In the tech world, DevOps is a strange thing. It’s vital to companies that want to keep up with the competition, yet, no one really knows what DevOps is for sure. To one company it means a certain thing, but something entirely different to another. Yet, at the same time, DevOps, as a practice, is defining the tech industry.

To gain some insight as to what’s going on with this new way of doing business, Stu Miniman of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, joined Chris Williams and Shawn Markham at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2016 conference. Williams is a cloud architect at Kronos, Inc., and Markham is a senior systems admin with IDEXX Laboratories.

User groups and the application world

The conversation started with a look into just what DevOps means for the two companies. Markham answered that DevOps is a moving target, shifting as the industry changes and new tools come to developers. He said his company runs a user group to help people share their ideas on DevOps with others. Williams noted that as a cloud company, Kronos has made DevOps an integral part of their operating environment.

From there, the talk moved to what’s getting people excited. Williams mentioned his team was interested in bridging the gap between the operations and applications worlds. Meanwhile, Markham referred to the increasing amount of automation in operations and development, saying that there’s so much to do, explain, and figure out about the cloud. He felt his company had a real need for people to help them through the cloud process.

Updates and feedback

Development cycles have been contracting from months down to weeks or days. Both companies have felt this change, shifting their refresh cycles to match. Williams said his company pushed code and patches through on a weekly basis. Markham replied that his company used a monthly system for patches.

Finally, things turned to what the companies were looking for from their users. Both guests were clear on their customer focus. Williams replied that they were asking customers how they could better work together and how they could better receive feedback from their customer base. Markham said they need to get out in the field, ask customers what they want, and drive that.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE