Dell Technologies World 2022, DevOps and Rocket Science

Heading into Dell Technologies World 2022 and being in my brain which tends to spiral; leave it to me to be on vacation last week, see an acronym and immediately think about work. The acronym is CSM. At Dell Technologies, this only means for me one thing and that is Container Storage Modules, CSM. Technology, science, medicine, etc...are all immersed in acronyms so running across one in unexpected places might not be so rare. Now to my story. My acronym encounter happened while I was walking through the Kennedy Space Center in Florida “geeking” out over rocket science and this book caught my eye. If you look closely, it is labelled CSM Rescue Book. CSM in this case stands for Command Service Module. This is the book that was heavily referenced during the Apollo 13 space flight after the crew’s service module was exposed due to an oxygen tank explosion. Now, imagine that you have over 400,000 employees, engineers, mechanics, etc.…all working on the space program and you have this manual to reference to help get your crew home safely. If you haven’t watched the movie “Apollo 13”; I highly recommend it as a lesson in organizational skills, perseverance, and teamwork.

This is all very dramatic and scary, but it isn’t just about the reference manual, though helpful; it is the people behind the reference architecture that really understand how “things work.” Right? So, referencing a manual is one thing, but the Apollo missions would have never happened without a VERY powerful computer. Led by Margaret Hamilton and a team of 350 software engineers, the navigation, and journeys of these spaceships to be able to get to space and the moon was and still is very daunting and takes a LOT of smart people coding and programming. This was the 1960s.

Flash forward 50 years to today and the next space program is underway to send another rocket to the moon. This is the Artemis program, and it relies on 200 software engineers, 5.5 million lines of code, coordination with the physical build team at a remote location and an infinite amount of testing.

Parallel this to the realm of what you, our customers are doing to bring together agile development, automation, and seamless IT operations through DevOps and it no longer feels like rocket science. It takes a lot less people, a lot less code and probably a lot less testing. Regardless of the advancements in technology, the goal to automate everything for seamless development processes is becoming second nature conversations for us. The marriage of developers and IT operations is indicative of how you organize around DevOps. Wherever you are in your considerations for on-premises and multi-cloud infrastructures, we have solutions for you to dig deeper into at next week’s expo - in addition to the countless sessions and hands-on-labs.

Here is your personal reference for navigating the expo floor. It isn’t drawn to scale and you are likely to have to look up for the signage more than a few times, but you can always come back to us in the DevOps and Kubernetes booth for directions. Have a great time and see you there.?