Solarwinds Head Geeks at AWS re:Invent
Transcript
[Music] hey how's he wanted chief Towser from the sea to a visor I don't know I want to call this a virtualized ego those were CTO triple dose quadruple dose I'm surrounded by three geeks so the CTO of Iser will try not to take too much of our County technically wise were coming to you from Las Vegas AWS reinvent I have the SolarWinds geek team with me I'm just gonna call you guys the geek team I have the head geek in the head geek in the
head so we'll go around and introduce everyone Patrick sorry it's our with you yeah so uh Patrick Hubbard I've been in town for 12 years at this point and I started as a developer and kind of came to enterprise and now back to software actuation and reminding people that there is a way to have better weekends by using automation there's there's a chance that there's no weekends a mighty that doesn't even with automation the top topsail Rock also a geek with Patrick and miss Sullivan's technically
seven years by VIN program analyst database administrator kind of a little bit of everything and you know how IT goes this is a Sabbath and but these days yeah I get to be a hickey and it's just wonderful when they call yes thanks for having us on by the way keep Cong yang it's old and techie in its elements three years in there before that office of the CTO of the big four did consulting did evangelism practice lead and a startup that got bought and then
join these two fellows and smiling ever since Allah so you for disposal SolarWinds has sponsored coming CTO adviser content in the past this is not a sponsored podcast just a conversation about the the show and and what we've seen this is my first really my - okay come third so developer background third well what brought you to reinvent so is your infrastructure guy right so yeah I started out del Y so servers hardware right right then with virtualization Naxalism but then when I started with the
startup practice there right so that was my first taste the pre-event I've been convicted sense because the energy the amount of money that's come into this net is insane right is insane so 42 a few numbers 42,000 people 18 billion dollar runway with a 40 percent kegger so year-over-year growth they're expecting the business to grow at forty percent so the first thing I want to get out the way you I mean we all see each other Patrick my first time meeting you in person I follow
you on twitter but this is we normally be each other being one that's right and this is quite different than via more VMware has employee but this is quite I remarked that you could spend two days on the expo floor by itself the number of solutions and partners on the show floor all just amazing SolarWinds had a booth on the show floor and he you guys work the booth not technically but we hug they're quite a bit in the integrate conversation they ask a little bit
of time there I mean it always is right because this show me you're right it is an introduction I mean is intentionally aw this does it for reason when you go back to its first year in New York the whole point was to get influencers and certain people to be the technical leaders excited about it but now you know to your point it's a commodity so you have that crossover between traditional enterprise traditional on-prem now they've got multiple clouds you know but they do is is
typically one of several linkers that they're working with but they are here as much because half of their team has already made the made the transition or is you know what we said but two years ago we'd say most CIOs would save some time by 2017 we'll have 10% of our workloads and now you look at surveys and it's more like 50% of enterprise has 25% the appointment is always been celebrated and so they are torn in that conversation between I still got all of my
own career but now I've got cloud and now I'm dealing with containers dealing with orchestration and a bunch of other technologies that they weren't even thinking about you like if you went to me and we're being whirled three years ago orchestration wouldn't have been the conversation a little while exist again and and this year it was mostly orchestration you know so let's talk a little bit SolarWinds a little bit not too much so liz is in a unique position you guys for the count of your
range of customers range all the way from the smallest of businessman so if you have a team at all then SolarWinds is an entry point where there's a product for you there this deals all the way up so AWS reinvent is kind of that saying that that same geography of customer and that's a great point we scale with our customers so from the one-person shop all the way until the global that you find companies right because we're fundamental and what we the problems that we address
for our customer base and that's monitoring just across the entire full stack so so that's why we can touch the one-person shop and still a lot of thought of you for those enterprises in there so I love that's a lie we're going to talk about so little is open up you guys Canada I invited you guys over for the conversation for a reason and that is you guys are traditional IT in a sense you still have customers who deep roots so you're not traditional IT present
you have roots in traditional IT so as a organization you've had to meet the transition from okay I'm helping people who are maintaining their own infrastructure to help you people maintain their their environment in the cloud and then people in between then have a foot in both worlds something that we can't kind of call high variety I did a a book for SolarWinds on hybrid I team talked was about that journey and as take me through a typical customer journey who goes from you know what
all of my stuff is arm trim - oh my god I just got a part people want ticket because s3 field and I had no idea that we had stuff in history probably knows more about the journey god I can speak to that company thing no I think and here's its to me it's all about what did you make your entry point so if you're a company who made an entry point and you tried to you didn't think of yourself as an early adopter but maybe
you work you were probably in that set of people that tried to get stuff into the cloud and fail right yeah and so now you maybe have a little negative feeling about the cloud so you cloud you're still of hesitancy into it but if you weren't that early adopter if you came in that next wave after the early adopters you learned from that you probably had a little bit more success and if you're our company that has really just started then cloud is something you've already
known there's a really good chance that even though you might not think you're fun but you are you're using o365 we're like you said something spun up something in that's three and suddenly became mission critical you knew nothing about it yeah I think Pack DLC you're in the lands beer world said that their survey average customer at eight different tile partners yeah not products no but in different pal partners yeah so as we're transitioning to kind of this IT is the gatekeeper of Technology and we're
creating service catalogs and we're digging now like porridge IT and Technology capability to the enterprise to the enterprise being able to consume it directly if they get into a situation if they find oh wait hold on I can't I can't do this by myself I need I t's help what types what what is that help what is the number one thing that IT departments are coming back and asking 15 so on that point I found it funny in Warner's keynote today right he talked about change
management and how builders are developers says they you know builders as AWS calls up that's gonna be their challenge in AWS is gonna help them with change management and my first thought was DD welcome back yeah EMC on they had been mentioned BMC on the stage but we I had BMC an interviewing one of the first things they talked about is is discovery why we gotta know what you have before you before he can do anything and you know so to that point I think having
a conversation how do you break that it's the same way IT pros break issues that they run into me and that's breaking down sideways you gotta cut across all those stats it's just that some of these stats are owned by different providers yeah in there outside your org and you have to go shoot those pieces sometimes only leverage you got our terms and conditions and there's some ways that you can you know you don't have the same knobs like in data center if time came you
said Keith I'm not getting enough my reader are just too slow I can that I can go in there pop in some more disk and magically faster faster be more I ops more reads well there's another thing to where you know I think sometimes developers or groups River criticized for example your sling is too complicated or it's just you're too inflexible that you can't be agile but here's sort of that new and shiny versus old thought right and so now we're seeing cloud applications that are
old enough that have been around long enough that you know thing we're in with a developer comes by and on the shoulder when you're not so now you're seeing a lot more integration also between what were atomic standalone projects that were really sponsored by EXO sort of like almost CEO blessed rogue IT yeah in and so now they're integrating more and more systems and to your point a lot of murder disparate multiplied and discovering that oh well as a developer I having some requirements and an
expectation of scope an overall circumference of the complexity of this application and now it's beginning to grow out and Ops has a lot of rich experience with dealing with what does an app look like three years five years ten years out with multiple layers of integration that we're never planned at the time that those were created and that's something that can developers can actually work from and we're finding a lot of times a bill the developers will come to abstain we'd like for you to help
us so there's it's a little bit less adversarial than it maybe has been layers so let's switch over to announcements what were the announcements from the show we're not even just mountains what was either announcements or experiences that were the highlight of the show for us I'll tell you right now when Vernor today they spent 10 15 minutes talking about security being a shared responsibility across everybody and it has to be your number one thing everything you do you should be thinking you know is this
secure first mmm to me was I just thank you thank you thank you because that I feel security has always come second to functionality and the busiest leave the s3 buckets open everyone read it man like you were just saying though you were talking about the rogue IT I mean the business and the end users don't care what magic happens they don't care how you got the job done right and if it's a mess back there you we're the ones that usually have to clean up
the mess but they don't care yeah you can tell my service providers I don't care you have 30 people in the background and I'd be cold to deliver the change that I've been put in that I don't care I just want I just want to be solved that functionality in that business driver always Trump's has Trump security traditionally with every passing day week month with every breach that comes up and with every breach that's handled incredibly poorly breaches are an opportunity for you to shine mm-hmm
and how you handle it and take responsibility or for you to completely bury your company and how you handled it and shed responsibility so for him to Amazon's a huge market for him to stand the front of that market and say security should be a focus was a great message to set I'm hoping it gets received Patrick what about you well it's kind of dovetailing it's interesting you know I the first real wake up there was deciding that Enterprise that you know needs machine learning for
dummies right oh this is too complicated practitioners don't know what to do with it so we're gonna simplify that but as a metaphor for getting people to adopt manage services in general right - I think there were a couple of different presentations where he basically would show before and after building yourself or use managed services version of it and one of the things that I'm really excited about that especially from the security perspective is that there is whether its traditional laundering or its telemetry or -
the foreigners point about was talking about building out your innovation architecture like most companies don't even have an area where they have to tell Madoff or you can even you know programmatically look at the data and the processes that you were that you're executing are you actually delighted users or not but there's an opportunity with all of this the cloud presents to get people think about injecting security at the design level instead of the way we normally do it which is you know first you buy
a fire building app then you find infrastructure to run it on and then maybe you've got a little bit of budget left for monitoring then way down at the end there security and instead making the statement that everyone is a security engineer that we're moving too fast to like to finally move that forward he's he's fundamental to IT continuing because sooner or later we need a point where we cannot continue to accelerate we can't move fast because the risk is the real business or it's not
regulatory compliance or something else obscure but losing a billion dollars of corporate value as a result of a security of the state that eventually will force transact will force innovation speed and hit the plateau the social security is a big deal oh my god so I have a different take okay you know security is important but the minds less on on the technical announcements the doctor said announcements that came because there were plenty to go through but my most poignant moment was during Warner's you know
the fact that we had so many distinguished female engineers come to the stage in name from Norah Jones the addy fuller to feed the young lady who was I forget her name this year engineer from Amazon who did the demo but a Warner ordered two pizzas and beer in there I mean they were distinguished skilled and they articulated complexities simply you know and it was fabulously done by that was the biggest point to me because usually conferences will say oh women in tech and then don't
show off somebody from marketing yeah would you I'm a marketer so I don't mind that brought that that there there are examples of hundred men do it's just like hey this is an SVP or a general manager and I love the way that he threw the challenge right because in his typical winter fashion they came out all the demos were amazing and he made the statement which is you know some people say it's hard to find a female rock started as a technology I didn't have
any farm already right we just you shouldn't eat it you we use an industry that's really yeah I would love to see that that that same diversity and racial diversity as well there are plenty of talented humans are pretty amazing people and no matter where they're from what gender they are pretty smart so I love missed that part of the keynote unfortunately I was doing talking to a bunch of students and I think that's the thing that I found most interesting about the show well 42,000
attendees anywhere from 40 to the 50s and 45,000 are the numbers that I've heard is that all of these people aren't necessary I team they're not even necessarily developers there are people looking to build stuff and get technologies solve what I said in the past and I think this show has started to materialize it is IT is going to get to the point where a IT staff there's no longer needed it I don't need up I don't need a when you look at and I think
that's Amazon's goal you know Jesse got on stage and said that they don't build technologies because they are cool they build technologies because they solve problems and at the end of the day if you make the technology as simple as possible which is not an easy thing to do together any business of creating technology and software it is not easy to make it simple to use that's just the reality today now Amazon is pushing the envelope and making software not just software but infrastructure when I
first spotted my first V PC in AWS I'm thinking oh my god this would it took me six months to deal from provisioning me from procurement to provisioning to QA and in deployment configuration I did it in a matter of minutes and I think that is the thing that I didn't expect is to see so many business users at the conference who I interviewed that had nothing to do with technology in and in general they just they just their builders they consume the these services they
don't know what what it took to build a circle is Aurora don't even care they just wanted to zoom the database so you talked earlier about there being a difference between vmworld and Riva and so you just basically articulated exactly what the difference is that you call it builders however you want to call it so first of all Amazon's really an online bookstore that has now grown into being in a precise run by an online bookstore they had 42 people we went to the profitable part
of the company right it's just that they are an infrastructure conference look at everything they offer they started with ebooks and now they're doing storage and everything else and all the services that come with it it's a wonderful ecosystem that they have built in 20 plus years it's an amazing thing so an event like VM world is really for the people that are using VMware technology and there's when they get ten fifteen thousand people at their event it's still a sizable yeah twenty-three thousand right but
you have only twenty three thousand 42,000 twice that number it there in its all walks of IT life yes it's across over the people that are doing virtualization and the people in need the orchestration and the people I just want to write the business logic so yeah you get a big net right you cast a big net and for a friend event like this see this element I just - Thomas there you had asked why it resonates with a lot of folks right there resonates with
a lot of industries from retail to FinTech and so forth because AWS has reduced it to the lowest common denominator made it easy to sub-surface the services that they provide right in there and they're going towards the goal of providing services that are frictionless to consume which means that we may be attacked and our colleagues and friends and Industry that building wonderful widgets with this technology but your abdominals your keep the hugs they're building the mobile app so that they can get consumers to eat more
pizza well if they leverage some tools that if the services that uws provides up their path to getting that down as short because they don't have to do when you talk about procure by vision and they set up all those pieces thinkin setup functions I think that's what I just want to deal they just want to solve business problems so with that we'll wrap up though I would love to have talked to you guys about the role of monitoring in all of that the there is
a theme on the show floor of the expo for the big booths work from the monitoring companies and that is something to definitely dive into but until then if people want to find out more about what SolarWinds is doing and what you guys are doing individually where can they find you online Patrick well I mean obviously you know solarwinds.com is a great place to start this visit MIT we had a lot of people that were looking a new public which is that optics so that's combined
APM infrastructure monitoring and it's really fun to play with so that's economy our user community if you're on the enterprise side that's why calm and then we're all that divided winds calm don't over third number four years of that and then also black capcom has some of our in the street talks with some of our industry times you know so you won't get twitter handler's permit geek sequel rock star Kanye and I at CTO advisor on Twitter you can find this in other great content the
CTO advisor calm and I'm probably end up publishing this as a podcast because we went along then that's okay go to the great conversation alright talk to you guys and then CTO dose things happen
