Armon Dadgar, CTO – HashiCorp: Enabling Innovation

Grand keynote: Armon Dadgar, CTO- HashiCorp – Enabling Innovation

Preparations are in full swing for #TiEcon2022 at Santa Clara, CA in May, 2022. Among an exciting lineup of speakers and panels at this largest entrepreneurship focused conference will be Armon Dadgar,  CTO & co-founder of HashiCorp giving a grand keynote on day 1.

HashiCorp is one of the fastest growing tech companies in the cloud and DevOps space. With its open source tools, Hashicorp supports the development and deployment of large scale service oriented software installations and enables companies to deliver applications faster. Each tool focuses on specific stages in the life cycle of a software application, with a goal towards automation.

With a range of products like Terraform, HashiCorp Vault, HashiCorp Nomad, and HashiCorp Consu, it has truly emerged as a company that enables innovation. Highly respected by the developer community, Hashicorp is a prominent open-source promoter and is also a leader in all remote working practice.

Armon Dadgar says, as CTO at Hashicorp, he combined his passion for security and distributed systems and their applications to solve real world problems, through the world of DevOps tooling. In early childhood, when children were still leaving cookies for Santa, Armon begged his parents to get him a coding book for Christmas. His parents also gave him a box set of .NET kit and he used it to build games like Tetris and Tic-Tac-Toe. 

The secret of Dadgar’s success seems to be in the way in which he puts himself in the shoes of the user community. Speaking of the transition from writing code to managing people, Dadgar says, “making the shift from IC-land to manager land was a tough one”, but it helped to internalize that “I can only be so effective with just two hands at a keyboard. But if I can train 10, 20 other people to think the way I do, or to apply the same design principles, then it’s like I have 20 hands at the keyboard”. 

Initially, Dadgar says he felt he knew the system better than anyone else, that he would think about edge cases, he could be the code reviewer, but at some point, he realized it wasn’t practical. Then a new realization set in that after all software is malleable, it can be fixed, it’s not set in stone. That seems to be a key leadership skill that is constantly called for when one leads and manages people. 

Register for TiEcon2022 at @TiEcon at www.tiecon.org .

Challenges and Opportunities in DevOps

After Agile and Waterfall, recent red hot trend in creating optimum software engineering culture in organizations, has been DevOps. DevOps is about unifying software development and operations and aligning it with shared business and product objectives. Creating smoothly functioning DevOps culture helps organizations shorten development cycles and ensure dependable and timely releases.

With DevOps enabling real-time visibility in every layer of software construction, the risk of rapid innovation is reduced as communication barriers are dissolved between teams and feedback loops are shortened. Objective single source data through shared dashboard reduces finger pointing. Companies that have not yet adopted DevOps, increasingly feel the pressure to do so. However, when companies seek to adopt DevOps, they also face challenges.

Creating a smoothly functioning DevOps culture, requires creating an optimum environment for the shift in mindset to take hold and enabling a smooth transition process through soft and hard skills training.  Traditionally, goals of Development and Operations are not aligned and handovers between different teams are costly and time consuming. A company seeking to adopt DevOps culture, needs to overcome this mentality and create product aligned team culture, away from project based culture. This is a major mindset shift that may require restructuring in staff and reporting lines, in addition to skills based training. While there is high barrier to entry with microservices, the move to automation and continuous delivery is facilitated by replacing or changing older legacy infrastructure to microservices architecture.

In any organization but more so in one seeking to adopt DevOps culture, people on the team are going to be the most important resources, for a smooth transition. Adopting newer tools may be effective only to the extent that staff receives training to use them and the tools are well integrated with the existing infrastructure.  A shift in culture must be gradual and include change management training to help people embrace the change. It will be easier to bring Dev and Ops teams on board to adopting newer tools if the focus is moved away from personalities and preferences to broader picture and larger, overarching goals of the company.  While the change may be scary at first, adoption may be smoother with objective data and feedback loops from small scale deployments and other teams to see the benefits of it working in real time.

Exciting track at TiE Inflect 2018, the largest entrepreneurship conference to take place in May at Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, will feature VCs and industry leaders discussing trends, opportunities, and strategies to deal with challenges. Entrepreneurs with eyes towards innovation in DevOps will also get to do a deep dive in the Startup bootcamp, and may learn to become investor ready, learn to effectively network and maximize visibility, and fine tune presentations and pitches. Register for the conference at www.tieinflect.org .

Where are VCs investing in DevOps

In software engineering culture, unifying software development and software operation is gaining great momentum. Automation and monitoring at all steps of software construction from integration, testing, releasing to deployment, and infrastructure management, DevOps shortens development cycles, ensures more dependable releases and is more closely aligned with business objectives. Recent M&A activities of DevOps companies like AppDynamics and Automic Software and $100M+ investments in DevOps solution providers like UIPath,, XebiaLabs and Tricentis points to the red hot market, ripe of entrepreneurial innovation.

VCs have clearly embraced this transformation in culture and processes as a more efficient organizational culture for development and deployment practices.  But as yet, DevOps sector is in the early phase. There will be incredible new opportunities for entrepreneurs in this sector, in the next few years. A panel of industry leaders will discuss and opine on new opportunities for entrepreneurs, at TiE Inflect 2018. Register for the largest entrepreneurship conference with exciting tracks in Blockchain, FinTech, DevOps, HealthTech, CyberSecurity, MarTech and more to take place in in May, in Santa Clara, CA  at www.tieinflect.org .