Q&A: DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2018 with Shozab Naqvi, CloudBees

The 2018 DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas (DOES18) is fast approaching! CloudBees is the proud Founding Partners of the event with IT Revolution , and we’re looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and meeting new ones October 22-24 at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas . There’ll be several opportunities to meet us at our booth during Expo Hall hours, but we hope that you also enjoy and learn from software delivery experts presenting in the CloudBees track . From AI and machine learning, to experience reports from Fortune 500 companies, we’ve put together a variety of talks designed to provide attendees with actionable best practices to help their companies stay on the cutting edge of software delivery. Ahead of the show, we wanted to hear from speakers and attending staff about how they are helping improve the lives of customers, what trends they are seeing take shape, and what they are most looking forward to at the show. In this edition, we interviewed DevOps Enterprise Summit alum Shozab Naqvi, solutions architect at CloudBees. Naqvi won’t be taking the stage this year, but will be at the booth and walking the show floor. Here’s what we learned:

Q: How do you see CloudBees Flow improving the lives of customers, or your customers’ customers?

Shozab Naqvi: When companies start doing DevOps on their own, they look at companies like Google and Netflix, and a lot of these unicorn tech companies and look at things they can implement and build or use some of those tools. The problem with that is, obviously, there's an immense amount of money that can be put in to a team and build the skill set at companies of that size. But, for most enterprises, software isn't their only thing. Software is just part of what they're doing. One of the things that CloudBees Flow does is it enables a lot of our customers to offload the overhead of building automation into the platform. They’ve got this platform that can take on the overhead of building out automation, building scripts and understanding how to integrate with third-party tools and other DevOps solutions -- so you don't have to worry about it. Your focus as a developer or as an engineer or enterprise architect is to get product out the door. If you're spending time spinning up databases, that's not directly contributing to your product - it's just overhead. So let someone else, like CloudBees, do it for you.

Q: What sort of improvements have you seen from your customers?

SN: IT operations has very little visibility into what developers are doing. All they really see is an email saying, "Hey, look, here's my code. Can you go ahead and now deploy this into production?" And they would say, "Yeah, we did all the testing. Don't worry, that's all good." But it was just them taking their word for it. And, they would go ahead and deploy it, and then they would realize that there were all these failures and issues in the code. So, what CloudBees Flow does is it gives them the ability to have insight and visibility into what development was doing, i.e. if they ran the tests and what were the results of the test.

Q: Are there any trends that you're seeing from the operations side, including challenges or other best practices?

SN: When DevOps first got initiated, all the focus was on dev. Typically, what ended up happening was members from development were coming into operations and saying, "Hey, let me lend you my developer, and he'll help you write all your code." Then once it was done, operations were supposed to maintain it, and that maintenance of code is kind of what we call the “script-apocalypse” -- where there's so much code and no one knows anything about it, and if that person who wrote the code leaves, it's a mess. So what software like CloudBees Flow does is it eliminates that process. We take what took maybe weeks and months of scripts and cut that timeline way down. Now the operations person can come in and get a list of catalog items that they can do. All they need to do is a couple of clicks and they’re done. That's huge, right? That's giving operations power that they kind of lost at some point. Now the trend, I think, is development is going to be automated. You won't really need that many developers. I think that's the future.

Q: Have there been any specific roadblocks or common challenges you've seen with clients trying to adopt DevOps?

SN: When doing DevOps with legacy enterprises like banks, they were structured to isolate and have silos. DevOps is all about destroying those silos. You always face challenges with things like that and the change in roles. Your job description is changing, and people are afraid of automation because they feel like, you know, "That's my job security.” You may have heard that DevOps is like a three-legged stool. One leg is the tools, all the automation tools that you have. The second leg is the process. The third one is the culture. No one focuses time on the culture, right? But you can't really sit on a two-legged stool. You’re bound to fall. That’s a big and common challenge.

Q: What are you most looking forward to at DOES18?

SN: Besides, the CloudBees Industry Party on Tuesday evening, I’m most looking forward to networking! I’ve met a lot of people in the software delivery community over my years of experience, so it’s great to see some familiar faces at the DevOps Enterprise Summit events. Plus, it’s always great to meet new people, learn what challenges they are facing at their organization, and to be able to share how CloudBees Flow can help. Come meet Shozab and the rest of the CloudBees team at DOES18 Vegas! If you haven’t already – there’s still time to register. Don’t delay, because tickets are close to selling out! For more hands-on DevOps training, join us at one of our workshops before and/or after the conference. Experts like Gary Gruver and John Willis are featured hosts, as well as the DevOps Institute – learn more and register (DOES18 attendees receive a discount!) If you’re interested to learn how CloudBees Flow can help eliminate your release anxiety, try it for free , or reach out for a demo .