Episode 50: Dave Ezrakhovich of Taboola Makes DevOps Possible with Data

It's all about the data.

Episode 50 , featuring Dave Ezrakhovich, senior engineer from Taboola, wraps up the series of interviews conducted during DevOps World | Jenkins World 2018. In his conversation with host, Brian Dawson, they focus on how data has become an integral part of the DevOps process – very fitting considering Dave is wearing a shirt reading “Data Nerd” during the recording of this podcast. Along the way Brian reveals he secretly wants to be a data scientist.

As Brian and Dave launch into the main focus of the discussion – data – Dave helps define the widely used term of “big data.” Big data is more than just gathering information, it’s enabling fast access to the data – which is crucial to Taboola’s business. Indeed, Taboola's business is designed to provide content recommendations for website visitors with "Around the Web" and "Recommended For You" boxes at the bottom of many online news articles.

Dave discusses how data makes DevOps a reality because if fuels how organizations automate and capture metrics. All the observability solutions, value stream analytics and machine learning capabilities developers have grown to use fall under the common theme of big data. He then offers an example of build agents and what happens when one is not working properly and gets lost amongst the other agents during the build process, which then slows down development and causes problems.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact bottle neck unless you have the data to show you where to improve, Dave states.

Looking back on his panel at DevOps World | Jenkins World Nice, Quantifying and Measuring DevOps , Dave's main piece of advice is to collect as much data as you can. It’s hard to know what you need today, but better to plan for the future to avoid data loss, he believes. When it comes to the actual future of data of DevOps though, embrace data to continuously improve and make software better.

In Dave’s view, if you want to transform your 1970’s VW into Tesla, you have to look at the data under the hood.

For more DevOps transformation stories, be sure to check out previous episodes of DevOps Radio available to stream and download on iTunes and Spotify .

Additional resources

• Download a whitepaper on why DevOps is important

• Watch a webinar on how to successfully achieve true CD

• Learn how quickly resolve errors with DevOps