So the Global DevOps Bootcamp has passed, and we got a chance to sit down with Donovan Brown to talk everything Stockholm, DevOps and the bootcamp. Here's the interview in it's entirety - enjoy:

Welcome here, how does it feel to be back here in Stockholm?

I think the last time I was in Sweden, it was dark and now it's always light outside. It's messing with my jetlag and when I first got here I knew I that when youre jetlagged youre supposed to stay awake until you're supposed to go to sleep. So I was fighting it and I just kept waiting for it to go dark so that I could go to sleep and I was thinking "why is it still light outside". I remember I grabbed my phone and it was around 10.30 and thought "what, I'm supposed to be asleep already". Then I go to sleep and I wake up at 3 am and I'm panicking thinking "OMG I missed the bootcamp and I'm looking outside and thinking "what's going on", but then I remembered it was 3 AM, not 3 PM.

So yeah, that has been messing with me the entire time I've been here. It's fun to be back and being here, but I'm not used to it being light 24 hours a day, it's just unbelievable.

Haha, that's what Swedish summer does to you I guess. So talking about the bootcamp, what are your impressions of the day?

It's always awesome. I'm fortunate enough to have been involved since day one, I was the very first virtual keynote you did and went to Gothenburg that year. So I've had the privilege of being involved since the very beginning, and I go to a different location every year and actually speak. This year we chose Stockholm because it worked out great and I have to be in NDC in Oslo anyway.

But yeah, the deck is always amazing, the content is amazing and the fact that you pull it off every year is unbelievable. It's funny, I heard some stories that this year was all about disruption and causing issues and azure was so reliable that it was actually hard to force the issues.

We had a great turnout in the venue here and it seemed that people had a good time. Me and the league are always happy to support it, not only do I go to locations but since last year the entire league picks a location and goes there. This year we covered Tokyo, Canada, the US, I was here and Copenhagen was covered by damian brady and so it's great to be able to contribute that way.

Well, from our end it's always amazing to have you guys involved and here on site, it pulls a big crowd.

I hope so, that's what we're trying to do and we do se more and more exposure for the event. The team that puts it all together, you guys are just unbelievable. We really appreciate what you're doing for our community and we want to support you in doing it.

Thanks for that. When talking DevOps, how would you view DevOps compared to SRE?

That's interesting, because we covered that in the GDBC. The way I see it, you have DevOps bringing Dev and ops together. If you were to focus just on the dev side you're going to see things like Kanban, agile, the ways that we do our job. If you instead look at the ops side, SRE is the way that they do their job. To me, it's not like one competes with the other but instead when you double click on either dev or ops, you'll learn more about the way that they do their jobs. We use agile, Kanban and scrum on the one side and they use SRE on the other. That's the way I see it; they're complimentary, it's not just one or the other.

Interesting, I think the bootcamp might have been an eye-opener for some regarding SRE and it's nice to hear you clarify further a little bit.

Comparing DevOps today to 2-3 years ago, what's happened since then?

Good question. What's happening is people are maturing more with DevOps and you're starting to see them doing more and more in their devops pipeline. If you look at Dora, they just did their state of devops report in which they found that databases and security are really important areas. You see devsecops being talked about a lot, you see companies like redgate go out there and show you how you can use database tools inside your devops pipeline. So we're seeing more and more people saying, "hey this DevOps thing is making sense. We're already deploying to our website, let's see if we can also deploy our databases and infrastructure.". We're also seeing people asking "Can we make sure that it's secure?". In short, what I've seen and what I hope to continue to see is more and more investments in what we can do in our pipelines and taking it to every aspect of what we're doing from development.

All right, so you actually covered a bit of my next question. What you think devops will look like in the future, maybe from a Microsoft perspective?

I think DevOps in the future should be - and I don't think this is a Microsoft's perspective, I think this is more of a philosophical one – something like this: I've been doing this demo recently where I go onstage, and I've deleted everything in my Azure subscription. So my Azure subscription is completely empty. And then what I do is I try to go to a website that used to be hosted there in like if you go to peopletracker.u.s, the page fails to load. Then I'll show you my phone and I'm trying to use the peopletracker for mobile app and it keeps crashing because the back end is gone. Like this would normally be a disaster. This is like everyone's nightmare, you call everybody and "Everybody get up. We got to go put our system back together". People are manually provisioning servers or reading documents or just they're pulling their hair out trying to get their system back.

So here I am on stage, the app completely gone, and I push one button to start a build and I just start talking to them about what's happening in the background. About 10 minutes later, I hit F5 on my browser and the web sites back. Then I open my mobile app and the mobile app is working again, there's data back in the database and what I've just proven there is that the entire system can be provisioned from a repository.

I deployed all the infrastructure - that's AKS cluster are deployed. I deployed an app service. I built Docker images, database projects, I ran UI tests and did mobile deployments. I even wrote a Powershell module that calls into GoDaddy and updates the DNS record with the IP addres I just read from my Kubernetes cluster! There's really no human intervention to go from a complete disaster to your entire system is back up and running. To me, that's the future devops, where nobody panics anymore when there's a disaster because a disaster is just a deployment, that this is how we always deploy our code and it doesn't matter if everything is there or if it's gone. All I'm gonna do is press one button, and everyone can go back to sleep again. To me, that is the future of devops, to the point to where it just does everything for you and it's something that we no longer worried about.

It's not something that we're constantly investing in because it's just what we do. That's just how we write software. That's what I hope devops becomes - something that we don't talk about anymore.

Yeah, that sounds really cool. Can some of our readers/listeners see this in action?

Good question. I did first at VS live in New Orleans and I don't remember if they recorded that or not. I think I'm going to bring it out again, twice. I'm going to do it in DC on Friday for my second session and I'm going to do it again at xamarin. So if by the time I do it at xamarin Summit it hasn't been recorded, I will record it myself. But between now and then someone should record me doing it on stage and then I will go ahead and publish that video. If not, I'll have to find a way. I think there's a lot of learnings when you literally are willing to go in and delete everything inside your Azure subscription.

Think about that, how devastating with that be for your company? If you don't feel confident doing that, go invest in your pipeline some more because no one should lose any sleep over it. Abel Wing who's on my team sent me some emails saying he wants to start doing what I'm doing and asking me to give him some pointers. I just told him just do it. Just do it and figure out what it takes and don't hesitate. Don't ever go back to the Azure Portal again. Delete everything in your resource groups, delete everything in your subscription and start building a pipeline so that you never have to go to the Azure Portal again. Make it so that your entire infrastructure gets up and provisioned. What I'll do to prove it is that I'll use the Azure CLI and say "don't even wait, go ahead and confirm it". I literally delete every resource group in my subscription and then I run my pipeline again. If it works, you're good and if it doesn't you need to keep investing in it.

Absolutely, it sounds like a utopia for many companies.

Yeah, it's a lofty goal. What's happening is I need to prove that it's real because a lot of people say "oh yeah, that's great on paper but it'll never work". But it does work because every time I get on stage I have nothing beforehand. It also helps me when I'm preparing for demos. If every demo I have can be provisioned by a push of a button, that's literally what I do and I avoid wasting money by having 20 different demo scenarios in my subscription just sitting there. Instead, I just flush it. I don't pay anything for my subscription up to an hour before I get on stage. I push the button and boom, everything's ready to go. So it is possible. Now, granted, what I'm doing for demos is going to be slightly different than what you do in a production environments, but the concepts are exactly the same.

That makes a lot of sense. So what are you up to nowadays? You talked a little bit about going to Norway and to Xamarin later.

Yeah, it's business as usual for me. It's so ironic how building the league completely backfired on me. I built the league so that I would have to travel less. I got Jessica Deen who's just a rock star presenter, Abel Wing who destroys every stage that he's on, Damian and Steve who get up on stage and they're all comfortable. I thought that it was a great idea and that I would have to travel less, but that backfired because as a group we're even more popular. Everyone's looking to have a league member at their event and since it's still just the five of us, I'm still traveling more now than I did before. It's also really cool when someone asks me or Steve and we're double booked, the next mail is about whether or not any other league member can come. But we're all extremely proud of that, of course.

Well, it's a great testament to you guys and the work you do.

Absolutely, we appreciate it for sure.

It sounds like the league is quite busy, then?

Indeed, oh my goodness. We have this calendar on our website and we always joke that it's not a competition, but we enlist where everyone's going and you always want the longest line, haha. You want to prove you're destroying it all the time, so we always tweet the pictures and say it's not a competition but yeah, it is a little competition. It's a friendly rivalry amongst the team members, though we're always so proud over everyone that's on there. It's been an honor because as a manager, you basically ask somebody to put their career in your hands. Especially looking at the league, I recruited all those people – two of them to enter Microsoft for the first time and two other ones to leave their current teams where they were obviously known and comfortable. In that sense it's really humbling and amazing to know that someone has trusted you with their career to take it forward. In addition, it's so nice to have them blossom like they have. Just look at Jessica Deen who had seven hundred Twitter followers when we met her. Now she has something around 7,000 followers and she's just completely exploded on the scene.

For sure. We talked and listened to Jessica this winter during Tech Days here in Stockholm and you're right, she's just magnetic.

Yeah, man, just sit down and get comfortable because she's about to talk your ear off about Kubernetes. And you're going to want to listen, because she's so passionate and just leans in on everything. We're very lucky that she joined the team.

Absolutely. Anyway, thanks for being here and helping out with the events and thanks for doing this interview!

Thank you, it's always a pleasure.