Devops Weekly with Gareth Rushgrove

Bridget talks with Gareth Rushgrove, who curates the DevOps Weekly newsletter and is a product manager at Docker, after time at Puppet and before that the UK government. The episode uses the newsletter as a framing device and moves to conference speaking, Docker and open source business models, and why Gareth thinks context matters more than chasing technology. The cold open is Gareth: "I can force myself to think about it from your side."

How the Newsletter Started

DevOps Weekly is 7-plus years old, about 360 issues, with 25,000 to 26,000 subscribers, one of those "side projects that got out of hand." Gareth's colleague Dean Wilson went to the first devopsdays in Belgium and came back saying Gareth would have liked it, and Gareth went to the second, in Hamburg. Around the same time Gareth was doing Ruby and liked Peter Cooper's Ruby Weekly, a curated weekly email, and decided to collect the things already being read and share them. The first issue was issue 0, and early on it wasn't on Sundays or truly weekly. Sunday stuck, and the regular habit helped Gareth and the readers, who read it with coffee in New York or first thing Monday in Australia.

Gareth jokes you should never put the cadence in a name: "including the cadence of something in the name is not a great idea," since a fortnightly version would need a rename, though the name also creates social pressure to keep publishing. Growth has been organic, with no advertising, plus an occasional bump when someone mentions it at a conference.

Curation and Bias

Bridget asks how Gareth's varied jobs shape the opinions. Gareth has been the first employee of a founder-led company, worked at agencies, been an in-house developer at a radio station, worked for government, and at two growth-stage technology vendors. The downside is less depth in any one of those, but the perspective helps. Gareth doesn't claim to be unbiased and will link to own work, but includes things Gareth disagrees with, using "is it interesting?" as the barometer, and doesn't cover industry news, acquisitions or hires. Bridget notices the blurbs never say who wrote an article or where they work, and Gareth says that's deliberate: "the thing is the interesting part, not the personality." Containers, serverless and Kubernetes each show up in the newsletter's volume over time, which reflects Gareth's own interests.

Gareth says DevOps as a banner has been "purposefully broad from the start," and the conversations at devopsdays have moved on, which is good, and the newsletter changes as the conversation does.

Speaking and Visibility

Gareth did meetups before the newsletter, starting with a local mailing list in Newcastle after asking a Brighton organizer how they got theirs going, and found that organizing means you always need a speaker. Travel was a bonus Gareth couldn't otherwise afford. Gareth values that devopsdays recordings, slides and videos create a large corpus of shared content. At vendors, content from practitioners already trusted by a community is more powerful than pure marketing, and at the UK government, "Us being super visible was strategy, not tactics," for recruiting and openness. Gareth also uses talks as a design tool, since acceptance validates interest and the audience gives feedback, and Bridget notes people from Chef or Puppet who propose a configuration management topic and then let the room talk.

On capitalizing DevOps, Gareth says "Patrick didn't camelCase it, therefore no one else should do," though Gareth has lost that argument often and once restored lowercase in a UK government publication that someone later changed.

Debate Club and Containers

Bridget recalls the Velocity Debate Club in Amsterdam in fall 2015, arguing whether containers and microservices are good for business, and switching sides halfway through. Gareth says taking both sides builds empathy, and that for someone trying to win an argument on the internet it doesn't matter, while for someone trying to learn it does. On containers now, Gareth says it's a messy period where it isn't about containers: Docker is trying to build a business helping large organizations modernize technology, infrastructure and applications, with gnarly problems that aren't about containers. Gareth joined as a product manager to see how the pieces work better together.

Open Source as Strategy

Bridget asks how a vendor decides what is open source, such as Moby versus Docker. Gareth, new at Docker, says "open source is strategic, not tactical," and the question is what gives the most benefit back, sometimes direct revenue, sometimes a large user community. Gareth points to recent posts by Luke Kanies, who founded Puppet, about licensing decisions, and notes earlier open source companies like MySQL AB were acquired before the industry could learn from their data. Now Hortonworks, Cloudera and Mongo are public and will produce data about the model.

The Microservice Conversation Isn't About Technology

Gareth says the microservice conversation is about people, teams and independence. Technically it adds latency and operational complexity, but it reduces complexity for an independent team: "You've moved complexity around." Bridget calls that the conservation of complexity. A 20-person company changes team structure all the time, but an organization that's been around for decades, like the UK government, can't easily reorganize to use technology the way fluid companies do. So the vendor goal is getting benefits to organizations that can't adopt early. Gareth adds that "everyone is a software company" is easy to say, but Google has about 40 to 50% of headcount in R&D, and there aren't enough software engineers to staff the FTSE 100 that way. Large organizations are also spending far more getting onto virtualization than on serverless or unikernels, and both can happen at once.

Context, Not Chasing

Bridget asks where things are going in early 2018. Gareth: "I'll be boring and say context." If you chase Kubernetes, Docker or serverless, you'll always be chasing the next, and should ask what business problem and what context you have. Gareth would also like the industry to get better at technology that stops changing, since large organizations have far more technology running than developers working on it, and asks what it would take to build software that lasts ten years. Bridget jokes that becomes a talk called Built to Last.

Gareth is helping run an ethics track at QCon London with Anne Curry, arguing ethics for technologists is becoming a pressing issue since the industry is increasingly powerful and lacks ethical education, and that conferences are a way to reach people. Gareth's pet project is Kubeval, a local validator for Kubernetes configurations.

Bridget discusses Devops Weekly with Gareth Rushgrove.

Referenced in this episode:

• Devops Weekly
• Velocity Debate Club, Amsterdam 2015
• Luke Kanies - Should You Open Source Your Product? That’s the Wrong Question

Header image

Postbox

Community & Event Stuff

If you have an upcoming conference you would like to see promoted on ADO, you can fill out the handy form at arresteddevops.com/conf

Upcoming conferences

Open CFPs

• lots of DevOpsDays
• GopherCon: CFP closes March 15; Conference Aug 27-30.

Discount codes

• ADO2018 for 20% off lots of devopsdays, 10% off ChefConf, 5% off GopherCon.

Checkouts

Gareth

• kubeval

• QCon London 2018 ethics track

Bridget

• IOT DevKit
• Male Ally Summit New York March 29