PurePerformance - Scaling Day 2 Operations: SDLC at Humana with Michael Villiger

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

In this episode Dynatrace's Michael Villiger shares some tips about his work with Humana to chose PCF as a key platform to power their digital transformation.He reviews the culture change and new methodology that helped to exposed gaps in existing monitoring practices and tools. And how Humana's strategy for the future using public cloud deployment, continuous monitoring with DevOps, and monitoring tool consolidation.

Coming to you from Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, it's Pure Performance! Hello from Dynatrace Perform 2019 in Las Vegas. I'm Andy Grabner and this is Up Close and Personal with somebody actually from my team, Mike Villager. Hey, Mike, I want to quickly introduce yourself for our listeners. Yeah, sure. It's a pleasure to be here, Andy. So my name is Mike Villager. I'm part of our strategic alliances and innovation team. I specifically handle kind of our relationship with Pivotal from a technical perspective. So it's always a pleasure to chat with my colleague. Yeah, there you go. And so we're here in Vegas at Perform.

You just came out of one of the sessions that you were actually leading. I think it was actually a panel discussion that you were leading. That is correct. That is correct. So our panel discussion was scaling day two operations. And we were talking about the shift to a product-focused SDLC at Humana. So we had a number of attendees from Humana. We had Bob Johnson, who's their director.

We had Quinn Johns, who's the manager of what is effectively one of their SRE teams. And we had somebody from Pivotal with me as well, Dino Bingham. Oh perfect. Hey, day two operations. I know, I mean I'm not, English is not my first language and I remember months ago, I think you actually explained to me day two operations. Can you quickly fill everybody in that may not be aware of what day two operations really means? Yep, so what we're talking about within the context here is we've got our applications and our platform up and running. And now we're starting to bring our applications and deploy them onto the platform. So these are some of the concerns that you run into when having a real production environment that's serving user-facing traffic.

So day one operations might be the process of actually standing up that platform. Day two is going to be the process of running applications on the platform. Okay, makes sense. That's how I define it anyway. Oh, that's perfect, yeah. So then in your panel, I guess you walked through a couple of questions, and everything has been recorded, so maybe people that didn't see it and they wanted to look at the recording, what did they miss and why should they actually watch the recording?

What are the highlights? What are the things that people take out of it? So from my perspective, there's a couple of different things. So I've had the pleasure of working with the Humana people off and on now for, I believe, over a year. So it's been a pleasure to be a part of their journey. And one of the things that's really exciting to me is just seeing how transformative some of these things are for them. Things like the ease of use and the ease of deployment for our own product, seeing some of the neat things that they're doing with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. One of the things that's really interesting maybe for PCF folks that might not be familiar with it, Humana is doing a lot with PAS for Windows.

So they're actually deploying a lot of native.NET workloads to the PaaS platform, so taking advantage of the benefits of a platform as a service with.NET workloads running on top of Windows. So that's really neat. And then when I look into some of the things that I really like, I really like to see some numbers and things like that. So I believe Dino had shared some numbers with us

around some of the numbers of applications that they have running and some of the benefits that they've seen from these new methodologies. That's pretty cool. So I'm also at another track and we have a lot of discussions about operations as well. Everything is centered around automation. Any best practices, anything how to integrate, I don't know, chat ops, or how to, any, let's say, kind of like the things

centered around automation, I would say. What does it, what can people, what can we bring to the table to make the work of an operations engineer easier? Anything that you discussed?

Yeah, so, you know, one of the really neat things that we've seen happen and that we talked about in this panel as well as elsewhere is, you know, what we've done at Dynatrace with Bosch. So to actually weave agent deployments into the fabric of the platform. So anytime a developer is pushing an application into the platform, monitoring just happens magically. They don't have to think about it. They don't have to do anything else in order to make that happen. Right.

So that's something that's been really helpful for both Humana as well as other organizations. So I think it's a great topic in the sense that we really should be thinking about fabrics, right? And how we weave technology into the fabric and how we make it all ubiquitous, right? So one of the things that Bob has liked to talk about in the past was this concept of making monitoring something that's as ubiquitous as the electricity that's, you know, delivered to your desk or to your home. You don't have to think about how it got there. It's just there for you to use. It's like monitoring is a platform capability, which is just baked in.

There's no question about it. Everything you do is monitored. And obviously we know because everything that we cannot monitor, we're flying blind anyway. We have no idea what the impact is of our change. So that's pretty cool. Anything else that you wanted to highlight before we part here? You know, I think we've covered some of the really great highlights, you know, so definitely take an opportunity to listen to some of the talks from this panel. If you weren't able to do so live, definitely take a look at the recording.

And I look forward to, obviously, any further hall conversations and things like that I might have with other attendees here at Perform. And anybody who doesn't know, not sure if this will be part of the intro or not, but anybody who doesn't know, they can reach out to me on Twitter

at Mike Villager. And it's V-I-L-L-I-G-E-R, not an A. Well, you know because you're my colleague. Yeah, yeah, but I made the mistake. But other people might not know. Hey, I got another question actually for you. So obviously you are one of the public faces when it comes to Cloud Foundry and Dynatrace, right? We've just done a performance clinic together,

like two weeks before perform. And so when people are interested in learning more about the capabilities and also the use cases, we enable for them with Dynatrace. Do you want to give us a quick kind of hint into what's coming maybe in the next couple of months? Because I know you and Daniela at the performance clinic, you alluded into the next couple of months? Because I know you and Daniela at the Performance Clinic, you alluded into the next thing, right? Yeah, so we have another Performance Clinic coming up.

I think some of the scheduling is still getting sorted out, but we're going to look towards delivering some great content about what Dynatrace is doing with data coming out of the Auctioneer component. For those of you that might not be aware, the Auctioneer is something that actually handles app placement in PCF. So if you have a new app that gets pushed into the environment, the Auctioneer is one of the things that helps figure out where that will go. And I'll be walking folks through kind of a live demo

of things that can go wrong when you're doing a platform upgrade, things that might go wrong if you lose a Diego cell and your environment isn't sized big enough, and actually show you how some of those things might look inside of Dynatrace when things start to go awry. Yeah, very cool. Cool. So in general, if people, yeah, one more?

And I have one more plug. For folks who might be attending the Cloud Foundry Summit in Philadelphia. I'm going to have an opportunity to talk about the unbreakable pipeline that I've built with Concourse and Dynatrace and PCF. So I think that's going to be a really great deep dive. It's going to go into the hows and whys of what I did there as well as tempting the demo gods since I'll be attempting to do a live demo of this in a breakout session which you know for those of you that have attempted to do this before sometimes it can be a good time so that is coming up at the end of April so I'm gonna double

check kill some kill some dead time there. So my session, for those of you that might be at the Cloud Foundry Summit, my session will be on Wednesday, April 3rd, and that is actually Thursday, April 4th, at 11.05 a.m. Assuming nothing changes between now and then. So Cloud Foundry Summit is a little ways away Assuming nothing changes between now and then. So Club Fundry Summit is a little ways away,

but they've already published the schedule. Yeah, cool. So if people want to stay in touch with you at mvillager. At mikevillager. mikevillager, yeah.

Or michael.villager at donatrace.com. Perfect, cool. Well, I have to say thanks, Mike. As always, yes. And for Pure Performance, say, thanks, Mike. As always, yes. And for Pure Performance, I'm Andy Grabner. Bye-bye.