Jim Hirschauer: Hello and
welcome to ShipTalk.
I'm Jim Hirschauer, your host
for today.
ShipTalk is a DevOps podcast
brought to you by Harness, the
software delivery platform.
My guest today is Bijit Ghosh,
Head of Cloud Engineering at
Deutsche Bank.
Bijit, welcome to the show.
Bijit Ghosh: Hey Jim.
Thank you for having me on the
podcast.
Jim Hirschauer: Yeah,
absolutely.
So Bijit, why don't you just
take a minute to share your
background with our listeners.
Bijit Ghosh: Sure, definitely.
My background is back in 2008
right after college, I started
with IBM in the early stage of
AI with IBM Watson, and later on
Financial Institute.
Right now with Deutsche Bank,
I'm head of cloud engineering
and DevOps where my team is
responsible for implementing the
DevOps, SRE and the entire IT
Ops structure, but at the same
time organizing the cloud
migration journey into, the
Google Cloud services.
So starting from strategy and
applying to cloud infrastructure
management and implementing the
DevOps best practices and
promoting those cloud management
across the firm is my
responsibility.
Jim Hirschauer: Awesome.
That's quite a responsibility.
It sounds like.
It's a lot of work.
Of course it is.
Alright, so Bijit, as you know,
on this show we like to start
off with a little bit of fun.
So we're gonna jump into our
just for fun section.
And I hear that you like to
travel, so why don't you go
ahead and tell me about your
favorite place that you've been
so far, and, and why is it your
favorite place?
Bijit Ghosh: Oh, great.
Yes.
Fantastic question.
So recently me and my family
been to Croatia and, and very
specifically, for the food and
the culture we love about the
country which offered, A
combination, the blend of
Mediterranean and the central
European food.
And I think it's pretty much
give us the rich culture
experience of the Mediterranean
breeze and the overall the rich
experience.
I think that is what we wanted
to have the entire experience.
Jim Hirschauer: Yeah, you know
I've been to Croatia a couple of
times.
I've been really fortunate and I
love going there.
It's actually one of my favorite
places to visit.
Personally I've been to
Dubrovnik before but I haven't
gotten to explore a whole lot
outside of that area.
I've been to Dubrovnik twice.
It was so good.
there anything in particular,
like any places that you would
say were your favorite places or
some of the foods that you got
to try there?
Honestly, I don't even remember
the names of the foods because
they're different from what I'm
used to, but they were
delicious, everything I've
tried.
Bijit Ghosh: Yeah, so one
specific food is called Peka
which is basically a traditional
cooking way of baking meat,
potatoes, and vegetables.
And it's served in the
traditional restaurants.
And I think the, the best part
about Croatia is a scenic road
trip which I had from Split to
Brag exploring the Croatia
Island beauty.
That is a remarkable and
unforgettable road trip.
Jim Hirschauer: Yeah, for sure.
For anyone who's listening who's
unfamiliar with Croatia and the
geography, it is right on the
Adriatic Sea and it is
absolutely stunning.
So somewhat mountainous, and you
have that like Aquamarine color
in the sea right there.
Really.
It's just one of the most
beautiful sights I've ever seen.
Bijit Ghosh: Indeed it is.
Jim Hirschauer: Absolutely.
All right, so we are gonna jump
into something a little bit
heavier now.
Given your background, you are
the head of cloud engineering at
Deutsche Bank.
I want to talk a little bit
about Cloud native and DevOps.
I would love to hear your views
on what you see shifting in the
industry and what are the best
practices that you're seeing and
you're adopting.
Bijit Ghosh: So a couple of
things which I have seen in the
cloud native industry, how it's
changing to the design and the
deployment and the manageable
structure of the cloud.
So, the cloud native system
itself describe how the
application and infrastructure
are designed to deploy and
managing the cloud.
But at the same time, typically
based on the microservice
architecture which allow us to
scale and give us the complete
flexibility elasticity and the
resiliency we are looking for.
And then there are a number of
reasons why we and various other
organizations are part of this
cloud native platforms.
Which gives again the tremendous
potential to improve the
scalability, flexibility, and
the resiliency and the security
posture altogether.
So it has very strong value
proposition and ROI related to
and also overall efficiency and
the cost, it brings the values.
With, relation to that, you know
the cloud native application
platform is growing.
It defined a very unique set
which encompass various aspects
how it going to solve some of
the architectural challenges and
the process roles and the
responsibility overall.
But the entire operating model,
how we structured that into the
cloud native platform.
So first of all, the growing
need of cloud infrastructure and
platform services itself.
So that's include how you
leverage your your your cloud
service provider, including your
compute instance, database,
storage services, and networking
capability.
The second elements of operating
model is microservice
architecture.
The operating model should
promote the design and the
development of application as a
collection of loosely coupled
and independently deployed
services.
The third is container
orchestration.
So as we're growing more into
the containers world, containers
such as docker play a crucial
role in the cloud native
application platforms.
And the entire operating model
should incorporate iteration as
a fundamental building block
which outline the usage of
continuation tool, but at the
same time how we creating the
container images, how we
managing the container lifecycle
to define the entire
orchestration system to handle
the deployment.
And this is where the popular
choice of Kubernetes comes into
the picture.
Some organizations are utilizing
Docker Swarm or Apache Mesos,
but Kubernetes is a defacto
standard in orchestration
platform.
Jim Hirschauer: You walk through
some important things there and
when I look across all of the
different companies that are
doing similar things, They all
seem to have some similar
challenges as they're working
their way through this process.
So how far along are you in the
process and what are the
challenges that you've seen so
far and how are you're working
through those?
Bijit Ghosh: I think we are
still growing into the process
especially into the architecture
and development approaches.
And then we are leveraging the
fundamentals of cloud computing
principles which is serving us
to, to scale.
But again, our, our maturity is
still is still new as we are
scaling and, and there are a lot
of antipattern we're reducing it
with that maturity level.
The primary challenge is the
cultural shift.
Adopting cloud native requires a
cultural shift within an
organization which involves, how
you embrace your DevOps
practices, your CI/CD, and the
entire mindset of automation and
collaboration.
So in changing those established
process and the mindset is
always a challenge, and it may
require a very significant
effort.
Both top down, bottom up.
And other few challenges are
technical complexity, security
and compliance, and scalability
and performance and the
observability and monitoring
altogether.
Jim Hirschauer: Yeah.
So you said something really
interesting and this is
something I've talked about for
many years and I love hearing
the different perspectives on
this.
You mentioned a cultural shift
and you mentioned that you were
working on it both top down and
bottom up.
I would love to hear you drill a
little bit deeper into that.
How do you go about creating a
cultural shift in a large
organization.
It's such a daunting task.
I've been there, I've tried to
do it myself, and I've seen some
things that work and some things
that don't.
How are you all approaching
that?
Bijit Ghosh: So, again it is
again a mindset change.
So adopting a mindset of
continuous improvement,
innovation, and this is the
theme we have captured
altogether.
So the the primary way to create
a cultural shift is more about
collaboration.
Especially the DevOps
collaboration to encourage the
integration of development team
and the operation team and
breaking down those silos and
promoting cross functional team
alignments, joint accountability
for delivering high quality
software.
And then again, there's is a
continuous learning and the
improvement which basically
provide the right iteration, the
experimentation, the learning
curves.
Jim Hirschauer: So how do you
get that executive alignment?
Speaking from a top down
perspective, what happens?
What is the process of getting
that executive support that's
needed?
Bijit Ghosh: Getting executive
alignment is crucial for the
successful implementation of any
strategic initiative.
Some of the steps we have taken
is to clearly communicate the
benefits.
What is the strong value
proposition which going to serve
us for multiyear strategy.
But at the same time, the
stronger benefit.
How are we going to connect with
the strategic objective which
demonstrate how a cloud native
alignment with the organization
for a longer term vision.
And then educate and build
awareness constantly with our
executive team showing the right
metrics which get them involved
into the model overall.
Jim Hirschauer: Yeah.
I love what you just said there.
Conveying that value and helping
the executive staff to see what
is the objective, what's the
overall business benefit?
So from that perspective, what's
the point of doing all this?
In your mind and for your
business, how have you made that
business case?
What are those values that
you're seeking to achieve?
What is the ultimate business
objective here?
Bijit Ghosh: The ultimate
business objective is the
scalability and the elasticity
and also the agility and the
time to market we want look for.
Especially as the dynamic of the
business and the software
industry is changing.
We really wanted to quickly
pivot to the needs and then
streamline the continuous
software delivery process, which
has become more efficient for us
to operate but at the same time,
it gives us the right resiliency
in the high availability system
work on.
But as you're progressing to the
cloud native and the nitty
gritty elements is we constantly
need to innovate and be
competitive in that world.
Jim Hirschauer: Alright.
Well, I've gotta ask the
question then.
Are you starting to realize some
of these objectives at this
point?
Bijit Ghosh: We have seen how it
is helping us to give the
calculated ROI in terms of cost
savings, in terms of the right
scalability and the elasticity
it gives, but again, we are in
the early stage.
And I think there are a lot of
maturity we have to bake in,
into the platform, into the
product, and into the services.
But definitely it looks very
promising in its perspective,
the business agility
requirements the needs and the
potential benefits for, the fast
innovation cycle which talks
about quicker time to the market
overall.
Jim Hirschauer: So you're,
somewhat early on in the
process, you see that there is
definitely potential here.
So many companies have been in
this position and so many are
headed towards this position as
well.
One of the interesting things
that I saw in the most recent
state of DevOps report, they
asked a bunch of questions about
reliability to go along with the
traditional survey questions,
and one of the findings was
really interesting.
They found that, It almost
didn't matter what was happening
with the other four traditional
metrics that everyone is looking
to improve upon If you didn't
account for reliability in a
meaningful way.
I'd love to hear your thoughts
on that.
Bijit Ghosh: Yeah.
The report talks about some of
the key factor that contribute
overall.
But at the same time how
reliability is a core pillar of
the feature and the
functionality it brings to the
customer.
Especially the focus on
monitoring, focus on learning,
focus on automations and
building those reliability from
the day zero perspective, it's
so important.
Bringing those learning into,
how organization can constantly
achieve higher level of
reliability, adding more 9s,
which, impacting the cost, but
at the same time, if you have
the right proper automation to
deliver the new feature and
functionality more quickly and
reliably, how what is impact has
with the customer.
How you delighting the entire
experience of the customer and
also developer.
Jim Hirschauer: All right.
So look, we've talked about a
lot of tech specific stuff here.
It's time for our second, just
for fun section.
Bijit, what is your favorite
hobby outside of work?
Bijit Ghosh: Favorite hobby?
I like to cook.
I think fully the most important
powerful course to correct my
oxidative stress.
I want to make sure that my, my
guts are healthy but at the same
time wanted to explore and be
more creative with my family.
Jim Hirschauer: Yeah.
So tell me about that.
What what kind of healthy foods
are you preparing for your
family?
Bijit Ghosh: It, it's pretty
much fueling my body with the,
with vegetarian food.
This is the recent adoption
which we have did in our home
teaching kids to and then also
inform them about the right
choice of the food.
They have to make especially
whenever I'm cooking, I make
sure that I talk to my kids
about the nutrition value of
different food of a different
vegetable, fruits and also the
lean protein, which is
associated with the, with the
health.
And making sure that they're
knowledgeable.
Knowledgeable about the
foundations of making lifelong
choice and that benefit their
health.
But I think this is what the
strong foundations I believe we
need to build and to establish
and engage our children.
To talk about how they can
choose the better food, but at
the same time create awareness
of the balanced meals.
Jim Hirschauer: I love hearing
you say that.
I think it's so important as
well.
I think it's something that not
a lot of kids are getting these
days.
They're really not being taught
enough about health and
nutrition, which is at the core
of their overall wellbeing.
So bravo.
I do have a question.
Thank though you, because it is
it is interesting trying to feed
children and teach them about
health and, and make sure that
they're eating healthy.
Are they just eating all these
vegetables without putting up a
fight or, or do they put up a
fight like mine did?
Bijit Ghosh: Of course.
Yeah.
I think that there's always a
friction between me and my kids,
but I think it is more about
educating them and empower them
to make informed choice and
develop the healthy habits and
create a cultivated kind of
positive relationship with them.
So they do understand though
they don't understand too, but
it's all about the value and
health aspect it brings
altogether.
Jim Hirschauer: Yeah,
absolutely.
Well, here's what I can tell you
for sure.
So my kids are a little bit
older now, one's about to go off
to college and one's still in
high school.
And my older one has actually
started eating really healthy on
their own.
It was kind of like their own
initiative.
So while I tried to raise'em
really healthy when they were
young and then they got to eat
on their own as they grew up and
were out of the house more and
ate very, very unhealthy, just
like all kids do.
Mm-hmm.
It was amazing to see that
transition back to eating with a
much more healthy style.
And of course they still, have
ice cream or treats or whatever,
but it's much more rarely, it's
much more occasional at this
point.
So for me that's been amazing to
see and I like to think, and I
hope that that all started with
teaching them at a very young
age about what healthy eating is
really all about.
Bijit Ghosh: For sure.
Yeah.
Jim Hirschauer: Alright.
Bijit, thank you so much for
coming on the show.
Thank you for sharing your
insights.
It's been a pleasure.
And to all of our listeners, if
you wanna share your DevOps
stories as a guest speaker on
ShipTalk, please send us an
email at podcast@shiptalk.io and
we'll get back to you.
Thanks again, Bijit.
Really appreciate it.
And that's all for now.
Until next time,
Bijit Ghosh: Thank you, Jim, for
having me.