Up next, Ken Chini, the CMO chef. Ken? That was right, right? Yes. Yeah. Good to see you.

Nice to see you, too. Hi, everyone. I want to start off by asking you, where are you at? So we talked about continuous automation a lot the past two days.

And we talked about this journey from DevOps awakenings to continuous automation as a platform to driving business outcomes. So I'm in marketing. We were just talking about marketing people. So you can compliment the show or the booth. Great. Appreciate that later. What I want to do is some primary research, though,

another part of marketing. I want to do an informal survey. How many of you right now are at that DevOps awakening stage? Will you raise your hands? Just getting started. OK. Good number of you. That's awesome. And how many of you are well down that path towards

continuous automation? OK. There's a lot of you not raising your hands. Just as a marketer, it'd be great if we got all of you to participate. And finally, how many of you are actually at that point where you're advanced? You're actually driving business outcomes?

Small number of you. Well, I tell you what. We were just talking about we're a community. And one of the opportunities we have here is to look around and look at those that are at various stages of maturity and learn from one another. And in that learning, if you look at where people are going who are actually at that point where they're driving business outcomes, they're actually working very close to the business.

One of the things that they've learned how to do is they've learned how to talk the language of the business. So Adam talked about language earlier and the importance of language. And one of the things I want to give you is this thinking around how to talk to the business better. I spent a lot of time meeting with customers. I think I spent 250 plus days in a hotel

last year to put in perspective. So I'm out talking to customers all the time. And it's very clear to me that one of the things that we need to master as a community is how to talk to the business. And one of the ways to get there is to think in the terms of how business thinks. So they think about things, speed, efficiency, risk.

This is the language. And you want to actually get there and you want to connect what you're doing, what you're doing, hands on the keyboard work, to what the business cares about. And the way that I think about it is you want to connect the capabilities that you're driving.

And this is one of the things that we help a lot of customers with at Chef. So our customer success organization comes in and helps you figure out what are the important capabilities for your organization and how can you put them in place? And so for example, if you're thinking about speed, we help Standard Bank take their time

from commit to deploy to under 18 minutes. That speed, right? You could also look at another metric like deployment frequency on the speed front. On the efficiency front, we help Intuit

reduce incidents tied to change by over 90%. You could also look at something like what Barry kind of poo-pooed yesterday, which is time to provision an environment. But that capability ties right back up to efficiency, okay? That's speaking the language of the business when you're out there talking to them. If you look at the risk front, it could be driving known vulnerabilities down to zero

across your infrastructure. And it could mean working with their developers to make sure that they don't ever introduce a known vulnerability ever again. That's how you get there, right? Now underneath that, underneath those capabilities are the use cases, right? Those use cases are how you actually turn the crank

and deliver on those capabilities. But what I want each and every one of you to walk out of here with to think about is how are you doing that, right? Where are you gonna start? Are you starting with risk? Are you starting with efficiency? Are you starting with risk? And what capability matters to you? What's the stack rank of capabilities

that you wanna put in place? How are you gonna go about doing that? That's how you deliver on continuous automation. That's how you get to being that kind of outcome-driven organization. And it can really start with you, that person who's having a DevOps awakening, that practitioner, that sysadmin. It can start with you and you can build from there.

So all of our investments that we've made at Chef that we've been talking about are really aligned around this kind of thinking. How can we help you deliver on these outcomes? And you've heard the past few days about the investments we've made in Chef Automate, about how we're going about bringing together

both the view of what's happening from a state perspective with Chef for infrastructure automation, with Habitat for application automation. So now you can see in one spot the node state, whether you're looking at a Chef client reporting in, Chef solo reporting in, or you're looking at a supervisor reporting in.

But you can also see from a policy perspective how you're doing. How are you doing from a compliance coverage, security perspective? Are your applications and infrastructure actually hardened? Are the services that you're consuming on those cloud service platforms hardened? Do you actually know? And I think this is fascinating,

what's happening right now. I was reading the Wall Street Journal, because I'm in marketing, and I was reading the Wall Street Journal this week, and they said an article, every IT professional is now needing to become a security professional. And I read the article, I was like, well, really?

Do we really all need to become security professionals? I think kind of, but really when you look at something like InSpec and what it brings to the table, it empowers developers. And if I look at that through that lens, that's really heartening about what we're doing. You don't have to necessarily become a security professional, but what you need to do is you actually need to collaborate with those security teams.

In addition, I actually think more important is agility. And what we're doing with Chef is we're providing that platform that helps you meet where you're at today with your current environment, but also helps you move to support modern applications. And that concept of agility,

I think is really where the power to unlock your business happens. So whether it's looking at a security issue and that ability to remediate it in minutes, or that ability to actually push a change tied to a business need any time, any way you want, that's where we need to be.

So whether you're looking at your current environment or the future environment, what we're trying to do is provide this common platform that lets you manage across both. And I want to suggest to all of you that you need to think about agility. You need to think about it not just for those future modern DevOps teams that you're forming,

but for all of your current estate. If you have large amounts of legacy infrastructure, VMs out there, you want to be able to move fast on those systems as well. And for all the reasons I stated, the next WannaCry, the next Heartbleed, the next Business Change is becoming a competitive weapon for you.

So, what I'm going to do next is I've got two customers. I'm going to have conversations with them both, one at a time. And they're each at a different step in this kind of process of moving from kind of infrastructure centric to modern applications. So the first step is Westpac Bank. And so I'd like to invite up Dave Corlett.

He's the Head of Application Lifecycle Management at Westpac New Zealand Limited. Dave. Dave. So Dave, 200-year-old bank.

Well, that's the group bank. We're about 150 in New Zealand. 150? Yep. Okay. Well, legacy there, right? Yeah, a bit of legacy, I can imagine, yeah. So walk me through a little bit about the business and where you're at. Okay, so just to set some history, I guess, we are a full-service bank.

We do consumer, wholesale, lending, the whole lot. We have about 5,000 employees and about 200 branches. And last year, we had Westpac Bank up here. Yes, we did. And we invited you back again for a reason, right? And that's to talk about the progress you've made. Yep. Right, and so for you to give us an update, because you've been on a real journey, right?

And so, one, why don't you start by talking about where you started with that journey. I think it's a great idea. Yeah. So I guess, like two years ago, we started a journey with Chef. And if you looked at what we were like as an organisation at that point, we had a pretty low level of employee engagement.

We were taking, on average, nine to 18 months to deliver projects. We followed a waterfall methodology. You'd get to probably the last mile of delivery of an application and it would take you three months to get through that cycle. And it's a pretty typical thing, I think, for a lot of large legacy organisations at that particular time. And what we did is we were working with Chef.

We actually took a different approach. We took a culture-driven approach. We didn't start with the tooling. We started with these guys working through, how do we do things differently? How do we change the way we do our work and how do we work as an organisation? So about probably last year, we would have been partway on that journey.

We would have had probably a couple of slices of the organisation operating in an agile way. Since then, we've pretty much taken our entire technology team and squadified it, for want of a better word, where we have cross-functional teams working together to deliver outcomes. And that includes both from a run-and-change kind of perspective.

So it's been a significant change for us. Yeah, so one of the things you've done, I think that's really cool, is you've actually put in place these measurements on the business, right? And they go from kind of very, very technical measures all the way up to higher-level kind of business-oriented measures. So we've probably had about four measures that we watched on the way. One of the key ones was employee engagement.

That's the one that I talked about before. So we've managed to lift that from what really was bottom quartile from a survey perspective from McKinsey to second quartile, right? Because if your staff are not engaged and enjoying what they're doing, then it doesn't really matter what tools or approach you take. The second one was one around how much of every dollar do we spend

actually finds its way in the hands of the customer? And how much of that dollar are you actually spending on managing the process and the governance and the checkpoints and that sort of stuff, which obviously was a problem for us under the waterfall. And pretty much that measure's moved from, increased by about 100% actually. It's from about 20 cents in a dollar to about 50 cents in a dollar.

So what that kind of means is that we're now delivering twice as much value to the business as we were before for every dollar that we spend, which is a significant change. One of the other kind of measures that we used was around the impact time to customer. And what we found in reorganising around the way we work and looking at

breaking work down into small increments and getting it into production, because it's only of value to the customer when it's in the hands of the customer, right? So getting it there very, very quickly is what you wanna be able to do and that's when the value starts to come. Now we found that in doing that, we've reduced our customer impact time by over 90%.

And that's huge when you look at it from a customer perspective. Yeah, and we at Chef do very similar types of activities. So we look at Net Promoter Score, for instance, at a very high level, which is very simple. Would you recommend this place as a place to work or would you actually buy from this company, right?

It's a very simple measure, but it's actually very telling when you start breaking it down to like an org unit level and individual team level. So on Net Promoter Score, I guess, from an organisation, we also use that. And what we've started to see now is that actually in about the last four months, our Net Promoter Score has moved by about 10 points. Wow, that's a big shift. Yeah, keeping that moving is one of the things

we're trying to do with the business. Right, so one of the interesting parts of your business is that you rely on outsourced relationships. I know a lot of people out here in the audience do as well in the conversations I've had. So how did you bring these outsourced relationships along on the ride with you and these vendors along on the ride with you? There's some interesting parallels

to the whole sense of community and stuff that happens within Chief here, right? You have to be inclusive. You have to be able to work with them and bring them into the culture that you're trying to create. Because the culture and the way of, you know, the growth mindset that we've been talking about is really important about how do you bring all of that together? So including them in the way you do things,

making sure they're part of that and not treating it as something separate. Because you need it all to work from an end to end perspective. So we did a lot of work working alongside them, involving them in what we were doing, taking them on the journey as our own people went through it. And I think that was the key to them being able to adapt and start working with us to deliver end to end.

Yeah, makes sense. So you're a bank, you're super regulated. Yeah, we're a bit of that. Yeah, I mean, and I've got to imagine that that's a big task for you, but you have this concept called minimum viable governance that you bring to your teams.

Talk a little bit about that. Well, we try and bring the concept of minimal viable, everything to what we do, right? So what's the minimum you need to do? Again, it comes back to that principle of how do you get things into production as quickly as possible? And how do you deliver value as quickly as possible to your customers? So governance around that is just part of it,

to make sure that it is as lightweight as possible to give you the control and the compliance and the risk that you need, but not to burden the process, right? And so it's how do you manage that and do that? So we look at everything we do and try and make sure that we're not overloading the process. I mean, we used to have a process, a cab process, whereby everybody would have to come together

and go, okay, I want to put this change in production, whole bunch of senior managers like myself would sign it off. We've kind of blown that whole thing up and we've given the empowerment back to the teams to go, you're actually the best people to assess the risk. You're the best people to understand what the implications of that are. How do we build in the right kind of tests and process and quality into what you do,

but actually how do we give you ownership for that change? And if you're the people who build it and you're also the people who run it, which is the way we've reorganised ourselves, you take that responsibility and that ownership. And so all of that comes together in getting great outcomes through the empowerment of the individuals. Yeah, makes sense. So when we engaged with you back a year

and a half ago initially, we ran our customer success team, ran a number of these DevOps transformation workshops. And talk a little about what that was like. And I know because it impacted both the IT executive team as well as the, of course, line level and practitioner level folks in your organisation.

Yeah, as I was touching on before, the journey for us and Chef didn't start with the tooling. It started with actually how do you help us look at the way we're doing things and the culture that we're doing, right? So the workshops were about probably challenging our own mindsets around how do you make things smaller, right? How do you challenge yourself that it takes your IT master to deliver a project? In fact, actually, we don't do projects anymore.

We just do work as it sits in our backlogs, which is an interesting change. But it really helped kind of start to challenge the mindset of our engineering teams and our leadership team about how do we support that environment? And then as a leadership team, how do we create the environment in which we make the engineers successful

and empower them to deliver the results? So that was really forming in that kind of stage. And then subsequently to that, obviously, we started to implement the tooling. We have a number of pipelines starting to run now. We're using spec in terms of those pipelines. We're beginning to gradually move that out right across our existing infrastructure. We automate everything that we do new now.

That's just a given. We must do that to operate at velocity. So you have this continuous automation platform and are you mandating that teams use it or do you have a kind of consume it because it's a great type of philosophy?

That's a great kind of question. We're trying to work on a philosophy which is based on the same thing as Chef as with communities, right? So we're trying to take the engineers and go, you are a community in and around this. You know best what the tools are that are required to deliver it. As a community, we try and bring that thought process together to say, you guys make the decision.

You help guide us in what we need to do. Now we have to balance that with not having 500 different ways of doing things and different tools. But again, it needs to work for the engineers that are doing the work. So we try and bring that community together so we have that constructive comment and then the different points of view

to come together to get the right outcomes. And that's starting to really take shape. We're also doing some really interesting things. I don't know whether you guys have seen the ThoughtWorks Tech Radar. So we're using that as a vehicle to try and get all our engineers to contribute to, well, where do we go next? What techniques do we adopt next? What tools do we adopt next? And all of those things.

That makes sense. So IT, you've done a great job getting it moving down the path. That's very clear. But you're at that point now where you're trying to connect to the business and teach the business of these new capabilities you have, right? Like you have this ability to move very quickly from commit to deploy. So it means you can actually take an idea and ship it.

And so how are you changing the behaviour on the business side? Because I know that's got to be a challenge. The business engagement has been critical all the way through, right? Because again, I referred a bit before about prioritising the work. So we're now at a point where the engineering kind of way of doing things, we can operate at velocity. But that means we can deliver the wrong stuff

really, really fast too. So it's really important to have the business on board making sure we're doing the right things and getting the feedback in terms of what happens. So we're now at the moment where we're just starting to pivot from an agile perspective and start to work. And how do we construct with the business cross-functional multi-discipline teams that work with tech as one to deliver the idea to production as quickly as possible?

Because we can do it from a tech perspective but now we need to extend it all the way into the business. That's what our customers need. Yeah, well, I tell you what Dave, great conversation. Really appreciate the time today and you'll be around. So if people have questions, please find Dave in the halls. So thank you so much.

Thanks, man. Thanks, man. Give me a hug. Another hug. Okay, next up, we have Graham Weldon from Rakuten. And welcome out on stage with a big round of applause.

Graham.

So I'm betting a lot of people in this audience may not know who Rakuten is. So why don't we start there? Okay, I think a lot of people know Rakuten but they don't know that they know Rakuten. I think that that's actually very true. So we have our core business as an e-commerce service

based in Japan, headquartered in Japan but we have global services and companies around the world. Some of the more popular ones, e-reading service like Kobo is fairly popular. We have banks around the world as well as other non-e-commerce services. It's fairly diverse. It's very diverse but in Japan,

it is one of the biggest brands. It is one of the biggest brands. Everyone knows Rakuten. Everybody knows, yes. Yeah, and so Rakuten as a company has some interesting kind of core tenets to its philosophy, right, and how it operates. There's a few things. So we have a philosophy initiative, I guess,

to how we operate as a business and that is to empower society through technology and more recently to be a global innovative company. And that's a fairly broad objective but it helps us drive what we're doing and why we're doing it. Yeah, absolutely. And then the way you operate,

you're a Japanese company but you're English speaking. Yeah, so about six years ago, I believe, the CEO announced that the company would be English speaking, unannounced and announced that in English to a Japanese company. So we are internally English speaking and allows us to communicate globally much more easily.

We have a unified language across the world. Right, right. So one of the things I find really interesting about Rakuten and the work you've been doing is that you have essentially one foot in that current environment I was discussing about VMs and all of that networking and all of that but you have another foot in very much in modern application architectures.

Right, so we're coming up with new services and new businesses all the time but we're also into acquisitions and folding in existing businesses, interacting. So with acquisitions, you have older systems or existing established systems and we have systems that have been around since 20 years ago when we started the company. So we're looking at legacy infrastructure,

some bare metal VMs but also there's a big push internally to start using containers and push that to production. Right, right. So Rakuten was one of the first organizations in Japan to really embrace Chef and was a leader in building out community in Japan and continues to be.

So why don't you talk about the journey with Chef and where you're at today. Okay, so the journey with Chef in the company, it's kind of always been there since Chef was around. It's been an attractive product from the beginning but Chef, the company, has changed over the years and we've tried to change with it and we've been taken along this journey with our customer success engineers from Chef

engaging with us to try and take us along this journey. But automation started out with Chef on existing platforms, legacy systems and it's been more and more widely used for big data infrastructure and more commonly applications throughout. Yeah, and you're actually running at pretty significant scale in terms of a number of nodes

under management with Chef. Right, so I actually gave you a number yesterday. I've got some updates. So it's 50,000 nodes, give or take a couple of thousand. So big scale, right? Impressive. And you're using Chef HA and some of the more other features that you need

to be running at scale. Yeah, there's a mix of different systems, of course. Like we've got those legacy stuff, we've got some new stuff as well. So we're running the Chef HA as a central service for all of our companies to use and there are some people using Chef solo. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive. Right, right. So when I was talking to Dave just a minute ago, we were talking about how you push out

that kind of central service. And I know that you have an approach to it that's worked successfully. Will you talk a little bit about how you've kind of driven the adoption of that central service? So with services, the platform team that runs that particular central HA provide a service that is great, reliable and is an excellent service.

And it's the same approach I take with automation in any respect is that I'm not selling to internal clients anymore. Right. I don't sell to them, I don't enforce and enforce that they have to use particular tools or ways. What we're doing is showing them that the work that we have and the tools that we can use in our approaches, there's a wow factor there and they want to use it after having seen it.

I love that. That's a great thing to take away. How to create that wow factor in your own organization, right? So it's almost like it's like marketing or selling the heck out of it. So previously you would have to sell things. You would have to sell this solution and it's going to save you this much time.

But demoing Habitat to people, for example, it's, there's a clicking point. There's a moment, the light bulb goes on and they're like, I need this. When can we have this for this, for our project? Right. They just want in, there's that wow factor they just can't deny. Okay, well that's a nice pivot point over to Habitat. So you've been spending personally a lot of time

with Habitat and you have a pretty large team now engaged using Habitat. Right, so we've got a fairly core service to the business that we've done development on Habitat, sort of off to the side of our traditional automation. I was actually very annoyed when Habitat was released in the timing. It came at just a very bad time because I'd have to rebuild everything in Habitat

because we were already well into it. But it's so quick and easy to use we've been able to build alongside in parallel with the traditional automation on Chef. We now have both solutions at a point where if I wasn't here at ChefConf this week we'd be testing that in production right now. Oh, excellent. So, when you looked at Habitat,

what was it about the current container ecosystem that you saw that was kind of lacking that Habitat would fill the gap on? Developers I think find Dockerization simple for their local usage, but when they're starting to move to production and how that works and how that's orchestrated it becomes a little bit more complicated.

This is empowering developers to build their applications in a way that still works for production and it works across the board. So, and I guess for you as an operator, what did you see in it beyond just that kind of huge dev benefit, which I think... Okay, so I'm a lazy guy, right?

I don't want to do too much work. I look forward to the day I can sit back on the beach and pretend I'm still working. There's a lot of stuff removed from operations that we can empower devs to take control of. We can still mandate and control particular versions through the Habitat dependencies, but it makes system deployment much simpler and frees us up to do more important and exciting things.

Right, so you've got a few services that you've moved forward with Habitat. You want to talk a little about what that journey was like, what that first use experience through to where you're at today? Okay, so one of our internal services managers a loyalty program that we have.

We've built alongside the traditional automation with Habitat. And the first usage was, it was scary. And to look at Habitat from the outside, someone that's spent five years on Chef, Habitat's a little bit scary. It's a scary monster. But once you spend five minutes, 10 minutes looking into it, it's actually quite simple, quite elegant and quite easy to get started.

Bash put me off. I think I heard Adam talk about this yesterday. I was Jamie Windsor talking about Bash, putting him off. But we all kind of know Bash, it's easy to get into. That experience was, as I went through it, it's simplifying the build process. We have a very complicated and convoluted

legacy style build process with Java applications publishing to Nexus repositories. And then that jar gets passed along all the way through the pipeline. Now it's a simple package. And whether it's on the legacy infrastructure or with what we're pushing towards in terms of containers, it's the same package. It's just a different export.

Oh, that's excellent. So when you look at the future and where you see it going, how do you see Habitat playing out in your organization? What's your roadmap? Well, I'm going to continue trying to wow people. And that's what I'm doing with this to be production next week concept.

We're going to continue to show this to people and show them the benefits, empower the devs to make their own builds and continue that push through containerization. So Habitat's solving a lot of things that we didn't know we needed to solve. And that push from legacy to new containerized environments,

particularly for modern apps, works really well. It also allows us to fix some of the problems we have in infrastructure in terms of legacy systems that are difficult to upgrade and move on. When security issues are made aware and we need to update, it can be a very complicated process to push all of those out to different systems. This allows us to pick up those apps, drop them onto more modern systems

and maintain that up to date throughout. So you as a company, you've been a major contributor to open source for some time. You've actually had some pretty significant projects that you've open sourced. The company has quite a few open source projects. The biggest one I think we have is a LeoFS block storage. Yes, yep.

When you look at where Habitat needs to go, how do you feel about the role that your work can play and the role of the community? The community is, the role the community will have is gonna be in and around some of these new tools that are coming with Habitat like the scaffolding.

There's a lot of stuff done there. When I saw that came in again, you guys are solving problems I don't know I have. And then I see it and it's like, we needed that six months ago. So there's things that I see coming in with Habitat that are really pushing us forward. What we can do and what we want to do is prove these cases are useful for production, that it's a safe and viable option

for legacy and for modern applications and educate the community on how they can use that. Being the scale that we are and the sort of company that we are and being so diverse, we have lots of use cases that we can try and report back on. We can also contribute as part of our work as well and we have built scaffolds for Habitat.

Well, that's great. So, Graham, one, you've been a great community member, Rakuten's been a great corporate community member and we really appreciate the time and effort that you've put into both on the Chef front and on the Habitat front.

So with that, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Yeah, yeah, really appreciate you coming out today.