Tim Banks, Dell Technologies | AWS re:Invent 2022

Hey, welcome back to techstrong's president here at AWS re:invent. 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Mitch Ashley.

I'm joined by Tim Banks whose lead a developer Advocate. Yep. They get that right with yeah Dell Technologies.

Great to be talking with you Tim. Good we talking with you too. Good so I'd love to hear a little bit first.

Well, I think we all know who Dell is. I'd love to hear a little bit about developer Advocate role at a company like Dell. So it's really interesting a lot of folks start off by saying I didn't know Dell had developer Advocates and and I'll be honest when they talk to me about the job.

I didn't know that they'll have developer Advocates either. So I was very intrigued to figure out what a developer Advocate does at a company. That's typically not typically thought of as a software company and I was very surprised to find that Dell has more folks working on software than they do Hardware.

So there's internal developer. Advocacy that that happens for a lot of the software teams because you know just like any other large organization we have, you know, devops concerns and engineer engineering practice concerns and things like that. But also there are a lot of Enterprises out there that are using you know, Dell Hardware that do have developers that are writing things against that and they need to have you know, they have information apis you need to have tutorials.

They need to have you know, their infrastructure Engineers need to know how to work with our various Hardware apis as well. So there's a lot of that work that that has done but I think more importantly for Dell especially considering what we're doing here reinvent is that there are a lot of folks who are writing platforms or writing automation or infrastructure because stuff that are now the customers their customers are now moving into Data Centers and to private Cloud, you know, you see things like AWS outposts and eks anywhere and Google anthos it's around. You know that that people are using.

You know to run their their Cloud workloads on Prem, right? And so those are people that have never seen Iraq before never used Iraq before they you know, we're they were born into the clouds. So moving over into the data center is is new and strange for them.

And so we're there for them too. The other thing that Dell wants to do is we want to be part of the cloud computing conversation. We don't want to necessarily tell people how to do it.

But we just want to help them do it if they're going to do it on private on premises or in a private cloud. And so talking to those communities not just the developers that the engineers the operations folks the finance folks the people who are responsible security. Like these are people that that get focused on a lot by the cloud hyperscalers and the cloud SAS, but not very much by Hardware think about the roles that have emerged changed.

Since before the cloud really kind of took hold and what's different with the sres or devops Engineers or you know numerous kind of roles. I think one of the things that's interesting is oftentimes the next thing whatever thing a technology devops whatever might be comes along. Oh that's going to replace everything right?

So we won't need operations people we won't need because we have the cloud. We don't need the private data center, right? So the pendulum always Predicted or expected to swing hard and stay there it never does it always kind of finds some equilibrium.

And a lot of organizations that go to the cloud. Yeah, go there for certain reason find the value that they get from that some also step back or move some things back. Yeah or reinvest modernize things that are already in the data center.

But where do you see us in the kind of that pendulum process? So I think the like, it's a Once I first heard Google anthos being announced and and idea was Outpost being announced. I knew the panel was on its way back.

You think about customers and organizations out there that like I said have been born Cloud native. They've signed an Enterprise agreement with the cloud hyperscale that says hey we're going to be with you for the next amount of years and we're going to spend this much money for the year, right? You know, so the notion of moving of being in the cloud and everything is a utility and everything is isn't Opex right goes out the window as soon as you decide to Commitment you now have a capex, but you have a capex on stuff that you don't own.

right, so that's why you see coming companies now, they're like There's a financial aspect to Me. Maybe not going to be in the consumption base to a fixed Command. Right?

And if I'm gonna do that, maybe I want to do that myself. There's some things where maybe you need particular Hardware right very very particular Hardware. That's not going to get or be able to get predictably in a cloud.

Hyperscaler. You may be in a situation where you have compliance or regulatory restraints that constraints that say Hey, a lot of people won't go to the cloud. No, and and so they're as as they're expanding to serve more of these markets like now we do really realize that we need to have some of this, you know, bare metal on premises infrastructure, but we never really worked with it.

So you see the cloud hyperscale is trying to cater to those and that's how you can tell when when the the people up on the mountains right are saying this is what we're going to do. They know what's coming next and you've seen those pressures for customers. I will say, you know when the recessions that we had 2020 and I was working in helping people renegotiate their AWS contracts, right?

They knew that there was a big Financial incentive for people to go to very predictable spend and you're not going to get more predictable than owning the hardware you pay for it. Once you know, it's going to be there. Right but the hard part was delivering that cloud experience to folks once they got on the data center, right and you know, the the discussions that folks used to have into moving moving in Cloud was that it takes so long to get anything done in the data center and it's very very reasonable critique that had a lot of evidence behind that cloud salt a lot of that problem.

Thing is is that what one of the things that Dell has been trying to do one things. I'm very passionate about is making that cloud experience consistent with the developers and the operations folks no matter where that compute is if it's in the cloud hyperscaler, if it's In This Cloud hyperscaler if it's on Prem or if it's running in all of those, right you need to be able to do your job deliver your code run your application no matter where right and that's gonna take a lot more support from Hardware manufacturers than we've seen in the past. And that's one thing that Dallas committed to do it.

Yeah. It's in some ways not helpful to be bipolar about it. If one way to do it if we're in our data center another way to do it.

If we're in this this or that cloud you like some, you know, some common processes. Yeah and models software different things to work on. I'm curious about Cloud native specifically because kind of there's many many definitions of that.

One of them is born in the cloud. Yeah, there is, you know, microservices and containers and what you can all do in the day to Center. well How does a cloud native?

Thinking of microservices containers. Yeah kubernetes Etc. How does that sort of bifurcated hybrid in the maybe all in the private data center versus in the cloud look, so I think it's interesting when we talk about Cloud native Computing lowercase Cloud native Computing a lot of the stuff that you see that was very container focused started really on on gcp on Google Microsoft came on board AWS came on board, but you saw people running it kind of wherever wherever it was wherever they needed it.

They would just schedule something containers wasn't have to be a cloud thing. No, and and that was the thing. It was a containers was originally developers laptop thing right was probably Adele, but the but the notion of running a container in multiple places has always been the default like yes, you're gonna you're supposed to be able to do that.

so architecturally stretching that out from a cloud hyperscaler to a private data center. Right as long as I can schedule container there. I know what port's going to be open and how it's going forward how Discovery gets done then it doesn't matter to me.

Right? So for cloud native organizations especially ones that are very have very mature devops practices very mature SRE and automation practices. All they really need to be able to have is like those API endpoints.

They need to have those metrics and points. They need to be able to have the ability to schedule to to do some kind of remediation to Route traffic things like that. The things that they would do on on a cloud hypervisor.

They need to have those abilities in a private Cloud if they have that. That's gravy. And that's one of the problems that like I said, they've been solving from the cloud hyperscalers.

But if you don't want to run eks anywhere, you don't want to run anthos and you're just running a vanilla kubernetes installation or you're running openshift or you're running tonsu or anything like that. You should still be able to deploy that wherever you want to without having it be a major major process or as or worst of all another set of Engineers or another set of processes you have to do just because now you're in this place, right? And so I I when I look at those Cloud native things, they're gonna look they're gonna look for the path of least resistance for them to move into the data center.

And we're just trying to grease those Wheels, you know, if you keep the developer hat lens on for a moment. You know do I really care if I can use it? I'll pick any random technology vagrant or something to set up in my environment on my on my laptop so I can do what I need to do and I'm whether I'm running kubernetes here or you can ask or something else up in the cloud as long as I'm not back in the days of waiting a month to get my Dev or my test environment set up.

You know, if you're working in something where the the workflow can be smooth and I can you know, pretty much set up what I need. The way I would in the cloud whether I'm in the private data center or not. I think developers care less about that.

Yeah way less and the developers kind of cared about AWS because that's kind of usually where they started if they're working defensive catered to do. Yeah, and but but in the end, they're mostly just dependent on using that API, right? So if you can tell them we're you can use this API and it's gonna work with any of these things.

They're happy, right? They don't you again the developer experience should be seamless. For whatever, you're deploying and that like I said, that's that's the work that we're trying to do.

Now. Let me ask you does Dell think about either now or in the future providing developer focused kind of tools or apis versus operations and infrastructure, obviously where they played for a long time. Absolutely and you know Dell being, you know, a, you know responsible for the ground up we're talking anything from the keyboards to the peripherals to the monitors the laptops, you know, we've got that project Sputnik, which is that canonical Ubuntu powered laptop.

So we've been trying to make the developers jobs easier. From the time that they start banging away on the on the keyboard the time they deploy to production, right? So we're looking at more of those tools that are focused towards them but we don't but for for us as infrastructure providers, we're typically less concerned about the the indeveloper when it comes to the deploying of their code, but we want to work with the tools that they work with right.

So if they're using gitlab, right it's using GitHub if they're using any kind of automation or automation tool to deploy code we want to work with that. Like I said, we want it we want to make the developer experience seamless. That's what I was going to notice I or we are using developers kind of the broader term.

But yeah, there's the developers but then there's also devops Engineers that's where engineers and those folks and if they're setting up the environments you do that and their private data center similar to what they would in the cloud. Step. That's what in part kind of paid the way for the developer to say.

This is you know an environment. I'm really comfortable. Yeah, and that's one of the that's a lot of the work.

We're doing with automation infrastructures code, whether it's provisioning through terraform or whether it's provisioning through through ansible or or any other API you're used to using I mean, I would say that you know cdk is not out of the realm of possibility where I need to just provision something using the same code bases that I'm used to I just need to Define this as a different region, right? I need to have a slightly different network definition. So you've got you know lift at the beginning when you're setting it up, but you're still not having to learn a whole new code base or not a whole new set of implementations, right?

You're just using terraform and you're changing these parameters. I need to use this specific module terraform and that should be the only change you have to make excellent. How about storage from that standpoint?

You know, we're talking about compute networking the storage becomes an interesting and interesting realm to get into because you have It's gonna depend on how much interaction you want to have to have at your storage device. Right if I just want to stay strictly within kubernetes that's going to be that's something we can do. We can do that today, right if I need more low-level kind of things.

It's going to depend right are you talking about you know, I'm gonna have hands on the keyboard and we're running SSH commands and we're running ansible commands. Am I going to be running terraform to make these things as a certain way. How do I Bubble Up?

How do I present the storage layers? What kind of stores do I need? Right do I need object stores.

Do I need to file a store over do you is that important to you for your for your level of your app or just something someone right? And so that that conversation becomes a lot more nuanced. I feel that most compute is almost agnostic at this point story does not.

Yeah, it's still very even the service in the cloud, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's retrievable speed.

It's retention. It's and and I'll tell you there's there's a lot of ways that we are working to improve that experience for whether it's you know, for database use cases or for long term objects toward or for you know, network files stores across various concerns, right? But what I think the most important part that we're trying to do, especially as developer Advocate it's going the open source community and saying y'all are using y'all have some solutions already here.

How can we help you make that work with Dell. How can we make Dell Storage Solutions? Make what you're doing easier and so that's Lovely isn't we got one of the other lead developer Advocates a guy named Ryan Wallner who started a little bit after me super super active in that area.

Very very smart stores guys. Got a lot of storage vendors in his resume and it's been doing a lot of work toward that we've got a lot of folks who are writing modules. They are writing open source Services.

They are writing open source implementations for making it easier to provision storage for for containers or for other uses. So we're doing the work and and I we want to make it again a seamless as possible for those folks who have to provision stored on Dell. Yeah.

There's no more local data center than our laptops. So we want the killer developer laptop, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I want one too. I keep you know, it was I've been working with with Max for so long.

I started working at the like, well, you have to have Adele so I you know, I was like, oh cool I want this is this and I got it and you know, I got to say like report that laptop Okay, you know I'm not saying I'm a convert to Windows but I'm definitely at least a big fan of the building a lot of yeah. Yeah, but it's been it's it's been a good experience for you to figure out oh if I'm a new developer and I just got this deal on top of develop on Windows, you know. Yeah a lot of yeah, let's do that.

But one of the one of the focuses that I have that would love to see delegate into also aside from just developers. There's a whole market for gamers out there that they're seeing Dell focus on with Alienware. There's a lot of streamers and stuff like that people.

They just buy kind of whatever laptop whatever platform they have to use that that's a whole Market out there. Like if you've ever seen like twitchcon, it's like that huge market. So and what you see this you see these rock star developers who have big streaming followings and it's like I would love to have those then do that with Dell rack in the background, or maybe I tell laptop or Del peripherals and they can show off the new keyboard.

They got like when we say that we're going after the developer, I mean All levels developers love it when you cater to what they need they want and they know that's your focus not it just happens to fit and you may shift tomorrow. They know that that you understand them as an audience there. They'll build loyalty with you their voices are important to us and we want them to know that well Jim great to talk with you talking to you working folks find out more information about hybrid cloud and some things that we've been talking.

com. We're working an overhauling that to make it even more Community focused the community friendly, but you know, hop on stay tuned participate informs there. We've got a Dell Community slack that you can link to off of there.

We're going to be at more events that you're not used to seeing us at we were just at kubecon. We're gonna be there again look for us at devops days. And if you see us come talk to us, we want to see the Tim Banks twitch channel one of these days.

All right. Well, I threw it went through. Yeah, thanks much Tim for joining us and thanks for being with us.

We're gonna be back with some other fascinating guests. Just like Tim. We'll see in just a minute.