In the latest VMware multi-cloud podcast, Eric Nielsen (@ericnpro) and I (@djasso7494) sat down with Mandy Storbakken to discuss DevOps and its relationship to Cloud Management. Mandy is a Senior Technical Manager leading VMware’s Emerging Business Solution Architects. She is also a core member of the VMware Cloud Management Center of Excellence team and in her most recent role before this one, Mandy was a VMware Cloud Technologist with a primary focus on Multi-Cloud Management.
Before joining VMware, Mandy worked as a cloud architect for several large companies that were building their own clouds. Since joining VMware, Mandy has worked with hundreds of customers, helping them to implement a cloud operating model. She has also authored dozens of blogs at VMware including an extensive series on DevOps and Cloud Management. We asked Mandy to join us on the podcast to explore the intersection between DevOps and Cloud Management
We started our discussion by talking about what makes the “Ops” part of DevOps so much different than what people think about when we they think about more traditional IT Ops. Mandy walked us through three key areas of differences: How teams collaborate, how teams are empowered by their leadership and the differences in the level of autonomy DevOps teams are granted versus that of teams that operate in a more traditional IT model.
We also discussed some of the best practices for teams to assess when considering whether their DevOps program is hitting the mark in terms of adding value. Research indicates that four key metrics are highly correlated with the success of DevOps programs. They are:
- Lead Time (length of the development cycle from start to production)
- Deployment Frequency (for software updates)
- Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) (after a service incident or outage)
- Change Fail Percentage (when making a change to production)
A recent blog by Mandy, “What Does Shift-Left Really Mean for IT Platform Teams?”, encapsulates a lot of what we discussed in the final segment of the show. Our focus was on considering the requirements that an effective cloud management solution must address in order to support DevOps across the application development lifecycle.
What I really like about the way that Mandy writes about DevOps and Cloud Management, is her ability to first focus on what developers are doing at each stage of the app dev lifecycle and then extend that point of view into the capability that a cloud platform must deliver. She is great at focusing in on how cloud management capabilities get translated into one or more cloud operations tasks. Those cloud operations, when taken together, comprise the cloud operating model, another topic that Mandy has written extensively on.
I hope you’ll enjoy the podcast. I also encourage you take a look at the numerous blogs that Mandy has written across DevOps and the Cloud Operating model. I’m sure you’ll learn a lot. I know I did.
Get the Podcast
You can get this podcast from any of the venues below:
Additional Resources
If you are interested in other multi-cloud podcasts Eric and I have done in the past you can find links to playlists for the VMware Multi-Cloud Podcast below:
