The New Stack Podcast

Case Study: How Dell Technologies Is Building a DevRel Team

Episode Summary

DETROIT — Developer relations, or DevRel to its friends, is not only a coveted career path but also essential to helping developers learn and adopt new technologies. That guidance is a matter of survival for many organizations. The cloud native era demands new skills and new ways of thinking about developers and engineers’ day-to-day jobs. At Dell Technologies, it meant responding to the challenges faced by its existing customer base, which is “very Ops centric — server admins, system admins,” according to Brad Maltz, of Dell. With the rise of the DevOps movement, “what we realized is our end users have been trying to figure out how to become infrastructure developers,” said Maltz, the company’s senior director of DevOps portfolio and DevRel. “They've been trying to figure out how to use infrastructure as code Kubernetes, cloud, all those things.” “And what that means is we need to be able to speak to them where they want to go, when they want to become those developers. That’s led us to build out a developer relations program ... and in doing that, we need to grow out the community, and really help our end users get to where they want to.” In this episode of The New Stack’s Makers podcast, Maltz spoke to Heather Joslyn, TNS features editor, about how Dell has, since August, been busy creating a DevRel team to aid its enterprise customers seeking to adopt DevOps as a way of doing business. This On the Road edition of Makers, recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in the Motor City, was sponsored by Dell Technologies.

Episode Notes

DETROIT — Developer relations, or DevRel to its friends, is not only a coveted career path but also essential to helping developers learn and adopt new technologies.

 

That guidance is a matter of survival for many organizations. The cloud native era demands new skills and new ways of thinking about developers and engineers’ day-to-day jobs. At Dell Technologies, it meant responding to the challenges faced by its existing customer base, which is “very Ops centric — server admins, system admins,” according to Brad Maltz, of Dell.

 

With the rise of the DevOps movement, “what we realized is our end users have been trying to figure out how to become infrastructure developers,” said Maltz, the company’s senior director of DevOps portfolio and DevRel. “They've been trying to figure out how to use infrastructure as code Kubernetes, cloud, all those things.”

 

“And what that means is we need to be able to speak to them where they want to go, when they want to become those developers. That’s led us to build out a developer relations program ... and in doing that, we need to grow out the community, and really help our end users get to where they want to.”

 

In this episode of The New Stack’s Makers podcast, Maltz spoke to Heather Joslyn, TNS features editor, about how Dell has, since August, been busy creating a DevRel team to aid its enterprise customers seeking to adopt DevOps as a way of doing business.

 

This On the Road edition of Makers, recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in the Motor City, was sponsored by Dell Technologies.

 

Recruiting Influencers

 

Maltz, an eight-year veteran of Dell, has moved quickly in assembling his team, with three hires made by late October and a fourth planned before year’s end. That’s lightning fast, especially for a large, established company like Dell, which was founded in 1984.

 

“There's two ways of building a DevOps team,” he said. “One way is to actually kind of go and try to homegrow people on the inside and get them more presence in the community. That's the slower road.

 

“But we decided we have to go and find industry influencers that believe in our cause, that believe in the problem space that we live in. And that's really how we started this: we went out to find some very, very strong top talent in the industry and bring them on board.”

 

In addition to spreading the DevOps solutions gospel at conferences like KubeCon, Maltz’s vision for the team is currently focused on social media and building out a website, developer.dell.com, which will serve as the landing page for the company’s DevRel knowledge, including links to community, training, how-to videos and an API marketplace.

 

In building the team, the company made an unorthodox choice. “We decided to put Dev Rel into product management on the product side, not marketing,” Maltz said. “The reason we did that was we want the DevRel folks to really focus on community contributions, education, all that stuff.

 

“But while they're doing that, their job is to bring the data back from those discussions they're having in the field back to product management, to enable our tooling to be able to satisfy some of those problems that they're bringing back so we can start going full circle.”

 

Facing the Limits of ‘Shift Left’

 

The roles that Dell’s DevRel team is focusing on in the DevOps culture are site reliability engineers (SREs) and platform engineers. These not only align with its traditional audience of Ops engineers, but reflect a reality Dell is seeing in the wider tech world.

 

“The reality is, application developers don't want to shift left, they don't want to operate. They don't want they want somebody else to take it, and they want to keep developing,” Maltz said.  “where DevOps has transitioned for us is, how do we help those people that are kind of that operator turning into infrastructure developer fit into that DevOps culture?”

 

The rise of platform engineering, he suggested, is a reaction to the endless choices of tools available to developers these days.

 

“The notion is developers in the wild are able to use any tool on any cloud with any language, and they can do whatever they want. That's hard to support,” he said.

 

“That's where DevOps got introduced, and was to basically say, Hey, we're gonna put you into a little bit of a box, just enough of a box that we can start to gain control and get ahead of the game. The platform engineering team, in this case, they're the ones in charge of that box.”

 

But all of that, Maltz said, doesn’t mean that “shift left” — giving devs greater responsibility for their applications — is dead. It simply means most organizations aren’t ready for it yet: “That will take a few more years of maturity within these DevOps operating models, and other things that are coming down the road.”

 

Check out the full episode for more from Maltz, including new solutions from Dell aimed at platform engineers and SREs and collaborations with Red Hat OpenShift.

Episode Transcription

Colleen Coll  0:08  

Welcome to this special edition as the new stack makers on the road. We're here in cube con North America and discussions from the show floor with technologists giving you their expertise and insights to help you with your everyday work. Dell Technologies is a unique family of businesses that help organizations and individual build their digital future and transform how they work, live and play. The company provides customers with the industry's broadest and most innovative technology and services portfolio spanning from edge to core to cloud.

 

Heather Joslyn  0:49  

Hi there, and welcome to another on the road episode of the new stack makers podcast. I'm your host, Heather Jocelyn Features Editor at the new stack. And we're here today coming to you from cube con and cloud native con North America here in Detroit, the Motor City. We're talking today about developer relations or Dev Rel to its friends. And taking a look at how one company Dell is building a DevRel team and how that team is working to connect DevOps to the work of enterprises. Where does DevOps stand with regard to large companies? How is infrastructures code maturing? And what's next? We're joined by red Maltz, Senior Director of the DevOps portfolio and Devereaux at Dell. Hi, Greg. Hi. And we'd like to give a thanks today to our sponsor for today's podcast, that is friends at Dell Technologies. So let's dive in. My first question to you is, you're starting a DevRel. Team at Dell. How did that begin? And how's it going?

 

Brad Maltz  1:47  

Yeah, so basically, from the Dell perspective, we've looked at it through the lens of our existing customer base is very ops centric, Server Admin system admin. And with the whole DevOps movement in the industry, really trying to create the new culture, the new operating model, what we realized is our end users have been trying to figure out how to become infrastructure developers, they've been trying to figure out how to use infrastructure as code Kubernetes, cloud, all those things. And what that means is we need to be able to speak to them where they want to go when they want to become those developers. And that's really what led us to say, you know, what, we need to build out a developer relations program with lead developer advocates. And in doing that, we need to grow out the community, and really help our end users get to where they want to go,

 

Heather Joslyn  2:34  

where are you at, at Dell before building the SEMA or where you

 

Brad Maltz  2:37  

go, I've actually been at Dell for eight years, I came in through the EMC acquisition. So

 

Heather Joslyn  2:41  

you're starting a dev rel team from scratch, what are your first tasks and doing that?

 

Brad Maltz  2:45  

So there's a few things first of all, there's two ways of building a dev rel team. One way is to actually kind of go and try to homegrown people on the inside and get them more presence in the community. That's the slower road really good for the scale out. But we decided, you know, we have to go and find industry influencers that believe in our cause that believe in the problem space that we live in. And that's really how we started this is we went out to find some very, very strong top talent in the industry and bring them on board. I've already brought three out of the four on board that I'm actually gonna be hiring. They're here at coop con with us. And now we're going to add a fourth one by the end of the year.

 

Heather Joslyn  3:19  

So you're sort of really on a fast tracking, when did you start this

 

Brad Maltz  3:22  

beginning of August? Wow, that

 

Heather Joslyn  3:24  

is fast.

 

Brad Maltz  3:25  

I've gotten a lot of kudos for the hiring speed that we actually can do

 

Heather Joslyn  3:28  

that is some recruiters might want to talk to you about your secrets. Let's pull back the lens a little bit and take a look at the broader look at the industry. First of all, how do you define DevOps? And I've heard I mean, I've heard a lot of different definitions. Yep. How do you define DevOps?

 

Brad Maltz  3:43  

Yeah, so DevOps to us is really, it's an operating model, it's a culture. It's not a person, it's not a group. And what I mean by that is, when you look at what DevOps is originally intent was, it's to try to get the developers in the company to really align in a more agile fashion to the operators in the company or systems admins. And where it's morphed into is two things. It's taken the agile practices of software development, and tried to make systems administrators more agile by the operating model. The second thing that DevOps has really done is it's helped to actually redefine the roles of the folks that are in that DevOps kind of world. And the two roles that we actually play off of traditionally are SRE and platform engineer, those are the two that we believe are in the DevOps world. The reality is, application developers don't want to shift left, they don't want to operate. They don't want they want somebody else to take it and they want to keep developing. Yeah, so we're DevOps has transitioned for us is how do we help those people that are kind of that operator turning into infrastructure developer fit into that DevOps culture?

 

Heather Joslyn  4:48  

So that's the sweet spot, sort of sort of opposition to okay, you said the magic words platform engineering, which we've heard a lot at this discussion here, especially here Yes. So where does what you're doing fit in with platform engineering.

 

Brad Maltz  5:03  

So when I, when I break down what a platform engineering team is meant to do in the DevOps kind of operating model, there's this notion of the Golden Path of the paved road. Right. And the notion is developers in the wild are able to use any tool on any cloud with any language, and they can do whatever they want. Yeah, that's hard to support. That's where DevOps got introduced, and was to basically say, Hey, we're gonna put you into a little bit of a box, just enough of a box that we can start to gain control and get ahead of the game. The platform engineering team, in this case, they're the ones in charge of that box. They're the ones that have to drive that golden path paved road, they got to make sure that the automations are in place, the tooling is in place, the pipelines there and that they can meet the needs of their development community.

 

Heather Joslyn  5:49  

last few years, we've been seeing these sort of the infrastructure as code space, evolve and mature, we've heard about get ups and there's DevOps and get ups and X ops and as an umbrella term for all that, you know, if I'm running, running teams running IT infrastructure, where do I Where do I start with all this? Yeah, good

 

Brad Maltz  6:09  

question. So the answer to start is not to just go start building, that's, that's the wrong answer. Yeah, the first answer is to understand the problems you want to deal with you're trying to deal with. So I always tell teams that you have to take a step back, you have to understand your processes and procedures within your current IT organization, you also have to understand and in the developers organization, because those processes and procedures that you're trying to learn about and document really well. That's where the tooling comes in, you have to start saying, Okay, we've been doing this task 1000 times a month. And we have we spend 10 People resources on this, why don't we automate that. And even if it's a simple automation that isn't fully artificial intelligence AI ops oriented yet, but it's just we're gonna build the automation, and we got to manage the automation, you might reduce 10 people doing it 1000 times manually, to one person that has to go and update it 10 times a month. That's the beginning of understand your problems, the processes and procedures, and then basically start is figuring out what tools you can apply to help solve that problem. And

 

Heather Joslyn  7:15  

also, I mean, the saying that, you know, every technology problem is a people problem at its core, like what what part of the Deveraux vision that Dell has is, what part of it is the tools and technology? Well, part of it is culture and like learning, teaching people how to read, see their culture.

 

Brad Maltz  7:31  

And under my kind of leadership, I have two parts of the program, I have the dev rel team. But I also have our DevOps portfolio, which is my product management half. And we're actually unique in the fact of in Dell, we decided to put Dev Rel into product management on the product side, not marketing. The reason we did that was we want the dev rel folks to really focus on community contributions, education, all that stuff. But while they're doing that, their job is to bring the data back from those discussions that we're having in the field back to product management, to enable our tooling to be able to satisfy some of those problems that they're bringing back so we can start going full circle. So in this world, Dev Rel, for me is community, as culture and contribution are really the big things that we're looking for from dev rel, and overlaying all that is education, their job will be to help educate our end users on everything from operating models to technologies and use case based discussions.

 

Heather Joslyn  8:25  

So how are you sort of spreading the word? Is it like, You mean, you obviously come to conferences like this, but what what are some of the

 

Brad Maltz  8:32  

consequences like this is the starting point in social media, this is part of the reason I mentioned we're hiring some industry influences is to help them through social media, kindly get the Dell message out. We also have a website developer.dell.com, which will be the landing page going forward. For all of these conversations. It'll be our our adult oriented community mixed with all of our training our hands on labs, it'll be mixed in with how to videos, our API marketplace. We're trying to make it so that when you have a question, over time people get educated to go to this one spot, you know where to go. Okay, so that's developer developer.dell.com.

 

Heather Joslyn  9:06  

Okay, great. So what are some other parts of the Dell portfolio you feel are relevant to the case of enterprise DevOps?

 

Brad Maltz  9:15  

So when I break down the DevOps problem, I'm gonna break it into two pieces. There's the automation side of the house, slash observability, kind of the tooling and stuff up there. Yeah, you then have the container and Kubernetes side, right, because one of the enablers for DevOps finally is a common abstraction across the public cloud and on premises, and that's Kubernetes. So now that Kubernetes kind of won, I'll say in this case, what we're looking at now is we have something called container storage modules or CSM, our container storage modules are open source. They're available to anybody out in the industry through GitHub. They sit on top of the CSI drivers for Kubernetes. And that's the type of enabler that we're driving through a DevOps portfolio that allows our platform engineers and SRE folks to really manage and automate our storage natively up through Kubernetes primitives through things like coop cuddle and whatnot. So you don't have to go to element managers to manage storage, provisioning, snapshotting, replication, security, encryption, all those things. So when we look at our portfolio, again, I see the infrastructure as code half. And then we have the container half, is there

 

Heather Joslyn  10:18  

anything new on the horizon that you want to either coming from Dell or just in general that you think is going to be influential in this in this space?

 

Brad Maltz  10:27  

Yeah, there's two programs. One of them was actually launched at Dell tech world, this year in May of this year, that was thing we call a project Alpine project. Alpine is actually where we believe that our customers that consume our storage today, they have a desire for our storage, even in the public cloud for certain use cases. So project Alpine is about making data and storage more seamless between the public cloud and on premises. That's where project Alpine is going to help a lot of these platform engineers, that's the reason DevOps communities. The second thing, and we just announced this few weeks ago is strengthening our partnership with Red Hat is being able to deliver more OpenShift oriented kind of solutions and appliances to market to be able to say, when you have a shop that has chosen Red Hat with OpenShift as their go to, they can get an experience that is hey, I want the full stack, I don't even want to have to go deal with the low level stuff, I just want to out of the box working, or I want you to tell me how to do that really, really simplistically through solutions and reference architectures, that partnerships going to again, help drive those DevOps cultures a little further into that OpenShift Dell type mentality.

 

Heather Joslyn  11:32  

I wanted to circle back something you said about developers don't want to shift left that they like, it does seem like shift left was the buzzword maybe even a like a year ago, like like, like, is it shift left dead? I mean, it does seem like that whole,

 

Brad Maltz  11:45  

I put shift left on the proverbial hype cycle. I think it had this, Hey, it's this thing. And now the industry is gonna define it. And it's finally hit a point where it means something. It's real. Yeah. People were like, but I'm not really ready to do it yet. Because it's not working, or we're not we're not there operationally as a company, or even in thought yet. Yeah. So I don't believe shift left is dead, the concept is alive. I don't think people are at the maturity level to really be able to implement what its original context was. And I think that will take a few more years of maturity within these DevOps, operating models, and other things that are coming down the road.

 

Heather Joslyn  12:22  

Well, thank you very much for being with us today. Brad, I really appreciate you joining us. And I just want to thank all of you for joining us. And thank our sponsor, Dell Technologies. And this has been Heather Jocelyn for the new stack makers. And we'll see you next time.

 

Colleen Coll  12:39  

Dell Technologies is a unique family of businesses that help organizations and individuals build their digital future and transform how they work, live and play. The company provides customers with the industry's broadest and most innovative technology and services portfolio spanning from edge to core to cloud.

 

Alex Williams  13:02  

Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, please rate and review us on Apple podcast Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's one of the best ways you can help us grow this community and we really appreciate your feedback. You can find the whole video version of this episode on YouTube search for the new stack and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss any new videos. Thanks for joining us and see you soon.

 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai