“What would DevOps do?” might be the information era’s motto for the world of cloud computing. While the rest of us are name calling on social media, tech’s mega-corporations have laid down their arms, peacefully collaborating on a technological revolution. It’s developer operations for the better. Synergistic, open-source software looks to be a win-win model for all.

“One of the things that Microsoft is so excited about with open-source is that our customers can get to value faster,” said Bridget Kromhout (pictured), principal cloud advocate at Microsoft. Everyone that we collaborate within the other clouds and with all of these vendor partners … keep the ecosystem moving forward.”

Kromhout spoke with Stu Miniman, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host and cloud economist Corey Quinn during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Barcelona. They discussed DevOps, open-source, containers, cloud, and all things cool and geek (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Bridget Kromhout in its Women in Tech feature.

Go-get-’em DevOps!

With her multicolored hair and bedazzled Microsoft tee, Kromhout is a vocal supporter of DevOps. A self-professed math nerd in high school, she expected to live her days as an introvert engineer. Instead, she switched to the spotlight of the conference circuit as an advocate for cloud development.

“Microsoft issued me a Mac when they hired me to help people use Linux on Azure,” reads the pinned quote on Kromhout’s Twitter page. Not that long ago this would have been an unthinkable act of treason across device manufacturers and operating systems. Today, it is symbolic of the changing face of business in the digital revolution.

“We need to question long-held opinions, let go of deeply cherished stereotypes, and welcome this new era of open collaboration,” Kromhout tweeted.

Software development in the new age means a new level of maturity. Rushing into production with fingers crossed and lacking a follow-up plan has proven an unstable strategy, according to Kromhout. “[Enterprise customers] are pretty interested in things that don’t just work on day 1, but they work on day 2 and, hopefully, day 200 and maybe day 2,000,” she said.

The DevOps way means support and evolution continues throughout the project’s lifecycle. “You ship something, then you keep iterating on it; you keep bug-fixing,” she said. “Sure, you want features, but stability is a feature, and customer value is a feature.”

Understanding that not all businesses work on the lightning speed of the technology world is another lesson to learn. “One of the great things about a company like Microsoft is we … respect the fact that if something works, you don’t just YOLO a new thing out into production to replace it,” she said.

Instead, Kromhout advocates a “kind of Unix philosophy,” where customers can pick and choose from modular pieces provided by Microsoft and its partner ecosystem. This allows businesses to take into account the value proposition for replacement rather than implementing the newest, most shiny innovations, just because.

Kromhout is involved in an open-source project that is one of these “modular pieces”; the Kubernetes package manager Helm. The project’s latest iteration, Helm 3 , was announced during KubeCon 2019. One change that brought an enthusiastic response was the removal of Tiller.

“I think people are excited about the work that went into removing this particular component, because it ends up reducing the complexity in terms of the configuration for anyone who is using this system,” Kromhout said.

In Helm 2, Tiller acted as the server to Helm’s client and was necessary to manage resources in Kubernetes. As the Kubernetes security model matured, Tiller became a superfluous burden developers had to work around. Helm 3 removed this burden, evoking cheers from developers in the KubeCon crowd.

Standardized service mesh interface

Service mesh isn’t normally a subject that inspires jokey banter, but Kromhout makes any topic lighthearted. “We used to joke about JavaScript framework for the week, but I’m pretty sure the service mesh project of the week has outstripped it in terms of speed of new projects being released,” she said.

The number of service-mesh projects available makes choosing which to deploy a perplexing task. “You’re an enterprise. You would very much like to do enterprise-y things, like being a bank or being an airline or being an insurance company, and you super don’t want to look at the very confusing Cloud Native Computing Foundation project map and go, ‘Uuuuhhhh … I think we need something in that quadrant,’” Kromhout said.

Microsoft and the open-source community set out to create a solution. The newly released Service Mesh Interface provides a standard interface for Kubernetes-based service meshes. This removes the issue of developers becoming “locked-in” to a specific provider.

“Whatever service mesh technology you choose to use, you can be confident that you can move forward and not have a horrible disaster later,” Kromhout stated.

A data center of darkness or managed cloud happiness?

Resistance to disaster is a benefit of adopting fast-to-fix cloud services. “If you’re an Azure customer, I don’t ask you what version of Azure you’re running or whether you’ve done the latest security patch, because Microsoft takes care of you,” Miniman stated. But customers who don’t have managed services aren’t so lucky.

“If you rolled your own, you are responsible for patching, maintaining, securing your own,” Kromhout said. This creates a tension between those who have adopted cloud … and those who are still working to create their cloud strategy.

“That’s that continuum we always see our customers on. They probably have a data center full of vSphere and sadness, and they would very much like to have managed happiness,” Kromhout concluded.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: This segment is unsponsored. Red Hat Inc. is the headline sponsor for theCUBE’s live broadcast at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Red Hat nor any other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE