While some question the role of developers in the operations and infrastructure-focused VMware Inc. community, others view the collaboration between developers and classical DevOps people as an indication of a healthy organization. As Rebecca Fitzhugh (pictured, left), technical marketing engineer at Rubrik Inc., pointed out, companies can innovate much faster when developers start becoming operations minded.

“We’re definitely moving from sort of a bureaucratic type of development to more of an agile where you have to iterate. … Working with Rubrik, we’re on basically a quarterly release cycle … so I think a lot of it is mindset. So, I don’t want to say it’s shooting from the hip, because it’s not, but it’s just adapting and moving forward, and then getting ready for the next thing,” Fitzhugh said.

Fitzhugh and Byron Schaller (pictured, right), DevOps practice lead at RoundTower Technologies Inc., shared their thoughts with host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer) of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at this week’s VMworld in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

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Schaller’s background in both DevOps and as a developer gave him an interesting perspective on how classical DevOps engineers are starting to take on some developer-oriented tasks, especially in the world of application program interfaces.

“It really comes down to the API integration. At what point do you stop being an ops person if you’re writing a bunch of API code and become a developer, and it’s becoming a lot fuzzier lately. … There are API explorers now that make it really easy to write REST [representational state transfer] calls and things like that to kick off jobs. It just makes their life easier to adopt that trend,” Schaller said.

On the other hand, Fitzhugh explained that developers should increase their involvement in the underlying DevOps and infrastructure team. By getting involved in VMware developer communities, developers can learn what it takes to deploy their code to production, which ultimately makes them better coders, she said.

“Anybody can do DevOps, and I think that’s something that we need to change our mindset on. I hear a lot of people say, ‘Well, why would I join the VMware community? I don’t write code.’ And anybody can write code … now contribute. Put your work on GitHub; let other people use it; consume from other people. It’s a community of sharing, so share,” Fitzhugh concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE