Ignite 2018 Catch Up with Donovan Brown

Trevor records at Microsoft Ignite 2018 with Donovan Brown, who runs the Microsoft DevOps advocacy team nicknamed the League, and a last-minute co-host, Jason Hand, who had joined Microsoft about two weeks earlier and walked by the booth. Donovan has been at Microsoft just under five years, joined to sell Team Foundation Server, moved to the VSTS product team, and then built the advocacy team with Steven Murawski, Damian Brady, Abel Wang and Jessica Deen. Steven now manages Jason, and Donovan helped interview Jason. The cold open is Jason: "let's all advance together because it's going to work out best that way." Trevor is at Chef, and all three say on air that they're a little Microsoft-biased.

Aligned Incentives

Donovan is a 20-year developer and notes that Jason's hiring interview collided on one topic, since developers usually tell Donovan the ops team is in the way, while Jason says it's usually developers applying the brakes. The two were brought into different floors of the same kind of organization. Donovan says ops teams can be rewarded for keeping the lights on, while developers are rewarded for changing things, so the two teams' bonuses conflict. Donovan tells companies to make the bonus depend on both teams reaching the same point, since "you literally told them to work against each other, and they're doing exactly what you told them to do." Jason adds that in large companies value to the customer gets abstracted away, and the fix is aligned goals and transparency, with dashboards showing the business, since SRE "isn't about reliability of infrastructure, it's reliability of the business." Trevor's first question to people is what they're incentivized on.

Azure DevOps and the Keynote

Donovan's keynote was about the rebranding of VSTS, once nearly monolithic, to Azure DevOps, whose components can now be used individually. The stage demo wired a GitHub repository to pipelines through a GitHub Marketplace extension, showing only pipelines, with no boards or repos, since customers are on GitHub. Donovan stresses it's a platform that can be extended, with the agent and tasks open source on GitHub, and Donovan learned to write a task by cloning the repo. The message is "any language, any platform," which Donovan backs with a blog post on VB6 and a demo of a Node app built on Linux and deployed to Kubernetes.

New Microsoft and GitHub

Trevor says four or five years earlier, learning C# felt like a poor choice. Jason and Donovan say the open source shift and Microsoft Learn show competition dissolving. Trevor wonders aloud whether 90-year copyrights hold society back, which Donovan says is for another show. Donovan is most excited about the announced plan to acquire GitHub, and says "I want GitHub to stay GitHub," and not be absorbed into Microsoft. Donovan cites the mission to empower every person and organization to achieve more, which "you don't do that by holding patents over them," and says it's the only Microsoft Donovan has known, joining in December 2013, just before Satya Nadella took over.

Donovan loves VS Code and once let an audience pick the language (.NET, .NET Core, Node or Java), the platform and the Azure region for a live demo, with VS Code on a Mac, a PC and Linux. Trevor notes VS Code pieces appear in Cloud Shell, and Donovan says Azure DevOps's quick edit uses Monaco, the engine behind it.

Rub a Little DevOps on It

Donovan explains the catchphrase. On the VSTS team, Donovan and two other PMs were at a large customer's headquarters trying to make a big Gradle build work with Java, knocking down pain points one after another, and blurted "we're just going to rub a little DevOps on that." The room laughed, Donovan tweeted a picture of a tube labeled DevOps, and the first time saying it live was Build 2016. Some people hate it, and one who did came to a meetup and was disappointed when Donovan forgot to say it. A birthday cake carried the hashtag. Donovan means it literally: find what hurts most in your pipeline, fix it, and when the next thing becomes the bottleneck, go back to it, which is continuous improvement.

Jason plans to bring SRE and incident response to Microsoft's advocacy on the operations side. Donovan ends by pointing to the League's website and hashtag, which reach the whole DevOps advocacy team.

Trevor and Jason are joined by Donovan Brown at Microsoft Ignite 2018, and have a quick catch up on the event and the state of the DevOps world.