Gene Kim + The Rise and Fall of DevOps | Conversations from DevOps Enterprise Summit

**Adam Noble** (0:00)
Hey, Dev Interrupted listeners, this is your producer, Adam Noble. I'm always in the background, but I don't normally have my microphone turned on. I'm here to introduce a special episode of Dev Interrupted. Not only is this week's episode a double header, but both interviews were recorded in front of a live audience at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas. First up is Gene Kim, the award-winning CTO, researcher and best-selling author. Gene has an incredible body of work with a stellar and much deserved reputation in the DevOps industry.
After Gene is a conversation with Bryan and Dana Finster on the rise and fall of DevOps. Longtime listeners of the podcast may recognize Bryan's name. He previously joined Dev Interrupted to discuss outcome-based development and his book, Five Minute DevOps. The conversations in today's episode are a taste of a series of amazing interviews that were recorded over several days at DevOps Enterprise Summit. So expect to see more episodes like today's in your feed in the not too distant future.
It was a ton of fun to be able to take the podcast on the road and record in person. We hope you have as much fun listening as we did recording. Now, on to the episode.

**Dan Lines** (1:16)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. We have a super special episode today.
We are broadcasting live from the Dev Ops Enterprise Summit with the man himself, Gene Kim. Welcome to the show.

**Gene Kim** (1:34)
Hey, so great to be here and thank you all for help supporting all the great things happening here. This is great.

**Dan Lines** (1:39)
Yeah, it's awesome to have you on.
Obviously, there's a lot of accolades to your name. I'll try to see if I can remember a few of them. Founder of IT Revolution, founder of the conference that we're here at today. You wrote a few books that I think a few people read. Accelerate, Unicorn Project, Phoenix Project. Not that I read every single one of them, but I did.
And since you had this amazing, amazing career and experience where I wanted to start with you is what are you most proud of that you've seen our industry improving with CI and CD? What comes to mind for you?

**Gene Kim** (2:24)
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think it's really what you're witnessing here.
So this is our 15th conference. And nothing excites me as much as this because it's the technology leadership community, right? Mostly from large complex organizations. So I've been saying high performing technology organizations for 23 years. And so that took me into the middle of the DevOps movement.
And back in 2009, 2010, that was Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, right? And there's no doubt that they pioneered the principles and the practices and they were shocking the world doing 10 deploys a day at least. Yeah, that's right, right, right. So that was 2009 that frightened everybody. And then by the time Amazon announced that they were doing 136,000 deployments a day, right? I was like, that's amazing. But yeah, I think my real passion is seeing how those same principles, same practices are being used by large complex organizations that have been around for decades or even centuries across almost every industry virtual. So this morning we saw American Airlines present as not just technology leadership, but with their business partner, right?
Mattel, same, right? Business partner who's responsible for the direct to consumer strategy, right? With the technology leader who's making that happen.
So these are the, and Nationwide Insurance. So these are organizations that are 80, 90, 100 years old, right? We heard from the Navy, it's almost 300 years old. So it just, I have so much pride in the fact that here's a community that's driving amazing, not only principles and practices, right? But helping our organizations win in the marketplace.

**Dan Lines** (4:13)
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like not only the coolest engineering companies ever are able to do this. Of course, all these other companies are cool, but it seems like it's more accessible to these large organizations and-

**Gene Kim** (4:27)
Yeah, in fact, to give you one more that delights me so much is like one of the best engineering stories ever heard from Captain Andy Bean about the work he did with the US Navy Aegis Missile Defense System, right? So I just, you know, if you can do it for ships, right? And missile systems, right? Yeah, what's our excuse in commercial industry for not doing the same things, right? We really have no excuse.

**Dan Lines** (4:47)
Absolutely unbelievable stuff.
What are you seeing in terms of trends, more of the cutting edge stuff? Like where are we going next here?