Summer Replay - Innovations and the Changing DevOps Tides of Tech with Nigel Kersten

·39 min·3 clips

Corey Quinn credits Puppet for turning him into a public speaking monstrosity after a summer of teaching angry students.

Corey Quinn opens by humorously crediting Puppet for his public speaking skills after a summer teaching Puppet Fundamentals to defensive students. He introduces Nigel Kersten, Field CTO at Puppet, who discusses Puppet's domain-specific language for managing infrastructure state and its role in DevOps collaboration. The conversation shifts to Docker, with Nigel noting it empowered developers by shifting control away from ops teams. Corey reflects on tech workers resisting change, like AIX admins facing Linux replacements, and Nigel empathizes with enterprise employees near retirement. They touch on the State of DevOps Report's 10-year history, highlighting that most companies are stuck in medium evolution due to unclear goals and legacy infrastructure. Nigel shares findings on team topologies, validating patterns like platform teams to scale efficiently. Corey critiques Kubernetes complexity, predicting it will become invisible like Apache. Nigel reveals that cloud usage often mimics old VMware practices, not leveraging elasticity. They discuss enterprise challenges, such as confusing team structures and billing systems still using waterfall methods. The episode concludes with Nigel promoting the report at puppet.com and Corey encouraging reviews.

As heard by us

Legacy gets defined as the quick-build systems that still demand attention.

Screaming in the Cloud opens with a sponsored conversation with Nigel Kirsten, Puppet's field CTO, and it quickly circles a sharp question: what legacy means after years of rapid growth in applications and infrastructure.

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Why you'd press play

When your legacy stack is really a slice of rapid growth turned into an unmanageable mess.

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