The Art of Modern Ops
Weaveworks
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Welcome to the Art of Modern Ops - a podcast series on modernizing cloud infrastructure; hosted by Cornelia Davis, Weaveworks CTO, and author of the book Cloud Native Patterns. Through a series of interviews with both visionaries and practitioners, she discusses hands-on use cases with those who have completed the digital transformation and others still in transition. https://www.weave.works
Available episodes
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May 24, 2022
Lunar Bank Uses GitOps to Standardize Workflows and Enhance the Developer Experience
Lunar is a 100% digital bank and a FinTech company that strives to democratize the power of money and the way we spend and invest it. Headquartered in Aarhus, Denmark, Lunar operates in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway serving its 500,000 active customers with a team of 650+ employees. Having received over €345 in funding, Lunar’s valuation is currently at $2.25B.
In the latest episode of our podcast the Art of Modern Ops, Bjørn Hald Sørensen, Engineering Manager of the Platform Team, and Kasper Nissen, Lead Platform Architect at Lunar Bank, are describing how Lunar Bank streamlined workflows and enhanced their developer experience with GitOps
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Feb 17, 2022
The Art of Modern Ops: Policy management for trusted delivery
In the latest instalment of The Art of Modern Ops welcomes Weaveworks CEO Alexis Richardson and Magalix CEO Mohamed Ahmed talk trusted delivery and GitOps.
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Dec 9, 2021
The GitOps market: driving progressive delivery and experimentation's expansion
Our latest episode of The Art of Modern Ops welcomes Tech investor and managing director of Dell Technologies Capital, Tyler Jewell. Topics covered are the increasing need of automating software particularly in complex fields such as continuous delivery and the growing shortage of developers handling increasingly intricate software systems.
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Nov 15, 2021
Kubernetes has won the enterprise
In the latest episode of our podcast, The Art of Modern Ops, we welcomed two renowned technologists to discuss the state of Kubernetes in the enterprise right now; Michael Cote and Joe Beda. They discuss the enterprise adoption of Kubernetes relative to the growth it saw in the start-up and small-to-medium-sized business.
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Aug 12, 2021
The cloud native transformation for telcos
In the latest episode of our podcast, The Art of Modern Ops, host and Weaveworks CTO Cornelia Davis welcomes three leaders from the telo world, each with their own perspective on the transition from virtualized infrastructure to cloud native architectures.
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Jul 22, 2021
The Art of Modern Ops: Authorize better with OPA - security policy as code
In this episode of the Art of Modern Ops, Cornelia interviews Gareth Rushgrove, VP of Product at Snyk, in Cambridge, England. Together, they talk Kubernetes, GitOps and policy – focusing on Open Policy Agent (OPA) a recently graduated project in the CNCF.
With a background including stints at Docker and Puppet as well as the UK Government Digital Service, Gareth specializes in application development security tools, including OPA. As Gareth explains in this episode, OPA is important because it provides an essential function: the ability to define and enforce a single set of policies and manage them all through a single interface, rather than using different languages, models, and APIs for different tools, across your organization.
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Jun 17, 2021
OpenGitOps - The Vendor-Neutral GitOps Project
*Weaveworks CTO Cornelia Davis leads an insightful and very lively discussion with some of the founding members and active contributors of the **GitOps Working Group** (GWG). The focus of the GWG, a working group under the CNCF App Delivery SIG, is to clearly define a vendor-neutral, principle-led meaning of GitOps. The goal however is to express a foundation for interoperability between tools, conformance, and certification. *
*All of our 6 podcast guests have extensive working knowledge of GitOps, from the way it came into being to the way their customers are putting it to work today:*
* *Brice Fernandes**, Senior Solutions Architect, Weaveworks*
* *Christian Hernandez**, Senior Principal Technical Marketing Manager, Red Hat*
* *Chris Patterson, Staff Product Manager,** GitHub*
* *Chris Sanders**, Program Manager, Microsoft*
* *Dan Garfield**, Chief Open Source Officer, CodeFresh*
* *Jesse Butler, Senior Developer Advocate, **Kubernetes team AWS*
*Talking points range from defining GitOps to what its underlying principles are and why we are seeing a steadily growing number of practitioners. *
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Apr 1, 2021
Delivery engineering = GitOps at State Farm
As the owner of the GitOps Platform team, Mae Large is responsible for “delivery engineering”. She explains that delivery engineering is about enabling every product team to deploy changes to platforms in a simple, compliant, and repeatable manner - a very succinct explanation of the term "GitOps".
"Our goal is to give every product team the ability to deploy their changes to our modern strategic platforms in a simple, compliant and repeatable manner."
They achieved their primary goal to improve the developer experience by enabling a self-service developer platform. The job of the GitOps platform team in this case is to enforce compliance while giving more power to developers. This is a challenging balance to walk, but Large and her team at State Farm have found a way to achieve this balance.
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Mar 8, 2021
How the Service Mesh became a Service Mess
The nature of technology is to continuously evolve. Each iteration draws on learnings and mistakes of the past. As we move past the cusp of change from monolithic infrastructures to cloud based microservices we are experiencing an evolution of the tooling and monitoring of our applications. We knew how to monitor our servers, network devices and our applications running on our systems, however the shift to microservices required a new infrastructure and with that new ways to automate and monitor it.
In the early days at Twitter, William Morgan, worked heavily on their in house tools to monitor their transformation to a microservices infrastructure. One critical tool, called Finagle, was eventually open sourced and became the basis for Linkerd which William and co-founder Oliver Gould eventually dubbed a “Service Mesh”.
Linkerd is reminiscent of a monitoring system developed at CloudFoundry leveraging some of Netflix OSS releases as well as the Spring Framework. Without out of the box tools, innovators built what they needed without knowing it was a service mesh.
Now with the widespread adoption of service meshes to manage microservices infrastructures, Buoyant has watched Linkerd adoption skyrocket among organizations adopting cloud native technology such as Kubernetes. (Here is an excellent article by William explaining what every Software Engineer needs to know about service meshes.)
Tune in for a brilliant discussion on the origins of service mesh, its ecosystem and why it’s important for Kubernetes centric infrastructures today.
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Feb 3, 2021
DevOps Foundations and Future
In this episode of the Art of Modern Ops, Cornelia Davis and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, Gene Kim discuss the ways of working with DevOps as portrayed in Gene’s ground breaking books on DevOps.
In “The Phoenix Project” Gene describes how the 3 ways: Flow (System Thinking), Feedback and Continual Experimentation and learning, help the operations teams during their digital transformation. Although DevOps starts with development, we hear Gene discuss his thought process around why Phoenix Project revolves around Operations.
In the follow up “The Unicorn Project”, we view the same problem from the lens of the Developer who uses the 5 ideals: locality / simplicity, focus / flow / joy, improvement of daily work, psychological safety and customer focus during their digital transformation. Here, Gene circles back to his roots as a developer to bring to light key elements of successful development. Cornelia and Gene riff on how the teamwork between Dev and Ops is crucial to winning the game.
Gene Kim “All the hopes dreams and aspirations of the organization, as people think about digital transformation, will be done through the act of development.[...].So much of infrastructure and operations are really now in service of elevating developer productivity”
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Jan 12, 2021
Tech as Fashion: Do tools drive developer cultural change?
In software engineering, we often think about how the process itself, for example Agile or Extreme programming is what influences engineering culture. But what if the tools themselves are what drives developer culture and have a much bigger impact than process on engineering culture ?
In this episode of the Art of Modern Ops, Cornelia Davis sat down with industry analyst James Governor of Redmonk to discuss the state of DevOps, cloud native and what really drives developers to choose the tools they use. “Sometimes technology is chosen by people based on their gut instincts rather than on facts,” says James Governor. “Of course we all view ourselves as computer scientists, but often there are more than facts involved for why people gravitate towards particular brands.”
Listen to the entire episode as Cornelia and James drill down on choosing technologies, testing in production and progressive delivery.
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Dec 10, 2020
Kubernetes at Deutsche Telekom - GitOps at the Edge
The panacea for most organizations when they adopt cloud native technologies is portability across multiple clouds, data-centres and even the edge. In this latest podcast episode Vuk Gojnic of Deutsche Telekom and Cornelia Davis of Weaveworks discuss Das Schiff - a Kubernetes as a service platform for vendors and application developers.
Vuk Gojnic is a squad leader for the Kubernetes Engine at Deutsche Telekom. Originally a developer, Vuk discovered open source and has been a convert ever since. At Deutsche Telekom, he’s responsible for Das Schiff their Infrastructure as a Service platform built on Kubernetes and other cloud native tools. The platform allows 1000’s of application owners and vendors to securely deploy workloads and other services on-premise, across multiple sites, clouds and at the edge with the standard GitOps operating model.
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Oct 15, 2020
DevOps and the Visibility of Work in the Value Stream
In this age of faster, and leaner software delivery, managing teams and more importantly managing tasks and workflows, both within teams and across teams, is more relevant than ever. Time waste, too much work in progress and an overhead of technical debt are just a few of the problems that enterprises and other large organizations are faced with. What are the root causes of work overload and how can it be mitigated so that cloud native adoption is a reality without your organization having to compromise on quality?
Cornelia Davis, CTO Weaveworks and Dominica DeGrandis, director of Digital Transformation at Tasktop offers some practical advice on evaluating IT workflows in the enterprise and how to manage technical debt and other invisible work.
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Sep 29, 2020
Camille Fournier on Building Internal Kubernetes Platforms
For most organizations building an internal platform team can be a challenge when your internal customers are engineers and you don’t have any type of formal product management. How do you go about keeping up with the product side of things when you’re knee deep in Kubernetes, storage systems and configuration management and other frameworks for services?
In this latest episode of the “Art of Modern Ops” Camille Fournier, Managing Director at Two Sigma and Cornelia Davis, CTO at Weaveworks discuss what it takes to build an internal platform within your organization. Many organizations might not think they need an internal product management procedure to identify the key features from their customers to prioritize and build into the platform. At Two Sigma the platform team’s customers are other engineers, who generally work on data engineering, building tools for financial operations, as well as for systems that trade in the markets.
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Sep 16, 2020
Z System in the Age of DevOps: When Eventual Consistency is Not an Option
In this latest episode, Cornelia Davis, Weaveworks CTO discusses DevOps and open source on the mainframe with Rosalind Radcliffe, distinguished engineer at IBM. The IBM Z system has been around for more than 50 years, and according to Rosalind, it’s the system that “runs the world”. How has Z adopted DevOps best practices or is it the other way around where DevOps practices have caught up to Z?
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Aug 18, 2020
Buzzword Bingo - What do you really need for Kubernetes?
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Aug 6, 2020
Kubernetes in Highly Regulated Industries
BlackRock is one of the largest investment companies in the world. With a 30-year history and an impressive performance, the company does not shy away from the latest trends in cloud native infrastructure. In just 100 days, the BlackRock platform team managed to roll out a full production Kubernetes environment and released a more modern version of Aladdin, their internal investor research app. Mike Bowen, Director of Open Source discusses the challenges and benefits of Kubernetes and other cloud native tooling in a regulated environment like Blackrock.
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Jul 20, 2020
DevOps Metrics - Success Follows Failure
Cornelia Davis (@cdavisacf) in conversation with Steve Wade (@swade1987) takes a look at GitOps, DevOp and the metrics used to measure your progress as a newly formed DevOps team.
Steve Wade is the platform lead at Mettle, a fintech company in the UK that provides free digital business accounts that can help small businesses and the self-employed start, run and grow their business.
Steve thinks about DevOps in terms of a process rather than a technology. DevOps to him is using automation to eliminate waste from development and platform management cycles. In addition to this it can be thought of as a type of systems engineering that when done effectively, enables information sharing across all business units. But to close those information gaps across an entire company, you need to make iterative improvements that can be easily measured and improved upon. Once you’ve identified those improvement areas the entire organization is propelled towards a much higher velocity.
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Jun 23, 2020
Does Open Source Drive Business Innovation? Matt Asay, AWS & Cornelia Davis, Weaveworks
In this thought-provoking conversation Cornelia Davis of Weaveworks and Matt Asay of AWS explore the history of the open source movement, and examine the motivating factors that have driven consumers to increasingly insist on open source.
Arguably launched by the success of Linux as an open source project, the shift has driven technology providers to include open source software as an integral component of an enterprise-wide technology strategy. A few defining moments led to this explosion of available open source projects, as well an increase in trust shown by the number of companies who have built businesses around open source. Matt has spent virtually his entire career experiencing these shifts first hand, and we think you’ll agree, that he brings a wealth of fascinating insights to the open source conversation.
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Jun 8, 2020
Is Envoy a Service Mesh or a Platform? Matt Klein, Lyft & Cornelia Davis, Weaveworks
Lyft migrated their single monolithic service to 300+ microservices with their internal proxy and API gateway, called Envoy. Knowing that many other organizations will have faced similar problems to Lyft, Envoy was open sourced and later donated to the CNCF where it recently graduated to production ready status alongside Kubernetes and Prometheus.
In this episode of the Art of Modern Ops podcast, Matt Klein, Lyft Software Engineer and Cornelia Davis Weaveworks CTO discuss the history of Envoy and how it was originally used as an API gateway and how it differs from a purpose-built service mesh.
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May 18, 2020
Carving out a Cloud Native Culture in Established Organizations with Cornelia Davis, Weaveworks & Chris Short, Redhat
It’s been said that the process of building software is as much about people as it is about writing the code. According to a recent survey conducted by the CNCF, 43% of respondents indicated that cultural changes were a top challenge.
The success of implementing cloud native technology and DevOps best practices into your organization depends a lot on your existing company culture. Internal teams must not only learn to adopt cross-functional methods that ensure software is iterated on with a continuous cadence but that it also complements the business goals. Making the actual switch to a cloud native technical solution may be the simplest part in your journey; but how you get to that technical solution, and propagating that throughout your organization could well be the most difficult part of the process.
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May 7, 2020
Is Kubernetes Ready for Specialization? with Cornelia Davis, Weaveworks & Cody Hill, Packet
Kubernetes is often selected by organizations to meet specific requirements that can give businesses a competitive advantage. Requirements may include features involving machine learning to make real-time recommendations, to perform ‘intelligent queries’ or they may be needed for real-time, on-site data processing like that available from Edge infrastructure setups. In this episode of the Art of Modern Ops, Cornelia Davis, Weaveworks CTO and Cody Hill, Packet Field CTO explore what this type of Kubernetes infrastructure looks like in practice.
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Apr 23, 2020
Navigating the Kubernetes Hype Cycle with Cornelia Davis, Weaveworks & Liz Rice, Aqua Security
Anyone who looks at the growth of Kubecon CloudNativeCon attendance over the past four years can recognize that Kubernetes is more than a passing fad. Instead, Kubernetes represents the way forward for companies to scale, go faster and be more competitive. Many question whether we’ve achieved ‘peak Kubecon’.
Listen in as Cornelia Davis and Liz Rice discuss the current state of cloud native, its ecosystem of projects and how the CNCF can help you navigate the complexity of piecing together a Kubernetes solution that’s right for your team.
Most organizations find open source software appealing because of the choice it offers. However there are tradeoffs; an abundance of choice can also increase complexity. An ideal situation would consist of an integrated plug and play solution with open source standards and solutions. One of the most pressing questions is whether we'll see a more integrated solution for delivering Kubernetes in the enterprise versus a straight do yourself appr…
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