Where are the Future Enterprise IT Roles - Sarbjeet Johal CTO Advisor Road Trip Interview
Transcript
[Music] hey it's keith townsend principal of this cto advisor and i have with me sabji joe hall sergey what's your official title man i am techno technology strategist so if you haven't noticed me and sarpjeet get in back and forth a lot of time in conversations i'm an old-school i.t infrastructure guy i like i like data centers i like cables i like wires but sarbjeet really came up with a great topic that we're going to discuss on this cto advisor road trip stop and check those
wearing lost altos california at lincoln park pretty nice park yeah it's it's a it's the beautiful part of the bay area los altos yep you can you can tell right yeah it's uh the there's fancy shopping right across the street this really really nice area yeah so sarge we're talking about the new stack who what that one defining what is the new stack and then two what are the roles and who's been kind of left behind yeah in the new stack so define for us what
is the new stack so i think that new stack is all up in the air right now like overall but just if you back up a little bit stacks change all the time and i usually sign this one talk with our cto back then from rackspace john and gates did um for splunk at their annual conference was like the the title of the the talk was stack what stack means like there's no stack we're multi-stack right now right so what that does is uh it takes
us away from we used to have blue stack red stack you know your oracle or your ibm or microsoft right but now it's all over the place right you talk about yeah i was looking at i was gonna install the linux subsystem on windows 10 the other day you're talking about stack is that the microsoft stack is that you want to stack what is yeah what is the stuff everybody's doing everything right you notice that like everybody's doing everything at all levels even within our world
which is infrastructure platform as a service and then sas world almost everybody's doing everything like look at salesforce look at um work day they're trying to go you know um you can sit down that's the act if you will like from sas to pass you know both these companies and oracle is struggling there a little bit at the same time it was purely infrastructure service and they are trying to go into the past layer now right with the interjection of kubernetes and other sort of their
esmeral their esmeral and lighthouse we just we just did a video with uh chris adler who leads their uh lighthouse initiative and then i'm thinking wow this sounds a lot like the openstack days what you guys did with openstack but now with this new stack but okay so this is actually we were talking off camera before we started like rolling the camera a lot of roles have been impacted traditionally we had you know traditional development and traditional operations and and security and we used to have
knocks and and dbas remember those dbas there's there's still data data's the most valuable asset but there's no database administrators yeah exactly so like you never hear the word dbas these days the term dba but we talk about data all the time so what happened to dbas what are they doing these days uh what have they become so it's um law is moving so we are doing micro services they are we are not doing monolithic software we are not doing this in memory calls to the
other sort of set of functions within an application we are going over the wire doing rest apis so it throws a lot of things the traditional thinking into um sort of this basket you know your trash now and then there's a new way of building software the lego blocks and and i think it's a beautiful thing we wanted to get here but the problem is like now we need to make it work so i there's two parts of it there's when you're talking about the new
stack and the dba's dba's role in the new stack i'd like to delve into like what it functionally who's doing the dba's job but when i go to customer sites they still very much have a dba group that dba group just isn't doing new stack applications yeah so you know the the old stuff is still there there's still a there's still teams performing that dba functional work for sap for the oracle databases etc but for a cloud native application that's running off of some uh some
nosql database or some something that developers really don't care they're just making a call from an api and getting the data sets who's maintaining and taking care of the data and how should the current dba think about moving from being a dba to being that new thing the thing yeah so like so with the advent of devops right the whole idea was the developers are doing operations about as well if you think about dbas they were in the middle developers were writing code right the epa's
kept you honest like as a developer i used to define the schemas the database schemas and then that will pass it to dba and they'll say like oh no no this phone key is not right you know like this is not um you know um normalize or do we need to denormalize it for performances and they they knew that performance correct database site so they just kind of fixed the problems so that it performs in operations so they were close to operations but today we are
trying to make developers do everything developers are defining these schemas and they are persisting they are actually operations as well that's what that's what amazon calls two visa teams uh so these this one team is responsible for development and operations and everything in between like release and all that stuff so i see that i see that executed in varying degrees yeah some companies have gone all in and the concept of devops other companies you know what they've they've created a development group then they've uh created
an operations group full of developers so there's you know there's a range of it but if we're gonna stick to kind of the extreme range of you know what developers doing both development and operations and you're a dba today and you're looking at you know i need to work for another 20 years what should you be looking to do yeah i i always say that the dbas and the network traditional network engineers they need to learn how to code so they can start using so network
engineers will do infrastructure as code and here on this side the dbas will do nosql and i seriously think that the future of data democratization and data sort of interfaces is apis i seriously think that right because if you think about no sql code and how that data gets persistent from it like atomic function into some database somewhere right do you care where that data is sitting as long as you can get to it and it's persisted and and it's also it has shelf life whatever
you would define as long as my date is consistent uh recoverable uh i have ability to uh do version controls integrity etc just as long as those things exist i don't you know i haven't seen you yeah behind the scenes you know i don't care if there's literally somebody eight people going back and and doing the checks just as long as i'm getting the api and the slash i need then i don't care about the backing yeah and then this whole discussion actually another from another
lens like what we usually call the isolation you know like how how much isolated you are from the end yes application or use case you know like we've talked with the source isolation in the cloud context we used to talk about like okay you're using shared infrastructure right and then you may not use the shared infrastructure some companies don't allow that because the regulations and all that stuff so that you get dedicated servers even in the cloud right so then next is the shared and next
after that it's a shared physical and then next is shared logical means like you're sharing the library just code as well or the past layer as well and then the next thing is like you're sharing if you if you think about no code um no no server or less right you're sharing amazon's sort of code libraries everybody's using that so somehow there's a lot that the sharing level goes higher if you will so i think depending on your your appetite for for this copyright towards the
regulations if you will like how much you are willing to bend the rules if not break them you are people are going more towards more like shared models like more sharing so that means like i don't care that i mean what i'm trying to say is like in this context i don't care whether where the data is setting it can be sitting in this sort of data mart versus that as long as i can get to it but the problem there will be problem after a
while for us for the industry i think which i think we need to so go ahead if you're a dbi here there's there's a there's a bifurcation that you either go deep and help the likes of amazon google oracle the um microsoft the cloud providers the the the providers of the data uh solve those hard consistency and availability and recoverability type problems or you go to the consumer side and you talk about how that data is put to use closer to the developer that there isn't
going to be in your opinion long term this middle layer the dba that kind of negotiates between the two it's either the the cloud provider is going to give you the guard rails that developers need to do the the development that they need without care about impacting performance because the apis are the are the guardrails and the system has the guardrails to prevent you doing bad stuff yeah i think i i think that's one part one way it will it can evolve yes like how many
top dbas can hyperscalers hire not many right there are so many out there so what will they do i think some of them will be still doing traditional like uh dba work the legacy will stay it stays a little longer than what you think right we still people are still long-term right right now i mean cobalt programmers are actually very expensive these days i think that's some point the traditional dbas will be expensive as well right now if they are kind of suffering but at some
point they will be like okay people will do less and less demand is flying but i think some dbs in the middle they will morph into more like they will learn the new newer database technologies nosql you know the api based persistence if you will um there's a lot of um i i don't have any doubt about that there will be new way of persistence in the next five to ten years i can't tell you what they are going to be like we didn't think about
people 10 years back like gradually came into the picture and caught on so and another thing is there's a polyglotism in the database world right so there's the most of the decent size applications not the lower end of applications they use relational databases as well as the no support yes they do yes yeah the there is this kind of the best you know we talk about it in the multi-cloud but it's existed in the database world for a little bit now of using the right platform
for the right thing if i need a uh a a time scale type of solution or real time system et cetera i'm using the right data source for the application yeah so sargy if people want to find out more about your kind of musings or even our back and forth because we have some great back and forth i think it's great because i i come at it from the infrastructure perspective you have great history from a vendor application perspective where can people find out more about
your views and kind of your uh services i i mostly tours traverse on twitter actually i do my brain dump there i spill my gut there i usually call it so um that's where you can find me and uh linkedin all right sarge thanks a lot for joining the conversation we are going to have i'm sure great conversations about multi-cloud uh workload repatriation uh when will the data center die if ever to follow those conversations you can follow me on the web at ctladvisor on twitter
and sarpjeet on twitter as well and he will gladly tag you in some of our long and drawn out conversations in debates talk to you next cto does
