Announcer: Live from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE! Covering Nutenix.Next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.Next here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host John Furrier. We are joined by Gene Kim he is an author, researcher, entrepreneur, and founder of IT revolutions. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE Gene! Thanks so much Rebecca and always great seeing you and John. So you are a prolific author, you've written many books including The Phoenix project, The DevOps Handbook, you have a new one coming out, but this is the latest one we have here the DevOps handbook. Gene: Yeah that was in 2016 and then we came up with another book called Accelerate based on the state of DevOps support and yeah it's been a fun ride, what a great space to be writing about. DevOps has been covered going back years, now its mainstream and you're starting to see the impact of people who have taken a DevOps mentality, put products into the place, we see all the web scalers from Facebook you name them. But now the enterprise is now really looking at agility, so there you've been working a lot on, you host a DevOps enterprise summit, what's that been like I mean it seems to be taking longer than some of the hardcore cloud guys. So what's the state of the union if you will for the enterprise from a DevOps standpoint? Yeah what a great question. I mean I think there's no doubt that the DevOps principles and practices were pioneered in the Tech Giants, the Facebooks, Amazon, Netflix, and Googles. But I've long believed with a certain level of certainty that as much economic value as they've created, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The real value will be created when the largest most complex organizations on the planet adopt the same principles and patterns, and when you have I think IDC said there's 18 million developers on the planet which at maximum a half million are at the Tech Giants, the rest are in the largest brand across every industry vertical, and if we can get those 17.5 million developers as productive as if they were at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, that generates trillions of dollars of economic value per year and with that much economic value being created that will have undoubtedly incredible societal improvement outcomes as well. So it's been such a treat to help chronicle that journey. One of the things I wanna ask you Gene is that those are impressive numbers but also if you factor in net new developers, younger generation, reskilled workers, I used to be a network guy now I'm a developer. You're seeing developers really at the infrastructure level now especially a show like this where Nutanix was a hardware company, they're now a software company. So they are at the heart of DevOps in terms of their target audience, they're implementing this stuff, so this is a refreshing change. So I gotta ask you, when you walk into an enterprise what is the currently temperature or the IQ of DevOps, are there a percentage that's there, some are learning, take us through the progress. If I were to guess as much as I love statistics and comprehensive benchmarking, I think we're 3% of the way there. Rebecca: 3%. We're in the early stages of it which means the best is yet to come. I think DevOps is an aspiration for many, I think DevOps is often a group rebelling against ancient powerful order, forces far beyond the control, conservative groups protecting their turf I think that's kind of the typical situation and so we're a long way away from DevOps being the dominant orthodoxy. So if that's the case there's probably some people who adopted it and had success which seeing in these new innovative shifts, the early adoptive have massive value extraction from that and that's an advantage, competitive advantage. Can you give us some examples of people who did that, took the rebellion, went to DevOps, were successful, and then doubled down on it. The ones that come to mind immediately are like Capitol One, they went from 80% outsourcing to now almost 100% in source. Same with Target where they really started off as a bottom up movement and gained the support of the highest levels of leadership and it's been so exciting to see these stories not just told by technology leaders but increasingly shared and being told by both the technology leader and their business counterpart where the business leader is saying I am wholly relied upon my technology peer to achieve all the goals, dreams, and aspirations of our organization, and that's what a treat to be able to see that kind of recognition and appreciation. It's an opperational shift to they have to buy into changing how they operate as a company. Yes. And IT believe me they're like clutching on to the old ways and that's just the way it is. There's a wonderful phrase from the Nutanix CEO that I loved is that we often characterize the developers as the builders but operations infrastructure they're builders too in fact developers cannot be productive if they are mired in infrastructure and so you get peak productivity, focus, flow and joy when you don't have to deal with concerns outside of the business feature and the business you probably don't even want to solve. And I know that from personal experience where the frustration you have when you just wanna do one thing and you've just carved out eight or 10 things that you just can't do, or you have to puzzle, these are puzzles that you have to solve. I'd love to get your reaction to some of the trends that I'm seeing because DevOps has been such an important movement at least from my standpoint because people can get lost in what the word means. At the end of the day program ability, making infrastructure as code which was the original ethos, making the infrastructure programmable and invisible which is one of the themes of Nutanix, was the dream. That kind of is the objective I mean to make it programmable so you don't have to stand up all these services and prep and provision hard infrastructure stuff. In November the Unicorn Project is coming out so that's a follow on to the Phoenix Project and what we're really trying to do is capture how great it feels when you can be productive and all of infrastructure is taken care of for you, by your friends in infrastructure. It allows you to have your best energy focusing on solving a business problem not on how to connect A to B which needs to be connected to C and the YAML files, and configuring all these things that you don't really care about but you're forced to, and I think that allows a level of productivity and joy but also its that the ideal working relationship between development and infrastructure where developers are constantly thanking their infrastructure peers for making their life easy. We were joking, Rebecca and I were joking about how we use Siri, hey Siri what's the weather at Bello, Alto? This should be an app for they enterprise that says hey CUBE or whatever at Nutanix or whatever, give me some more storage. Why isn't it happening? That's kind of a joke but it's kind of a goal. Oh increasingly right that's just available on demand, and you certainly don't have to open up 30 tickets these days like was so typical ten years ago, that's a modern miracle. My question for you is why books? So here we have we're in this very fast changing, technological environment and landscape, and as you said the DevOps is still relatively new it's 3% really who understand it, why use a bunch of dead trees to get your message across? I like writing in fact in an ideal month I get to spend half the time writing and half the time hanging out with the best in the game, studying the greatest in the field and I think even in this day and age there's still no more effective and viral mechanism to spread ideas than books. When someone says hey I loved the Phoenix Project, I loved reading it, it says a couple things they probably spent eight hours reading it and that's a serious commitment and so imagine how many impression minutes it takes to purchase eight hours of someones time and so for with this I really do think that the written form is still one of the most effective ways to communicate ideas. You've got the dream job, you're writing and hanging out with the best people, what have you learned from these people? Oh my goodness. Rebecca: You could write a book. (laughter) For 20 years I've self identified as an operations person, even though I was formally trained as a developer I got my graduate degree in compiler designer in 1995, and so for 20 years I just loved operations because that's where the action was, that's where the saves happened, but something changed about four years ago I learned a programming language called closure. It's a functional programming language, it's a lisp so very alien to me, the hardest thing I've ever learned I mean I must've read and watched 80 hours of videos before I wrote one line of code but it has been the most rewarding thing and it's actually brought the joy of development and coding back into my daily life so I guess I should amend my answer. I would say it's half the time writing, half the time hanging out with the best in the game, and 20% coding just because I love to solve problems, my own problems so I would thank the people I've been able to hang out with and had the privilege to watch because if it weren't for that I think I would've been happy just saying that coding was a thing of the past so for that I'm so grateful. Well how do you use what you learn about in terms of your writing and in your coding and vice versa, so how are they different and how are they the same? That's a great question. I think what's really nice about coding is that it's very formal in fact the most tactic stream is all mathematics. Books are just a pile of words that may or may not have order and structure so in the worst days I felt like with the Unicorn Project I wrote 150 thousand words, target word count is 100 thousand, and I was telling friends I wrote 150 thousand words that say nothing of significance, what have I done? And I think that's because you have to impose upon a destructor and a point, so in the best days it's very much like coding, everything has a spot and you know what to get rid of so I think the fact that coding has structure I think makes it in some ways an easier form to work with. What brings you to NutanixNext this week? What's the story, what's the focus? I had the privilege and I was delighted to take part in what they call Dev Days. So they were gathering developers to learn, to educate everyone on how to use the Nutanix capabilities through API's, just as you said to help enable automation and I just found that very rewarding and fulfilling just because even though I think Nutanix as a community is known for being the innovators and so the rebellion, as productive as that technology has made them to turn into an automatable platform, I think that's another order of magnitude gain in terms of value they can create for their organization so that was a treat. And they've transformed from an operations oriented box company years ago and now officially subscription based software, they're going all software. They're flipping their model upside down too. And it was just a delight to see the developers who are attracted to that one day thing. I would recommend to anyone who is interested in development and just being on the cutting edge of what can be done with for example, if you had cameras in every store is there a way to automate the analysis of that to compute dwell times and cue abandonment rates I mean it's like a crash course in modern business practices that I thought was absolutely amazing. Well Gene you do great work I've been following you for years I know you're very humble as well, give a plug take a minute to explain the things you're working on you've got a great event you run, you got the books, what other things you got going on? Share with the audience. Oh just those two things, everything's about the book right now the Unicorn Project is coming in November and so excerpts will be available at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London. So that's a conference for technology leaders from large complex organizations and over the years we've now chronicled over 250 case studies by technology leaders from almost every brand across every industry vertical and it has been such a privilege to hear the stories and to see how they're being rewarded for their achievements. I mean they're being promoted, and being given more responsibility so that is a treat beyond words. And it's a revolution it's a shift that's definitely happening here and been doing it for years, we're documenting it and you are as well. And looking forward to seeing you there. Awesome. I just have one final question and this is about something you were saying about how Nutanix is the insurgent and the rebel in all of this, how do you recommend it as a researcher, as an entrepreneur yourself and as someone who's really in this mindset how do you recommend it stay feisty and scrappy and with that mentality especially as it grows and becomes more and more of a behemoth itself? There were some statements made about like how 10 years ago virtualization was the one key certification that was kind of guaranteeing you relevance forever in the future and I think there's some basis to say that alone is not enough to guarantee lifetime employment and I think the big lesson is we all have to be continual learners and every year that goes by there are more miracles being created for us to be able to use to solve problems, and I think the lesson is if we're not always focused on being a continual learner, there's great joy that comes with it and great peril if we choose to forego it. Great well that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE Gene. Thank you so much and great seeing you both. John: Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, we will have much more from .Next just after this. (upbeat music)