Infrastructure Automation Maturity Model – David Williams, Quali

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstruck TV. My next guest here on techstar TV.

Today is David Williams. David is with quali quality is a company I known about for a really long time many of you may have heard. I met some of you may even be customers, but I'm sure that some of you who are not familiar with quality, so we're gonna dive into that and then have a really great discussion I think but first, let's welcome David welcome to text strong TV.

It's great to be here, and thank you. Thank you, so David, I you know before we even jump into quality and what we want to talk into let's talk a little bit about David Williams. Share with our audience kind of your story a little bit.

Sure. There's a I've been in this industry a while. So I'm gonna keep this as brief as possible.

So I started my career in systems and networks operations. So I started at the the hard end of the equation if you like actually working with technology and delivering it as an operations person to a whole set of production systems, but I moved into software development over a period of time and that's and that ended up me moving into product management. So I've sort of gone from the using the technology to working to design it and then actually managing the product lines in regards to delivering it to to clients.

i. I had a similar role at CA Technologies. I worked at BMT software and I also was the head of products and management at IBM Tivoli.

So it's been a bit of a journey in amongst all that. I worked for a number of startups specifically around devops that was where I really started to engage with the startup community so much goodness was coming from that overall approach and I thought this is a really good time to invest my time into actually making it solving something that was fairly typical that was different from what I've been happening before. Um and what helped me a little bit was I spent also eight years of my life as a an analyst that Gartner covering Automation and devops and a number of other practices.

So it gave me a flavor of when I'm talking to clients. When you're an analyst. You hear an awful lot of good bad and ugly stories around technology and how it can support your business.

So it's sort of like made me a little bit smarter on what the realities are in regards to adopt in technology. So when I move back into becoming a vendor again, at least it gave me a little bit of a color background, so we had a make sure that the technology was relevant was valuable and resonated with that current marketing condition. So it's been a it's been a bit of a journey.

I join quality to over two years ago. I was attracted to the company purely because it was tackling a very hard problem that I haven't seen really Soul. It was one of fragmented infrastructure.

The complexity around Cloud management and it was really a maturity type of Journey where companies were extremely a flexible in how they approach the whole space but it gave a level of flexibility that lost a little bit of control visibility and now the market obviously wants to be relevant. It needs to have infrastructure tighter value. It needs to be at a cost and plan more accurately.

But you've got to do that without upsetting everybody. You got you're gonna make sure that you're Implement is solutions that do not disrupt processes Etc. And that's why we use a model really when we talk to our clients to understand.

Where are they on the journey in Automation in regards to their whole infrastructure and exactly, you know, how does that affect the processes that they have the organizations that they they're working with and that they have themselves and what is the culture within an organization? So understanding that basic metrics is also enables you to position your technology in a little bit more creative more accurate way, so You know technology is not going to solve all your problems in respect to organization, but you can have Technologies actually take it into consideration when you deploy and that's what we build a model and that's what attracted me to Quality. I love it.

You know I haven't heard Tivoli mentioned in the Lord. I appreciate that. I want you to know you kind of made me smile.

It was I mean what I mean the idea I don't want to waste our time on it. We could do it in another time, but Tivoli what what up? You know.

It just became the monster of many many tentacles that could do anything and everything sometimes it but anyway, you're right. You know, we've seen it interesting. I guess it's the nature of Of nature, right?

You know some people say do we move towards Simplicity or as the time, you know arrow goes this way to become more complex. Well when we talk about infrastructure as it relates to Computing and and so forth. I think there are a lot of people who say this thing this Baby's got very very complex, right?

It seems the more the more we evolve the more that timeline moves to the right the more complex our infrastructure. Comps yeah it exactly right, you know, and I I think and and the more complex our infrastructure becomes the more we yearn within our industry. for something to help right to to reduce that complexity.

but it's if you're typically mentioned by the way was interesting that taught me a little bit what it taught me is is that you can't make things simpler by adding something that's equally as complex as the problem you're solving and I'm gonna say that's a succinct as I'm gonna say every politically that was politically, correct you because it when I said a monster I meant but anyway, but you're right, but but here's the trick that or the The unrealistic kind of childlike fantasy that we live in is that we want to somehow reduce that complexity without any reduction in functionality without losing anything. And so that's a really hard. You know that's making lead out of a gold out of lead.

Right? We want it. We want all this great things that this complexity brings us, but we want it less complex and we want everything we want our cake and eat it too.

Right? And so let's talk a little bit about how companies like quality. Are are addressing this because yeah.

you know, you have a couple of audiences you play to you you play to the Customer the it consumer who may be in fact the employees of the company where you're at, right they may not they're not necessarily external customers see the internal customers. You have your your devops engineers and you're sres and your you know your Ops Folk Who who have to manage these things? You have you developers who have to develop and and Deploy on it.

You know, the new thing today is platform Engineers, right? We have platform Engineers who are kind of trying to map this all out. How do you win this David?

Wow, that's a good. Well. I see the this is in the software industry.

We have this behavior in the behavior is to make things simpler. We add something. It's it's obviously counterproductive.

It'd be just think about the whole premise of it will make your life easier. If you just add something additional to what you already do and to your point. The there is a number of audiences that are participating especially with infrastructure the way it is there is the the managers or the leaders within the unorganization that I've always strived to get visibility and a level of control over what is being used how it's used and why it's being used and yet you have an awful lot of enablement at the the doers level that the developer level at the some of the operational levels where you have technical people who feel very comfortable with using the tools that a cloud provider would would offer you as well as the developers and the devops infrastructure where they're very much I would say the dominant thing is more infrastructure as code.

Some people are still using configuration management yaml type of Of Technology, you know, there's a whole bunch and there's also sort of see the release engines that come from a prior era of maturity in regards to the infrastructure. But to your point the stacks are getting more complex the the places that you locate things are getting more distributed. And so therefore how do you make sure that the technology that you're providing actually does remove something and is accepted by the people who have to work with the infrastructure every day, but also provide the business especially in today's market conditions where cost is an issue and value to the business is an issue with everything that is used.

How do you make sure that that is the capital it's a pretty tricky thing. So if you've got from our previous comments around some companies that work for the idea there was to have this Uber technology that basically took over and everything was subsumed by it. The problem with automated infrastructure is that very few Technologies see themselves as a subordin?

To another one. So what you end up doing is having not only are you have the complexity the infrastructure Stacks you have automation that is stacked on each other where one piece of automation that is blind to what the piece it's triggering triggers another piece of automation. So when it comes to solving problems what issues with infrastructure deployments, whatever it is just you know looking at what the problem is is hard.

So what we did was we really looked at it from okay. We need to have something that provides the ability for organizations to have what they use subsumed into a control plane of sorts. So the ability to be out of take what you already use within your groups because each team may have different types of Automation and infrastructure.

They may even use the same type but differently, so you're having different different command sequences different services are being pulled in. So even if you're using one product one scripted type of AIC Eat you're really going to have multiple variations of that. So how do you bring that in?

So how we use our model was ready to say? Okay. We need to make sure that we can subsume what is being used today make it simple make it easier to use then we need to be able to provide that information of what is being used in its disparate way and make it consistent at a layer that enables the business to say.

I Now understand what the infrastructure is being used for and who's using it and then of course, your other point is the consumers the people that actually want infrastructure but don't necessarily have the skills with which to provision it and and make it happen. So typically that go through an operations team or someone that gives them a Sandbox or something that they can work with but it's got why why do that if you can do it for yourself service portal that gives you all the information about a set of Embark and environment that you need and then you can actually apply it and bring it out automatically without that so you've got these these levels you've Of the the people that actually have the skills to do infrastructure that are actually supplying it to many other people. You've got the management layer that wants to understand what's going on and then you've got the consumers that want to be able to use infrastructure they but they don't have the skills.

So what we really did was look at it in that way. So we build a technology that can basically bring in IAC normalizing the information so it's consistent. So whether using a yaml or an IAC or something it brings the information into a consistent layer.

That enables you to be able to apply consistent policy two things now things are the same once you can normalize something Discover it automatically normalize it and make it look the same the to a point where you understand what it's doing extracting the very specific infrastructure pieces, and then use that as building blocks with which to then leverage it for the consumer. So how can you take all that really smart knowledge and those few very key infrastructure Savvy people. How do you get those skills and then make what they do much more usable then that is the way that this this control plane can work and that's how in quality That's What attracted me to the company was this philosophy of don't make people do things completely different don't Implement something that changes the way that they do stuff make it open for them to use what they can you what they're familiar with using but also provide them with the ability to reuse that share it across different development teams.

So in a pipeline what you develop upon and all the instances of that infrastructure, Be leveraged in regards to what you test against you're using a consistent thing and not building it again in tests building again in release. So you want to be able to have that consistency. You can build that within the normalization layers that makes that thing that goes away he the complexity goes away.

Well you're adding as well is you want to take away the the governance regulations and the Securities and secrets management you want to be able to have making sure that if you want to build infrastructure that it complies to all your internal regs Etc. So the control plane applies that because it's normalized and then you can provide the catalog to your infrastructure the consumers. So you take all that you can actually provide environments in a catalog or in a way that enables it to be more self-service.

So one in the equation you could actually embed the capabilities for the developer within the within something like an IDP, you know, so you've got basically something that is within their environment in just pull the infrastructure in and at the higher level within operations, they can actually integrate it with their their Idol type of approach technology. There it service management products and that's how we really gone to Market with our product and that's why Enterprises are using this in this way specifically this market conditions you know, it's interesting too though, because When you look at this problem it really any time you can get the devops audience and the idol audience around the same Solutions around the same problems you doing good, right because traditionally they're here in here. I'm interested David.

So, you know, you talk to your customers you talk to the people who watch this video. Look they're aware. They live this problem, right?

This is not a revelation to them that this is an issue. No. When you explain this to them?

And what quality can do for instance, right? What's the reaction is it and you know, that's too good to be true. Is it you know, show me is it you know, what what kind of reaction are you getting from?

From the field when you talk to them about like this. Well infrastructure has been around for this technology was invented. So there's always been the need to associate compute with peripheral devices and then obviously it got out of control and is now what it is today.

So you get I would say that when you come in with a very specific value prop to a client so they say we want greater visibility and our governance model. We want to be able to have the ability to plan our costs which can only really be done. If you actually understand how your how your provisioning infrastructure and support of a an outcome.

So you can't plan your costs and prioritize and optimize your your infrastructure unless obviously you understand what it's being used for within you can apply your this is just for prototyping. This is for Mission critical stuff and then you can align it that way so we can go in there when we go in there. We typically can talk about that to that layer.

But however, the skepticism to your point comes when they say but we Have you know a dozen technologies that do we got a cloud set of Technologies? We use this for IAC. We have something that does you know that does our we have a management for the cloud platform.

We have all these things. We have configuration tooling what and they can all do aspects of infrastructure management. What exactly are you bringing?

So there's always this ability to be able to say, you know, it's okay to talk to the layer which sees the organizations challenge in regards to infrastructure, but it gets more complex as you talk to the specific departmentals or the divisions or the teams that use it because they're not thinking the big model they're thinking this is what I need for me. This is what I use. So what how we actually discuss that is really the ability to provide what they use today.

We can subsum a majority of it, especially if it is the coding Technologies the animals Etc that most people build even when you say homegrown typically what you're doing is building something upon. Some open source technology that's out there. So what we're actually when we discuss it with the developers, we can show them how we can Implement all the infrastructure in a way that takes away huge amounts of the restraints that are currently putting that's been put in their place for example, consistency on governments policies and tagging all these things that inhibit your ability to do it.

Even if you get new infrastructure coming in you might end up with another technology that's specifically to automate that piece. So what we can do is we can take some of that away and build it into an environment that contains the data you're using the infrastructure your provisioning and using as well as all the tools that you would like to use with which to manipulate that part of the say applications life cycle. And I think that that resonates well with the developers when you show how it's fully integrated with as I say their development platforms integrates all their cicd Technologies, it brings them in beads from the get it's the edible part of the get so it shows that you can use a technology that actually enables you to do things faster, but also leverage what you've already done and it's still enables you to do the IAC.

So To the point you made it's like you can talk to the very level that says I need that but you can't force people to use it. So our technology doesn't force people to change. Yeah, absolutely.

David this was I'm ashamed to tell you how far over time we are, but it's okay. It was a great discussion. I think it's Something that's interesting to our audience, especially for people want to get more information on quality the website.

qai. Yeah cars and that will have all the information and detail about what I've discussed today. Thank you.

Hey, thanks for coming on texture on TV today. And Diving was a pleasure. Yeah, anytime.

We'd love to have you back until then though. Keep doing what you're doing, man. It sounds great.

It sounds like you it sounds like you having a great time doing it, too. I love the enthusiasm. Yeah, it's pretty exciting stuff.

Very cool. All right, we're gonna take a break here on Tech strong. We'll be right back.