Episode 6 | Holly Cummins | Innovation Leader

Luke Schantz: Thank you for joining us for another installment of In the Open with Luke and Joe. Today I'm excited to bring you a conversation with Dr. Holly Cummins. She is an innovation leader at IBM, and our conversation is going to cover a variety of topics ranging from sustainability and cloud native development to the IBM Garage method. Before we welcome our guest, let's say hello to my co- host Joe Sepi.

Joe Sepi: Hey, Luke. How are you my friend?

Luke Schantz: Hey Joe, how are you? I'm well, thank you.

Joe Sepi: Good, good. The weather is lovely today. It really is quite nice. I can actually see our pool guy is out there freshening up the pool. We're almost like really nice pool weather. It's beautiful.

Luke Schantz: So, I think we are in the same microclimate this week. As some of you may remember in past weeks, Joe and I are very close to each other, but the weather will be drastically different. And I was in my garden this morning and it was beautiful, gorgeous.

Joe Sepi: Nice. Yeah. Yeah, I'm up in the woods up in the corner, and you're down close to the water. It's very different, interestingly.

Luke Schantz: Which something I wanted to mention regarding this is we've been talking about microclimate, but I learned something new this week. There's actually nano climate, getting down to meter scale. And this is really important in agriculture, because where the frost happens could really vary depending on where there's tree cover, where there's not, and there's all this. I had a conversation last week with some folks from UC Davis, and they were talking about this and how they're studying it. And I wanted to mention before we bring in Holly, there's a new Linux Foundation project that just launched this week called Agstack for Agriculture Stack, and it's going to be all about open source models and data and code for the agriculture industry.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's fascinating. Nano...

Luke Schantz: Nano climates.

Joe Sepi: They can't even predict the weather very well already. But nano, good luck, but I'm very curious about that, and I'll look into the Agstack. Pretty cool.

Luke Schantz: So without further ado, let's welcome Dr. Holly Cummins.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Hey.

Joe Sepi: Hey, Holly.

Dr. Holly Cummins: I got all excited before we do anything. Have you seen the streams from Sebastien Blanc?

Luke Schantz: No.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Red Hat. He has this sort of house in France that seems to have this magnificent pool with these magnificent views, and so he now has started doing all his streams from inside the swimming pool. And come out and have the microphone and the keyboard. He'll be like half underwater. Really must try harder, frankly.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's a grand idea. And like we said, Luke's not far, we're both vaccinated. They say we don't even need masks now, which I'm a little hesitant on. But we could go out to the pool and do this and do it in style. Let's see next week.

Dr. Holly Cummins: We could do open pool party.

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

Luke Schantz: Out of the gate innovation. Thank you.

Joe Sepi: Thank you, Holly.

Luke Schantz: That's why I'm here.

Joe Sepi: That's great. Why don't we start off, if you don't mind doing a little introduction, and let people know more about you.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, so I'm Holly Cummins, and my job title is an Innovation Leader. And what that means is I work across IBM, and if we've got a client that has this sort of need to innovate and then we've got a client team that has a really cool solution and they just need a little bit of an extra push to make it happen or they just need a few more ideas adding or maybe they don't have any ideas and they just need... " Please we don't even know where to begin with this. Let's get some ideas together." Then that's my job is to try and make it happen and to try to come up with the cool ideas, and then to try and get them actually out and happening.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Sometimes it's a few less ideas even that they may need.

Luke Schantz: That's great.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, that's one of the things about innovation actually is never underestimate the power of a good idea in a different context and reusing these ideas and moving them from context to context and saying, " In this area this is incredibly boring, but actually if we take it here, it's incredibly interesting." I think that actually is some of what's going on with the agriculture is taking the techniques that we would've applied to something else as business as usual and realizing that in agriculture they're new and they solve problems.

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

Luke Schantz: That's so true. And there's another Linux Foundation project called Open Horizon and that's exactly what's going on. They use it in factories, they use it in retail, and now, yeah, it's being adapted and being used for agriculture.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Cool.

Luke Schantz: So I would also like to let our audience know a little of your CV because you have this very interesting CV. You've been involved in Java, you've been involved in all kinds of development and product, and now you're in this innovation role. But you have a PhD in Quantum Information Studies, is that right?

Dr. Holly Cummins: It is, yeah. So I've got a PhD in quantum computing, which is actually why I joined IBM because IBM has a huge history of doing quantum computation work. And so when I was doing my PhD, I met researchers from IBM and I said, " Oh, that's cool. I want to work where you work." And then as it happens, I joined IBM, didn't end up doing quantum computing, I decided that actually I'd rather just program all day. So I joined IBM as a developer, and then I started out working on Java performance. So that was really rewarding because the JVM is so widely used that if you can make a half a percent difference to it, then that's going to have a huge impact. And then when we're going to talk about sustainability in a bit, and when you think about in terms of sustainability, those improvements, again, can have a huge impact even though they're small. And then from there I went and started working on WebSphere Liberty, which then became Open liberty. And then I wanted to see the outside world and I wanted to see clients and I wanted to see people who were using the things that I was building, so I switched and I joined the IBM Garage, which is a services organization. We help clients take advantage of the cloud and become cloud native because there's a lot of ways to think you're becoming cloud native and actually not become cloud native. So, we try and teach the best practices and share what we think works and co create.

Joe Sepi: Yeah that's fascinating. I remember not long ago, a year or so ago, maybe a little bit longer, wanting to dive more into Quantum and learn more about what we're doing at IBM and Qiskit and all the things. And I kept coming across your name, and I'm like, " But wait, she doesn't work in Quantum." Yeah, so a fascinating trajectory. That's one of the things I love about IBM too. You meet people and they started here and then they've done this and then they're now they're doing this over here, and it's a long arc.

Dr. Holly Cummins: We talk about diversity in teams being a good thing, but I think diversity in individuals is a really good thing as well. And so again, we talk about the certified [inaudible 00: 06: 3 ] person that it's our breath that gives us our superpowers and that if we know something from another domain, we can pull it in and solve a problem. Or if we have a weird little skill that doesn't come in handy very often, then one day it's going to come in handy and we're going to be able to raise our hand and say, " Ah, I know how to fix this."

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's fascinating.

Luke Schantz: And I can imagine having this solid foundation in Quantum, but then having all this experience in real production systems and working with clients. The time we're in now, the last few years and this next few years are such a pivotal moment where quantum is becoming real. It's obvious to me you're so poised to be able to just come out of the gate and really help people use this technology effectively.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, when I did my PhD, the conversation that we had when we were getting tea and stuff was will there ever be a quantum computer? It was like an if, not a when, and for really good reasons because there's really fundamental physical reasons why a quantum computer is hard to build, because you have to have it perfectly isolated from the outside environment and yet you have to be able to interact with it. And those two are opposites, you can't do both. But actually now they've managed to do both. We really were back at the physics level and the theoretical physics level, and it's jumped forward so much in the past 20 years. And now, you can go and you can play with a quantum computer on the cloud for free, which still slightly blows my mind. And the conversation that we're having now is not will we build this thing because we've built it, but how is this going to be useful? What problems should we use it for? What problems have we not even thought of yet because we assumed they were impossible. But now with a quantum computer, they moved from intractable to tractable, and we need to change how we do business to take advantage of that.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it's interesting. I think we talked about this in one of the prep calls when you were doing your PhD in quantum computing and you joined IBM, quantum computers were in theory at the time and then they became real. And now not only that, they're on the cloud and people can take advantage of them. Is that accurate?

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, most of my thesis I did in that lab because that was the only way that I could do it, and I think if we did this on a quantum computer, if we had a quantum computer, it might work out well.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's amazing. And I'm curious too, you have all that background, and then now you're doing innovation with the Garage. Is it coming... I don't know if full circle is the right word, but do you see quantum on the horizon in terms of your innovative work at the Garage? Or how is that lining up at all now or in the future?

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, so IBM is starting to work with businesses to... We talk about this idea of phases of quantum. So we had a theoretical phase and where we want to get to is quantum advantage, which is when you can solve something on a quantum computer that you couldn't have solved otherwise, at least not in any reasonable amount of time. And it's genuinely useful. It's not the theoretical, we couldn't solve this problem before and nobody would ever want to solve this problem but we could solve it. It's when it's going to make a difference to your business. And where we are now, we talk about quantum readiness which is oh we're so close to that quantum advantage. And so we need to make sure that we've got everything in place that as an organization that we figure out what problems we want to be tackling, that we've got the skills in place, that we've got those connections because there's going to be an advantage for the first movers to take advantage of quantum advantage, which is more advantages than that sentence.

Joe Sepi: Oh, you're on mute, Luke.

Luke Schantz: I love to do that at least once every broadcast.

Dr. Holly Cummins: On our toes.

Luke Schantz: Yeah, keep us on our toes. I added the link to this blog post about the quantum development roadmap. But we don't have to get too into the nitty gritty of it here, but it's fascinating. Sometimes I feel like we're working... It's like NASA in the 1960s, the amount of change that is happening that were right in the middle of. And as you mentioned, right before the pandemic lockdown, I went to a financial conference and it was so interesting to hear from all of these industry players. Exactly like you're saying, while it maybe is not in production today, they need to get ready now, they need to start investigating, they need to learn these things, because it takes, especially with mission critical systems, say financial industry or materials and pharmaceuticals, you can't just turn it on a dime. You need to really prepare and figure out how to integrate these things. So such a fascinating...

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, it definitely does have this sort of feeling of a frontier or a horizon and you have an idea what's over the other side but you don't totally know. And we can guess what impact it's going to have, but we have to see it really to see it.

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

Luke Schantz: And very much like open source, I think this is such a time for opportunity. What it is, get involved. Like you were saying, if you're a subject domain expert in say financial space. I was talking to a video game developer the other day, lifelong video game developer, very successful, so passionate about quantum. Spends his nights and weekends doing it. I just saw he posted he won a big hackathon. And it's when you combine those things, now, all of a sudden, he's going to be able to bring that to domains that maybe wouldn't have... someone who maybe that physicist isn't necessarily going to know the things that he knows, and then you find that common ground. It's amazing.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, it's totally. There's a couple of cool things going on. One is, unlike NASA in the sixties, it's all being done as open source because we know that's the most effective way to do things. So anybody can just rock up, make a contribution to Qiskit, make a pull request to Qiskit, move things forward. But then as you say, as well, the thing that we really need is the problems and the applications, and yeah, exactly as you say, physicists, they're not going to know every problem in the domain of banking, they're not going to know every problem in the domain of gaming, of maybe even agriculture. And when people are using these systems, we're going on the trajectory that we went with classical computing but much faster. So we have the equivalent of Moore's law where we can see we're getting more computational power. But then in terms of the programming models as well, they're advancing really quickly. So, a lot of times when we're teaching quantum computing, we start at the gate level of you could do this and that to the gate. But nobody, I don't think except to learn it, really wants to be programming at the gate level. You want to be programming in your domain, you want to say I want to do this financial regression model, I want to do this four- year transform, whatever it is. And so we need people to be developing those libraries that make sense to people in a domain that then take advantage of the quantum computing. And I think we're not there yet. At some point, quantum computing's going to become almost like a sticker. So, well there's a quantum computer inside, but it doesn't make any difference to my user experience as someone who's taking advantage of the system, I just know it can solve my problem and before I couldn't solve it.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's fascinating. And I encourage folks to take a look. You can engage with the quantum computer on the cloud today. Please go check it out. It's pretty exciting stuff. But I know there are lots of other exciting things that you want to talk about... Sustainability, so maybe we can dive into that.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, so I've been interested in sustainability for a long time. Like I mentioned when I was doing the Java performance work, one of the sort of things that made me feel really good about what I was doing was I could see there was this potential sustainability impact, but I think it's becoming more and more pressing as a conversation and more people are talking about it, which is really good. And we're just, I think, on the cusp of when we talk about the non- functional requirements of assisting for a while we've been talking about resiliency and scalability, and now we're starting to talk about observability and that kind of thing. And I think sustainability is going to be one of those"ilities" that we just should be including in the conversation by default. And if you look at the IT industry, getting an accurate measurement of its carbon footprint is hard, which is one of the problems that we need to fix. But if you look even just at data centers, they use around 1% or 2% of the world's energy, which is comparable to aviation. Aviation's around 2. 5%, and when we think about aviation, we just automatically think, " Oh, look at that, it's so environmentally irresponsible." But actually we're comparable. So, for pretty sound sustainability reasons, I think need to be doing what we can to try and bring that footprint down. The thing is a lot of it's not sort of hair shirts and making these really great sacrifices. It's things that we should be doing anyway, like maybe I don't need to have these servers that I'm not actually using that's hanging around burning cycles. That's going to reduce costs and it's going to reduce carbon so why wouldn't we do it?

Joe Sepi: Yeah. When you talk about sustainability and trying to do your part for climate change, there's small things, there's big things you can get overwhelmed by the big things, but there are a lot of small things. And I'm reminded of we as develop advocates and engineers have access to our IBM Cloud, and we have unlimited stuff. But once a month or so somebody comes knocking and says, " Hey make sure you spin down your containers and your clusters and all this stuff." And I think like you're saying, simple things like that and being mindful of what you are using and what you're not using can really go a long way. In the small term, it all adds up, right?

Dr. Holly Cummins: I'm fascinated by this problem actually, because it's one of those problems that seems like it should be really easy, and it is incredibly hard because that experience that you describe, I've had the exact same experience in the Garage, and I think every software developer in every organization has it. We want to learn a technology or we're playing or we're trying something out, and we spin up something, and then we've done it, so then we get excited by the next shiny thing and we forget to turn it off. And then someone somewhere in manager land looks and goes, " My bill is how much?" And there's this sort of steam coming out of their ears, and then they try and figure out how much of this is needed, how much of it can be turned off, and it's really hard. And every system we come up with doesn't seem to work. There's depleting emails is the first line of defense. We've all been there. I'm a bit horrified by my cloud bill, could you please try and sort it out? And then I think we try tagging and that seems like it should work, because tags solve a lot of problems. But then we have to come up with a naming scheme for our tag. How do I know what tags I can delete and what tags I can't delete, and how do I actually make people remember to do the tag because this is actually still a manual process? And then how do I write my automation to go through and find the things with the tags and delete it. And it just still ends up pretty clunky.

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, and then the worst one I think is meetings. So, we say my emails didn't work so I'm going to bring you all into a meeting, and we're going to sit here until our cloud bill is halved. Everybody in the room's like, " Okay, I'll turn off my workload, just let me out of the room." So, we're seeing innovations in this area but they're slow. With stuff like FinOps and inaudible I think can help, but it's still emerging for what is such a big, expensive, annoying, and apparently simple problem, except that clearly it's not or we would have solved it already.

Joe Sepi: It's funny that having a meeting to bring everybody in to bring down your cost is innovation.

Luke Schantz: I actually have a personal experience that really relates to this, and I'm both sides of this story. I'm the one who's perpetrating and the one who's cracking the whip... Is just my home electric bill. I'll have this studio, I have all these LED lights, and I'll have other rooms and I'll be running around and then maybe I'll just go to sleep, and then I'll wake up the next day and I'll come down and I'll be like, " What was I doing? Because we see it in our own home electric bill. I'm like...

Joe Sepi: Yeah I don't know if this is a dad thing or whatever, because I know other dads have joked about it. But my superpower is going around, turning off all the lights. I walk around, " Why is that light on?" Turn that light off. And when we moved into this house a couple years ago, one of the first things I wanted to do was get solar on it. And so now I have a battery, and I have an app that tells me how much I'm using and how much is from the grid and whatever. So now I'm pinpointing things like, " Oh, that pool filter is not very efficient. I need to look at upgrading that." Yeah, it's funny how sustainability comes into all this.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, the data is so important because I think without actual numbers we go on our intuition, and I think we all trust our intuition a lot because I'm a smart person, I must know. And we end up really fixating on something that actually doesn't contribute a lot, and then it's something like the kettle and overfilling the kettle actually can be a huge drain, the biggest thing, but we don't think about it. We think about oh that device, I don't trust that device. But as well, I'm a developer, I love automating things. I've never seen something I didn't want to automate. And it feels like we shouldn't be at the manual stage on this problem still. You shouldn't be wandering around turning off things after your kids. We should be detecting that no one's in the room and dimming the lights, and we should be doing that in our houses and we should be doing it in our infrastructure as well. If this server hasn't had traffic for 30 days, maybe don't shut it off, maybe because actually that was the thing that was running the computation that was going to be in 60 days, solve all of the world's problems. So maybe send an email saying, " By the way, do you still want that? Looks pretty boring to me."

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Yeah.

Luke Schantz: That reminds me, this past week I did a Think session and the topic was code engine. And I feel like this is a tool or a solution that actually gets to some of these problems because it lets you do cloud native without having to worry about any of the cloud native infrastructure management, but you can also use it to run batch jobs. It's basically a Functions as a Service as well so you can get to that place of it automatically only runs things when it needs to run and you don't have to worry about all the tags and rules. I come from a soft layer Infrastructure as a Service, and I see why they created Kubernetes and why we got to this place, but it's still not that easy, and now we're finally getting to a place where we've got some mature tools like this.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, I think managed infrastructure and multi- tenancy and that responding to demand rather than being always on, those three things are really important, and code engine manages to combine them, which is so cool. Because sometimes in the past, I've heard people talk about just plain Knative as a solution because that allows you to scale your workload down to zero. But the pattern I was seeing, which just sort of made me go, "no, no, don't do that," is we'd have Knative, but in order to run Knative we'd need to spin up a cluster. So we'd have this whole huge cluster and then the one little application in the cluster would spin down to zero when it wasn't being used, but the rest of the cluster was still there not doing anything because we hadn't sorted at our multi- tenancy. So with the managed and the multi- tenancy that fixes that and then you really do get the good...

Joe Sepi: This is a perfect segue to the next topic, but I wanted to make sure that we shared your blog post here because I think this is really important. Do you want to touch on this before we move over to the cloud native topic?

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, I think a lot of what I write in that blog post we've just talked about, but I've got a bit more detail on some of the factors that can make Kubernetes be inefficient. I think Conway's law, we talk about it for architecture, but I'm sure it applies to your network topology and your cluster topology as well, and these sort of human factors that can then end up having that environmental impact. And it's got pictures, the biggest recommendation for it.

Joe Sepi: That's great. Yeah, so I would love to hear more about, you were saying, patterns you're seeing in the space. So let's talk about cloud native. I know it's a hot topic. What does cloud native mean to you?

Dr. Holly Cummins: Cloud native means so many different things. And I think when we were talking about sustainability just now, every time you said something, I said, " We can automate that. There's a technology solution for that." That's techies, that's what we do. And I think we've done that a little bit with cloud native, and we've tended to focus on the technology aspects of cloud native, and we think sometimes we even say cloud native and Kubernetes as if they're synonyms. But what I've been seeing is that a lot of organizations want to be cloud native and so they try and buy cloud native and they try and install cloud native. But the why of cloud native is being missed because the sort of cultural aspects and the process aspects and some of those DevOps aspects aren't there. And so then it means we've got all the kit, but we're not actually getting the benefit.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it's hard to just plug in cloud native.

Dr. Holly Cummins: And I think when we're try and define cloud native, for me, I sort of think we want to go back to the why and then frame it in terms of the why. And if we are getting that why, we're cloud native, and the why really is getting to market fast really and being able to get something from a developer's laptop to a user in a really short time, and then when you realized that maybe that time was too short and the developer has made a horrible error that you can then get the fix from the developer's laptop to the user fast enough that actually it didn't matter because your quality's higher than it would've been if you'd done it the slow way.

Joe Sepi: I'm curious in terms of app modernization, and perhaps migration, what are you seeing people doing wrong and what do you think is perhaps the right approach when you have more of a legacy application that you want to be cloud native? Native being the kind of tricky part.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, I'm going to sound like a broken record, but for me you have to figure out what problem you're trying to solve. And I think sometimes, again, this is something that all of us do, is we see things being done by others, and we want to be better, we want to be as good as we can. And so, we copy those but without stepping back to the what problem that are we trying to solve. So for example, I heard a story and it was a bank, and they're quite well- established, long- established bank, and then they were starting to suffer with competition from these newer nimble competitors. And they said, " What's going on? How can we fix this?" And they look, and they had this huge COBOL estate, and they said, " Our competitors are not using COBOL, they're using microservices. We can fix this." So they were hoping to modernize everything, rewrite it all in a more modern language, have it all be microservices. And we thought, " Great, yeah, this sounds like really good, exciting project, we can help you with this." And then they added our release board meets twice a year, every six months. So the point of microservices, the value of microservices, is that you can release them independently, and the cost you pay for that is more overhead in terms of just the automation that you have to have and the testing that you have to do and that kind of thing. So, if you're planning to release these things in a huge chunk every six months, you may as well actually just have them running in one process, and then you're going to save a whole bunch of complexity which is going to give you more time to actually write a better application that's better for your users. Or if you're not going to do that, then you need to rewind and you need to not start with, let me make my application distributed. You need to start with, let me figure out how I can build enough trust internally to release this thing without going through this really slow heavy infrequent release board and that's what's going to actually make the difference to my customer.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's really interesting. When I worked at Adobe, I was on the Behance team, and they were acquired by Adobe, and we had already had a pretty modern approach to CI/ CD and were even building out our own tools to further facilitate that. And Adobe recognized how we were doing things in a modern way, and they elevated that team within Adobe. " Okay, help modernize the rest of our groups." And the first thing that we got was a three page a checklist for a Java deployment that took two days and had multiple people sign- offs, and we're like, " Oh my god, this is insane." So yeah, those challenges are real.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, I worked on one of my first Garage projects. We'd been brought in by a client who really... It was a similar thing. They could see that how they were doing things wasn't quite ideal and wasn't fast enough, and they wanted us to coach them and help them. But that change is hard because these processes are there because people think they're reducing risk, and in fact they're increasing risk. Making that mental flip is tricky. We were doing full CI/ CD and full automated testing and test- driven development and everything. And then when we went to release, we had a similar, I think it was like 86 tabs in the spreadsheet. And one of the things was about how many of our tests were passing. We were like of course it's 100%, because if it wasn't a hundred percent that were passing, the build would've broken and we wouldn't have got to this stage. And there's no such thing as tests that aren't passing in the CI/CD world. But again, it's just sort of changing and updating those processes.

Joe Sepi: I work on Node. js and so that 100% isn't always. We have a column for flaky tests. But yes, I agree. But that mental switch is really hard for people, I think, especially who have been doing it that way for a long time. And that previous situation I was describing, we were sometimes deploying 80 times a day and people were like how do you not break everything. But when you have a process and you have tests, that's what you do. And then sometimes you do break things but you also have a process to roll back a step.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah. And if you deploy that many times a day, you're so good at it that you can make changes really quickly. Whereas I think what we sometimes see in the other way of doing it is it goes out and it's not good, and then there's a real panic. And either we have to do something really horrible, open a shell on the production system, and I'm going to like patch by hand on the production system inaudible just don't do this. Or we end up with it's going to take us two weeks of people working overtime and nights to try and get this thing out, whereas it should be just a boring thing where we go, oh yeah, whatever inaudible.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. And so good at it is typically tools that enforce the processes. Yeah.

Luke Schantz: I wanted to mention quickly that we actually have a whole podcast series on app modernization. So, folks are interested in, this would be a great place to get started thinking about what techniques to apply. Because when we had our prep call last week right after the prep call, I went and produced another Think session and it was on Open Liberty, which we had just talked about. So I was like, this is so funny. And they said the exact same thing that you just said, which was there's this backlash sometimes you see on blogs and forums now where, " Oh, we're getting going back to the monolith from microservices. That's not the answer." And I think it comes back to we want to chase that new and shiny thing, but if it's not actually the right solution for that problem and you apply it, of course it's not going to work.

Dr. Holly Cummins: There's not going to be one answer for your whole estate, which is really annoying because when you talk to an architect and you say, " What should I do?" And they say, " It depends." You're like, that's not what I'm paying you for, just tell me the answer. But it does depend because some things in your estate you only change them when you can't possibly avoid it, and it's running in the server under the stairs. And the right thing to do with that is to leave it alone and to not touch it. Whereas other things, either you're changing them all the time and every time you change them it's really hard or you're not changing them but you can see you need to be, and your customers are going, " Look, this is so annoying, why haven't you fixed this?" And it's because it's too hard to change. Those are the ones you want to put in the microservices to put to the head of the modernization queue.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it's interesting that you call it an estate a couple of times here, and we're talking about owning houses and whatnot. If so much of my house and property needed updating modernization, I wouldn't take the whole thing at once. I would be like, " Okay, what's going to be the most impactful, and what should I approach first that really makes...

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah.

Joe Sepi: I'm curious, oh sorry did you have something Luke?

Luke Schantz: I was going to say if anybody has any questions, I forgot to mention this earlier, please feel free to drop them in the chat. We definitely have a lot of chatter going on in the chat. No direct questions. We have a very funny audience today. They have lots of silly things to say which I'm not going to repeat but feel free if you have any questions we'll surface those here.

Joe Sepi: Nothing inappropriate.

Luke Schantz: No, nothing inappropriate. Just silly stuff.

Joe Sepi: I'm curious, the conversation we're having here around modernization, so it's funny, I've worked at IBM for five years now, which I know is a small amount in the IBM world. A lot of people work here for decades.

Dr. Holly Cummins: You're a baby.

Joe Sepi: Exactly. Multi generational sometimes, which is fascinating in and of itself. But I don't know a lot about the Garage. Maybe you could tell me more about the Garage, what you do there, and how it applies to some of this work that we've been talking about.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, so the Garage... So many things that when we talk about IBM I start out by saying I love it. So I love Open Liberty, I'm so proud of what we did there, and I love the Garage and I'm so proud of the Garage. It really started when we were looking at the startup world, and we were looking at how startups were doing business. And we said we have a cloud that's going to be really, really great for these startups. But they weren't our traditional customer base in IBM, and we said we need to change how we work in order to fit with these businesses. So we adopted a lot of best- of- breed technologies and practices, so things like extreme programming, things like lean startup, things like design thinking, and we combined them together, which was quite novel at the time. And we said we're going to work in startup spaces, so we were in Galvanize in San Francisco, and we were going to work like a startup. And what was interesting was startups went" That's cool. And wow, look Watson could really help. Let me work with you." But then a lot of the really large companies looked and said, " Wow, that's amazing. We've been struggling to work in a modern way, and we're getting bogged down by this old way of working. And we thought because we were a big company we couldn't change, but IBM we can see you're working in that way now. Can you please tell us how you did it with your scale so that we can do it?" So, we started working with a mix of startups and large companies, and with all of it we were really working on web apps or the traditional domain of the cloud. But then what we defined, we called it the Garage method, and so it was getting that set of practices. And then we realized that's not just for greenfield, that's not just for a web application, it works really well for data and AI, because a lot of it is the things that I've been talking about. Start by trying to figure out what problem you're going to solve and what problem you need to solve before jumping to the technology. You need to do that in data and AI as well. And again, I think especially in data and AI, people forget, because it's so exciting and you think, oh, I could make a data model, and we don't step back to say, " But is that data model that anybody needs?" And then we realized it's the same thing for apps modernization, it's the opposite of those kind of greenfield web apps. But the principles were the same of let's figure out whose life we're making better and figure out how to make their life better. Let's be really sort of radically incremental and iterative and not do this big bang thing because that's probably going to fail. Let's do these small steps that are going to succeed. Let's do DevOps, CI/CD. So all of these things we just kept expanding and realizing that it worked in various domains. And so now sort of Garage and IBM, we do a whole bunch of different things. So, we work with people who maybe haven't even bought anything yet, and we say, let us show you how this can solve your problem. We have a services organization, and then we can do these big transformations as well to say I've got a big company and I need to change a lot of things, so this is a different scale than just one team, but Garage can help with that.

Luke Schantz: I was going to say that's so interesting and it makes sense. The whole history of lean and that sort of methodology, if you trace it back, it's like the Toyota method and Deming and all this. So, it came from the big org, got really popular adopted in for the small, and then comes full circle. And the other thing I was going to say, I come from startup background as well and I think the what's so cool about IBM Garage method to me is it's like a full stack. We think about full stacking code, but this is full stack all the way through design. And I think that's so important. My own startup failed, but almost every startup I've ever met that failed didn't fail because their product didn't work, it did work, it was a product market fit, it was the team, it was other factors. So, when you approach it from the IBM methodology, you're getting all of these factors. Everything, right? And that's why I was like I'm so smitten with it.

Dr. Holly Cummins: And I think one of the things that we've adopted from lean startup is this idea of let's try and figure out what our biggest risk is and let's do that first. Whereas I think we have a natural tendency to put the riskiest thing off for last, and we'll say I've got a really great idea, this is really great technology, let me do all this first and then by the end I'll go try and figure out if anybody wants it. It was like, well, no, let's try and figure out if people want it and if this is the right thing to do first. And I think we do it in terms of our architectures as well, there's this really natural tendency to say I'm going to do all my plumbing work first. I'm going to do all my infrastructure work first because I know I can do that, and it's going to make me feel really good to have this solid infrastructure. But it's like, well, there's no point having a solid infrastructure if there's nothing on top of it.

Luke Schantz: Which that's actually what you just said perfectly relates to this question we have from Facebook is how do you deal with/ anticipate things out of the developer's control. For example, server OS kernel updates that affect the developer?

Dr. Holly Cummins: I think with that you probably want to divide them into two buckets, and you need different coping strategies for the two buckets. One, it's the sort of known/ unknowns where you say I can probably anticipate that this might happen, I don't know when it's going to happen, but because I can anticipate this, let me try and front load that risk, and either put in place a system to handle it as an early thing or try and do something to make sure it doesn't happen, or that kind of thing. But then on the other side there's going to be things that you just didn't anticipate. Maybe you made a mistake maybe you couldn't have anticipated, but either way they're just going to come out of the blue. So then there's where you really need the resiliency and so you can do resiliency in a few ways, and I think they're all really important. So one is what we were talking about with the bad release, you need that kind of CI/CD DevOps resiliency where if something goes wrong you can get a fix out without even breaking a sweat. And then you need your team resiliency as well, so one of the things that we do is pair programming, and we do that partly because it works for built- in code review and it catches problems and improves code quality. But the main thing that we do is there's this idea of staff liquidity, which is if we have just Bob and he's the only one who can handle it. If a kernel update happens and Bob goes on holiday, then the rest of us are in trouble. So we need to make sure that Bob is pairing and sharing his knowledge, maybe the rest of us aren't going to be as good as Bob handling the updates, but we can do enough so that we don't have a catastrophe. And so there's the people resiliency which comes through doing multidisciplinary teams, full stack development, pair programming, the technical resiliency which comes from optimizing for tight feedback loops, and then as well front loading the inaudible.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've worked at places with a Bob.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, everybody's had it where it's don't touch that code. He's the only one. Anytime any of the rest of us touch it, it's broken for six weeks.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, but I've seen it too in terms of the CI/ CD stuff and just containerizing applications and being able to repeat your deployment steps, staging QA testing, and all those things. And then if you do have to update one thing, whatever it is, whether it's the deep down or just in your application, you have a process and it's repeatable, and then you also can rollback if it doesn't work. All these things fit into that I think.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, one of the things that we always say is never do anything manually. It's got to be automated. And never do a fix until you have a failing test that reproduces the problem. Because otherwise you can get into these sort of a car fishtailing where you veer from catastrophe to catastrophe, so you fix the one problem but you don't write a test for it, and then the next problem comes along that was created by your first fix and so you fix that but then that regresses the first thing because you didn't have a test for it. And so then you just yo- yo between bad situations which doesn't make anybody happy.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if I've thought about it in the same way, but always if something's broken, write the test for it and then fix it and then you're covered.

Dr. Holly Cummins: For sure.

Joe Sepi: I'm curious too, do you see the Garage within IBM growing and the usefulness of it... Obviously it's very useful. I don't know if influence is the right word, but do you see it expanding and growing?

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, it's growing both in terms of size and in terms of influence, which is really nice to see. So, they are hiring loads and loads at the moment, should anybody want to go look that up. Not just in terms of the numbers, but in terms of how so many organizations are looking at what we're doing and seeing how well it works, and then adopting by either turning into a Garage themselves so now there's lots of different Garage organizations across IBM, or independent of the name just picking up bits of the method and saying, " Yeah that really does work."

Joe Sepi: Pop that up there for folks. I want to check it out. And is the concept expanding? Correct me if I'm wrong, but technology Garages or is that related in the same sphere of what's going on there?

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, so technology Garages, that's a presale facet of the Garage. So again, because we were doing really good stuff but people had to pay for it, and then we said, " Wouldn't it be cool if we could have a bigger reach by doing this without necessarily having to have that sort of services contract in place because people are going to get a lot out of this."

Joe Sepi: That makes sense. I know we've talked about Open liberty a few times and it's something that we wanted to make sure we touched on, and I'm looking at the clock and realizing we should switch gears and chat about Open Liberty. Tell me about what you've done there and what's what's happening.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Open liberty is probably a really good modernization story actually. I hadn't thought about it in that way until just now. WebSphere Liberty was hugely successful for IBM and was used by lots and lots of our customers, but it was large. The ops experience was really great. The developer experience was large, which is not necessarily what you want on your laptop. But we couldn't modernize it because so many people used WebSphere that we couldn't just say, " Hey, I've got a better newer WebSphere, because people would be like, " But I was using the old one, I can't cope with that change." And they shouldn't have to. So then we had this sort of challenge to try and figure out well how do we completely change it and make it miles better changing it at all and without breaking anything. And we worked out that the things that people were actually depending on was the sort of the programming models and the APIs and those external libraries, so we kept all those the same, and we had them in little OSGi modules, and then we changed the sort of inner core to be much more dynamic. And so we saw things like it would start in three seconds, which certainly traditionally no application server had ever started in anything like that time before, so we could run it on a Raspberry Pi. And again, at the time it was inconceivable and no matter who you were that you could run an application server on a Raspberry Pi. But it was so small and it was so fast. And the problem that we were solving was developer experience. And this is actually one as well where I'm going to contradict myself because I say you've got to know what problem you're trying to solve. But sometimes you solve a problem that you weren't trying to solve because it turns out that we'd optimized it for laptops and developers, so it was just started instantly and it was a tiny footprint, and that was great for developers. And at the time the cloud was just starting to emerge and it turns out that's exactly what you need in the cloud as well, it's so sensitive to footprint in a way that it's not if it's on- prem in a data center. It turns out that Liberty was the version of WebSphere that was really appropriate for the cloud. So as everything moved into the cloud, it ended up being Liberty really took over there. And then reflecting the success of Liberty as well, it was open sourced which was really nice. And again, it was this is too good, we don't just want us to be using it and developing it and we want community contributions. And we also want it to be that sort of friction free access where developers should just be able to use it without having to worry about contracts and stuff. You should just be able to use it.

Joe Sepi: And that's interesting. I'm not as familiar, correct me if I'm wrong. So it's now a little bit more componentized and probably a little bit easier for developers to get involved into different areas of how it's structured now?

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, so the sort of the big change... There was two changes. One was that we componentized it and that made it as a performance statement and it made it more dynamic and it reduced the footprint, and then it carried on like that for a while as WebSphere Liberty. And then we made another big change and it went from WebSphere Liberty to Open Liberty and it was open sourced.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, when I say developers I'm thinking about open source folks who want to get involved and help to improve and such.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah.

Joe Sepi: Interesting. Okay. Sorry, I'm looking at the website.

Luke Schantz: I wanted to mention, I just asked Jann if you answered a question, and she said, " Yes. You answered a question that the two bucket explanation really helps, so she said thank you. I wanted to ask too about when you were working on Liberty, it was closed, and then now it's been open, so now you've gone probably back and you probably still have contributions in there. What was that? I heard a story from Brad Topol about the Eclipse folks when they worked on it. They were real upset when it became open, because they thought they were making this proprietary thing. What was that experience for you working on something proprietary that then became open?

Dr. Holly Cummins: I was so happy when it became open source. There's a little bit of a scary thing once things become open source that weren't intended to be open source, because all of a sudden your code is visible to way more people. And I think every product, there's all the stories, isn't there? Of the comment that was never intended for more than a small audience and now all of a sudden people are going, why does this line say this never works and should never be released? It's out there. So I didn't have any of that in my code but yeah it was really nice, because you know what? So much is open now and there's so much vitality about the open source community and being able to see my stuff out there and see my stuff being used on the community is really cool.

Joe Sepi: That's cool. Do you see anything on the horizon, the future, Open Liberty that's exciting?

Dr. Holly Cummins: So, it's really gone now with MicroProfile, so there's so much activity around MicroProfile and bringing in a lot of things that you need in a modern server, a lot of the observability and that kind of thing is coming in via the MicroProfile standard rather than by the JEE standard, so there's lots and lots of vitality in that community which is nice.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, very cool.

Luke Schantz: So if there's any other questions... But we are getting close to the top of the hour, we probably could fit in other question in if we get one through but no pressure, folks, and I will add the link to MicroProfile in case anybody wants it. But since we are getting close to the end of our time, Holly, do you have anything we didn't discuss that we should have or anything that we didn't ask that we should have?

Joe Sepi: Do you have a movie coming out or anything?

Dr. Holly Cummins: No, we were talking beforehand because I do have a book but it was written before I started working on WebSphere Liberty, and it's about the power of OSGi and OSGi is the technology that made WebSphere Liberty so fast and it made it so dynamic. But I think it's a fairly niche subject and the book was a while ago, so I think we probably won't be beating down the doors of our local bookstore.

Joe Sepi: I will share the link though.

Dr. Holly Cummins: But you can share the link.

Joe Sepi: Oh yeah, let me pop that up there.

Luke Schantz: Well, thank you for adding it, because I had actually had it there and then I deleted it so...

Joe Sepi: That's funny. Cool. Anything we want to wrap up on?

Dr. Holly Cummins: Oh, actually I've got one other thing. Unfortunately, I don't know if we have the link, because next Tuesday I've got a webinar on IBM Cloud TV. I don't know what it is.

Luke Schantz: Expert TV?

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yes, thank you.

Luke Schantz: Let's see if we can find it.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah, it's with Dana Price and Dwight Ford, and it's about the why of modernization. So we're going to be doing a lot more of sharing some of those stories of here's good reasons to do it, and here's reasons why you really shouldn't and you should have just done something else a while ago.

Joe Sepi: I found the link but it's maybe not an easy one for folks. We might have tweet that one out. Or hang on, actually, I have IBM biz Expert TV. Let me just pop that up. Oh, dang it. Now, the page went the other way.

Dr. Holly Cummins: It's okay. I only remembered it when we started talking about modernization.

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

Luke Schantz: At least I'll put the title up so people can have a reference there. And it's funny, that was the Think session that I produced was Dana's session, so that's where they were talking about microservices and sort of the misapplication of them some time.

Dr. Holly Cummins: I've got a new party game though, which is I can come up with lots of really obscure things to reference and watch you two scramble to try and find the link to put it in.

Joe Sepi: It's fun.

Luke Schantz: You're welcome back anytime. You could come up with some obscure things and then just, yeah, we're here for you.

Dr. Holly Cummins: Yeah. Super. This was fun. Thank you.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, thank you for joining us. It's been really great talking, and I feel like we could dive deeper on any of these topics, which would be fun, but we'll save them for another time.