Cloud Talk - CTO RT- Modern Ops
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Jeff DeVerter: [00:00:00] All right. And welcome to the second in our series of the CTO round table. I have got three amazing folks here to introduce you to today. One, you already know, Justin Cuss making a return appearance. Justin, welcome back to the program. Why don't you just refresh people on who you are and what you do around these parts?

Justin Kuss: Hey, thanks for having me back, Jeff. My name is Justin Kuss. I'm from Columbus, Ohio, and I am the VP of IT for products, or sorry, for platforms and shared services within internal IT at Rackspace. 

Jeff DeVerter: So this is going to be interesting folks. So Justin, over all the internal stuff and my next two guests it's going to be Travis and Simon CTOs here at Rackspace, one for public cloud, one for private cloud.

So I feel like we have a couple of idealists and a realist in the room. And so we'll see if the boxing gloves come off. So Simon, let's jump across the pond. Once you introduce us, tell us who you are, where you are, all that fun stuff. 

Simon Bennett: So hi all, Simon Bennett, I'm the CTO for Private [00:01:00] Cloud. I'm based in the UK, in the west of England, and I spend most of my time working with customers, talking to them about how Rackspace can solve their problems, mostly Private Cloud, but obviously Most customers are in public as well.

So I talk a lot about hybrid cloud as well. 

Jeff DeVerter: It's a real thing. The there, there's not a lot of either or it's, there's a lot of and going on right now. Absolutely. Yeah. All right, Travis, last not least, tell us who you are. 

Travis Runty: Yeah. Thanks Jeff. Hey Travis Renty, CTO for the public cloud business, been a Rackspace for about 17 years and I'm located in South Texas, a little bit South of San Antonio.

And just like Simon, I spent a lot of my time talking to customers about their challenges, what they see, the opportunities, what's keeping them up at night, what their stakeholders want and, what we see and how we can help them through that journey. Try and tell the hybrid story, the multi cloud story.

And like Jeff said, it's usually an and not an or. 

Jeff DeVerter: That's right. As we've been thinking about topics to talk about here on the CTO Roundtable series, the [00:02:00] thought came up around, what is, what does operations look like in this modern world of infrastructure? So I thought we might dig into what you guys are thinking about modern operations for IT, and maybe to kick that off, we should probably define it.

Justin, let's start with you or, and then anybody who has a thought about what you think, cause there's not a real, there's no textbook definition out there, so let's define what we mean when we say modern operations. 

Justin Kuss: Yeah. Thanks Jeff. Some modern operations when I think of it and how we use it internally at Rackspace for the inside of operations is really focused around combining the use of technology.

So thinking about Artificial intelligence, automation maybe even some development some software here to, to help us with a scaled version of operating different workloads, right? We have to figure out how we can operate things at a private cloud within a public cloud, things on bare metal.

So we have to cover a large variety of platforms. [00:03:00] to to make things work inside of Rackspace and to support our customers and our rackers. The combination of all of those things to me is what I think of as a modern operating framework. 

Jeff DeVerter: And Travis, somebody who's been around here for forever you, I think have had a lot of opportunity to personify When you think back to what, if we're, if I don't want to say old operations or antiquated operations, what did it look like in the past?

What are we talking about here? What is modern the opposite of now? 

Travis Runty: Yeah. Yeah. First of all, Jeff, forever is a long time. 

Jeff DeVerter: Yes it is. 

Travis Runty: And I think the reality is historically we had a pretty Well defined, physical, almost sort of idea of what our infrastructure was, right?

The systems were known, they're well documented, they're tangible. And there wasn't a whole lot of sprawl or we'll say drift in those configuration, with the concept of multi cloud hybrid cloud, the complexity the amount of tools [00:04:00] that are available to assist our teams in a, Full we'll say stack, I think is has only increased the challenge there.

And so what I like to call a modern operations, what I mean is an opinionated point of view, a well defined point of view to deliver a full stack we'll say infrastructure. 

Simon Bennett: I guess if I build on what Travis has said and look at it, maybe from the customer perspective, rather than internally, most customers, when I talk to them, talk about modern operations being.

Doing more with less people, taking, having less people involved in the process. If I think about it in a legacy technology standpoint, people leaving university now don't want to work with legacy technologies. They prefer to work with public cloud. They think that's, that's where the action is at, but the old stuff still needs to be run and maintained.

So if you can run and maintain it with less hands on keyboards, people driving consoles and things like that. Then ultimately, as a customer, [00:05:00] from a business operations point of view, you've got something that probably the quality has gone up. You're less worried about having the people to do the work, because ultimately you've automated it and built that out of that framework.

And to the end of the day, what you've got is something that maybe is more sustainable in that environment, rather than hoping you've got people to be able to do the work. Frankly, in many cases, want to work on something else these days. So that is probably a customer perspective of. Blending old and new world together to make the two work together.

Jeff DeVerter: Simon. So the practical part of my brain starts to kick in and And so we, you're right to say that some of these older, the older applications still need to be maintained over time. Now, when we think about monitoring operations and you get to look after a lot of things in a private cloud context, and there's a ton of innovation that's happened in and around a private cloud.

But a lot of these applications are still running. Maybe on, I don't want to call it legacy hardware, but maybe not on the most current stuff. So how are [00:06:00] companies, doing like what you're saying, and that is less hands, less people doing the job more console work, more automation. How are we doing that with older applications?

Simon Bennett: So two ways, really, if you, although the applications may be older, often the operating systems have to be kept current because of compliance or regulatory frameworks, and you can run modern tools on a modern operating system. Even in the cloud, if it's Linux or Windows or even something, more niche now like Solaris or other operating systems like that, most modern tools because of heterogeneous environments can run in that environment.

So developing things like infrastructure as code is eminently possible in a private cloud context, just as much as it is in public cloud. The same disciplines apply, maybe the tool set is slightly different, but ultimately, you can achieve the same things in private cloud than you can do in public, albeit there may be a little more effort because public cloud provides some of those things out of the box that need to be developed for private cloud.

But as a private cloud provider for [00:07:00] Rackspace, you don't have to develop it once. We can develop it once for many customers. Develop and design once, deploy many times. Which is really the public cloud model, but translated into a private context. 

Jeff DeVerter: And then Justin, doesn't this create what you refer to as the villain complexity, it, nothing is cut and dry, is it?

Justin Kuss: No, never. Every day is its own adventure, but what we've talked about it in and out of it, there are many different platforms having applications. From 20 years ago, 30 years ago 25 years old. So not quite for us 30 years ago, but certainly many years ago and trying to combine that with some of the new shiny stuff, right?

And then you talk about event driven architectures, and we did a lot of public cloud things, a lot of containerization. How do we drive, uh, how we're looking at internally is really driving application modernization and infrastructure modernization to leverage. Better tools, more modern tools to really try to tamp down that complexity villain, because it is [00:08:00] ever there, right?

At any given point in time, it is ready to strike especially with the amount of tech debt that enterprises can accumulate just because there's always something else out there. 

Jeff DeVerter: There's always a shiny toy to get to go play with. Travis is laughing at me. If you guys aren't watching the video side of this, what do you think about all that Travis?

Travis Runty: Yeah I'm still reflecting on what modern operations which is ironic because it's not a modern challenge or a new challenge. It's an age old challenge, right? It's essentially establishing a scaling work workforce and workload, right? Ensuring that you're able to operate at scale.

You're able to leverage tool. You're able to automate. Automate established security best practices and the ways that we've done that historically in the ways that we do that now have evolved, right? Previously, it was scripting and, you're looking for batches and stuff like that, right now, it's looking for opportunities to containerize and have your portable workload.

So you could scale workloads, private and public, right? And it's interesting. It's modern operations, but it's not a modern challenge. It's it's a historical challenge. [00:09:00] How do you do more with less, right? And there's the ways, the tools that we have to do that have evolved to your point.

It's a, there's a lot more options now. 

Simon Bennett: If you want to add to that, the scale of most organizations, IT is far bigger than it ever was. If you think about back in the day, it was departmental computing or anything like that. Now most businesses are digital, therefore the sprawl of IT, both legacy and new, is far greater than it ever was, which means that the need to automate, the need to scale, the need to have elasticity wherever it is far greater than it ever was.

So Travis's point about operations is right. We've called it modern operations, but it was always evolving operations or whatever you want to call it. As it became much more important to almost every organization in the world. 

Justin Kuss: So Simon, if I pick up on what you're saying what I heard is the demands on IT and the reliance of businesses and the business success and outcomes on IT, that being at [00:10:00] higher stakes now is now forcing us to be either more rigorous, more disciplined, driving more formalized operations.

Things were before maybe Travis was running some shell scripts off the side of his desk to keep things running. I saw him do it. He 

Jeff DeVerter: actually was. I 

Justin Kuss: wonder who he was. He's got some Linux back there. Then now we've got other tools, other frameworks that we can codify this. We can formalize it and really govern, use to govern.

Simon Bennett: Absolutely. And if you think about it now, we've moved from where you could run batch to everything being online and anything, everything is 24 by seven. So periodically we, you take maintenance windows and shut things down to patch them and upgrade them. None of that's possible now, you need to move your workload or application or service somewhere else whilst you upgrade another area of your infrastructure.

So that always on technology is massively different in the digital world when the customers of our customers expect everything to be always on. And if it's not always on, they've often got choice to go and shop or buy from elsewhere. So it [00:11:00] becomes an imperative as much as anything else. 

Jeff DeVerter: And when the statement was made early on, I think even in around the definition of modern operations of how do you do more with less because everybody has to do that.

And you can just, you could feel some of the listeners cringing going, Oh, is my job at stake? Or, here we are just trying to cut people out so that, the, there's more profit. Hopefully in the last four or five minutes, what you're realizing is. or being reaffirmed in is the fact that there is more work for IT to do than IT could ever do.

And what this allows, if we get the blocking and tackling of operations under control and let systems and tools handle some more of that, then that allows for more opportunity for for the IT and technical talent to do well, higher order things inside of the organization. Justin you're a great person to even speak about this because you guys have gone through a massive, application, rationalization, consolidation here.

We've seen some personnel shifts as well, but really, ultimately, [00:12:00] these folks are now able to focus on work that matters at a greater degree. 

Justin Kuss: Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing from, we talk about that tech debt, that the complexity villain that drove a lot of tech debt for me and drives that for other companies, moving away from moving into a position where I can eliminate that I can now focus on value add, it's not just, how do I go source a patch for something that was 10 years old, now I'm talking to you next level, right? What are we going to deliver next quarter and not firefighting some of the things in the past?

Absolutely. 

Travis Runty: Yeah, I think that's a really accurate, assessment. The joke historically, was that I was going to be, I was going to automate myself out of the job with a basic bash script, that never happened. Yeah. I don't know anybody that have ever effectively done that, did that.

But that was absolutely the joke. I think the reality is most I. T. Organizations have a mountain of tech debt, right? And so we're able to effectively address that. Justin and team are actively addressing that. And what that does is it doesn't eliminate the work. It [00:13:00] allows them to focus on what the stakeholders want.

Not what the stakeholders need, right? From a resilient, secure, sustainable infrastructure. It's the new stuff that they want, the new competitive elements that allow them to meet the needs of their workforce or really leapfrog their competition. So by freeing up space, you're not eliminating your role.

You are creating space to create value. 

Jeff DeVerter: All right. So let's paint a picture of a, of an it shop. That's got their act together and they are doing quote unquote, modern operations. What does it look like? Justin? 

Justin Kuss: Modern operations. By the 

Jeff DeVerter: way, Justin, as you answer this question, you don't have to answer the entire question because everybody's going to get to add to what this looks like.

So just grab a couple of characteristics and pass the baton. 

Justin Kuss: So what I would key in on first is having visibility and telemetry available for your systems and I will pass it off. 

Simon Bennett: If I pick a, if I build on telemetry people actually need [00:14:00] an accurate asset register, a CMDB. How do you automate if you don't know what you're managing in the first place?

People forget that you need to know what your entire infrastructure is, and how it interrelates with each other. How does the storage relate to the compute? How does the compute relate to the network? How does that relate to maybe some middleware or a database? Ultimately, that mapping is imperative. To be able to manage that estate and keep it always running.

Jeff DeVerter: Travis. 

Travis Runty: Yeah, I think basic DevOps practices and the ability to scale and flex as appropriate. And that's on a public and private, right? But the ability to really adapt to the business needs in a very systematic or as code way is an absolutely critical element, I would say. 

Jeff DeVerter: Yeah. So should we have an accurate CMDB?

Should we have visibility into what's actually running? And should we have automated process or processes via DevOps that we can, do the work that we need to do without hands on keyboards and do it at [00:15:00] scale? That really starts to lean us towards a road of, I think one of those core characteristics of modern operations is a automation.

And so let's pick apart automation for a little bit because, we go back to that first, that one of those opening salvos, and that is do more with less. One way to do that is through automation. So Justin, back over to you. In some cases, this is automation that we are going to manually fire or instigate.

Some cases, it's automation that is a responsive automation to a condition. So pick it apart a bit. 

Justin Kuss: Yeah, a number of things, and it gets even more interesting of late when you talk about injecting AI which seems like it could be He was the 

Jeff DeVerter: first one who said it. No, 

Justin Kuss: Where's the, yeah I gotta go there because it's true, right?

And to pick something apart real quick from what Travis was talking about a few moments ago about creating a little bit of gap. What we've done internally is we created a little gap for ourselves through tected elimination. We stopped, we were able to free up some people and they [00:16:00] didn't go anywhere.

They, there wasn't like, Oh, yep. Thanks for your services. We put them back into AI. It's go forward. Run for your free, go forward. Don't, go learn, go help us, go drag us forward. And As they're doing that, we circle back now to automation where we have different forms of automation, whether it's reactive, proactive, or now I'll say AI driven is a little bit different on its own, right?

Because that's that opens up a different a different game for us. But really, what I want to think about when I, with automation is along the lines of. If we're talking about, it depends on what we're talking about in terms of what's happened or what we want to affect, but the ability to do a repeatable, predictable process over and we do that many times because we all know, anytime we have to solve a problem, it won't be the last time we ever have to solve that problem as much as we'd like to think that I've had to solve the same problem of deploying a web server hundreds and hundreds of times.

But having the repeatability helps me and helps my team scale because now I know it's no longer Simon is the only one in the world who ever knew how to do [00:17:00] that. So being able to layer in that automation, that consistent framework, whether it's infrastructure as code, shell scripting. A. I.

All of that. That's consistent approach of delivering. Automation is really what helps us scale. 

Travis Runty: Yeah. And talking about the landscape where the ecosystem of resources and tools that are available to us, historically, automation meant, knowing what happens and being able to address reactively things happen the most frequently, right?

And so you have a common challenge or a common issue, and you're able to systematically react to it. Or if you're done really well, you could proactively address it. But looking at the, say, the current landscape, we do have some really neat tools, right? Leveraging AI, we can get a lot more predictive on what we think is going to happen at a system level, right?

And so I think that is a real game changer. And from a stakeholder perspective, it creates a much, much better experience. We're not having to live through the pain or have a lot of the pain or repeat the pain. And, script the remediation, [00:18:00] we are able to address proactively before maybe it even happens, right?

What what may interrupt the system, what may create an event, what may wake someone up at 3 a. m. to have a manual interaction. And I think that the predictive element is a game changer. We've had elements of before, right? But I don't think they're as clever as they are today. 

Simon Bennett: And so while Justin and Travis have talked about incidents and remediation, the other side of automation is things like deployment and, deploying new elements.

So self service comes into that. So if you think of automation around self service to be able to deploy for developers, they can deploy new services themselves. They could automatically be shut down at weekends. So the whole thing about elastic computing or right sizing or paying for what you consume and making things consumption based is a real major benefit of automation, so that, especially in the public cloud space, where you can generally look at operations around typical things an operator might [00:19:00] do to spin something up or add more storage.

If you can make that more self service or more, automated provisioning, then you've got massive efficiencies there in terms of your, either your end user or your developer productivity. So there are productivity gains to be had. There's cost savings to be had by, maintaining only the estate at the right size you want.

So all round there's a bunch of other collateral benefits just by thinking about this holistically from really first deployment right through to retirement.

Travis Runty: Yeah, absolutely. So Jeff, I have a question for you. All right. I don't really know the answer to it, by the way, so I'm going to ask you. At what point does modern operations become platform engineering? I feel like that's the evolution, right? But and there are differences, but they begin to become blended, I think, as as You get really effective at modern operations.

Jeff DeVerter: Somebody is living in every day. Sounds like I'm going to just throw the ball right at Justin in the face. I'm 

Travis Runty: sorry, Justin. I'm sorry. 

Jeff DeVerter: There's no ducking that one. [00:20:00] 

Justin Kuss: I tried everyone. I was looking for the person. So great question. Platform engineering. Versus operations, right? So what a couple of things that Simon really keyed in on were the self service that the capabilities, right?

How do we expose capabilities that would otherwise have been centralized or confined to a special role? Maybe a network admin or systems admin number of roles. How do we combine that wisdom and experience over the course of time and expose it to a developer or to a security engineer in order to self service through a set of technology, right?

So if I can expose a platform that allows me through a conversation with an, with a chatbot. Maybe on teams or on slack to provision, get GitHub repositories and hook in CICD to leverage something with maybe GitHub actions over to, to deploy a container on any platform, any, any hyperscaler or private [00:21:00] cloud I've just codified a bunch of knowledge and capabilities that would have taken historically a lot of teams, right? You start talking about the handoffs in there between networking security. Application teams, and I've exposed that as a platform. So now I've exposed that operational aspect into the, into a capability.

And that's what I think of in platform engineering. 

Travis Runty: So Justin do you think the persona of the stakeholder or the customer is what differentiates the two? One is a system or a business stakeholder, right? For modern operations. And maybe a developer is a customer from a platform engineering perspective.

Justin Kuss: Yeah the audience, the intended consumer, absolutely. Yeah it all defines the the outcome you're looking at. So the platform really becomes another product or another. Service that you're offering. 

Simon Bennett: And then just to confuse things, your administrator is now a developer as well, because you're not going to drive keyboards.

You're going to create scripts or processes using Ansible, Terraform, or [00:22:00] whatever it may be to actually develop new ways of delivering self service or delivering reliability. So if you think about the organization now, you don't have administrators. Is everyone. in that regime in operations is now a developer of sorts and needs to learn to code, needs to learn the coding disciplines in the same way as an application developer would have done in the past.

Think about, DevOps. It's really also DevSecOps because the last thing you want to do with automation is to make sure it can't be penetrated or messed with so that automation doesn't go rogue, if you will, start deploying hundreds of servers when you can't do that. So the guardrails around development in that space become imperative.

Jeff DeVerter: And do we actually also then just build on Justin's comment from 10 minutes ago and say that you're doing, Simon, you make the point that these sysadmins are now developers, or are they really just becoming prompt engineers next? 

Simon Bennett: Maybe in the long term, they do become that. But I think we've got a little way to go [00:23:00] before that happens.

Jeff DeVerter: All right. That's a gauntlet throw down of the challenge. How far do we think we've gone? Because everything else in AI is moving pretty doggone quick. And when I think about going into Azure control panel, there's a lot in there that's AI driven at this point. 

Simon Bennett: There is, there's all sorts that's AI driven, but yeah, you're building tool chains that link one AI element with something else and in a hybrid environment, you're linking maybe multi cloud.

So what you might do in Microsoft will be different to how you might do it in Amazon, how you might do it in private cloud and so on. So ultimately, if you look at your tool chain to automate something, you're now trying to blend in multiple technologies again, which goes back to the villain of the piece, which is complexity.

Jeff DeVerter: Right back to the villain. The villain is alive and well. Hey, we I want to grab one more quick topic before we jump on. And that is one of the others, and Simon, I'm going to give the mic right back to you. One of the other benefits when you look at at modern operations [00:24:00] is the benefit that it brings in the sustainability side of things.

We have less people that we're working with, the systems are more consolidated. You help us a lot on the sustainability side, Justin, Simon maybe just, Yeah, I could pontificate on that for a second of how this is helping a company's sustainability goals. 

Simon Bennett: So there's two ways, and a quote from a customer that I heard recently, which made me chuckle a little bit and make some people despair, is, I don't have to pay robots overtime.

Jeff DeVerter: Nice. 

Simon Bennett: So think about, you think about that for a second, if you are automating certain things that, would have had a lot of people doing it more manually you've got the sustainability in terms of, as much as I hate to say it, employee headcount in certain areas, because they're working on higher value things.

You've also got the elasticity in the provision. And if you can use automation or AI to right size your IT to support the business, your IT scale is directly aligned to your business volumes, which it never used to be in the past. [00:25:00] You can directly equate that to, from a FinOps point of view, to cost. But from a sustainability ops, and it's a horrible phrase, I've just invented it means that you can look at your CO2 output based on business transactions.

And if your transactions are lower, you're actually consuming less electricity and probably generating a lot less CO2. 

Jeff DeVerter: All right, Justin, say it out loud. You typed it in our chat. Say it out loud. 

Justin Kuss: I think in some, Places I've heard that referred to as green ops. So have I was 

Simon Bennett: just riffing on it a bit because sustainability was the headline.

Jeff DeVerter: And it's something that all of us have to think about. Simon, you guys are farther ahead than than we are here in the U S on where things are on the sustainability side, specifically in and around regulations for companies. Either, either directly a company individuals or their partner or suppliers.

The chain is starting to get long and this is another way where a company can help do the right thing and improve their scores. 

Simon Bennett: More than that, there's going to be requirements to report it. So as [00:26:00] a, as a cloud service provider, our customers will expect us to tell them how much resources we're consuming on their behalf and that's becoming mandatory over time.

It's not optional anymore. It is something else that really is going to be required and in government procurement in Europe It's almost a ticket to the game You need to be able to do that as part of responding to an RFP now and certainly from an outlook in the future That is absolutely, the way this is going and you know with the SEC announcements in the US You're not far behind at all.

I think it's catching up very rapidly 

Travis Runty: Yeah. And, sustainability can mean a lot of different things, right? Green specifically, but it could also mean from a engineering or architectural point of view, right? How sustainable is the collection of tools that you've developed and leveraged and how effectively can your workforce maintain that, right?

And so we talk about the emerging technologies, the broad ecosystem of new tools that are available to our teams, but there's a [00:27:00] real art and ensuring that the stack that you define that you land on is a reasonable stack for your workforce to manage. And so I think there is a, a lot of value in simplicity. It's sometimes it actually takes a lot of expertise to be simple or elegant, right? And that's another twist on unsustainability, which can often result in green ops too, but maybe that's not the priority, right? It's more.

Justin Kuss: So Travis, if I heard you right, operations then is a consequence of architecture. 

Travis Runty: Yeah. It's done it's a, it's intentional. 

Justin Kuss: Or better for worse. Yeah. If if you are intentional about your tech stack and the way you've architected your systems with good practices and types of encapsulation.

Your operations looks maybe modern if otherwise, then maybe, what we all think of as operations from 20 years ago. 

Travis Runty: Oh, that's a great point, right? Maybe your operations teams can only be as effective or streamlined or, emerging from capabilities perspective as the [00:28:00] architecture.

allow us. Fair point. 

Jeff DeVerter: Yeah, it's a good point. Justin, you guys, we just saw a demo last week in one of our internal calls about some tooling that you guys put in place just to keep an eye on not only the applications but also the personnel that it takes to manage, maintain some of that stuff.

What was the thought process there in, in streamlining our operations? 

Justin Kuss: So really looking at going back to visibility and just gaining visibility about what's out there. Rackspace no different than any other enterprise, right? We've had people come and go and I myself am a relatively new racker compared to everyone else on the call.

I have been at Rackspace for just about two years now, and I think I'm easily the newest racker of the four of us. Knowing the context, knowing what's out there, as we dug into things and got better visibility, right? We talk about architecture being a consequence of our operations being a consequence of our operation you know what I'm getting at not enough caffeine in the world today.

What we found and what we see is probably not dissimilar from anywhere else I've [00:29:00] been in that. We have multiple tool chains that accomplish similar things. So there's a lot of overlap, a lot of redundancy the complexity in that the ability to operate those various siloed systems at scale is diminishing, right?

We had a lot of. Pain points. So standardizing those tools, driving a stronger consistency in our architecture thread is really starting to pay off in terms of how we've been able to simplify our architecture. 

Jeff DeVerter: All right. Modern operations is an evolution of operations over time. It's just the things we're doing now is what makes it modern.

But let's talk about what's going on in the news. I asked you guys to each bring, either an article or something new that's going on that that Somebody maybe if it's released that we want to tell the world about. So Justin, I'll just leave the mic with you for a second.

Justin Kuss: Sure. So reading the other day a couple of weeks ago, actually a Forbes article actually about I think it's by, I think it was the CEO of big Panda so a little bit of a sales, a little bit of an ad for it. But really the mindset of what was [00:30:00] being driven off of that is really what caught my attention in terms of.

The evolution of what's next for operations for I. T. Operations and really got into, of course, to the A. I. Elements of it and how we get into A. I. Ops. But some of the things that stood out to me one from the research that they did, they claimed the average I. T. Outage and you'd have to go through a lot of math to get to this, but It was about 13, 000 per minute of a system being out.

That's going to vary into, you go into all the variances. But just finally having a number just to be contextualized at 13, 000 per minute and talking about now the speed of what you have to respond. We talk about, we talked about that from Simon many minutes ago about the complexity and the reliance of it as a.

As a business partner now, right? And how we know not everything has that same penalty, but giving really the target, if you will, to me, I took it as the, that, that could be what good looks like next, right? And how do we get there for the [00:31:00] things that are appropriate to make the investment to get there?

Jeff DeVerter: All right, Travis, what's what's catching your eye in the world? 

Travis Runty: Yeah. There's a article actually on devops. com which may be a bit biased, but what was interesting is it reinforced what we hear, what I hear and what I see from our customers. And it's the increasing appetite to embrace, to want to leverage, to want to be more intentional about a hybrid multi cloud strategy.

It's specifically notes that cloud adoption is projected to top over a trillion dollars. In 2024. Which is quite a bit but it also goes on to say how, folks are being more intentional about the workloads that they're leveraging, but they want to make sure that the solutions that they implement and design are multi cloud natively.

That's a hard thing to do. Historically. It's easy to. It's hard to span workloads over multiple clouds, but the increasing appetite of that and the increasing platforms that enable that, [00:32:00] I think we'll have an absolute competitive advantage. And so this article seems to reinforce that as well.

Jeff DeVerter: Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. I don't think anybody wants just a monocloud environment and nobody wants to do things the old way. Simon, what's catching your eye? 

Simon Bennett: For me as a recent article, I think that Forrester produced, Talking about the mistrust of AI and the mistrust of modern operations.

That's quite an interesting discussion point about, how much do you trust AI to run your organization right now? How do you put the guardrails around it? And I think it's causing a lot of debate about how that might work. And the Forrester note and paper covering that I think is quite an interesting read and quite thought provoking.

I think a lot of it, really, the message is don't be glib about it. If you're going to go in, it needs the structure, it needs the discipline. And you get the rewards if you do that and build from a good foundation. If you go in and rush to deliver something, it, the phrase, act in haste and repent at leisure, I think then comes to mind in terms of running these things.

Yeah, I think caution is [00:33:00] not necessarily the right word. But you think about the discipline you need for any software engineering or anything like that. I think you need to apply it even when you're learning and playing with new technology, as soon as you want to deploy it out in the wild. 

Jeff DeVerter: And Simon, it starts with having an understanding of what your applications are too, doesn't it?

Simon Bennett: Oh, absolutely. We 

Jeff DeVerter: got to go right back to the very beginning. And that's why, joke when we talk about bringing up the AI word. But the reality is everybody has a goal to do that stuff, but there is so much, you could call it deck. Tech debt, you could, the work we should have done, the old stuff the best catalyst that I've seen in my career to go and get that stuff done and cleaned up has been the pursuit of AI, whether that's a customer facing bot or whether that is, tooling to help make sure the applications are running as efficiently patching and, code being deployed.

So I think there's nothing but opportunity, but that opportunity comes at the cost of making sure you're. Your foundation is solid.[00:34:00] 

All right, folks, episode number two of the CTO round table. Thank you so much for being a part of of this today, gentlemen. Thank you for joining in. Always great to have a chat with you and learn from you and folks. We'll be back with another episode of the CTO round table very shortly. We're recording the next one next week.

All right. Bye [00:35:00] [00:36:00] [00:37:00] [00:38:00] [00:39:00] [00:40:00] [00:41:00] [00:42:00] [00:43:00] [00:44:00] [00:45:00] [00:46:00] [00:47:00] [00:48:00] [00:49:00] [00:50:00] [00:51:00] [00:52:00] [00:53:00] [00:54:00] everybody.