DevOps Radio: Laura Frank, CloudBees – When the Stars, Coffee, DockerCon and Code Align

Episode 35 of DevOps Radio features Laura Frank , formerly of Codeship (now a Bee). Not only has Laura been a great addition to the CloudBees team as director of engineering, but her expertise with Docker and container technologies, enables her to lend valuable insights on the rise of containers.

As Laura prepares to speak at DockerCon later in June, it’s no coincidence that her journey to CloudBees started at the same conference several years earlier. Was it luck back then, or did the stars perfectly align when her yen for coffee, her seating choice at Jess Frazelle’s DockerCon session and her fluency in German led to a chance introduction with the Codeship team? Either way, we’re glad it did!

During Laura’s conversation with Andre, she reflects on the software development process and how it is evolving, particularly with containerization. She notes that a positive part of the evolution is that more and more developers are “eating their own dog food” – using the products that they are developing and that will eventually be introduced to market. This enables the product development team to have a better understanding of customer use cases and ensures they are speaking the same language as their users. Laura also discusses the importance of customer feedback as a way to measure what functionality to develop, versus what developers want to develop. Those customers are then natural beta testers of the new functionality prior to GA, resulting in real-world functionality ultimately being delivered in a high-quality way.

As a Docker Captain, Laura has observed the maturity of container solutions, including Kubernetes. While containers (and especially Kubernetes) have been considered really disruptive, Laura says it’s only a matter of time until highly regulated industries like banks and hospitals adopt this technology and it becomes mainstream. After all, there was a time when electricity was disruptive, too. But today we don’t even think about it!

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Laura Frank presenting at DockerCon EU 2017. Catch her at DockerCon 2018 in San Francisco this month!