management. Our traditional hierarchical top-down way of organizing is not, doesn't breed innovation normally, right? So we're looking at different ways to organize our own team. So one of those ways is all of our dev teams work in a balanced team concept with no uniforms on a first name basis. So we're basically taking, uniforms are really to strip the individualism away from people, but we kind of need that for creativity and to be able to solve complex problems and things like that. So we're really focusing on lifting the psychological safety needed to be creative and have our lowest ranking people feel as comfortable as the highest ranking people in IDA and coming up with ways to do things. Yeah, that's fascinating actually. You think about, we've been talking a lot about relationships between the groups and the devs and the operators, but you start putting rank in there which any company has some of that inherently, but the military, very much it's visible when you see them all the time. Absolutely. It's actually, our airmen have really adapted to it and they love it. It's one of those things where it's interesting, maybe a little bit different than commercial industry in that our airmen are developers and our airmen are also our users. So there's like, there is invested interest in improving things for the better for their fellow airmen to, so it's been really great to see and people have really like dove in and embraced it and our developers are doing really well. Yeah. What kind of lessons learned would you share? You know, you're sharing in your speak and talking to your peers. What kind of things would you share with them? I think the biggest thing I'm talking about today is to avoid getting this chap of trying to find the perfect person with the right technical acumen. I think having a foundation is important, but more important is finding people who have empathy for users and learning mindsets and have a really, are able to get out of their conference zone and learn new things. Building cloud native applications and 12 FAPT through applications are inherently new to the DoD effectively, right? So it's funny, we talk about how DevOps is, you know, innovative in our world when the commercial industry probably scoffs at that, but you know, innovation is defined as the introduction to something new. It really is innovative in the DoD space to work in this way. So we're seeing a lot of momentum throughout the services in the DoD and we're really heading in the right direction. Yeah, it's great to hear, you know, innovation in government can happen. We've done lots of interviews over the last few years to talk about it. Anything you'd like to share about like ways that, you know, your organization or peer organizations are moving things forward that people might be surprised to hear about? I would say the most important thing is just finding the right people, right? So a lot of the times we've found that our most senior leadership in the government is very much interested in innovating and moving things forward in the right way and there's this innovation ecosystem below that is driving things up. So it's basically the education that needs to happen at the middle level of that, that frozen middle that sometimes can thwart innovation by just like a lack of knowledge, I guess, or a lack of understanding of what we're doing. So we've been on a, you know, a feels like a parade of education and trying to share the things we've learned with other people in the government to help us remove some of those bureaucratic barriers and really just like really progress what we need to. All right, Adam, last question I have for you, something we're all struggling with, the pace of change these days. Seems every time you get on a new technology, the next one's there, you mentioned, you know, like, well, DevOps we've been talking about for years, but you're getting on. How does your organization look at that? How do you keep up with what's happening in the world? So I think Cloud Foundry as an example or this commercial solutions have helped us do that. Now we say like speed is the new security. We're able to be truly agile in that we're able to change and adapt to things as we need to. So I think in the old model, it took us so long to adapt and get things out into the field that change was almost impossible. Whereas in this way of working, we're able to learn things every single day, keep our learning loops very short and then react to them. So I think it's been a great way to take some of those things we've learned and implemented. Adam Furtado, I really appreciate you sharing the stories from the US Air Force, fascinating stuff. We'll be back with more coverage here at the Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.