Welcome to our new episode of Podcasts WALL OF CONFUSION. We’re excited that you’re here. Our guest today is Daniel Kreiseder (DK) from Hilarion5. In a trio with our CIO Christian Steinberger (CS) and our CTO Markus Weinhold (MW), personalities, dialects, and perspectives collide.
The three experts discuss, for example, how in an ideal world, Devs and Ops would collaborate on their perfect development project. A particularly beautiful part is when Daniel and Markus agree that communication and trust set the course for good collaboration between customers, Devs, and Ops.
Get ready for this sometimes really funny, sometimes almost philosophical episode that ultimately immerses us deep into the reality of IT everyday life.
Subscribe to our channel, activate the bell, drop us a like or a line – and now, have fun listening!
To the interview:
Christian Steinberger (CS): “Hello and welcome to a new episode of our podcast Wall of Confusion. Today, we have with us Markus Weinhold, and for the first time in our still relatively short podcast history, we have an external guest. That’s Daniel Kreiseder. Hello Daniel, hello Markus. Maybe you could introduce yourselves briefly?”
Marcus Weinhold (MW): “Sure, I’m Markus Weinhold. I’m in charge of the technical leadership at ROSSY. I’ve been with the company for about five years, started as an admin, and somehow managed to work my way up to leadership (laughs).
In terms of education: I studied Mathematics, and somehow got into this job during my studies since I was young and needed the money, chuckles.”
CS: “Mathematics! That’s cool. Daniel?”
Daniel Kreiseder (DK): “Hello, I’m Daniel Kreiseder. I’m the CEO of Hilarion5. We’re a team of nearly 15 people and have been doing software development for a long time. Haha, I was young and needed the money too (laughs). Actually, I still need it, but unfortunately, I’m not young anymore. Nevertheless, I’m glad to be part of your podcast episode, despite my white hair. Thank you for the invitation!”
CS: “Our podcast always revolves around exciting topics in the DevOps realm. And since today we’re fortunate to have specialists from both sides, development and operations, I’d like to know first of all, what do you exactly understand by DevOps?”
MW: “Essentially, DevOps is a concept. A philosophy on how to execute projects: What should be done? It’s about ensuring that development progresses smoothly and that operations run stably afterwards. What the customer ultimately wants is reliability. From my perspective, the DevOps approach aims to bring these two perspectives together using various means. However, I must admit that DevOps is often misunderstood: 'We have this DevOps guy in the company who handles everything.' Um, yes…”
CS: “Okay! So, it’s also about bringing these areas together. Now, you’re on the operations side today, Marcus. So, in your opinion, what does the operations side, this isolated side of operations, do?”
MW: “Well, on one side, I’m responsible for providing the infrastructure that the development side needs. And on the other side, I’m the guy who gets called on the weekends when things don’t work. So, I ensure that the thing is running and I ensure that the developers can develop.”
CS: “Thanks! Daniel, question 1, what is DevOps?”
DK: “For me, DevOps is a coined term. Earlier in the podcast preparation, I looked at my job posting for a DevOps role. It reads almost like a fairy tale from my childhood. (all three laugh) There are many things listed that, in my opinion, one person can’t possibly do alone. From my developer’s perspective, and what my team’s challenge is, there are constantly new technologies. There’s frontend, backend, databases, and many new updates. Even development alone is such a vast field. So, in my view, it’s challenging to incorporate DevOps. Of course, the goal of Devs and Ops is to provide stable solutions for the customer. But I believe having DevOps within one person is not realistic, that’s why I think it’s a coined term.”
CS: “Now both of you have touched a bit on the technical side – what I’m still interested in is whether DevOps is solely about methods and technology, or is there more behind it?”
DK: “Naturally, it’s a set of methods for ultimately delivering solutions to the customer. However, I believe it’s much more about communication. We need to talk to each other! That’s not always the case.”
Listen in to see how the discussion unfolds – on YouTube starting at minute 6:20.
