Guest: Mark Troester (LinkedIn)
Company: Progress (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Progress Chef not only provides a single DevOps framework that works regardless of the type and location of the application, but also extends the DevOps value with cloud-to-edge security and compliance.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Progress VP of Strategy Mark Troester shares his insights on DevOps, generative AI, and how Progress Chef is helping companies increase productivity.

On DevOps:

• Developers want to develop. They want to build these applications that have an impact on their customers, or on their business, or whoever they’re supporting. With DevOps, the idea is to reduce the amount of time it takes to set up the infrastructure, do maintenance, or be involved in the security aspect of it.
• While DevOps is very important and it shares a lot of values with what’s happening with platform engineering, Troester thinks what developers are really looking for are automation and self-service.
• Progress Chef aims to provide a single DevOps framework that works regardless of the type and location of the application. Whether it’s on the public cloud, hybrid cloud, whether it’s an application on the edge, edge devices, point of sale, it’s using a single framework that Troester refers to as policy-as-code (PaC).
• PaC is human readable (i.e., it helps people collaborate across different siloed teams) and machine enforceable (i.e., it’s the core of the automation).
• DevOps is not just about technology; a lot of it is about process and culture. It is putting together the right set of tools and composable services that constitute that platform.

On Generative AI:

• From a DevSecOps vendor perspective, it’s not access to information that we’re worried about. It’s the potential to mine that data to help in some ways get to automation. Before we get to automation, we need information to do some of the things in terms of SRE, to measure their efficiency and how fast they are developing great experiences.
• Progress does not get overly hyped on all things AI. Instead, we think about what we can do practically: how to use the data that we have more effectively and analyze that with whatever algorithms are available to bring the most value out of that data. Then, look for areas where we can automate processes, with or without AI. It’s really about using the best technology to automate.
• It’s not so much about what’s the latest technology, but how do you string together the right mix of technologies to drive the most productivity.

Advice for companies looking to start or improve their DevOps:

• Get the right people involved in your DevOps or platform engineering efforts and design the right framework that they will use to propagate out to the rest of the organization.
• Be very thoughtful about change management and cultural issues.
• The best people want to work in an organization that’s thoughtful about their processes, their work structure, and the tools they use.
• Focus on the long game. DevOps is continuous work: keep on top of things in terms of new changes, new technologies, new risks.
• Make small incremental changes to gain efficiency. They may be small efficiencies, but they will add up to something significant for the business.

How Progress Chef helps companies:

• Progress acquired Chef years ago to extend the DevOps value with cloud-to-edge security and compliance.
• It enables customers to think holistically about not only DevOps, but infrastructure management and all-around compliance.
• It provides a single framework for customers to configure, deploy, and manage their application infrastructure. Customers can do continuous scans to ensure the configuration hasn’t drifted and remediate compliance issues as needed.
• The same approach can be done on cloud assets as well out to the edge.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.