Latest / Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community) / Open Source and Fast Decision Making // Rob Hirschfeld // #164
Transcript
- 0:00I am Rob Hirschfeld, CEO, cofounder of Racken, and I like
- 0:06my coffee black and wheat, much to my wife's chagrin.
- 0:10She thinks I am weak nature because of it.
- 0:13Like, I like weak black coffee. Hello, Hello everyone.
- 0:18Welcome back to the Mill OPS Community Podcast.
- 0:21Today I am flying solo talking to my man Rob Hirschfeld.
- 0:27He is the CEO and cofounder of Rackin.
- 0:30And boy oh boy was this conversation.
- 0:34Awesome. Why is that, you say?
- 0:37Well, Rob has the DevOps mentality baked into his blood.
- 0:42He's been doing this for so many years.
- 0:45I don't even think he realises how much of A fundamental piece
- 0:50he is and has been for the DevOps movement.
- 0:54I mean, the guy invented the cloud.
- 0:59Can we just get that out of the way real fast?
- 1:02Do you hear him talk about it? I asked him all about that rainy
- 1:06day when he created. The cloud and what he thinks of
- 1:09it now and how he feels like. It's been done justice.
- 1:14By Amazon, I mean, he freely admitted that he did not know
- 1:19how to monetize it. He did not realise what he had
- 1:22on his hands when it was created.
- 1:25And Amazon stepped in and they did know what they had and they
- 1:28were able to make a pretty penny off of it.
- 1:30But. That is not to say that Rob did
- 1:34not and still has not been. Killing it when it comes to
- 1:39products after inventing the cloud.
- 1:42Right now he is the CEO of Rackin as I mentioned, and they
- 1:46are making DevOps so much easier.
- 1:50The user experience for the DevOps engineer is incredible
- 1:55and he breaks that down in this conversation.
- 1:59He also said something I think for me as far as my key takeaway
- 2:04if I leave you with anything here, he harped.
- 2:08On the idea of exercising your code.
- 2:12And that stuck with me. So I'm not going to spoil
- 2:17anything or explain what it means because I think he does a
- 2:20much better job and I probably won't be able to do it any
- 2:23justice. But listen out for when he
- 2:26mentions exercise your code and without further ado, let's just
- 2:31jump into this conversation with Rob.
- 2:33All right, hope you all enjoy, and if you like the ML OPS
- 2:38Community podcast, why not subscribe or leave us a review?
- 2:43Give us some feedback. But you know what can be the
- 2:46highest leveraged action that you can take?
- 2:49That would be if you send this to one friend that you think
- 2:52would also enjoy it. So bring in the DevOps
- 2:56fundamentals into the ML OPS mentality.
- 3:10I want to talk first about this stat that I saw, which is you
- 3:16have copywritten the term the cloud or you came up with that
- 3:21term. What is this?
- 3:22About. Dave McCrory and I are patent
- 3:25patented the cloud. That is nuts.
- 3:27So you were the first one to call it the cloud.
- 3:31We were, yeah. Tell me that story.
- 3:33What and how? Like when was that and how did
- 3:38it happen? Ohh boy.
- 3:40That is a great story in in 1999, Dave, Dave McCrory and I.
- 3:45And if you don't need Dave Mccrary, Dave McCreary is famous
- 3:48for work he did actually when he and I were reunited at Dell
- 3:52around Data Gravity. So Data he's, he's the data
- 3:55Gravity guru. Wow.
- 3:57And so he and I have been inventing together since 1999.
- 4:01We formed a company. To do application service
- 4:06providers or ASPs. It's early days of the web.
- 4:10I had been doing consulting where I was writing applications
- 4:13and delivering them into people's offices and things like
- 4:17that. It was hugely painful and so I
- 4:20was asking how do I make it so that I can Web API an
- 4:23application and make it more available.
- 4:26Something that people still were doing, hardly doing at that
- 4:29point, and Dave had come in doing Citrix work, which was
- 4:34remote desktop. The application sharing and
- 4:37things like that. And we got together and started
- 4:40and built this startup where we would help companies take
- 4:44software that they had running on desktops and turning it into
- 4:48a cloud offering. Although it wasn't called cloud
- 4:50at the time, it was just an Internet offering, right.
- 4:54And what happened is so we got funding on that model 1999 was
- 4:58crazy up until there's a crash. And so we we had, we had an
- 5:03interesting ride through this story through this.
- 5:06But in order to do the work. We had to create a complete
- 5:12application stack for each server for each customer.
- 5:16So we would have a customer come in, they didn't know if they
- 5:18could sell anything or not, but we would put 5 servers together
- 5:22so that they could do their dev process to see if they could
- 5:26actually build a Citrix enabled application.
- 5:28We needed a SQL Server, we needed all this stuff and so we
- 5:33were. This was the pizza box service
- 5:34that was one U servers had just come out and we were getting
- 5:38stacks of those servers and we were.
- 5:40Buying like $30,000 worth of gear for each customer.
- 5:43It was insane. Wow.
- 5:44And so we could not grow the business because we had.
- 5:49This need for this need for so much hardware, Yeah, Dave took
- 5:54VMware the desktop version. And ran a prototype where he
- 6:00built that whole 5 server stack on running on a desktop.
- 6:04And so this is really cool, we're going to do that and we've
- 6:06tried to install on servers that didn't work.
- 6:09We call it VMware, and VMware said yeah, we have this beta of
- 6:14this thing called ESX. Why don't you try and get it
- 6:17working? We were the first company to get
- 6:20SX working anywhere outside of VM's, VMware Labs, anywhere.
- 6:25And so we we, we virtualized all of those functions onto a single
- 6:29server. We were super excited and things
- 6:31were things were pretty good, right.
- 6:32That was that was the beginning of like OK, this is saving us
- 6:35costs. But we had enough servers that
- 6:38we were like managing ESX on five or six servers, right?
- 6:43There was no shared storage. There was no Sans were
- 6:46ridiculously expensive. There wasn't even this was, this
- 6:49was the very early days of Net app.
- 6:51There wasn't even good shared storage, shared block storage.
- 6:56And just to set the scene because it's important, right,
- 6:58when you 1999 inventing the cloud, yeah, we went to, yeah,
- 7:03we went to VM Ware's headquarters and we said this is
- 7:05really cool, We love this software, but it's sort of hard
- 7:08for us to manage. Is it OK for us to write some
- 7:11management software? And we talked to literally to
- 7:15Diane Greene, who was CEO for a long time.
- 7:17But she said, yeah, we're just worried about making this server
- 7:21better. We we're not so worried about
- 7:23managing it yet. And we said no, no problem.
- 7:26We, we sense a business opportunity and we came back
- 7:29from that meeting and started writing patents about how to
- 7:34manage and provide an API which is really what that pattern is
- 7:37about for infrastructure managed by another company.
- 7:44So it was all about multi machine virtual management in
- 7:48that system. And then we wrote I think 7 or 8
- 7:50patents down around those concepts, around managing VMS,
- 7:54around globally distributing them, all sorts of cool.
- 7:57Things that one got, that one got granted.
- 7:58It's almost been 20. It's the parents about to
- 8:02expire. Dave and I are gonna have a
- 8:03party when that patent expires. It's owned by Dell.
- 8:07Tried to get them to donate it to the Open Stack Foundation
- 8:09back in the day. Nobody's anybody enforces it.
- 8:12Right? The patent, the way these
- 8:14patents work. A tonne of people have referred
- 8:15to it. But yeah, my wife likes to tease
- 8:18me. She's like, yeah, he invented
- 8:19the cloud. And I don't know if it's a story
- 8:21of valour or shame because at the same time Amazon showed up.
- 8:26Yeah, 7-8 years later with the right business model for it.
- 8:30We turned it into a dev test system and never never never
- 8:34figured out how to monetize it, or figured out too late how to
- 8:37monetize it. So one thing that is fascinating
- 8:40to me is that you've seen this 25 years of cloud.
- 8:45What has changed and what's improved?
- 8:48What is still around for better, for worse?
- 8:54Less has changed the people than people think.
- 8:58Want to believe? They they feel like a lots
- 9:00changed but they're they're the there's things that are very
- 9:04persistent in this one is the confusion of the business model
- 9:08and the technology. Right.
- 9:12So like the thing that Dave and I were doing at the time was
- 9:15pretty novel, which was you would rent infrastructure, rent
- 9:19infrastructure as a service that has gotten so commingled with
- 9:23cloud, which I usually think of as API driven infrastructure or
- 9:27more elastic dynamic infrastructure.
- 9:29And I think one of the things that has was less confusing at
- 9:34the beginning is, is actually even more confusing now as
- 9:37commingling this idea of the business model and the
- 9:39technology. And so that that definitely has
- 9:42been there the behind the scenes stuff actually hasn't improved
- 9:46that much. I I we actually like to talk
- 9:48about about how little we've really improved the operations
- 9:52and the work of operations in this.
- 9:54It's still like we were joking in 99 IBM was doing all this
- 9:58work on data centre autonomics right self healing all that and
- 10:02it's we haven't really made a lot of progress with that that
- 10:04stuff it's keep adding new services and micro services and
- 10:09all of those little services are just.
- 10:11The complexity of that environment has really exploded
- 10:15in ways that people. Complain about that, they don't
- 10:19know how to, how to chase. And the same is true.
- 10:22We've made these very, very narrow businesses back in the
- 10:25day you you really started sort of a bigger footprint of it.
- 10:30You assumed you were going to have a bigger footprint of a
- 10:32business to make this stuff work.
- 10:33And now with some of the SAS offerings, you can start in a
- 10:36very narrow targeted way for a business, which is amazing.
- 10:40But we end up with some these, these very, very small use cases
- 10:44that become standalone businesses that actually is not
- 10:48that that has part of this cloud generation that's very
- 10:51different. And what we saw.
- 10:54Is that? Causing more headaches because
- 10:57you mentioned the microservices adding more complexity like what
- 11:01are the? Can you give us some examples of
- 11:03that and how you feel that potentially is has its pros and
- 11:07cons I imagine and what those pros and cons are.
- 11:11Yeah, it's it's sad to me cause Rakan is a software provider.
- 11:14We we sell software to people. They run that software.
- 11:17The level of control in that and the disciplines necessary to
- 11:21distribute updates and things like that are essential to our
- 11:25business, which is about automation.
- 11:27But if you look at the services that you're consuming as a
- 11:31business, right, it feels like every week I add a new service
- 11:36into the mix and that service is generally not integrated to
- 11:41anything else. And so.
- 11:44I I now have my day spread through using a tonne of apps.
- 11:50I have sensitive information spread across a tonne of apps,
- 11:53right. I've been playing with GPT
- 11:55ChatGPT a lot. That's like I'm cutting pasting
- 11:59that everywhere, which is OK, I don't want it scanning my
- 12:02systems, but right, the next generation of this, they're
- 12:05going to be clawing through my slack.
- 12:07They're going to be running through my git repos, right?
- 12:09The number of times you turn around and say, oh, I want a
- 12:12security scanner. For Go, I'm going to go to the
- 12:17company that writes security scanners for Go and then give
- 12:19them access without restrictions to all of my git repos and maybe
- 12:24my my my G drive for right? And so now I have a company that
- 12:29has access. For a very narrow reason into
- 12:33all of my information and that trend line should be terrifying
- 12:38people. Hmm.
- 12:39And we're very used to it. Frog boiling and water used to
- 12:43it, where we're potentially vulnerable to some startup
- 12:47smallest security violation or going out a bit.
- 12:50But it's really frustrating. Like if I wanted to pull slack
- 12:54back in and run it myself, I'd have to switch to matter most,
- 12:57but even matter most to really now focused on hosting we've
- 13:00just given up on. People running their own stuff.
- 13:05Mm-hmm. And.
- 13:08Man, that is fascinating. I 100% agree with you on that,
- 13:13that a lot of these times you get access to way more than.
- 13:18It's like you bite off more than you can chew in a way, because
- 13:21you give access for one thing. Like you were talking about this
- 13:25Go example, but you give access to the whole You let someone in
- 13:30the mansion when really they only needed to be in the
- 13:33courtyard. And so there is a I feel like
- 13:37you probably have a very strong opinion about.
- 13:41The better way of doing this and what what we should be doing
- 13:46instead and how to provision and how to make sure that things are
- 13:49secure and how to make sure that the data and the information is
- 13:55only given when it needs to be given and to it who it needs to
- 14:00be given to. Ohh boy I I wish I actually had
- 14:03answers to that problem. It's ohh boy we we keep.
- 14:11We keep sort of bypassing the question of security and access
- 14:15and controls because it's so hard, The UX is so hard for
- 14:20people to get right. And it's definitely something
- 14:23that the industry hasn't moved towards standards on.
- 14:28We we're starting to see a little bit like in the
- 14:30Kubernetes space around like some ingress controllers and
- 14:34some some spaces like that, but even that's really not helping
- 14:38us create standards around this. Even like single sign on is not
- 14:44particularly robustly supported by all apps or if it does it's
- 14:48using single sign on providers that are mining my information
- 14:53for habits and behaviours. It's it's a little bit of a
- 14:57dystopia compared to. To what we were hoping.
- 15:01Like when we did the startup, it was called Pro Tear.
- 15:03I never, I don't think I ever named it back in the day.
- 15:06Part of the idea was that you could put a couple of
- 15:08applications together but still have shared storage and things
- 15:11like that and we've. Every, every.
- 15:15App. And this is actually a big
- 15:17problem in operations tooling. We keep designing stuff that's
- 15:21designed to have its own data store, its own source of truth,
- 15:24and you're not designing things that are good at sharing
- 15:27information. And that to me, even more than
- 15:30security piece, which I think is important, is really, really the
- 15:35starting point of the problem is you have to have things that
- 15:39expect not to be the sole source of truth in an environment.
- 15:44But we keep, we keep doing that to ourselves.
- 15:46Isn't it kind of like the we could draw a parallel here with
- 15:50the ads and what you see on Facebook or any social media
- 15:55platform. And it's because they've had the
- 15:57cookies that have been following you around the Internet.
- 15:59And so you are now they have this picture of who you are and
- 16:05they have all of this data about you and so then they can better
- 16:08serve you ads. I look at it like, ohh, well, if
- 16:11we want the apps that we're using to better perform in our
- 16:16ecosystem. On all of our data, then they
- 16:18have to have that access to all of the data.
- 16:22A lot of times the people who are benefiting from that data
- 16:25are that's their monetization strategy, is that data?
- 16:29And we have to we've we've gotten used to not doing this.
- 16:32So there's a barrier here. But you know the idea that
- 16:35you're going to pay for the service that you're using or pay
- 16:40to run the software to increase your control and privacy on
- 16:43that. The inconvenience of that is
- 16:46high and people, the consequence of not doing it is pretty low.
- 16:52Right, so you were making a comment about my my camera
- 16:55stream from my background, right?
- 16:57That I had to hunt around for a device that had the option to
- 17:01locally let me retrieve the stream inside of my own land.
- 17:06Most of the cameras that you get, and they're much cheaper,
- 17:10which is stunning, actually will only send the video out to their
- 17:15service and you can only retrieve the video from the
- 17:18their their Internet site. So you can't connect to the
- 17:22camera directly at all. That has become a premium
- 17:25feature. And so we we have to figure out
- 17:30as an industry. How to make it easier?
- 17:34Because I don't think this is just the consumers.
- 17:35I think this is where the integration comes in, How to
- 17:38make it easier to keep our users in control or operators in
- 17:43control, keep our data local. But that might mean slowing
- 17:47down, it might mean agreeing to protocols, it might mean saying,
- 17:51oh, I'm not the sort, I'm not the source of truth, but if you
- 17:53were going to be like, ohh, that sounds great, Rob, I want to
- 17:56integrate into a control protocol.
- 18:00There's Which one of the six are you gonna pick?
- 18:02Yeah, and I can. I can give you an example out of
- 18:04the OPS space if it's if it's helpful.
- 18:06Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
- 18:07Please. Do so, Hugh, a couple of years
- 18:09ago. HP, did you know the Yeomans
- 18:12work? I have to give them some credit
- 18:13for establishing this protocol called Redfish.
- 18:16No, if you're familiar with it. If you're familiar with bare
- 18:19metal, it is. It is a protocol that's used for
- 18:23out of band management on servers.
- 18:26Before that there was something called IPMI, which was very old,
- 18:31incredibly fragmented. And then there were each vendor
- 18:34had their own. And so HP said I'm going to
- 18:37consolidate, we're going to, we're going to open source this
- 18:41protocol, we're going to build a consortium of vendors and we're
- 18:43going to standardise on redfish trumpets sounded angels, angels
- 18:47came down, blessed the servers, but the reality is.
- 18:53Now you have another standard. You have you.
- 18:56Well, the problem is not only do you have one standard, every
- 18:59vendor to make it work has their own variation on that standard.
- 19:04And so you went from N standards to 2N standards.
- 19:09And so it it helped a little. Because there's sort of some
- 19:14there. There's definitely a
- 19:15commonality, but it's not enough to make it where you can plug in
- 19:19a Dell server instead of an HP server and have your management
- 19:22tooling just work. And so that's a real deficit in
- 19:27how all those pieces fit together.
- 19:29And then the other thing that people forget, that's very real
- 19:32in this is time is actually a problem because the protocols
- 19:37improve over time. And what ends up happening is
- 19:41you don't. You don't just get to say, am I
- 19:42using redfish? This is true of every protocol,
- 19:45but it's not just Am I using redfish.
- 19:47You have to be like, oh, am I using redfish before they fix
- 19:50the bug in how the security protocols interact with the
- 19:54server, or after? And of my fleet of servers,
- 19:58which ones are patched or not? So when you're dealing with
- 20:01this, and This is why it's more work and we sort of just throw
- 20:05up our hands and say, I'm going to let the SAS provider do that,
- 20:08You have to deal with which protocol am I using, which
- 20:12version of that protocol. You have to deal with systems
- 20:14that are patched or not patched. There's a lot of work.
- 20:18It's valuable work, but it's work.
- 20:21Well, that is something that I wanted to get into you with get
- 20:24into with you about the impact of using open source.
- 20:31And having that capability to go and know everything about what
- 20:37you're doing and roll your own in a way versus.
- 20:42The using a SAS provider and being able to go fast as you
- 20:48were mentioning, and being able to then not necessarily have to
- 20:54think about all of these bells and whistles and knobs that you
- 20:58have to turn or patches that you have to be updated on.
- 21:01And so you inevitably have thought a lot about these
- 21:05trade-offs over the years. How do you look at that these
- 21:09days? There's there, vendored open.
- 21:16Open Source which I actually differentiate and because open
- 21:19source itself becomes a layered piece and then A and even as has
- 21:24the open open backed and and and non open backed.
- 21:27Although the end of the day I think if you're using a SAS it's
- 21:31very you're you're you're not really using open source
- 21:33technology that might that people might get upset when I
- 21:36say that but it's it's the the person the operational expertise
- 21:41to run software is its own distinct thing and no SAS.
- 21:46Provider I've seen opens and I'm sure there's an example.
- 21:51But by and large, they don't tell you what they're doing,
- 21:53certainly not like the hyperscalers.
- 21:55That is incredibly secret sauce on how that works.
- 21:59So the what what I see in that is that.
- 22:06The effort to maintain your own stuff.
- 22:10Track the versions, track the dependencies, patch the
- 22:13operating systems right. All of that that you have to do.
- 22:18We have not done a good job as an industry helping people do
- 22:22that in a repeatable way. So the the this is actually the
- 22:25travesty that started Rack end. If you want to indulge you with
- 22:28the story, yeah please do about this.
- 22:31So we started before we started Rack and the team was at Dell in
- 22:35the early open Stack and Hadoop days.
- 22:38And we built the first open stack installer, something
- 22:41called Crowbar. And we were it was beautiful.
- 22:45You could you could basically plug in a server and then build
- 22:48an entire cluster automatically. It was literally just did all
- 22:52the work for you. And we would take that to a
- 22:56customer site. And we would ship a rack of
- 22:59servers, they would plug it in and they would build open stack
- 23:02or Hadoop on that stack of servers.
- 23:05Took about an hour and it was lovely.
- 23:09And but what would happen is every time we went, we would
- 23:12learn things from that experience.
- 23:14We'd improved the software, we'd fix it.
- 23:16We'd come back to the office, we'd fix things, we'd add
- 23:19capabilities, the versions would change, we'd update all that
- 23:23stuff, and we'd go to the next site, improve the experience.
- 23:26And by the time we got through like ten of those, we were
- 23:29really good and fast about building that whole experience
- 23:32and making it go. I will tell you, never worked
- 23:34out-of-the-box. Because each site.
- 23:38Has is different. We show up in people like I I
- 23:40thought I had this, but I really have that.
- 23:42Can you reset? But that is normal.
- 23:45Yeah. But that wasn't a travesty.
- 23:47We got really good at showing up, getting it done.
- 23:50And then we actually had a benchmark where our customers,
- 23:53the benchmark of success was when you were flying home and
- 23:56the customer had done the reset tune and reset themselves while
- 24:00you're on the way home. Nice.
- 24:02So that was it was, it was amazing.
- 24:04But. When we got to that 11th.
- 24:08Install, we said. Alright, you know what?
- 24:10We really have learned a lot. Let's improve installs 1 to 10.
- 24:14We had no way to fix anything that we've done before.
- 24:20Every site, even though we'd use a completely automated process,
- 24:24ended up as unique, which is not software.
- 24:28So when we look at this problem, if you're a software provider,
- 24:32you're writing a product. You want you must have all of
- 24:36your customers able to migrate together so you can support
- 24:40them. Otherwise you're just making a
- 24:42faster consulting practise which is not solving this problem.
- 24:46Right now. Each person is still an island.
- 24:49What what we set out to fix in this was how do you make it so
- 24:54automation can be reused? So that if I give you a new
- 24:58version of my open stack install, you can go back to the
- 25:02site you already installed and put that in and then rerun that
- 25:05patch, right? So from an engineering
- 25:07perspective, I can actually build something and have people
- 25:09keep reusing it. I can have a community of people
- 25:12actually collaborating and helping each other.
- 25:15And this, to your question, is, what's missing, right?
- 25:18If we go back to my camera, right?
- 25:20It would be really cool if I could download, Hey, I want to
- 25:23store my videos locally. Here's a standard way to do it
- 25:26and run that software and make it work.
- 25:28And be confident that I could buy this gear and buy this
- 25:31camera and install this software and have it go, and then be able
- 25:35to hit a button and upgrade and patch all that stuff.
- 25:38There's not a lot of incentives in the market at the moment that
- 25:41make it easy to do that. We're living standards that make
- 25:45it easier right there. There's a lot of barriers to it.
- 25:49The benefits of being able to do that yourself and have that type
- 25:51of autonomy is really high, isn't it?
- 25:54Then you're not paying somebody yet another subscription fee to
- 25:59service whatever camera thing or not paying them a service fee
- 26:04and assuming that they've gotten the rights to watch all your
- 26:07videos. I neither.
- 26:10Neither scenario is particularly attractive to me.
- 26:14Well, you do talk. I mean in this story that you
- 26:18lay out, you talk about the automation and one through 10
- 26:22not being automatable, that word that I'm looking for.
- 26:27It's not it's not automatable, it's it's the.
- 26:31And ohh, there's there's a a thing I I'd like to talk about
- 26:34about the way to combat complexity is to exercise the
- 26:38systems that you have. And what what happens is that
- 26:41the the challenge here is that you attend people, 11 people all
- 26:45using Open Stack successfully and they're all pretty happy,
- 26:48but none of them actually can participate as a community.
- 26:52In improvements in the future and the the the complexity
- 26:56piece, what I mean when I talk about the the antidote for
- 26:59complexity is exercise. Is.
- 27:02I've I've got these ten people. They're all slightly different,
- 27:04but they're using 99% the same automation if I find a bug on
- 27:09one site. The chances are they all have
- 27:12the buck. So I have reduced the complexity
- 27:16of the whole system by exercising, by having 10 people
- 27:19exercising the code instead of 1 by 1.
- 27:22But what I'm missing, and this is actually what we set out to
- 27:25fix at rack end, is I want to be able to say well if if if one is
- 27:30gets the benefit of exercising, then I want to be able to repeat
- 27:33that across all of the other customers.
- 27:35They need to be able to take that fix.
- 27:38And then what happens is the community gets bigger and bigger
- 27:41everybody's. Experience everybody.
- 27:43Finding those edge cases and testing things creates a mutual
- 27:47benefit. Yeah, yeah.
- 27:49But that doesn't happen by accident.
- 27:51It's actually something you have to invest in.
- 27:54But why is that not happening? I didn't understand that.
- 27:57It doesn't happen because we, especially with all these SAS
- 28:02right right now, the cloud disincentives that from
- 28:04happening. They they don't want you to do
- 28:06it. They they want you to let them
- 28:09take the expertise and do that work it it doesn't happen
- 28:13because it requires more effort. For the individuals to stay on a
- 28:19system or participate in a system that they can share.
- 28:24Right, right Now when people build systems they have a
- 28:26tendency to build the automation they need and the it's they're
- 28:30like this happens all the time. So if you download chefs,
- 28:33answerable script or something like that you're like, this is
- 28:35really cool, but it has all this extra logic that I don't need
- 28:38for my environment and you start ripping it out because it's it's
- 28:41opaque complexity. And so you to make it easier for
- 28:46you to maintain that playbook. You take out all of the stuff
- 28:52that people have added for other environments that aren't yours
- 28:55or defence mechanisms that you're not going to hit.
- 28:57You don't keep it in because there's really no incentive for
- 29:00you to be like, well, I'm going to take out, I'm only in Amazon
- 29:05and I'm going to take out the Google and Azure stuff because I
- 29:08don't, I can't support it and I'm not planning to take the
- 29:12upgrades now. If you are planning to take the
- 29:14upgrades, those other cloud profiles are actually valuable
- 29:18because they mean that. You're now exercising that
- 29:21playbook on on 3 clouds and not just one.
- 29:26But we don't look at the systems as an operator.
- 29:30We don't typically look at. Those added pieces as beneficial
- 29:36to us if we're not actively using them?
- 29:40Right. Does that, does that help them
- 29:42when we build an infrastructure pipeline?
- 29:45The pipeline does a whole bunch of work that most people don't
- 29:49care about. Hey, this is Mike Delbalso,
- 29:53Cofounder and CEO of Techkon. ML OPS Community is the best way
- 29:58to stay in the loop on the latest ML OPS news and best
- 30:01practises. It's also a great way to connect
- 30:03with experts and get support from an amazingly helpful
- 30:06community. Subscribe and They're trying to
- 30:16solve their very narrow part of that pipeline.
- 30:19They get the benefit of the of the whole pipeline working.
- 30:22But most of the time this is the behaviour that we have to
- 30:26overcome. People, if you hit code that
- 30:29doesn't do what it is, if you're like, well, I don't understand
- 30:32why that code is doing it. I'm just going to rip that out.
- 30:35You used to have this fight internally in the team too, by
- 30:37the way. I have a story about this, might
- 30:40illustrate it. Boy, we had built these, these
- 30:43beautiful pipelines for bare metal hardware.
- 30:45We do a tonne of bare metal hardware.
- 30:47And so my cofounder, our CTO had this pipeline that literally you
- 30:52plug in servers and it discovers inventories, qualifies, updates,
- 30:56patches, installs the OS, installs the application.
- 30:59It just this beautiful, completely automated pipelines.
- 31:04And I took it because I'm guilty of this too.
- 31:07And I said, you know, that that's really cool, Greg.
- 31:09But I just need to do the cloud. And in the cloud systems I get
- 31:13the server, all that stuff is already done.
- 31:15I just want to skip to the end of the pipeline.
- 31:18And so I took his pipeline, I copied it, cut out all the bits
- 31:22that were for bare metal and was running it.
- 31:26And I'm like, look, this is great.
- 31:27Look how fast it is. And I mean he just, he
- 31:29literally, I could hear his forehead hit the desk and he's
- 31:33like, Rob, you missed, you missed it.
- 31:35To leave all that stuff in, I'm like, yeah, but some of it
- 31:37doesn't work. The bio stuff doesn't work when
- 31:39you're on the cloud. And he's like, then fix that.
- 31:41It doesn't work. The.
- 31:43Because what what happens is, and this is the way it is today,
- 31:48when you run that, it's exercise when you run the whole pipeline
- 31:52in every environment. That means that every time I run
- 31:56the cloud pieces, I'm actually exercising and able to move that
- 32:02automation into any environment. So now if I run a whole bunch of
- 32:06stuff in the cloud and somebody calls up and says, yeah, this is
- 32:08really cool, can you also run it in bare metal?
- 32:11I'm like, well, of course you can.
- 32:12That pipeline is exercised. In the cloud, in virtual
- 32:16machines and on bare metal. And so now I've gotten the
- 32:19benefit of the operational Right practise and the exercise across
- 32:25the whole spectrum because I fixed the place where it was
- 32:29failing to apply BIOS to a VM. Silly, but instead of removing
- 32:33it, I fixed that behaviour so I could keep the exercise in the
- 32:38system. As opposed to looking at it.
- 32:42So instead of looking at it as operational bloat.
- 32:47And thinking this is something that we're not going to need
- 32:50ever. So I'm going to get rid of it
- 32:52because it's not. It doesn't have anything to do
- 32:55with me. It's not my monkeys, not my
- 32:57circus. I'm gonna just get that out of
- 33:00my life so I don't have to deal with the headache of it not
- 33:03working and getting errors every time I want to do something.
- 33:07You're saying change the frame of mind because.
- 33:12Who knows what the future holds and you want to be able to
- 33:16change on the drop of a dime? Correct when as you exercise
- 33:22that code, as you participate in the community.
- 33:25Even though you're not actively thinking you're participating in
- 33:27the community, the fact that you're using something that is
- 33:31versioned and updatable, right, those things all support this
- 33:36reuse and accelerative effect that is much more powerful.
- 33:41And this is the thing I think a lot of us, I've watched this
- 33:43because some people think the antidote to complexity is, is
- 33:46simplicity, is removing items, which is what we see all the
- 33:51time. And I hear this, it's like,
- 33:53well, we standardise our data centres on Dell because.
- 33:56We're just going to be a single vendor and it's simpler for us
- 33:58to build our tooling and I'm like that works until Dell has a
- 34:02new version that breaks the old stuff because that happens or
- 34:05you acquire somebody and they switch or pandemic hits and I
- 34:09can't acquire servers anymore from that vendor and I have to
- 34:11switch, right. It's just and it's just bad
- 34:14business or you're for no technical reason except that
- 34:17you're procurement people say I've got a good deal, right?
- 34:20Or your your CEO played golf with the Cisco vendor and so all
- 34:24of those things are real. What we've we've gotten used to
- 34:28is just tearing out stuff that we we don't really we don't
- 34:31think is there and it's it's just a it's a it's across the
- 34:34industry we have the same problem right There's a joke
- 34:36about legacy code and people like what's another name for
- 34:41legacy code. It's like proven, tested,
- 34:44resilient. It's it's.
- 34:47A lot of stuff in in code is there because somebody learned a
- 34:51lesson and had to put in protections.
- 34:55And we just need to reframe it from that perspective.
- 34:57Doesn't mean I'm not in favour of refactoring or streamlining
- 35:00when you can. But there's a lot of cases where
- 35:03we. Don't look at the system effect
- 35:06when we do that. Well, there is something that I
- 35:09think you mentioned beforehand about automating infrastructure
- 35:13inefficiently and it feels like this what we're talking about
- 35:16kind of plays into that and I also would love to look at it
- 35:19through the lens of. The machine learning engineer
- 35:24and who's building with machine learning use cases and
- 35:27potentially building on top of the data foundations that the
- 35:31company has and how you see that when it comes to these
- 35:35automations and especially like automating code, automating
- 35:39infrastructure and doing it inefficiently as opposed to
- 35:43things that you've seen work. Ohh my goodness.
- 35:47Especially for for ML workloads. I I think that we because
- 35:54because they tend to be big, they tend to be ones that have a
- 35:57fair bit of complexity in the infrastructure and there's a
- 36:00high desire to have very rigorous repeatability across
- 36:05that fleet. But what that does is it
- 36:09actually undermines some of the counterintuitive pieces and I'll
- 36:14explain that for this. So one of the big barriers I hit
- 36:18when we started talking about immutability.
- 36:21And one of our, our, my chief solutions architect and I used
- 36:24to have this argument all the time.
- 36:25He's like, I want to reimage a whole server, I want to burn a
- 36:29server down and I want to build it back up from immutable
- 36:32artefacts. And I'm like, there's no way
- 36:34that's slow. It's hard.
- 36:36I don't want to risk breaking the whole server because we're
- 36:39going to reimage it. And I'm like, well, why don't we
- 36:42just take the server and patch it, just just apply the little
- 36:45patches. It's so fast, we can just
- 36:47surgically tweak it. And he was entirely right.
- 36:52What what we've seen as we implemented those practises is
- 36:59that when you take this sort of an artefact approach, this
- 37:03immutability of saying this is what I want my server to look
- 37:07like, and then you reset it from zero back into that pristine
- 37:11state, that immutable state. What what it does is it gives
- 37:15you a huge amount of certainty in what you have deployed and
- 37:18how. And the the thing I was reacting
- 37:22to and that this I think is one of the bad habits that that we
- 37:24get into is you, you have battle scars that say, yeah, that that
- 37:29that system didn't reset correctly or I have a high
- 37:32failure rate on the resets. And I see this a lot.
- 37:36A lack of reliability is the crisis in automation that people
- 37:41have to think about that if you're nervous about running an
- 37:43automation script or pushing a button to reset a server and
- 37:46burn it down to zero and reset it, then address your
- 37:49reliability problem. 1st. Right.
- 37:53That process needs to be reliable and what we've seen is
- 37:561 the artefact. Patching is actually a full
- 37:59system reset is actually a faster reset than patching in a
- 38:06lot of cases because that surgical patch that you think is
- 38:09very surgical ends up actually taking a lot of time and
- 38:12bringing us machine in from an already patched everything's
- 38:16right artefact with the applications installed.
- 38:18If you get, if you start with that actually laying that image
- 38:21in and booting it is very fast. If you go through like an app
- 38:25get, update and app get this app get, and you're pulling things
- 38:29in from all sorts of repos, that is the most fragile process in
- 38:33the industry. Any time I do it like app get
- 38:36update or Yum install, whatever, it goes to the Internet, it goes
- 38:40to repos. It's going to tell you you're
- 38:42out of date. It's going to pull in all sorts
- 38:43of random stuff that you weren't thinking you had to do.
- 38:46And those systems are incredible.
- 38:48That process is incredibly fragile.
- 38:50It's very slow in comparison and so if you.
- 38:54Build that image You do all that work once and then clone it to
- 38:58your entire fleet and then solve the reliability issue so that
- 39:01you can confidently roll machines over like that.
- 39:04The difference in performance of your system is remarkable and
- 39:08then right we have customers. To rebuild an Esxi cluster, they
- 39:13just push a button, they reset the whole cluster, BIOS,
- 39:15everything, and they push a button.
- 39:18They go get coffee, they come back and they resume their work.
- 39:21Right, but it's mind changing because now they're like well.
- 39:25It's out of date. Let me just reset and get I know
- 39:28what the correct state looks like.
- 39:29Let me go do that. They stopped wondering, like, is
- 39:32my system all the way patched or partially patched?
- 39:35Is it patching this break? Am I in?
- 39:37There's all sorts of mess that people create with incomplete
- 39:43updates or partial updates or not knowing the state of their
- 39:46system. And then there's no standalone
- 39:49system, so everything's interconnected to other things.
- 39:51And if you're not sure the version it's at or the patch
- 39:54date it's at, or if somebody hacked it.
- 39:56Right. This is it's it's it's
- 39:58beautiful, but it's a completely different way of thinking about
- 40:01it. The other thing I would I would
- 40:06say in this is. Turn rates are really valuable,
- 40:09like keep talking about exercise, right?
- 40:12A part of another thing of exercise is just being very
- 40:15comfortable with turning things over and having the the days
- 40:19when you would have a system and be like it's been up for a year.
- 40:23You sell pop champagne corks and be excited nowadays if you have
- 40:27systems that haven't been reset in 30 days.
- 40:30Right. You should actually be like ohh
- 40:31wait, I've all my servers are too old.
- 40:34This is cloud or or or on premise.
- 40:36I don't care where they are. If you're not able to roll all
- 40:39of your infrastructure on a 30 day basis or faster, then you're
- 40:43not. You're not keeping up with
- 40:45patches. You're not refreshing, you don't
- 40:46have the resilience in your operations to actually deal with
- 40:52an emergency patch or change or something like that, right?
- 40:55If you're every 30 days you're cycling through stuff and
- 40:58somebody comes out with the next Heartbleed virus and you're
- 41:01like. OK that's that's going to impact
- 41:03all my systems And now you've lost like when Java we had the
- 41:07Java things and people lost months of work finding,
- 41:10discovering, fixing patching. You want to be able to say oh I
- 41:14know how to fix this. I got the fix queued up.
- 41:16Start a rollout process and you want to be able to say I'm just
- 41:20instead of taking 30 days, I'm going to do my rollout over the
- 41:22next week. If you don't have those
- 41:24processes in place you're. Vulnerable and as you were
- 41:26mentioning earlier about the legacy code and that being
- 41:29resilient and tested and basically battle.
- 41:32And how do you look at these two things and how do they fit
- 41:35together? The you mean patching versus the
- 41:40immutable. The the thinking about
- 41:41immutability? Yeah, I'm I'm thinking more
- 41:45along the lines of having this legacy code and then also being
- 41:49agile enough to burn everything down every 30 days.
- 41:53I I don't see them as as incompatible.
- 41:56The the if you have legacy code, the thing that makes it scary to
- 42:01people. Is they don't know how to
- 42:03recreate the build, they don't know how to patch it, they don't
- 42:07know how to upgrade it, they don't know what the environment
- 42:09is. And so the the challenge with
- 42:12the legacy piece is not the language that it was written in
- 42:17or the age of the code. The thing that people gets
- 42:20people in trouble when it gets to legacy is they don't have,
- 42:23they don't know how to maintain it, they don't know how to patch
- 42:25it, they don't know how to upgrade it.
- 42:27They basically created a static artefact.
- 42:30And so it is worth noting right when I talk about.
- 42:33Having these immutable artefacts and version controlled
- 42:35everything, it's only useful if you have an automated process to
- 42:39build that artefact. Right.
- 42:42People forget I Immutability doesn't just mean that I have a
- 42:45whole bunch of stuff sitting in a locked vault.
- 42:48What it actually means is that I have a way to reproduce those
- 42:51artefacts in a predictable way and then apply those into my
- 42:55environment in a predictable way.
- 42:57The legacy thing that gets people nervous is when they have
- 43:00a a Fortran programme that nobody knows how to build debug
- 43:04tests, right, that that's installed on a mainframe that
- 43:07that four generations ago the person who set that up and made
- 43:11the decisions went away. That should make that should
- 43:14make people nervous, but you can have modern programmes.
- 43:17Right. Well, here's the magic Docker
- 43:20container that you run in Kubernetes.
- 43:22And how did I build that? I don't know how I built it.
- 43:24That person's gone. Don't mess with the container,
- 43:27just run it. That should send off the alarm
- 43:30bells, just like that's what we're talking about here.
- 43:33The legacy is. The lack of repeatability in the
- 43:37system. Hmm.
- 43:39And how do you look at that when it comes to throwing or
- 43:44sprinkling on data? Because it feels like a lot of
- 43:47the stuff that you're talking about is very much like.
- 43:51In the software world and very DevOps focus.
- 43:54But then when you start to incorporate data in there, and
- 43:58data isn't as I would say, agile as you're making these things
- 44:06out to be, how do you see the difference there?
- 44:09Ohh my goodness it can't be as agile.
- 44:12Without a doubt. I do think that the metadata
- 44:17collection of metadata I think access to that data how it's
- 44:21partitioned and shared. The way the way I see it is, you
- 44:25should have automated, repeatable processes for doing
- 44:29those things. So this, this actually goes back
- 44:32to our ability, what we were talking about with improving
- 44:36access to things. Some of it is the the tools
- 44:39actually have pretty good access controls.
- 44:42But we have a tendency as humans to interact right Turn the
- 44:47knobs, set it up, and say we're done.
- 44:51And spend less time actually figuring out how to automate
- 44:54what those processes and controls are.
- 44:58And so I would what I would suggest.
- 45:00When I'm I, I realised my world is DevOps so I'm I'm putting a
- 45:03very DevOps he spin on this. But you know, you should be able
- 45:07to get hands off in providing the access to that data,
- 45:12replicating the pieces of the data, right?
- 45:14We're back to is there an immutable process or a version
- 45:19to process? Is there a process that other
- 45:21people can see and inspect? Understanding how that the the
- 45:26parts of your data are replicated and put together.
- 45:29We do need to understand how all that stuff fits together and
- 45:34that stuff. And I'm glomming a whole bunch
- 45:35of data under that stuff. But it's it you do.
- 45:40You do have to have a way to manage all of those pieces,
- 45:44protect all those pieces, standardise how that stuff
- 45:47works. So Rob, I wanna talk about the.
- 45:53Idea of Rackin and what you're doing over there and get into
- 45:57what exactly it is and how it helps people and how potentially
- 46:02it can help us make sure that we have these automated processes
- 46:08and we're doing things effectively and not
- 46:12ineffectively. And basically leveraging and
- 46:15standing on the shoulders of giants who have been in the
- 46:18cloud business for the last 25 years.
- 46:21I am happy to try and try and shed some light on this.
- 46:26What what we do with with rack and and a lot of it addresses
- 46:30the problems we've been laying out right obviously that's
- 46:32that's that's where we see things that are going on reckon
- 46:36writes software product called digital rebar.
- 46:39Digital rebar is it's a workflow engine for automation and
- 46:43infrastructure, so it's not like there's some orchestrators out
- 46:46there that people are familiar with their job schedulers and
- 46:48the mill O space. Digital rebar is specifically in
- 46:52infrastructure tools. So the the the semantics, the
- 46:55nomenclature, the objects in that system are infrastructure
- 46:58focus and what it does is it builds an infrastructure
- 47:02pipeline. Which is very similar to like a
- 47:04CICD pipeline or a data pipeline in that you can sequence a whole
- 47:09bunch of tools and operations together in a repeatable way.
- 47:12So you can start a process and then flow data.
- 47:17In our case, data is state of the infrastructure through a
- 47:22series of transforms. For us that means Terraform and
- 47:26Ansible or shell scripts or talking to other APIs, but
- 47:30you're talking to all of the components of the infrastructure
- 47:33in. A version managed sequence to
- 47:37get to a desired state. And then one of the things we
- 47:40did that's really been fun is that we also have a way to do
- 47:44jobs. I'll put this in ML terms, but
- 47:47you know, we we have transforms, which is the infrastructure
- 47:51pipeline going from one state to another or resetting a rack of
- 47:55servers, things like that. But we also found that that
- 47:58automation can be applied in work orders, little jobs.
- 48:02And so people want to be able to say, you know what, I just need
- 48:04you to run a security scan. I don't want you to change
- 48:06anything. And so that type of of small
- 48:10operation or work order is also part of the system.
- 48:14So transforms and then you can schedule a whole bunch of work.
- 48:18And then the other thing we've done about with this is we've
- 48:22created a shared state system in that it's very easy to send
- 48:27state from digital rebar to other systems because you have
- 48:31to participate in the infrastructure or provide access
- 48:35to from other systems into digital rebar.
- 48:37So we find people wanting to do that like putting dev portal in
- 48:41front of digital rebar and then let the infrastructure do its
- 48:44thing, CI, CD systems, Terraform in front of it.
- 48:48You know what, what we find from an OPS perspective is that
- 48:52people want to consolidate and consistent operational
- 48:55experience. They want to abstract out is it
- 48:58cloud, is it VM, is it bare metal?
- 48:59Have that same pipeline run everywhere like we were talking
- 49:02about, but then not force people into having an operations
- 49:08experience when they just want a server when they want to dev
- 49:13experience. So for us a dev or I think a
- 49:16data scientist, right would say. I just need.
- 49:20You to build me a cluster that can do ML analysis.
- 49:23I don't care about the process that you use.
- 49:25I don't care about the operating system, I don't care about the
- 49:27cloud or the infrastructure. Just just set everything up.
- 49:29I just want to click a button and get a cluster back.
- 49:32There's a tonne of operational work that has to happen to make
- 49:34that go. That's what digital rebar does.
- 49:38Simple API, whole bunch of operational work that's
- 49:40consistent, portable and reusable.
- 49:43But back into a very simple API for a consumer to use and then
- 49:47we do a tonne of work as a company.
- 49:50Because it's software. To allow that to be a platform
- 49:54that somebody can use without giving up control of their
- 49:58systems, especially if you're talking about data here, right?
- 50:02None of our customers want us to tunnel in to their data centre
- 50:08or their data set like this whole thing we're talking about.
- 50:11That's no, we don't want it. I don't want access to anybody's
- 50:15data. That's the last thing I want.
- 50:17The other thing that we that nobody wants is for us to make
- 50:20changes to their automation platforms that are in our
- 50:24benefit because we want everybody on the same version or
- 50:28upgraded or patched. So the fact that we're software
- 50:32which is really important for automation especially we do
- 50:34distributed multi site control planes with customers so they
- 50:38have global global fleets of infrastructure.
- 50:41But this works even for teams and multiple teams collaborating
- 50:45around the automation. You don't want to have to say,
- 50:47well, I patched my automation to include this new feature.
- 50:52And force it on everybody else, huh.
- 50:55So because of the way we do versioned automation, you can
- 50:59actually control when people pick up that automation, they
- 51:02can pick it up that's, but they don't have to pick it up.
- 51:06That control is really important for people and all that just
- 51:10comes out as immutable artefacts that you download into digital
- 51:12rebar and and then make it run. But then each customer has their
- 51:16own version and they maintain it themselves and we work really
- 51:19hard to make that simple. And so is there the capability
- 51:23then you mentioned if you want to use?
- 51:27Or you can just ask for certain things and you don't care about
- 51:32other things and you just say give me this what I want.
- 51:36I don't care about the operating system, I don't care about the
- 51:38cloud any of that. I imagine there is the
- 51:40capability to say I do want it on this cloud, I do want it with
- 51:44this operating system and you can get that granular.
- 51:47Yes, yeah, but the but the system is uses declarative APIs.
- 51:52So the goal is if you start a pipeline, the system can fill in
- 51:57or. More more importantly, the
- 51:58operators who set it up can actually provide ways to fill
- 52:02all those details. So you can say I need to use
- 52:05this cloud specifically or you can say I just, I'm just gonna
- 52:08call, I need you to fulfil this request and not hear that not
- 52:12care how that abstraction is really important, right?
- 52:15Because what we've built over these pipelines that run
- 52:17anywhere and so and we do this internally all the time, I will
- 52:21test new builds and new development in cloud
- 52:25infrastructure because it's dynamic and inexpensive.
- 52:28Because of the way we build that pipeline, that pipeline then
- 52:31will work against bare metal system because the abstractions
- 52:34are fine for it. Because right here what we've
- 52:37got is this long pipeline of work that is consistently
- 52:41applied, and if I add something into the pipeline then I can
- 52:44make it go. Now I might only build and this
- 52:47is where the community effect gets really interesting.
- 52:49I might only build for Ubuntu if I'm only testing for Ubuntu or
- 52:52Amazon Linux or something like that.
- 52:54But once I have that code. Then we can come back and say,
- 52:58yeah, you know what, I'll also make it work for CentOS or
- 53:00Windows or right, we we have ways to keep extending
- 53:04individual tasks in the pipelines to broaden their scope
- 53:08or add different APIs or detect where they are and make
- 53:10adjustments to what's going on. That's a really powerful
- 53:15feature. When people look at it the first
- 53:18time, they're like, oh wait a second, they're doing a tonne of
- 53:20stuff. And that can be a little
- 53:22overwhelming, so important for people to be like, oh wait a
- 53:25second, they've baked in. These protections and standards
- 53:29and things like that. And even if I don't understand
- 53:31why it's doing this task instead of turning it off, we have
- 53:35people who do that and then they come back and they're like a
- 53:37couple of months later, I turned into and we're like, all right,
- 53:41did you turn off the? They're like I did.
- 53:42I copied all that stuff and took out the things I didn't need.
- 53:45And we're like, were they breaking?
- 53:47Like we were talking about earlier.
- 53:48Yeah, no. And then they pull it out.
- 53:50Even if they weren't, they were working.
- 53:51They just thought they were unnecessary complexity.
- 53:54They just hadn't reached that point in their journey yet.
- 53:58And so that's, that's part of how all these these things work.
- 54:01Most operators now understand they're like, OK, wait a second.
- 54:05If you can do all I maybe I only buy Lenovo Gear, but the fact
- 54:10that you can do the other types of gear is good protection for
- 54:14me. It's but it's a different
- 54:16mentality in looking at how these systems could just like
- 54:19switching to immutability. People like I don't want to do
- 54:22that. I've got to build images.
- 54:24Now that's painful and you're like, well, yes, but once you've
- 54:28built that image and everything you do is going to be more
- 54:31resilient and faster. And operators have to have the
- 54:34time to do that. It feels like that is something
- 54:37that you learn with experience after, as you mentioned, you
- 54:40could rattle off a few different scenarios just off the top of
- 54:44your head when shit hits the fan.
- 54:46Yeah, and I imagine those first couple of years before you run
- 54:50into the first whatever, maybe the pandemic hits and you can't
- 54:53get servers anymore or whatever. The five other scenarios that
- 54:57you were able to just talk about, obviously from battle
- 55:00scars that you have gone through over the years.
- 55:04That seems like it's it's very clear as to why you would want
- 55:08to keep that as opposed to rip things out and say, well, we're
- 55:11never going to need this. It's it.
- 55:14This is, to me, the reframing of perceived complexity.
- 55:19As right as as exercise or, you know, something useful.
- 55:25Yeah. And I do a lot of thinking about
- 55:27how because everybody runs around pulling on their hair
- 55:30being like Ohh systems are so complex, I'm scared of
- 55:32operations now. Which which I understand the
- 55:36feeling and I I spent a couple of years ago, I was like
- 55:39alright, how do we how do we deal with this?
- 55:41And I went down a whole bunch of rabbit holes until I realised
- 55:44that this is what it's actually well understood.
- 55:47There's a whole bunch of academic research on complexity
- 55:49and dealing with complex systems and what failures and complex
- 55:53systems look like. And and I can't summarise all
- 55:56that research that quickly but one of the things that made me
- 56:00reevaluate was complex systems are much more.
- 56:05Resilient to failure. Then simple systems.
- 56:11And and so. When you look at a system and
- 56:15see complexity that you're you're question shouldn't be is
- 56:19why is that system so complex? I can't understand it.
- 56:21You might not understand everything about it but you need
- 56:24to be like how do I exercise this system as it operates, how
- 56:29observable and transparent it is.
- 56:31Those are things like for rack end we work really hard on that.
- 56:34We have boy, I've done whole podcasts on nothing but this
- 56:37fact that when things break instead of doing retries we stop
- 56:41and tell people to fix the the root cause of the problem.
- 56:44Rather than just banging through, because when you're
- 56:47fighting complexity, you don't want unexpected behaviours,
- 56:51right? So there's there's all sorts of
- 56:52design elements that go into making these systems really
- 56:55resilient. But we're very used to needing
- 56:58comprehensible systems. Maybe, maybe ChatGPT is going to
- 57:02teach us something indirectly that not understanding what's
- 57:05going on behind the covers is not as bad as we thought it
- 57:09would be as we thought it was. We've sort of gotten, we're sort
- 57:12of very willing to accept that we don't know how these models
- 57:15got trained. But that's part of these systems
- 57:18is we can lean into making a complex system usable and secure
- 57:24and reliable and resilient, but there's a little bit more
- 57:28cognitive lift the first time you look at it.
- 57:31Hmm, so you have to have had played around with some ChatGPT
- 57:35and its abilities to use racking or potentially like lay with the
- 57:41API or do these operational loads under the covers.
- 57:44Have you discovered anything and is that has it been anything?
- 57:50Good I'm I'm actually doing some talks about what I'm calling
- 57:53generative DevOps that I would suggest people to look at where
- 57:57we're we're way down the rabbit hole at this point.
- 58:00But yeah if you search for generative.
- 58:01DevOps. You'll see some of the early
- 58:04thinking that I have with this, and the teaser on it is that.
- 58:10It's making expertise much more accessible and so I'm using this
- 58:14phrase, the 10X operator. Like we've been talking about
- 58:2010X developers for a long time, but we might be entering an era
- 58:25where there is the possibility of a 10X operator.
- 58:30And that. Completely changes assumptions
- 58:34on all sorts of things. How you run gear, can you run
- 58:37gear? How many people you need, how
- 58:40effective? Like like edge, like like the
- 58:4210X operator concept with generative DevOps completely
- 58:47could remake the landscape we had.
- 58:50I love it. I'm going to Google that right
- 58:52now. Well, Rob, thank you so much for
- 58:54coming on here and talking to me about all this.
- 58:57The past, present and future really.
- 58:59And bringing this DevOps feel to it.
- 59:03I. There's so much that the Milos
- 59:06world borrows from DevOps and so it's great to hear your spin on
- 59:11things and and also see what you're working on and what
- 59:14you're dedicating your. Time and energy into these days
- 59:19and it's fascinating stories you've got.
- 59:22I really appreciate this and I think that's it, man.
- 59:25We'll end it. Here, I appreciate it.
- 59:26Thank you for the conversation. It has been a pleasure.
- 59:33Hi, this is Michael Eric. I'm the founder of Pametan Data
- 59:36Innovation and Confetti AI and this is a quick public service
- 59:40announcement. If you're tired of having
- 59:42nightmares about the machine learning models you have in
- 59:44production, then I encourage you to subscribe to the ML OPS
- 59:47Community Podcast. It's where all the cool ML OPS
- 59:50kids hang out and learn how to tame their ML models.