PurePerformance - Observability, Cybersecurity, DevOps & SRE - Learning from the Public Sector with Willie Hicks

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

Zero-Trust Architectures. Data-Flow Inventory. User Experience First! Those are key initiatives in the public sector to ensure that digital services delivered to citizens around the globe are not only working with a flawless user experience but are also safe from any bad actors trying to disrupt agencies on local, stage and federal sectors.In this episode we invited Willie Hicks, Federal CTO at Dynatrace, to learn more about the state of observability and security with government agencies Willie has been working with over the past decade. In our conversation we explore the differences between commercial and government as it comes to ROI or how they see competition as a driving motivator.To learn more about the public sector tune into the Tech Transformers podcast that Willie is co-hosting with his colleague Carolyn Ford.

It's time for Pure Performance! Get your stopwatches ready, it's time for Pure Performance with Andy Grabner and Brian Wilson. Hello and welcome to another episode of Pure Performance. My name is Brian Wilson and as always I have with me my co-host Mr. Andy Grabner. Andy, how are you doing today? I'm pretty good and I am... so no weird dreams today? No, my Apple Watch is telling me I'm not. Should I endorse Apple? Sure sure my apple watch isn't uh i expect a free one now for my next one it's telling me i'm not getting much rem sleep or even

deep sleep but uh you know i'm still i don't know how well it actually in order to get a free one it measures it perfectly and it's wonderful uh and i can't highly recommend it enough um that's just my plug for a free watch this turned out to be the stupidest intro ever because I had no dreams it's because of me, sorry look, our guest is jumping in beforehand

he thinks because he's we didn't breathe him well enough he thinks, well this fits in with the sector that he works in always intruding, always getting in the way and thinking they can dominate everything. So I think it's very fitting that he did that. You know, I might as well just let him introduce himself because we already started talking anyway. And we can forget about all the other jokes we have prepared in the opening.

So welcome to the show, Willie Hicks. I have ruined everything. Everything. All right. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. I know I've stepped over all your jokes. I've stepped over everything, but it is a pleasure. The audience thanks you. The audience thanks you. And I thank you for inviting me. So, I'm Willie Hicks. I run our solutions engineering here at Donatrace. And I've known you guys for a minute or two, so it's good to be here with you. And really, we just said earlier,

we haven't seen each other in years. And obviously, with a pandemic in between, everything feels really odd these days. And we're like, how long? Six years or something like that. But it's amazing that you've been working with a particular type of clientele, that we typically, well, we sometimes interact, but not as much as you do. And that is because you're working with the federal government in the U.S. a lot. And actually, the reason why we got to this podcast is because I listened to another podcast that showed up in one of my, I don't know, streams.

And it's called Tech Transforms. And it's a podcast that you and Carolyn Ford are hosting, as far as I understand, right? Yeah, yeah. And I want to be, you know, I want to give all my props to Carolyn Ford. This was her brand, Child Tech Transforms. A couple of years now we've been doing this and usually it's myself and Carolyn or Mark Zanil,

who's the VP over public sector who do tech transforms. And it's just a phenomenal, I mean, super phenomenal podcast. But, you know, I would say I think you guys have been here a little bit longer than we have. And honestly, I've been listening to some of your podcasts for a while, too. But we come from maybe a little bit different slant. Like you said, we're focused on the public sector. We're focused on the kind of the federal side of the house and the state and local side of the house. But a lot of great episodes out there. Everything from generals

to we've had directors from even the Intel space. We've had, so intelligence, I won't mention any names here, but you can go and find it online. We get people from industry. Who's that behind you? I'm not supposed to say. No, I would like to keep my job. No, but no, seriously, a lot of great episodes out there,

even from different agencies like Department of Energy. We had Ann Duncan, who was a phenomenal, I so enjoyed that conversation with Ann Duncan, who's the CIO over at Department of Energy. Really interesting. It was one of those podcasts that when it was over, it had gone so quick, it felt like it had been like five minutes. But it already had been 30, 45 minutes. So a lot of good stuff out there. And for me, the interesting thing is, I just came back from a tour to South Africa where I recorded two podcasts. And I think in our role that we have here as podcasters, it's great to bring these stories to our listeners, right? Because I assume most of the listeners, we're spread around the globe,

but still I would assume most of you come from the EMEAs, the United States. And so listening to them and hearing stories from other parts of the world is really interesting. Hearing that we're all struggling with the same challenges. It feels every time when I talk with somebody from outside my geographical area, they always say, well, we are far behind of what you are because we're dealing with all these problems. And then I say, you know what? No, you're not.

You're not far behind. We're all dealing with the same problems. We all have the same challenges. And it's great that we can talk about it now same goes true for you right i mean i assume uh that you probably have you see similar challenges that we do but i don't know which is why you know we invited you to learn a little bit about what's going on what are the topics that you're discussing in the public space around what we are typically discussing, performance engineering, observability, security is a big topic, just looking at your last episodes, insider threats, critical infrastructure and evolving AI.

There's a couple of cybersecurity episodes up there. So Willy, just to toss it over to you, what are some of the topics that are currently hot in the space that you operate in most? What are the conversations you have on the podcast, but also outside of the podcast? What can we learn from you? Oh, well, so first of all, let me kind of comment on what you just said and really double click on that because the problems that we see in the public sector space, so that's federal, the state and local, you know, they're very similar to what we see in commercial. They're going to be very similar to what we see globally. So we, you know, I have the privilege

and honor to work with colleagues kind of around the globe in the federal space and public sector space. And what I hear from them is very similar across the board. Our agency partners are interested in observability, obviously, they're interested in things like DevOps and DevSecOps. They're interested, very interested in things like today, customer experience, user experience, which we talk a lot about here at Dynatrace is a very big topic in the public sector, in the federal space especially, because at least this administration, the taxpayers, they are citizens who are using,

you know, they use, you know, Amazon daily, they use e-commerce apps, they go to the bank and, you know, they don't go into branches as much anymore. They go online and they do all their transactions and so forth. And so those expectations exist for federal services as well. And so understanding that the administration has kind of doubled down on wanting to make sure that there is good customer experience across the board. So these are very similar wants, needs, desires. Now, what I would say is where we see a divergence, where there's a difference is motivation. Now, what I mean by that is that, you know, in the commercial space, and I've been here close to 13 years now, I think Brian and I, we were, we cut our teeth about the

same time here starting at Don and Trace. And working a little bit on the commercial side, and I come from commercial as well. I worked in the banking sector for many, many years before I came to Donna Trace. And on the commercial side of the house, you're really interested in things like ROI. What's my return on the investment I'm about to make. You're really concerned about competition and making sure that we are competitive in whatever space we're in. You're worried about your stockholders and making sure that you've got good revenue streams,

all of those things. The government, not as much. The government really is not concerned about when they're looking at a product like an observability platform. They're not concerned about ROI. They're not concerned about, you know, ensuring that, you know, that they are competitive from a financial standpoint as much. There are some agencies, to be clear, there are some agencies that are actually revenue centers. Like if you go and get a visa, you pay for that visa. Parts of the State Department, like TSA, DHS, those are actual revenue centers.

Their budgets actually come from the revenue they generate from their products and services. The rest of the government, they have budgets. They have to try to be good stewards of that money, good stewards of the taxpaying dollar, but they're not really driven by the same thing. Competition, competition's even a little bit different. You're not competitive with, it's not like Apple versus, you know, I probably shouldn't endorse, like you said, but it's not a product versus another product. A lot of times it's one country against another country. I was going to say that too, but I was going to say one country versus another, but like jokingly. Yeah, it is competition. You know, we have to be, you know, we have to be competitive with our adversaries. We have to make sure that we can remain technologically advanced enough so we aren't, you know, when we see a lot of this now in the cyberspace,

like a lot of cyber attacks, ransomware attacks, those are coming from, although they might be sometimes lone actors, a lot of times they're state sponsored. Like there are states and countries that are sponsoring these people to attack our critical infrastructure, banking environments and so forth. So that was a lot there, but that's just kind of a sense if that helps. Yeah. And one other thing, too, that I've heard in terms of some differences, and I'm not going to go deep into a rabbit hole on this at all, but like you mentioned it. So I've I've talked to somebody who's had some government contract work. And I think when you mentioned, you know, this administration is interested in user experience, right?

I think one of the challenges that I've heard in the public sector is specifically that changeover of who's in charge. Not necessarily always, you know, the president, but whoever's in charge of a department or whatever. As that changes, suddenly everything can shift right if that person wants to make their own mark and take in a different direction everything you've been working on at that time gets tossed out and you take a new direction until that person gets replaced and then so it just seems like from a challenge for the employees in the public sector is that you know i imagine that all the employees have very similar feelings that any, well, not just feelings, but technological feelings that anybody in any sector feels. I want to do really cool things. I want to do really advanced components. But they're a lot more at the whim of who's in charge at that time for wherever they're at.

Like, it's not like they're hard, the hopes and desires from a technological point of view are probably the same as every other developer and ops person. But is that, yeah. So you're, yeah. And I'm just kind of smiling here because it's politics. A lot of this is straight up politics. And, but I've actually learned over the years. And it's really interesting to watch that. Yes, administrations change. And with those new administrations, new leadership comes in.

They'll do a lot of swapping out of, you know, you know, be it a Democratic led administration or Republican led administration. You know, they're all going to have their own agendas. They're all going to have their own. And sometimes that can cause disruption. But one thing that I've actually seen is that when you get down to the people who are actually, you know, day-to-day protecting our country, the ones who are day-to-day, you know,

who have been public servants for years, for decades, they've learned, there's the converse of that too. Yeah, administrations can change, priorities can change, but also they can wait it out. So a lot of times, they know that in four years, this administration might change, but they're going to be here another 10 or 20 years. So they will continue on with, and sometimes that's where it becomes a little frustrating too, because so like there might be a new policy that comes out, like this whole new focus on customer experience. The next administration might not have the same focus and you might have an agency that they're like, yeah, this customer experience thing is important, but my mission dictates that I really need to focus on this. So yes, I'm going to try to do

the bare minimum to make sure I can comply with whatever the OMB might come out with or whatever regulations might be there. But I'm going to focus on my mission. I'm not going to really, like, I'm not going to come in and Dynatrace is going to talk to me about, you know, user experience. That's not really my mission focus right now. So from my standpoint, I have to do a lot of listening. I have to listen to what the agencies need. I have to understand their mission because, you know, the customer experience portion of it might not be their focus right now. And those things will switch with administration. So it is interesting, though, to see how politics plays into this whole thing.

Yeah. One thought that I had on this, though, because Brian, you mentioned the change of the guard, so the new administration comes in and everything changes completely. This can also happen in the private sector.

Think about when Twitter was taken over. I mean, obviously, that was a big change. Or every time you have CEOs get replaced for different reasons, and then they have a different mission, as you said. So it can also happen in the private space, and not only four years schedule, but even more frequent. I mean, it's obviously possible um really for me what's what's interesting so you say are people then moving a lot like

employees people actually you know as you said keep the country safe keep the machines running implement new new technology do you see a lot of fluctuation in people moving then either between departments or also moving to the private sector? Is this something that you see a lot? Yeah. And, you know, I will say, well, I don't see it directly, but I talk to a lot of my customers and a lot of agencies that, you know, we talk about workforce a lot and talk about how they maintain a strong workforce. A lot of the government workforce is contractor-based. So there are a lot of contractors in the federal government. So, you know, that's how kind of they maintain some of that workforce. But this is a big problem, just like in the private sector.

I'll use cybersecurity as an example. Cyber getting, I think I was reading a report a month or two ago that said that there's a shortage of about 700,000 trained employees that they need to fill cybersecurity roles. And that's not just the government. I mean, there are, and this is a problem, public sector as well as private sector. And so there is this pull from, private sector sometimes pays more money. What I've heard from the public sector

is that the public sector doesn't pay as much, but they have some really great benefits. They have excellent, super excellent benefits. And when I was talking to one agency, I won't mention the person's name, but because he told me this off to the side, but he was a little frustrated because he knew all the great benefits that come from the government, but his agency was just so bad at promoting those. It was like, if you promote this, you actually might get people who want to come over because you might not get paid as much. But, you know, when it comes to health care, when it comes to your pensions, when it comes to your your long term stability and so forth, you really can't get a better job than a government job sometimes. And then also you do have, in the past, you had public sector employees who were lifelong. They would be 20, 30, 40 year veterans of the public sector.

Today, you do have a lot more fluctuation, especially in the IT and the technology space, people just kind of move in and out. And so keeping someone in a job in a seat for a while is a problem. Now, there are some agencies I've talked to, they're embracing this, though. They're trying to actually do more public-private partnership where they're embracing people. Okay, go out, go into the public sector. I'm into the private sector.

You know, there's always an opening for you to come back. They're almost encouraging people to, if you go out and get that experience, if you find out it's not working for you, come back to the public sector, come back to our agency, because they actually get a benefit because this person goes out into the private sector, gets a whole lot different experience,

actually gets experience in more different varying technologies, then they can bring that knowledge back into, you know, their agency. So, I think agencies are starting to think about that. They're also actually starting to change their pay scale. So, they're actually trying to be more competitive as well. But, you know, we do, to answer the question, though, there is, you know, from what I have talked to agencies and all kind of, you know, this this workforce issue is something we're seeing across all agencies and keeping people in place. There are some agencies like I know I was like I mentioned earlier, I was talking to Ann Duncan at Department of Energy. They do a great job at internships.

They've got a really robust program where they're bringing people in very young, getting them experience in the federal government, trying to kind of promote like they used to in the past. Like they're working for the government in the past used to be like a badge of honor. You know, the whole idea, like they used to call it good enough for government work. That was that seems like a derogatory term now. In the past, it actually was a it didn't mean what it meant today. I mean, I think that there needs to be more better marketing of government jobs, and I think they're trying to work towards that. It feels a little bit like, as you bring this up, remember, working in a bank

used to be a big thing, at least when I grew up. How you work in the bank, it's amazing. And I think then it kind of lost a little bit of its appeal. But I think it came back, especially with modern banks in the fintech space. I remember Capital One was one of the stories that really made it in the DevOps space. At pretty much every DevOps conference, you heard the Capital One success story or how they were breaking out of the kind of rigid environment of the classical banks.

And that attracted a lot of new talent back to the banks and they wanted to work for the bank and revolutionize it. So it feels like this may be bouncing. I mean, this is stuff that may also come back with every industry, including the government sector. I agree that pendulum swings back and forth. And I think the government, I think it's starting to swing back to become more,

I'm hearing more and more agencies is becoming more in vogue. And you mentioned, we were talking about earlier, some of the topics like you don't hear some of the like um like in the in the commercial space in the private sector you've got like so sres like there's the the whole idea of site reliability engineers and so forth um i'm even starting to see not in every agency but i'm starting to see in agencies like at the Federal Reserve and places like, well, Federal Reserve is kind of quasi-government, but you look at GSA, General Services Administration, and I think even places like U.S. Digital Services, where they're really more focused on kind of newer technologies like web-based, containerized, cloud-based applications and so forth. This idea of cyber liability engineer is actually starting to get traction even in the government. So it's starting to, I think, become more and more like the private sector. They're still behind,

but I think we're starting to make some strides there. But I'm sorry, you were saying, Brian? Oh, no, I was going to say to Andy's point, too, is my story here is more on state government level, but it's still this government idea. When people think about the government institutions and all, the newer, more derogatory view of it is, oh, I'm good enough for government, right? But then if you go on probably most any state, but I'm here in Colorado, you go on their DMV site. You go on their government site. Everything's

available online. You can do almost all of your transactions online, quick, easy. Searching for something online has become very easy. In some cases, my online experience with some of the government, you know, the state government agencies that I have to get involved with can be easier and quicker than some stores, which just have lousy websites. So the idea that everything in government is antiquated, slow, bulky, it's going to be some green screen and you're typing text into it, you know, totally not the case.

And again, I'd say probably, I don't know about if it's every state, but most states, probably if you go on the DMV site, you know, you can do almost everything. You know, if you've got to get a picture taken or inspection, obviously you're going to have to go down. But you can do almost everything on that site smooth and easy. So that perception is definitely shifting. You see it when you interact with these things.

I don't do much interaction with federal agencies online, fortunately. But it's, you know, so I don't have that experience. But yeah, there's a shift going there. There's some cool stuff. So a lot of those people behind the scenes are getting to implement really cool stuff, really getting to show off their chops

of what they can do. They're just not getting the glory of the Capital One stories per se or the Amazon stories because it's just there. But the last thing I'll say on that, what I really appreciate is I think for the younger generations who didn't experience the old stuff, they just go on and it's a website, whatever, I get to do what I want. But for us older folks who knew the way we had to do it in the past, even before it was online and had to go wait three hours at DMV, but then maybe when it started online, we can

really see that shift and change and appreciate it a lot. So I just want to throw kudos out to there for at least on the state level, that's my only experience with it. But obviously that's transforming into, I'm sure every level of federal, you know, IT. I would say, Brian, your observation is accurate. I think it does kind of vary from state to state. Like you've got, obviously, you've got your big, you've got your California's, your Texas, your Colorado or New York, Florida, really big states, big budgets. you know, they got a lot

of population. So I think, you know, a lot of times you'll see, you know, a lot more online services, more, you know, more of that experience there. You get into smaller states, you know, get into places like, you know, I'm not going to call out small states and all, but you get into places like in the central Midwest, places like that, even some places in the south where you got, you know, smaller populations, smaller budgets. You're not going to, you're seeing maybe the uptick a little bit slower. I see at the federal level too, but it's also the same thing at the federal level. You got agencies like the big. The big so so in the federal government, you have agencies. There's something called a HISP in the federal government. That's the high impact service provider.

So in the federal government, this is kind of going back to those initiatives around better customer experience. a list or there are these groups of agencies and services that are considered like super high impact, super customer facing. You know, you think about USDA, like the WIC program or SNAP, or like some of the big, you know, food assistance programs. You think about IRS, obviously that's a huge, a huge four-facing program. Social Security Administration. So these high-impact service providers, they're kind of, they are kind of at the focus of the administration, making sure that they are working on their, improving their customer experience. They're like dashboards set up with Office of Management and Budget. They have to report like stats on, you know, how they're improving their services experience. They're like dashboards set up with Office of Management and Budget. They have to report like stats on how they're improving their services and so forth.

So, you know, but then there are other agencies that don't really fall in that category. They're smaller agencies. So, you know, a lot of times you'll get executive orders, you'll get these administrative mandates, but there's no money behind them. There's no budget. There's no money dedicated. So they're often trying to figure out how, OK, there's this mandate or there's this requirement that I improve X, but I have no money to do it. So it's kind of one of those things where it kind of varies from agency to agency. Yeah, really, if you think about, obviously, the topic that impacts us all at least every day, because that's who we work for, what we're working for, like observability. From an observability perspective, are there any, let's say, things that you see in the

private sector that just work differently on how they implement observability, especially when you compare it with what you see in the private sector? Or do you still say, no, in the end, it's all the same, even though there might be some regulations? Or are there specific requirements for observability vendors, for instance? I mean, that would be interesting. And therefore, certain things don't work the same way. Is there anything like that out there? So I think that, so when I think about observability kind of in the public sector,

the first thing I think of is that agencies, and kind of going back to their needs, what their mission really requires, I think that observability is seen a little bit differently. And we often approach observability and how we talk to our customers about it a little bit differently. Because a lot of times when we talk about observability in the commercial space, a lot of times we're talking about it from a cloud perspective, like, you know, migration to the cloud. How are you going to, you know, better utilize and make utilization better, show better utilization and and get more value out of your cloud investment? Those are the kind of things that we're talking about. A lot of times in the federal space,

especially on the DoD side, they're really just starting to get into the cloud. There's not a lot of cloud deployments. A lot of things are still legacy. A lot of things are still on premise. The civilian side of the house, that is a little bit more cloud. There's a lot more cloud activity going on there. So I think that it kind of changes the is a little bit more cloud. There's a lot more cloud activity going on there.

So I think that it kind of changes the conversation a little bit. Also, when I'm talking to customers about observability, and I'll say, I don't think we do this as much on the commercial side. You guys can tell me if I'm wrong here, but I tend to lean in and my SEs tend to lean in a little bit more often on security. We don't lead with security because we have our, you know, we have like AppSec, our application security. We have a lot of visibility that comes from, you know, just the nature of our agents being in place and all. But in the federal space today, one very hot topic, and it's not just a passing fad, this is something that's going to be a hot topic for a while, is zero trust. So, zero trust, this idea of a zero trust architecture or framework, it's not new. It's not something that's just like, you know, just in vogue today and just, you know, appeared after the last, you know, major attack or the last major ransomware incident.

Zero trust concepts have been around for years, but because of some major high profile breaches and incidents, agencies are really trying to figure out how they implement zero trust type architectures. And one thing that is important for our agencies to know and for our partners to know, and I would think this is important on the commercial side as well, is that observability, at least in my humble opinion, is foundational to zero trust. Because zero trust first is predicated on the idea that you know what's on your network. You know what is talking to what. You know the data flows. You basically have almost a data flow inventory. And that's actually one of the things that you would have in a zero trust. And data flow inventory is this idea of I know how all my data is flowing.

If I need to implement network segmentation, I know where the best place to kind of break up the data. I know the kind of the characteristics of the systems and the data. And when something is wrong, I'm reporting on it. There is actually even, when we talk about security, CISA, there is actually even when we talk about, uh, um, uh, security, uh, CISA, which is, um, part of DHS, uh, they, they actually, um, released about a year ago, what's called a bonding operational directive around, all the third party software you have on there, what's vulnerable you have like so long to patch it. These are things that are top of mind. And so these are things that, you know, again, I think make observability foundational and critical to building that zero trust architecture. And so I talk about that a lot with my customers about, you know, how are you gathering this information today? How do you understand your data flows? How do you understand how your customers are interacting with your application and what agencies data is coming in and out of?

And a lot of times they don't know that today, if that makes sense. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And obviously, you know, there's different ways on getting this level of observability, I guess, into environments. You can, I guess, from a network perspective, there's the classical network infrastructure monitoring by SNMP. But then we also see with our agent, we know exactly who is talking to whom. So I never thought about using the data that we have in SmartScape for exactly figuring out, well, see, of course, who is talking to whom, but then also using it for data segmentation.

I never thought about that. That's actually really, really interesting. And you should get alerts, right? You should be able to get alerts on, hey, this part of my data center must never talk to this part. And then you should even, I guess, with metadata and force, let's say, this part of my data center must never talk to this part. Yes. And then you should even, I guess, with metadata,

enforce, let's say, zone A, zone B, zone C, and nobody should cross from zone A into C directly. Something like this. And now I'm envisioning, I don't know why this comes to my head, but it's Munich, the city of Munich, they have the metro map. And I think it's like you have in the middle, you have your zone, and then you have the metro map and I think it's like in the middle you have your zone and then you have the next zone and the next zone and depending on how far you want to travel, you

obviously need to buy the ticket. I'm sure this is true for other cities as well. But it's kind of like if you want to go from zone one to three, you need to buy a ticket. You cannot just bypass one zone. And so this can be also applied to observability by saying hey you know something is wrong here somebody should not go from a to c they have to

go via b at least and this is so i i like that analogy and this kind of just triggered a memory um so uh about a month a month ago about a year year and a half ago, I was talking to another agency. This was on the defense side of the house. And they were so so in in. And you hear about this probably more on the federal side than you do on commercial. But there are these things called software factories and especially in the DOD. They have like multiple like all the different service branches have their different software factories. They're trying to get more into agile kind of mind state and mindset. And they've built out these software factories to be more agile, to be able to respond more quickly to threats and so forth.

And there was a software factory we were working with. And when they saw the smartscape and they saw kind of this mapping and we showed them like there was it was just it was actually just a very small part of a review of a POC. And they saw some APIs that were going back and forth and they saw some conversations. And it was an API. And they were like, whoa, that API should not be talking to this enclave. And they were like, first of all, they went to the developers like this API, you're not supposed to leave. And how they had it set up, they weren't blocking that right now. So they didn't want that to get into production where this was actually communicating the wrong way. And they were like, can you give me an alert if this ap like if i see just like you were saying conversation going from one from here to here because that means that someone has you know has you know is incorrectly

using this api they should not be calling out to to um an system. And it was something really simple, real self-convergence. They were like, that's huge because that kind of goes back to our, again, they were getting very more focused on baking in security earlier in the development process. And they were like, if we can catch these problems before they actually go into production, we're actually protecting the system, but also we're saving ourselves a lot of headaches and a lot of work because, first of all, it shouldn't work once it gets out there, but just God forbid something is misconfigured and it does

work, that data doesn't need to leak out. That's the exact kind of use case we're looking at. Yeah. And I think that should be easily doable with the data and with our automation capabilities now. And yeah, I think I need to write a note to some of our PMs.

So whoever is listening in, if you're listening in and you're also an observability vendor, then maybe this is an interesting idea to follow. You know, when I was explaining the story and I was, for whatever reason, coming back to when did we see each other last, really? And I think it was actually in 2016. No.

Even further, yeah. It was the Beyond 2016 conference. Well, the lockdown years don't count. So if it's like six years, you think about it as four. No, I mean, it's like a block. It's almost like traveling from zone A to C because you bypass that whole chunk in your head. Yeah.

And the reason why it came up again is, I'm actually wondering, I learn a lot at conferences, or at least I get to meet a lot of new people. I hear their stories. And these conferences that I go to, like KubeCon is coming up. And I guess by the time that this airs,

KubeCon is either just going on or has just finished. But I wonder, do you have in the government sector your own conferences that are government internal that we never hear about? Because most government agencies don't share anything publicly. Does this exist? So there are those types of conferences. There are conferences that you literally have to have like security clearances to get into certain sessions and so forth, but there are some that are big

in the government space, but just aren't big everywhere else. For example, I have actually spoken and moderated for a couple years now at a cybersecurity summit called Billington that's in D.C. Super, super well respected and big cybersecurity conference in the D.C. area. So a lot of federal customers and agencies go there, state and local, even I think some commercial. Again, it does have a cyber focus, but every time we are there, I'm amazed at the number of agencies that I'm talking to that are like, yeah, you know, we need to talk more because we don't know what's going on on our network. We, you know, getting these data flows, understanding these data flows, that's a big problem for us. Understanding, you know, just just really simple questions around, you know, like I was saying, just that simple API use case

is a big deal for our customers. So that's one. Then there's some really very specific industry-specific ones, like there's DoD, like there's FCO West is kind of a big Navy show. There's DOTUS, which is a big DoD IT show. So the defense space has its shows. Civilian has a lot of different shows, but they're still, I think you, did you ever come to AWS public sector? Personally, I've not been there. No, I know I was invited, but I couldn't make it.

But yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's another one. That's, again, it's one of the AWS, you know, they have, you know, every year they have a lot of summits across the country. This is just one DC area, but it's really focused on public sector. So that's a real big show in the public sector space. But yeah, generally, you don't hear about these outside of the government, outside the Beltway. Willie, is there anything else that we need to learn from you before we close out this

episode? Anything that you either wish the world would know about the government sector, I mean, our IT world, the observability world, or is there anything where you said, man, I wish that the government folks would listen more and do this more what I see outside of government? So I think we, well, first of all, I want to just take a minute and thank you both for inviting me. This has been super, super informative

and I always enjoy talking to you guys. So that's just been great. As for, you know, what I like to share, you know, I think if I could leave one thing, I think I mentioned I've been with Donna Trace now a little bit, right around 13 years now. Most of that time has been in the federal space. I've enjoyed every minute of working with the public sector. I enjoy every minute working with the federal government. I think today in today's

political climate, you know, people just think about the dysfunction. They just hear about like, you know, all the things that are going on and just all the craziness that's going on around the world. I just want people to remember that, you know, yes, there is craziness. There is some dysfunction. But all of that politics aside there are a lot of really dedicated um patriotic you know public sector um employees contractors and gubby or government employees that are you know dedicated daily, using observability and other tools and other, you know, mission tools and so forth to keep our country safe, to keep it, you know, running,

to keep even with all the craziness, keeping things and the lights on. And I just want to make sure that, you know, people don't lose sight that there are real people out there. You know, there's a lot of just nastiness and just, you know, politics going on. But at the end of the day they're real people who are doing really important jobs and that's just not in the us that's in every country

out there that's in you know in austria that's in you know in france that's in australia we've got i've got colleagues who are working in all of these countries we've got colleagues in israel in places that are seeing a lot of strife and a lot of just, I can't describe the pain, but there are people still trying to keep the lights on, who are still trying to keep their countries working. And I just want to give my utmost respect to them because I don't, I mean, I might work for the public sector in the commercial space, but there are people who dedicate their lives to this, to their government. So I just want to give my respect to them. Awesome.

You know, I, yeah, I agree with all that. It's definitely not a, as you said, with the pay scale idea, people aren't going into this because of of the glory right they're going into it because they want to contribute something um and i want to thank you a ton for being on i just want to share my one hope and dream for the government so this happened when i read um phoenix project right now i know this isn't going to happen because there's policy there's everything about the way politics can happen right but when i read the Phoenix project and I read about the DevOps

and the iterative changes, the let's get it out, let's find what's working, not working, I was like, man, imagine if government policy could work like that. We're seeing part of that. We're seeing the IT section being able to embrace these things, right? There's some way for it to shift over to policy. I always look at the Affordable Health Care Act as an example where it's like, yeah, it wasn't necessarily the greatest bill when it started, but if we could have a process where we put that out there and then quickly find what's working, what's not working, full DevOps style, and tweak and adjust and tweak and adjust,

you can get these things to be really good. Obviously, there's politics, what's not working, full DevOps style, and tweak and adjust and tweak and adjust, you can get these things to be really good. Obviously, there's politics, there's things that are, okay, if it's law, it's got to be voted on and all, but it'd be so awesome to see, in some fantasy world of mine, the DevOps and Agile push from the public sector IT stuff shifting into policy control and all that stuff, which would just be a win for everybody. Agile politics. That would be interesting.

Yeah, it'd be awesome. But in the meantime, thank you. Again, it's great to see what's going on there. It's great to know that there are a lot of awesome advancements being made in the public sector. It's not just this

bureaucratic boondoggle. People might think, oh, I want to change this line of code. We've got to get 10 approvals. That's not happening. That's not the case. But yeah, Andy, any final words from you there? No, I took a lot of notes. And I also want to highlight, we will add the links to your podcast,

the Tech Transformers, also into the description because I think there's a lot of great content there. That's also how I got to know about it because I found and I listened to one or two of the episodes and then I reached out to Carolyn and then ended up with you in a good way. I ended up with you.

Just so people can see. I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. My wife will not say that. Willie, you're good enough for government. No, but thanks a lot. And folks, listen to their podcast. And yeah, that's it. I hope it will not take another four to six years or however long it has really been to see you again.

I'm sure we'll see each other hopefully sooner. We're going to make that happen. All right. Thank you. Thank you again. Thank you. Awesome having you. Awesome. I think this might be, is this the first time we talked about government stuff, Andy? I believe so. Hopefully it won't be the last.

If something big happens, maybe you can have me back going. Absolutely. All right. And thank you. Thank you for listeners. We hope we hope you found this topic interesting. Interesting to us as always. And we always get to learn amazing things from our guests. So thank you, Willie.

And we'll see everybody next time. Bye bye. Bye.