Case Study: How Dell Technologies Is Building a DevRel Team

Key Takeaways

[Music] welcome to this special edition of the new stack makers on the road we're here in kubecon North America [Music] discussions from the show floor with technologists giving you their expertise and insights to help you with your everyday work Dell Technologies is a unique family of businesses that help organizations and individuals build their digital future and transform how they work live and play the company provides customers with the industry's broadest and most Innovative technology and services portfolio spanning from Edge Decor to Cloud hi there and welcome to another on the road episode of the new stack makers podcast I'm your host Heather Joslin features editor at the new stack and uh we're here today uh coming to you from kubecon and cloudnativecon uh North America here in Detroit the Motor City uh we're talking today about developer relations or devrel to its friends um and taking a look at how one company Dell is trying to is building a devrel team and how that team is working to connect devops to the work of enter Enterprises where does devops stand with regard to large companies um how is infrastructure is code maturing and what's next uh we're joined by uh Brad maltz senior director of the DeVos portfolio and devrel at Dell hi Brad hi um and we'd like to give a thanks today for to our sponsor for uh today's uh podcast that is our friends at Dell Technologies so let's dive in um my first question to you is is um you're starting a devrel team Adele um how did that begin and and how's it going yeah so basically from a Dell perspective we've looked at it through the lens of our existing customer base is very Ops Centric server admin system admin and with the whole devops movement in the industry really trying to create the new culture the new operating model what we realized is our end users have been trying to figure out how to become infrastructure developers they've been trying to figure out how do they use infrastructure as code kubernetes Cloud all those things and what that means is we need to be able to speak to them where they want to go when they want to become those developers and that's really what led us to say you know what we need to build out a developer relations program with lead developer Advocates and in doing that we need to grow out the community and really help our end users get to where they want to go okay were you at at Dell before building the steamer so I've actually been to Dell for eight years I came in through the EMC acquisition okay um and um would have been your first so you're starting a devrel team from scratch what are your first tasks in doing that so there's a few things first of all there's two ways of building a devrel team one way is to actually kind of go and try to home grow people on the inside and get them more presence in the community that's the slower Road really good for the scale out but we decided you know what we have to go and find industry influencers that believe in our cause that believe in the problem space that we live in and that's really how we started this is we went out to find some very very strong top talent in the industry and bring them on board I've already brought three out of the four on board that I'm actually gonna be hiring they're here at kubcon with us um and now we're going to add a fourth one by the end of the year so you're really on a fast tracking when did you start this uh beginning of August wow that is bad I I I've gotten a lot of kudos for the hiring uh speed that we actually can do that is some recruiters might want to talk to you about your seat about your secrets um let's pull back the lens a little bit and take a look at the broader look at the industry first of all um how do you how do you define devops and I've heard I mean I've heard a lot of different definitions yep how do you define devops yeah so devops to us is really it's an operating model it's a culture it's not a person it's not a group and what I mean by that is when you look at what devops is originally intent was it's to try to get the developers in the company to really align in a more agile fashion to the operators in the company or systems admins and where it's morphed into is two things it's taken the agile practices of software development and try to make systems administrators more agile by the operating model the second thing that devops has really done is it's helped to actually redefine the roles of the folks that are in that devops kind of world and the two roles that we actually play off of traditionally are SRE and platform engineer those are the two that we believe are in the devops world the the reality is application developers don't want to shift left they don't want to operate yeah they don't want they want somebody else to take it and they want to keep developing yeah so where devops's transition for us is how do we help those people that are kind of that operator turning into infrastructure developer fit into that devops culture so that's a sweet spot sort of sort of operation okay um do uh and we'll say you said the magic words platform engineering which we've heard a lot at this especially here especially here yes yes where do so where does um where does uh what you're doing fit in with platform engineering good question so when I when I break down what a platform engineering team is meant to do in in the devops kind of operating model there's this notion of the golden path or the paved Road right and the notion is developers in the wild are able to use any tool on any cloud with any language and they can do whatever they want yeah that's hard to support that's where devops got introduced and was to basically say hey we're going to put you into a little bit of a box just enough of a box that we can start to gain control and get ahead of the game the platform engineering team in this case they're the ones in charge of that box they're the ones that have to drive that golden path paved Road they got to make sure that the automations are in place the tooling is in place the pipeline's there and that they can meet the needs of their development community the last few years we've been seeing uh all these sort of the infrastructure as code space evolve and mature um what uh you know we've heard about get Ops and there's devops and get Ops and xops and as an umbrella term for all that um you know if I'm running running teams you know running ite infrastructure where do I where do I start with all this and and you know all this yeah good question so the answer to start is not to just go start building that's that's the wrong asset yeah the first answer is to understand the problems you want to deal with or trying to deal with so I always tell teams that you have to take a step back you have to understand your processes and procedures within your current it organization you also have to understand in the developers organization because those processes and procedures that you're trying to learn about and document really well that's where the tooling comes in you have to start saying okay we've been doing this task a thousand times a month and we have we spend 10 people resources on this why don't we automate that and even if it's a simple automation that isn't fully artificial intelligence AI Ops oriented yet but it's just we're going to build the Automation and we got to manage the automation you might reduce 10 people doing it a thousand times manually to one person that has to go and update it 10 times a month that's the beginning of understand your problems the processes and procedures and then basically start figuring out what tooling can apply to help solve that problem okay and also I mean uh the saying that you know every technology problem is a is a people problem at its core like what what part of um the the devrel vision that Dell has is is uh what part of it is the tools and Technology well part of it is how much of it is culture and like learning teaching people how to do their culture and under my uh kind of leadership I have two parts of the program I have the devrel team but I also have our devops portfolio which is my product management app and we're actually unique in the fact of in Dell we decided to put devrel into product management on the product side not marketing the reason we did that was we want the devrel folks to really focus on community contributions education all that stuff but while they're doing that their job is to bring the data back from those uh discussions they're having in the field back to product management to enable our tooling to be able to satisfy some of those problems that they're bringing back so we can start going full circle so in this world devrel for me is community it's culture and contribution are really the big things that we're looking for from devrel and overlaying all that is education their job will be to help educate our end users on everything from operating models to Technologies and use case-based questions and um so how are you sort of spreading the word is it like you mean you obviously come to conferences like this but what what are some of the other conferences like this is the starting point social media um so part of the reason I mentioned we're hiring some industry influences is to help them through social media kind of get the Dell message out um we also have a website uh developer.dell.com which will be the landing page going forward for all of these conversations it'll be our our Dell oriented Community mix with all of our training our Hands-On Labs it'll be mixed in with how-to videos our API Marketplace we're trying to make it so that when you have a question over time people get educated to go to this one spot you know where to go okay so that's developer developer.dell.com okay great um so uh what are what are some of other parts um of the Dell portfolio you feel are relevant to uh the case of Enterprise devops so when I break down the devops problem I'm going to break it into two pieces there's the automation side of the house slash observability kind of the tooling and stuff up there yeah you then have the container and kubernetes side right because one of the enablers for devops finally is a common abstraction across the public cloud and on-premises and that's kubernetes so now that kubernetes kind of is one I'll say in this case yeah uh what we're looking at now is we have something called container storage modules or CSM our container storage modules are open source they're available to anybody out in the industry through GitHub they sit on top of the CSI drivers for kubernetes and that's the type of enabler that we're driving through our devops portfolio that allows our um our platform engineers and SRE folks to really manage and automate our storage natively up through kubernetes Primitives through things like Kube cuddle and whatnot so you don't have to go to element managers to manage storage provisioning snapshotting replication security encryption all those things so when we look at our portfolio again IAC the infrastructure is code half and then we have the container half okay um is there anything uh anything new on the horizon um that you want to either coming from Dell or just in general that you think is gonna be be influential in this in the space yeah there's two there's two programs one of them was actually launched at Dell tech world uh this year in May of this year um and that was the thing we call Project Alpine project Alpine's actually where we believe that our customers that consume our storage today they have a desire for our storage even in the public Cloud for certain use cases so project Alpine is about making uh data and storage more seamless between the public cloud and on-premises that's where project Alpine is going to help a lot of these platform engineers sres and devops communities the second thing and we just announced this a few weeks ago is strengthening our partnership with red hat is being able to deliver more open shift oriented kind of solutions and appliances to Market to be able to say when you have a shop that has chosen red hat with openshift as their go-to they can get an experience that is hey I want the full stack I don't even want to have to go deal with the low level stuff I just want it out of the box working yeah or I want you to tell me how to do that really really simplistically through Solutions and reference architectures that partnership is going to again help drive those devops cultures a little further into that openshift Dell type mentality um what I wanted to Circle back something you said about um people developers don't want to shift left it does seem like a shift left was the the buzzword maybe even like a year ago like like is shift left dead I mean it does seem like they're that whole that whole I I'd put shift left on the proverbial hype cycle okay um I think it had this hey it's this thing and now the industry is going to Define it and it's finally hit a point where it means something it's real yeah people are like but I'm not really ready to do it yet because it's not working or we're not we're not there operationally as a company or even in thought yet yeah so I don't believe shift left is dead the concept is alive I don't think people are at the maturity level to really be able to implement what its original context was and I think that will take a few more years of maturity Within These devops operating models and other things that are coming down the road okay well thank you very much for being with us today Brad I really appreciate appreciate you joining us and um I just want to uh thank all of you for joining us and thank our sponsor Dell Technologies and this has been Heather Joslin for the new stack makers and I'll we'll see you next time if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more videos like this you can always subscribe to our YouTube channel we're on all the major social media platforms you can always find us at the newestack.io we hope to see you soon foreign [Music]