PurePerformance - The Journey to Autonomous Cloud Management with Trevor Ealy Kristof Renders

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

In this episode Trevor and Kristof give some practical guidance on how to make the vision of autonomous cloud management a reality, including the changes needed, the steps required to get there and benefits you will reap once you have arrived.

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 Personnel with our Dynatrace performed 2019 in Las Vegas. I'm Andy Grabner and this is Up Close and Personnel with our Dynatrace services team on Pure Performance. I actually have two guests today. I want to introduce them quickly. Trevor Ely and Christoph Randers. Maybe Trevor, quickly some more background on you. Sure, thanks Andy. My name is Trevor Ely. I'm a director with the Dynatrace services team. I've been with Dynatrace for eight years now, a full eight years in the services organization, and I'm happy to be here. Cool. And Christoph. Thanks, Andy. I'm Christoph Renders, a global

architect at the Dynatrace services team. I've been with the company for about nine years, and I've been helping customers all over the world with all kinds of Dynatrace-related topics. So you guys just came out of your session. You did a session on, can you remind me, what was the session about? It's Autonomous Cloud with the Dynatrace journey. And the topic of the session was to really introduce our customers to how Dynatrace came to develop the Autonomous Cloud management program. It really started with Dynatrace's own transformation and their journey towards

no ops, our journey towards no ops. And we really wanted to share that with the rest of our customers and enable customers to get there. Cool. The biggest takeaway that I see from this session is that a lot of folks ask me, you know, what's different from DevOps? How is this different from what I'm doing today? And for me, the main difference is that autonomous cloud management really connects the dots through all of the pieces throughout software delivery to really help customers achieve those ultimate goals

of delivering software faster, better, and more frequently. Very cool. So it's a lot about automation, about how to connect the tools, as you said, along the DevOps toolchain right and did you have I'm not really sure do you have customers customer stories are people already kind of going down that route? Yeah so we shared some today you saw with with Andrew Hiddle on main stage so KeyBank is one of our first customers and partners to help us really drive this autonomous cloud management program and we have had several other customers go through Autonomous Cloud Labs, a fully immersive hands-on

training environment that goes really deep into the concepts of Autonomous Cloud Management. It's really exciting. Cool. And Christoph, what is your take? People that didn't see it, the key takeaway is why should they watch the recording? What I talked about most is about how customers would actually go about and implement this on a more technical level so be it implementing an unbreakable pipeline defining key requirements of their applications

behavior through code you know something that we've coined as a mon spec file or whether it being implementing some self-healing capabilities into their application so an application has been deployed and we detect that there now is something wrong with the application how can we remediate that without immediate manual interaction from from an operator for example cool and so the common tools that people have in you you've seen probably a lot of customers out there already just to give it like a little overview of what are the tools that we typically integrate with along the DevOps tool chain.

Right, so it goes from an integration with the CI CD pipeline to Jenkins, but it also goes as far as integrating with, for example, Slack. So everybody is aware of the dynamics of the environment. So the whole idea of ACM or or one of the key cornerstones, is that everybody is aware of what's happening. And if we can automate that kind of information flow, then that's where we play as well. That's pretty cool.

So that means, as far as I understand, obviously the three of us have been part of ACM, right? We've been defining all this. It's a lot of event driven, meaning along the delivery pipeline as code moves through the different stages events are generated like you know build get started a bill gets deployed a bill gets verified these are all events and obviously slack or whatever chat up solution you have is probably a great

place and this is part of the ACM implementation yes exactly so part of the implementations that we assess what the customer is using and we define integration points. It could also be that we can suggest some certain toolings and there are some gaps in their implementation, but we try to stay as tool agnostic as possible. That's pretty cool. So in case somebody is interested, I mean, there's a lot of people hopefully listening to this and then watching the recording, how do people get in touch with Dynatrace in case they want to actually, they want to partner up with Dynatrace to get our help on that?

So first of all here at Perform in the marketplace there will be a tower dedicated to ACM, so we'll have several experts throughout the conference that can answer all of your questions. Beyond that I would recommend you reaching out to your local customer success manager or sales rep and they can certainly connect you with our ACM SWAT team. Cool, and then I think Trevor in the beginning you gave a quick overview of how like the process of such a project would look like but can you repeat that so in case somebody says this is interesting for me what would be the different steps along the way? Sure so once we agree that we want to partner on

an ACM project we would first start out as Christoph said with with an assessment so the assessment really focuses on understanding the current state of your software delivery lifecycle and all of the tooling and processes and culture and all of the everything that goes into getting software from code to reality and we identify where there's opportunities for improvements to help automate manual processes once we do that we develop an ACM blueprint which will identify the actual tasks that we want to help you implement and then we'll go through it that that training lab that I spoke

about before called the autonomous cloud lab just to get you enabled your team enabled on the core concepts that we'll be implementing. And then we move into the actual project of implementation. That's pretty cool. And then any lessons learned? I mean, it seems like, I mean, there's a lot of companies out there that are huge enterprises, right? Yeah. So are you going to boil the ocean, meaning doing everything at once?

Or what's the lesson learned on that? What's the focus of the project typically? So we definitely, we certainly focus on not the ocean, meaning doing everything at once? Or what's the lesson learned on that? How do you, what's the focus of a project typically? So we definitely, we certainly focus on not the ocean. We generally try to pick an application or a service that we know we can get some actual traction with. And then we teach them, the customer, and actually implement the things that we want to change on that service or application that then can be duplicated

across the environment as the customer wants. Pretty cool. Christoph, another question for you. I know actually the two of us, we've been on-site with KeyBank, who was mentioned earlier, right? So we did the blueprinting exercise. What I found extremely valuable in that kind of engagement, first of all, the commitment, obviously, of KeyBank.

They brought the right people, and I think there was there was pretty cool what were your observations anything from like the way we interact what were they what was still there the biggest lessons learned maybe in that week anything right yeah I think the the biggest part there is that we ask a customer really to show us how they deploy a coach agent to production so all the steps that intermediate steps that are taken so how does a how does a build go from one part of the pipeline to the other and and there you can really see the customer discover themselves as well what they're

doing wrong so by telling us what they're doing sometimes the lights already go on and then you see a this is probably not the best way and it's actually us guiding them through that through that journey that uh that made a big impact um even if it's just you know uh implementing automatic quality gates as opposed to manual steps uh we can actually see that it would uh cut the time of deployment potentially in half right yeah so that's that's pretty cool. Yeah, and I also wanted to add to this because I thought it was interesting that they, in discussion,

they saw how the current process works, but it seems everyone along the delivery chain already had some ideas on how to improve it and all of that. We gave, I think the whole ACM project gives them a platform to raise their voices and say, hey, if we're going to change something, I don't just want to have an external coming in and saying us how to do it, but we in collaboration, we can bring in our own ideas

and then we get to a final state. That's pretty cool. Well, thank you so much for that. Any final words? Is there anything that you want to additionally say? Or is it just party time now? What do we do? No, just a reminder to come visit us in the marketplace.

Come to our tower and talk to Christoph and some of the other experts around ACM. And looking forward to seeing you there. Cool. Well, with that, thanks, Trevor. Thanks, Christoph. For Pure Performance, I'm Andy Kretner.