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**Gerhard Lazu:** \[51:52\] I think it is valuable to stay focused, especially if you're passionate about something and you feel connected to that thing, and you feel like you're making great progress... That is very valuable. Some call it flow... By all means, do that. That is important. But be aware there's more to i... |
**Ian Miell:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So look around. Stop. It's okay to stop. It's okay to take a break. Because guess what - when you get back into flow, you'll be more efficient, you will be more guided; you will be better connected to everything else... Because it is a team sport. It's not just you. Even when you think it's your compa... |
So you've mentioned Container Solutions a couple of times... I know that there's this very -- well, I won't say very popular, but it's a concept which is increasing in popularity. WTF is X. So my question is, first of all, who is Container Solutions and what is WTF is X? |
**Ian Miell:** Right. So who is Container Solutions - Container Solutions is a consultancy that helps companies move to cloud-native. That's typically what we do. But we like to think that we have a wider perspective than just that. What we often do with companies is we don't just go in and say "Hey, you should be usin... |
My first assignment actually with Container Solutions (or CS, as I call it), was to go to work on an assessment - we do these two-week assessments, where we go in and we interview 15-20 people within an organization, the key people, for an hour each. We collate the information we've gathered, we synthesize that, and th... |
The reason I joined Container Solutions was because I had a meeting with the owner, a guy called Jamie Dobson, and he immediately figured out my frustrations with work, and told me "I could help you enjoy work more." And that's exactly what's happened since I joined... Because I now I feel like I'm thinking about the r... |
\[56:09\] So what happens is we often get companies coming to us saying "Hey, we want Kubernetes. You can give us Kubernetes, right? How much will it cost to get Kubernetes?" And we kind of say "Yeah, we know Kubernetes. We have engineers, we write operators, we do all this stuff... But we don't start there. We start a... |
We did an assessment recently of one company, and we basically told them that they're actually a shining beacon of how everything should be done, and maybe we can learn from them actually, more than them from us. That was really satisfying, because we got to tell the truth, and not just say like "Hey, we've got this wh... |
So we get to tell the truth... That's a lot of fun. A lot of fun. Obviously, we have our expertise in tech, and that's where we come in, so we have to demonstrate that... But yeah, that's CS. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** One of the things that I find very valuable on your GitHub, on the Container Solutions GitHub, is the Kubernetes examples that you have, the Terraform examples... I think you had a lot to do with that. The reason why I wanna call these things out is because it is -- like, if you care about the tech, c... |
The other thing which I want to say, in a conclusion to what you were saying, is it's really resonated with me, helping people in a way that they need, not necessarily telling them what they want to hear. Telling them the truth, the reality... Like "Hey, you don't have a problem." Or "You do have a problem." Or "The pr... |
**Ian Miell:** Yeah, it is very satisfying. It's more satisfying to work in an environment like that. You learn a lot more quickly, because there's no formula. You can't go into a company with a fully -- everyone has prejudices and experiences which fly against reality, but the 15 hours of interview process is a really... |
You very quickly develop a mental model of how different organizations work, and that's really a very valuable skill to gain. It's something that I've really developed over the last year, because I've worked with companies that are fully microservice-based, and then companies where they don't wanna use cloud because it... |
So the reason we can say that, in that example, in that case, was because we can see that you understand the limitations of what you're doing and how you're doing it, but you've actually accounted for that; you're ready for those challenges. And they did actually use cloud for some things where it made sense, but they ... |
\[01:00:02.10\] Anyway, you get to see all these different ways of thinking in environments, so you learn to become more flexible in your thinking, and it affects everything... Whereas when I worked in the same place for 14 years, I felt very stuck in a very particular line of thinking and way of thinking, that has bee... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** WTF is X, that's what I'm thinking. |
**Ian Miell:** Yes, yes. We didn't get back to that, right. So what happened is during the pandemic we've been very active in conferences, and setting up events, and so on... So the pandemic hitting suddenly, "What do we do now?" This is a whole area of business that we have hired people to do. So we flipped and we sta... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. |
**Ian Miell:** And you go to a conference and people are talking about it and you are kind of smiling along, and sometimes you know what they're talking about, and sometimes you think you know what they're talking about, sometimes you have no idea what they're talking about... And you don't often go "Hang on a sec... T... |
Everyone does this in the industry, and it's even harder if you don't have a technical background, or maybe you're a buyer, or a senior leader who is less confident about this stuff. So wouldn't it be great if we had this sort of banner of WTF, so that we could actually say "You can come along to these events and we'll... |
One of them we did was WTF is GitOps, which I did... There was a small technical demo, but it was really just kind of showing people who wanted that kind of thing really "Where does this come from? What does this mean? If you hear this in a meeting, what should you be thinking? Where can you slot this?" |
I don't think there's enough of that in software. I've noticed over the years that the really experienced engineers and the really confident engineers are the ones who always say "I don't know what that means. Tell me what that means." And then there's often a very short five to 20-second discussion between the two peo... |
So yeah, I love that side of it. We recently did a conference, WTF is SRE, and we had many thousands of people attending. It was like a super-success, and we were like "Finally, we think we've cracked how to do stuff online now, how to do a conference online now." But it was a long way to get there. |
And on the WTFs I also do a gossip thing. So the first ten minutes we have general stuff, and then we have a little section where we talk about gossip in the community, and that's kind of fun. |
\[01:03:41.18\] So it's pretty light, it's not a heavy, serious thing... And it's not heavy on demos or tooling. It's much more about exploring concepts in the industry, and what they mean, and learning from the people who come, and vice-versa. We often get even side discussions going on the chats, on the Zoom, and the... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I really like the approach of -- so first of all, I have attended a few of those, even like the WTF is SRE; that was a really good conference. I think the videos are now available on YouTube, so you can go and check them out. There's the Container Solutions website, and everything is linked there. The... |
And things change all the time, right? We always improve. So those improvements - how do you share them? How do you improve as a whole, as a group? Because the only successful teams, the really successful teams are the ones that improve as a whole. It's not individuals, it's the interactions. Are the interactions bette... |
**Ian Miell:** That's really funny, because my first engagement with a customer at CS I got criticized in the first week for not doing enough high-level architecture. I was a lead on this project, I came in halfway through it... And I was like "I don't understand... Why do they think that?" And it turned out that -- be... |
And what they actually wanted from me was like a rubber stamp of like "Your architecture is fine", but it came over as this kind of "Oh, we think you should be doing high-level architecture." And it's like, "No, no. I think I know what's better for you, but I should have actually called out that your architecture was f... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Biases and preconceptions. Oh, my goodness... I'm pretty sure that if we were to have another discussion tomorrow, I think it would be on that, how to manage preconceptions. Because they seem to be at the core of many things that we do. We assume that things are good, or fit, or the right thing. |
When I was talking to Dave Farley the other day, he was saying "Always assume that you're wrong... Because guess what - you won't be wrong." If you assume that you're wrong, you won't be wrong. If anything, you'll be right. "Oh, actually I was right." But you assume that you're wrong; you won't be negatively surprised.... |
**Ian Miell:** \[01:08:08.29\] That's right, yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Another solar system. |
**Ian Miell:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So this conversation, if anything, it reminded me how important it is to talk to you, and I don't think we did enough in the past... But I want that to change, definitely. Is there anything that you're looking forward to in the next six months or twelve months? Because that is a very nice segue ... |
**Ian Miell:** Well, yeah... I mean, at work I'm moving more towards doing that high-level analysis work, the lower-level technical work. So I'm excited about getting more involved in that and figuring out how to be more efficient and effective at delivering that work, because it obviously is one thing to do the analys... |
Sometimes I have done it too fast, tried to move people too fast and introduce ideas that they're not ready for, and you get a lot of pushback... Sometimes I conform too much to the way they wanna think and don't push back enough. It's an art, it's not a science, and this is the stuff I'm really interested in learning ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm really looking forward to having that conversation, Ian, 6-12 months from now, however many months it's going to be... Because I think this progression, as you mentioned, is super-important... So one-off's - what is one-off these days? What is transactional these days? It's relationships. It's bui... |
I think that's really important. I think we are getting better at that. I see conferences that are long-standing. Every six months you have a KubeCon. That's a great example. So many relationships are built and so many ideas get born, and then they just fly. WTF is SRE - that was a great conference. The platform is rea... |
The world is not the same, and it won't be the same again. 2020 taught us so many things... Those that wanted to learn. Because others are still blind and they still claim everything's back to normal and it will be back to normal... It won't. But that's not even the point. The point is where are we going? Where do we w... |
Ian, it was my pleasure. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to speaking with you the next time. |
**Ian Miell:** Thank you, Gerhard. It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. |
• Complexity in development and operations |
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• The concept of the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) and its application to complexity and decision-making |
• Ben Ford's background and how he came to understand the importance of the OODA loop in both military and business contexts |
• The idea that the OODA loop is a fundamental abstraction that can be applied universally, like functional programming concepts |
• The concept of nested OODA loops (OODA loops within OODA loops) as a way to handle complex systems and decision-making. |
• The OODA loop (Observe-Orient-Decision-Act) as a unifying concept for operational excellence and agility |
• Digital transformation as a top-down approach that often fails due to lack of bottom-up implementation |
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• Operational excellence as an emergent property resulting from combining principles and making them relevant to the organization |
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• Discussion of martial arts analogy for learning and applying principles |
• Explanation of OODA loop (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action) and its relevance to martial arts and other fields |
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