A Cloud CXO’s Guide to Driving Value from DevOps Investments - Jeffrey Hammond

1. © 2022, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates.
© 2022, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates.
A Cloud CxO's Guide To
Driving Value From
DevOps Investments
Jeffrey Hammond (he/him)
Head of WW ISV Product Management
Transformation

2. © 2022, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates.
What Putting The “Dev” In DevOps Means To Me:
1. Write “Code that matters”
2. Get “Fast feedback”
3. Maximize “Time in flow”
But CxOs don’t intrinsically care about any of that…
• CFO: ARR, COGS, margin, revenue growth
• CPO: Differentiation, new features, TTV
• CCO: CLV, NRR, NPS
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How Do Dev-ops Principles Align With What CxOs Want?
Principle CxO Alignment When it works Anti-patterns
Collaboration Revenue growth Ownership Silos + Duplication
Automation TTV, OpEx Acceleration Lots of LOCS
Continuous
Improvement
TTV, New
Features
Reduced time to
value
Shorter dev
windows
Customer–centric
action
NPS, CLV,
Revenue Growth
Fast feedback Bias toward
tactical action
Create-with the
end in mind
Differentiation,
New features
“Working
backwards”
Harder to
hire/cross train
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Source: https://www.atlassian.com/devops/what-is-devops

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Drive CxO Alignment With Cloud Computing
• Focus on operational excellence: Does the code we maintain drive growth and differentiate us?
• New levers and capabilities: Can we leverage new services to reduce our time to market?
• Teams can develop new applications in weeks: Does our technical debt slow our innovation?
AS THE CLOUD EVOLVES IT CHANGES THE CODE WE WRITE AND MAINTAIN
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Innovation vs commodity paradox

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Align Dev-ops Investments Using Newton’s Second Law
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F =
ma
What resources do
we have to invest?
(m)
How quickly can we
apply our
resources? (a)
How much market
impact can we
generate? (F)
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Going Faster (a): Acceleration vs. Drag
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Sources of Drag:
Technical debt
Manual processes
Verification & validation
Dependencies
Governance & Risk
Compliance
Accelerators:
Automation
Managed services &
APIs
Experimentation
(Low-code) Tools
Deployment pipelines
Patterns & Templates
Frameworks
For any..
n LOCs

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Where Are We Applying Our Resources (m)? An Example
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Front-end
APIs
Backend
Data
Option 2:
Componentized front end
Amazon API Gateway
Microservices
Amazon EKS
Amazon RDS for
PostgreSQL
Option 1:
Monolithic front end
OSS API Gateway
Monolithic backend
Deployed on EC2
PostgreSQL DBMS

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What Capabilities Are Differentiating? Table stakes?
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Front-end APIs Backend Data
Differentiated
Commodity
• DBMS Server
Maintenance
• Replication
• Schema design
• Predictive models
• API design
• Access plans
• Documentation
• API Server
Maintenance
• Traffic management
• Access control
• Throttling
• Version management
• Control plane
orchestration
• Autoscaling
• Security
• Image repository
• Service architecture
• Business logic
• Load balancing
• WAF
• Content acceleration
• Identity management
• Routing
• Personalization
• Customer experience

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Alignment Increases Mass Available For Differentiation
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From To Customer Story
Building a bespoke code management &
deployment system
Common deployment system, shifting 80% of reclaimed
resources to new feature development
Coinbase
Updating open source databases on prem
and on EC2 servers
Fully managed and scalable relational databases Domo
Multiple data ponds, difficult to manage
and control quality of analytics
A single data lake on managed infrastructure,
provisioning analytics tools with quality data
Intuit
Monolithic web app serving dynamic web
pages
High-scale, performant static site with a shared file
system
Spokeo
Self-managed Kubernetes control plane Fully-managed control plane Lacework
Bespoke development environments and
data access for data science teams
Unified enablement of data science teams across a
global organization
Janssen Pharmaceuticals
(part of J&J)

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Recommendations
• Identify your customer(s), and work backward from them
• Automation is great – but don’t forget continuous improvement
• Adjust DevOps tactics in step with evolution of cloud computing
• Use the F=ma formula to drive ongoing CxO alignment:
• What are our acceleration investments? How are we reducing drag?
• Are we writing differentiated code? Really?
• Where can we use managed cloud services to free up resources?
• Are we attacking technical debt that is a drag on innovation?
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Thank you!
© 2022, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates.
Jeffrey
Hammond
jshammon@amazon.com
@jhammond