Hello, GitOps - Boeing's Open Source Push

Key Takeaways

[Music] you're watching the new stack makers a podcast for people who develop deploy and manage at scale software for more information and articles about at scale Technologies please visit the new stack. now enjoy the show the cloud native Computing Foundation or cncf hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure cncf brings together the world's top developers end users and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences all right now here we go I was saying to dman dman Corbin here who I'm with who is global software strategy open source program office at Boeing and I said you know what I want to talk about complexity and dman said yes cuz I'm thinking like when I got here I started talking to people about complexity and it just seemed that it's the theme here I'm hearing all week long it's like complexity is overwhelming now you know it's so overwhelming and I like what Tim Hawkins said today he said in his keynote which he talked a lot about complexity and he said the result is increased operational and conceptual complexity and then there's this idea of a complexity budget right how much you really going to allow in your budget for complexity there's just a finite amount of complexity that we can absorb over a certain amount of time and I have to think you can relate to that at Boeing indeed indeed um I one thing that you just mentioned came to mind was The Color of Money um but we won't go there just yet uh when I entered Boeing I underestimate estimated the complex nature of the business inside of a Fortune 100 company uh let's use these numbers I'm not sure if these is exact but rough right so let's say 6,000 Engineers let's say 60,000 aerospace engineers oh wow and then 160,000 employees wow so the dynamic nature of what I'm trying to accomplish inside the organization uh many vendors don't understand it and many other end users don't have the same type of complexities with inside of their organizations even if they're regulated the type of regulations in the different regulator bodies that we have to abide by are completely different oh man there's so much there like 6,000 developers and how how deep is the complexity and what does the open source office do to help in the management of that yeah so one thing that our VP of software engineering um Jenna Hussein when he joined the organization about three years ago what he wanted to do was have visibility across what's happening from a software engineering perspective and one of the ways he was able to measure that was trying to reorg shift all Engineers software Engineers underneath his perview so that's where that 6,000 number comes up right however that 6,000 software engineering number doesn't indicate everyone who is still writing software so from an open source perspective I'm looking at the number of people who are downloading open- Source software and I have a lot more than 6,000 so there's still pockets of individuals that are writing code that are would be software engineers in another type of a company that we don't typically refer to as software Engineers so that's one complexity to begin with that speaks to personas that's correct and so there's multiple personas inside an organization I I uh I really got a sense of this in talking to Ikea mhm and they have multiple data science personas for example so you're saying that this Persona issue is a is complex at a different kind of a scale than than most organizations know so how does open source help with that how do you yeah so so from an open source perspective I go around the organization having conversations and ensuring that we just talk to each other internally and and and that's a job just making sure that one group knows what the other group is doing and I say we're doing three things number one how do we make it easier for our developers to consume open source software okay that's one number two how do I make it easier for my developers to contribute back to open source projects and participate in the open source communities like the cloud native Computing Foundation the Linux foundation and then number three is how do I identify opportunities for inner sourcing such that we can share some of the best things that are happening internally with different groups so can I break down some of those silos so we can hit a critical mass in some of the great software that's already being built with inside the company so inner source let's talk about that because it's not a topic we talk a lot about what is inner sourcing what does it mean to you yeah so so I I mean from a easy standpoint I would say it is open sourcing but just inside of your company firewalls so it's the same framework um but we're trying to be uh Reus as much as possible so we're trying to abstract away the different uh data that is uh restricted or have different requirements ments and come to what is the the least common denominator that can be reused across the organization Le if we start with that goal in mind from the beginning the way that we build will be different so we have to have a a culture shift of this is not just going to be used for me and my program this piece of it I can build it such that someone else with inside of the company may also be able to benefit from it and so do you take open source projects and bring them internally and like for and then bring them internally is that kind of well well we're we're getting away from that we're getting away from that and what we're doing is trying to better participate so the nature of our business is that we would bring things in and they would Fork them that's the nature but what we would do now is like hey how can we cut down those barriers in that we separate the pieces that are business critical and we separate the pieces that we can now contribute back because security is important to the entire Community we have a higher sensitivity to security but we don't need to just marry that for our products the security that we're building into open source we're trying to share that more with the community so I was going to ask the why question it seems like why are you cutting back on internalizing open source projects and what I'm hearing is it's AAL security matter is it just more than that is it the part of that is it Security in some sense but not in others what is it so I would say um historically the culture around open source is not what it is today open source is not new with inside of the boing company it's been going on for a long time but there hasn't been a central source of control in terms of how is this going to impact the wider organization so what we were able to do do with inside of the open source program office is to work very closely with legal to work very closely with intellectual property to work very closely with information security so all of these different people who are working some part of Open Source at the side of their desk we're pulling it all together and making sure that we have an Enterprise strategy that's beneficial for the masses so what is that doing for you like tell me like you know so you have this centralized office you work with legal I mean we've talked a lot about open source program offices at the new stack over the years and that seems very like very you know solid kind of approach MH but what what can you what can you point to internally and the difference that it makes so many people approach I suppose in many different ways some approach it from a legal and a compliance standpoint what we've decided to do at Boeing is to lean into the community aspect so we LED with our commitment to the the cloud native Computing Foundation to the Linux Foundation such that we're providing opportunities for for collaboration with our software engineers and we're not coming in trying to slap their hands and say why are you downloading this or why you downloading that we're saying here are the things and here are the communities that we are comfortable with and we want to encourage you to participate in these strategic communities because we like the governance structure we want to dive further into that channel and then we further show you the paths that you can further work on your personal development so Engineers want to collaborate on cool projects so how do we help them work on cool projects that's for their personal development and then we draw the line between what's a business requirement and what's a what's a a a resume driven development type of project if you will so can you provide any examples of those those projects yeah so I mean let's let's go to git right we've leaned in to G Ops we're making it very easy for teams to adop G to adopt gitlab okay to migrate into a git infrastructure okay we have so so that's one example so you're using gitlab which is recently adopted as I understand flux and so are you using flux then yeah I mean we have teams utiliz flux we have teams utilizing Argo CD love the approach huge fans of giops but teams are utilizing both so really getups is one of those examples that seems like a really strong fundamental aspect of software development and how long have you been adopting gitops so there's there's teams that have adopting it for a long time for for at least 3 years years now we've been on a path of educating and showing the benefit to software engineering teams certain teams have different business requirements that may change the level of adoption however my goal is to lower the barrier to entry such that it's a no-brainer for you to walk into this new place because it's easy it's comfortable and we're providing it for you so you uh so you contribute do do the members and contribute back to those projects such as Argo flux and and and participa in git lab too so we are participating in those communities I'm trying more so to create the culture of you know getting involved into the tags getting involved into the commun into the groups because that wasn't the culture ah so showing up at the meetings is the first part trying to understand what are the issues trying to understand just how the community operates is a shift now now is this something that you can find something to get into like for example open Telemetry we have teams that are adopting that by the droves now they're trying to understand how can you contribute are there bug fixes that you find that you don't just fix but that you could contribute back so it's it's a staggered approach of trying to make it friendly to contribute back to these communities so I get the sense what you're trying to do in essence is find the projects that are like on the on the pulse of the community that's correct and and and please remember that this also extends Beyond just the cncf and the Linux Foundation right so I would like to utilize the cncf graduating incubating projects as a use case however there may be other communities or other projects that are of importance for my my software engineers and I'm saying well go ahead and lean into that is there a deficit there is there a way that you can add value and we're just utilizing this as an opportunity to show them how they can participate why is this so important to Boeing this is important to all large organizations because we consume so much value from these open source software and there's single contributors who are not getting paid large organizations need to do a better job of giving back to these communities and we don't want to give it lip service we're trying to double down to make sure that our Business Leaders understand the importance of what's being done by the community so we have a bunch of uh Community folks who are now evangelizing and making it normalizing us contributing back we want to get to a stage where we can be able to pay software Engineers to work on open source projects we're not there today we're not uh an open- Source company where people are coming from that but we would like to move in that direction and that's what we're pushing for internally so how are you pushing for it internally well education so a business leader may not understand the intricacies of why why what's the benefit of allowing my software engineer or one FTE to work on that project well what does the impact to the business if there's a critical cve that comes out and you can't get in touch with that maintainer what what would the benefit be if you had the subject matter expert across from you so we need to build that expertise internally so that we can work more closely with the community and that's what we're trying to educate our Executives across the board to make sure that everyone understands the value and the impact do you have do you have senior level support we do we do we do but again we're a large organization that's complex so there's different chains of commands there's different engineering leaders there's different departments that all have perceptions so the education needs to be ongoing it definitely needs to be ongoing I think just in conclusion I'd like to Circle it back to this question about complexity how does it surface internally at your developer teams cuz like you know we heard Tim Hawkin talk about complexity today we heard it be discussed like a NeverEnding project open Telemetry is a never- ending project all these projects are never ending how are you how does what is that intersection of managing complex and open source intersect for you and how does that play into your job at Boeing so I think we need to break it out into bike siiz chunks okay um I have about 15 software Engineers that I was able to bring with me to to uh cucon okay um but they're in different sides of the business okay one group is building a software Factory that they're going to be serving multiple different constituents one group is building an application uh how however they've already servicing a program that's already on their path of utilizing kubernetes another group is in a closed area they will never be connected to the internet there's no internet connection I need stop SEC stop I need my teams to communicate with not specifically what you're working on but what problems are you solving the communication now as we come here we can the problems that we're solving we need to share that with our vendors so our vendors can better help us solve those problems and then we can better be able to solution when we understand the complexities of our business and there's not a onesze Shu at all what fun it sounds like you're having at Boeing listen every day uh I meet a new team and I'm learning something new uh we're essentially running a startup in a 100 year old company uh uh we have teams that are working on submarines we have teams that are working on Jets we have teams that are working on airplanes we have teams that are working on things that the far Edge and kubernetes and Cloud native is everywhere so it's of high importance to us to lean into this community and make sure that there's certain application teams that has not even experienced it yet but it's coming so we need to prepare for what's coming I just have then a last question because I know how hard it can be everyone has challenges in their job and often like in my job I have a really good idea what a sponsor should be doing right like when they're writing pose I'm like I think I have a good idea how you should be doing that right but a lot of the challenge we face is like even just getting people to write Poe right I'm wondering what it is like that challenge that you face internally in talking to people when you know it's the right way to go but you have people who don't necessarily understand what you're talking about or don't want to listen to what you're talking about do you have children 28 and 30 so I have a three-year-old a 5-year-old and a seven-year-old nice when you slap your child on their hands every time and tell them don't do this don't do that don't do that you limit the creativity of the children yeah what you want to do is start to unlock and allow the creativity but with guard rails yeah what we're trying to do is establish guard rails such that the software Engineers aren't feeling stifled they still feel that they can be creative in their roles but there are sufficient guard rails that the business is happy with and what we're trying to do is work with a number of different uh stakeholders with inside of the company to to understand the needs of the software Engineers to ensure that the restrictions that were there in the past uh do not stifle creativity thank you so much uh for joining us deanii I really appreciate your time sounds like you having a good time at uh at Boeing So yeah thank you so much for having me this was a great opportunity appreciate it if you like this video please give us a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more videos like this you can always subscribe to our YouTube 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