>> Narrator: From Boston, Massachusetts,
it's TheCUBE,
covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018.
Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage
of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018.
Always excited when we get to talk to some of the users.
And joining me this segment is Adam Furtado,
who is the Chief of Product with Kessel Run
at US Air Force.
Adam, you were saying you're not a big Star Wars guy,
but was the name come from the derivation of
the famous Millennium Falcon Kessel Run?
Yes, I am a Star Wars geek, you know.
>> It certainly was
and the rest of our team are Star Wars nuts,
so I've had to pick up things along the way
so I like to joke that we're delivering capability
to our users in 12 parsecs or quicker.
>> Yeah, and if you're not a,
whether you are or aren't a Star Wars fan,
you look at it and say,
parsecs is a measure of distance, not time.
That's still infuriating for us to watch.
Adam, tell us a little bit about your background
and what your group does that the US Air Force
that we don't need to explain the US Air Force.
>> Sure, so my background
is actually an intelligence professional
as a warfighter enlisted in the Air Force for ten years.
From there, I started working in IT systems
and I got out of the Air Force
and really was on the acquisition side of the house
where we were the provider for capabilities
for our warfighters.
So, over that time, I learned a lot
about how we struggle with getting capability to our users
with any kind of speed or quality.
Kessel Run is an effort to revolutionize the way
that we build and deliver software to our warfighters
and we are well on our way.
>> That sounds like an awesome project.
Can you give us just roughly
how do you get your arms around
how big this is, how many applications
or people are involved in it
or, you know, the scope of what you're doing.
>> Sure.
We set out to modernize the Air and Space Operation Center
so we have AOCs all around the world
that basically are where all the planning
for air warfare takes place.
So it's a large legacy system
that is under a lens.
So, they've really struggled in modernizing
that baseline system.
We've been designing a brand new system
to modernize for about ten years
and we just haven't been able to get it to the field
for a ton of DoD bureaucratic and acquisitions reasons.
So basically, Congress told us
to figure something new out.
So we had a small team that was tired of working this way
and tired of not being able to provide
this capability to the warfighters.
We got together and we looked at industry to be quite frank.
And found that the other bureaucratic regulated industries
were able to take steps to move closer
towards our digital transformation.
So we kind of followed along
and took some practices that we learned from them
and tried to apply it to the government.
>> Yeah, fascinating space.
Governments' big focus this week at the show,
there was the announcement about Cloud.gov.
There is a whole track on government here.
But, I want you to talk about your Cloud Foundry usage.
Button General?
How's the thinking of modernization,
digitalization, there was a big Cloud First initiative
from the federal government for a while.
How do those forces play together?
>> Sure, yeah, there's a ton of
innovation type of activities taking place
throughout the government and the DoD.
With Cloud Foundry, we just found that
because of our,
we frankly have a lack of software development
and engineering talent that's inherent to the Air Force.
We have actually a career field for software developers
that's been dwindling over the years.
So being able to find that talent's been really hard.
So with our Cloud Foundry commercial platform,
being able to abstract the technical complexity that it does
allows us to grow our software developers
in a different way,
focusing on identifying the character traits,
the empathy and learning mindset that we can take
and grow them by having that platform as a backbone
to kind of be our foundation,
I guess, is really was the emphasis of us
going in this direction.
It's really worked out so far.
>> Yeah, just going through my head
are all these discussions that we've had for years
about how we need to go from monolithic,
hierarchical to distributive architectures
and that's been happening in the military a lot too.
>> Very much so, yeah.
What we're trying to replace is that massive monolithic
system that takes us ten years
to design and develop
with no meaningful user input
and at the end of the day,
if we even get it out to the field,
it's not the right thing.
96% of federal IT projects are over budget
or over schedule
and 40% of them never see a user at all,
never get fielded.
There's a lot of room for improvement in this space.
We've been able to kind of tackle some of the,
some of the easier things,
but also tackle some more complex things.
Similar to technology.
But the policy, the testing of the security
behind it as well that we've been kind of focusing on
to move the entire DoD and entire Air Force forward.
>> Yeah.
So, security, I would think,
is a major concern.
How does that fit in to your thinking
and how does security fit in to your architecture?
>> We're always thinking about security.
Cyber security is obviously
really important to the DoD
and our space.
We feel that with,
being able to automate more
of the security with utilizing a platform
and the pipelines that we have
gets to a better place and we're more secure today
than we were yesterday.
We're always learning too, right?
So, we're more secure today
than we were literally yesterday.
And we're going to be more secure tomorrow
by learning how to move forward
and learn more about cyber security.
That's always something on our mind
and we feel like we're in a good place.
>> The majority of Cloud Foundry users
are doing,
they're a private or private hosted environment.
Can you share,
do you leverage public clouds at all?
Or is it all kind of in-house data centers?
How does that fit into the mix?
>> So our unclassified developments is the AWS gov cloud
and then we have hybrid solutions that we use
on other networks.
>> Okay, yeah.
AWS just launched that,
I believe it's their secret region, too,
so that they're capable,
but I guess your team or you can't talk about it,
isn't leveraging it yet.
>> Yeah, I'd rather not go there. (laughs)
>> No worries.
So, you're speaking at this show.
What's your experience, what kind of things are you sharing
and working on?
>> We're really heavily relying on culture.
So we had a couple of our team members
speak this morning, giving more of an overview
of our efforts and what we've been able to achieve so far.
I'm focusing on how we can
overcome some of the challenges
that are inherent to the DoD.
I mentioned earlier,
native engineering development and talent.
How we can change the way
that we do organizational management.
Our traditional hierarchal top down way of organizing
doesn't breed innovation normally, right?
So we're looking at different ways to organize our own team.
So one of those reasons,
all of our dev teams work in a balanced team concept
with no uniforms, all on a first name basis.
So we're basically taking,
uniforms are really to strip the individualism
away from people, but we kind of need that
for creativity and to be able to solve conflicts,
problems, and things like that.
So we're really focusing on lifting
the psychological safety needed to be creative
and have our lowest ranking people feel as comfortable
as our highest ranking people
and IDA and coming up with ways to do things.
>> That's fascinating actually.
We've been talking a lot about relationships
between the groups and the devs and the operators,
but you start putting rank in there,
which any company has some of that inherently,
but the military very much is physical
when you see them all the time.
>> Absolutely.
It's actually, our airmen have really adapted to it
and they love it.
It's one of those things where it's interesting,
maybe a little bit different than commercial industry
in that our airmen are our developers
and our airmen are also our users
so there's invested interest in improving things
for the better for their fellow airmen.
It's been really great to see
and people have really dove in and embraced it.
Developers are doing really well.
>> What kind of lessons learned would you share?
That you're sharing in your speech
and talking to your peers.
What kind of things would you share with them?
>> I think the biggest thing I'm talking about today
is to avoid getting in this trap of trying to find
the perfect person with the right technical acumen.
I think having a foundation is important,
but more important is finding people
who have empathy for users and learning mindsets
and are able to get out of their comfort zone
and learn new things.
Building cloud innovative applications
and 12 factor applications are inherently new
to the DoD effectively.
It's funny, we talk about how dev options,
you know, innovative in our world
when the commercial industry probably scoffs at that,
but innovation is defined
as the instruction of something new.
It really is innovative in the DoD space
to work in this way.
We're seeing a lot of momentum
throughout the services, and the DoD
and we're really heading in the right direction.
>> It's great to hear.
Innovation and government can happen.
We've done lots of interviews over the last few years
to talk about it.
Anything you'd like to share
about ways that your organization or peer organizations
are moving things forward that people might be surprised
to hear about?
>> I'd say the most important thing
is finding the right people.
A lot of the times, we've found that our most senior
leadership in the government is very much
interested in innovating and moving things forward
in the right way and there's this innovation ecosystem
below that is driving things.
So it's basically the education that needs to happen
at the middle level of that frozen middle.
That sometimes can thwart innovation
by a lack of that knowledge, I guess,
or the lack of understanding of what we're doing.
We've got what feels like a parade of education
and trying to share the things we've learned
with other people in the government.
It helps us remove some of those bureaucratic barriers
and then it's like really progress where we need to.
>> Alright, Adam, last question I have for you.
Something we're all struggling with,
the pace of change these days.
Seems every time you get on a new technology,
the next one's there.
You mentioned, you know, like, well,
dev ops, we've been talking about for years
but you're getting on.
How does your organization look at that?
How do you keep up with what's happening in the world?
>> So I think, Cloud Foundry is an example
of how these commercial solutions have helped us
do that.
Now, we say like,
speed is the new security,
we're able to be truly agile
in that we're able to change and adapt
to things as we need to.
I think in the old model,
it took us so long to adapt
and get things out into the field
that change was almost impossible.
Whereas in this way of working,
we're able to learn things every single day,
keep our learning loops very short,
and then react to them.
So I think it's been
a great way to take some of the things we've learned
and implement them.
>> Adam Furtado, I really appreciate you sharing
your story from the US Air Force.
Fascinating stuff.
We'll be back with more coverage here
at the Cloud Foundry Summit 2018.
I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.
(bouncy music)