DataOps, Observability, and The Cure for Data Team Blues - Christopher Bergh

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hi everyone Welcome to our event this event is brought to you by data dos club which is a community of people who love

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data and we have weekly events and today one is one of such events and I guess we

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are also a community of people who like to wake up early if you're from the states right Christopher or maybe not so

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much because this is the time we usually have uh uh our events uh for our guests

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and presenters from the states we usually do it in the evening of Berlin time but yes unfortunately it kind of

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slipped my mind but anyways we have a lot of events you can check them in the

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other data enthusiasts during today's interview you can ask any question there's a pin Link in live chat so click

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on that link ask your question and we will be covering these questions during the interview now I will stop sharing my

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screen and uh there is there's a a message in uh and Christopher is from

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you so we actually have this on YouTube but so they have not seen what you wrote

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but there is a message from to anyone who's watching this right now from Christopher saying hello everyone can I

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call you Chris or you okay I should go I should uh I should look on YouTube then okay yeah but anyways I'll you don't

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need like you we'll need to focus on answering questions and I'll keep an eye

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I'll be keeping an eye on all the question questions so um

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yeah if you're ready we can start I'm ready yeah and you prefer Christopher

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not Chris right Chris is fine Chris is fine it's a bit shorter um

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okay so this week we'll talk about data Ops again maybe it's a tradition that we talk about data Ops every like once per

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year but we actually skipped one year so because we did not have we haven't had

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Chris for some time so today we have a very special guest Christopher Christopher is the co-founder CEO and

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head chef or hat cook at data kitchen with 25 years of experience maybe this

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is outdated uh cuz probably now you have more and maybe you stopped counting I

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don't know but like with tons of years of experience in analytics and software engineering Christopher is known as the

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co-author of the data Ops cookbook and data Ops Manifesto and it's not the

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first time we have Christopher here on the podcast we interviewed him two years ago also about data Ops and this one

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will be about data hops so we'll catch up and see what actually changed in in

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these two years and yeah so welcome to the interview well thank you for having

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me I'm I'm happy to be here and talking all things related to data Ops and why

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why why bother with data Ops and happy to talk about the company or or what's changed

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excited yeah so let's dive in so the questions for today's interview are prepared by Johanna berer as always

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thanks Johanna for your help so before we start with our main topic for today

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data Ops uh let's start with your ground can you tell us about your career Journey so far and also for those who

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have not heard have not listened to the previous podcast maybe you can um talk

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about yourself and also for those who did listen to the previous you can also maybe give a summary of what has changed

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in the last two years so we'll do yeah so um my name is Chris so I guess I'm

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a sort of an engineer so I spent about the first 15 years of my career in

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software sort of working and building some AI systems some non- AI systems uh

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at uh Us's NASA and MIT linol lab and then some startups and then um

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Microsoft and then about 2005 I got I got the data bug uh I think you know my

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kids were small and I thought oh this data thing was easy and I'd be able to go home uh for dinner at 5 and life

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would be fine um because I was a big you started your own company right and uh it didn't work out that way

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and um and what was interesting is is for me it the problem wasn't doing the

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data like I we had smart people who did data science and data engineering the act of creating things it was like the

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systems around the data that were hard um things it was really hard to not have

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errors in production and I would sort of driving to work and I had a Blackberry at the time and I would not look at my

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Blackberry all all morning I had this long drive to work and I'd sit in the parking lot and take a deep breath and

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look at my Blackberry and go uh oh is there going to be any problems today and I'd be and if there wasn't I'd walk and

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very happy um and if there was I'd have to like rce myself um and you know and

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then the second problem is the team I worked for we just couldn't go fast enough the customers were super

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demanding they didn't care they all they always thought things should be faster and we are always behind and so um how

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do you you know how do you live in that world where things are breaking left and right you're terrified of making errors

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um and then second you just can't go fast enough um and it's preh Hadoop era

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right it's like before all this big data Tech yeah before this was we were using

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uh SQL Server um and we actually you know we had smart people so we we we

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built an engine in SQL Server that made SQL Server a column or

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database so we built a column or database inside of SQL Server um so uh

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in order to make certain things fast and and uh yeah it was it was really uh it's not

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bad I mean the principles are the same right before Hadoop it's it's still a database there's still indexes there's

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still queries um things like that we we uh at the time uh you would use olap

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engines we didn't use those but you those reports you know are for models it's it's not that different um you know

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we had a rack of servers instead of the cloud um so yeah and I think so what what I

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took from that was uh it's just hard to run a team of people to do do data and analytics and it's not

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really I I took it from a manager perspective I started to read Deming and

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think about the work that we do as a factory you know and in a factory that produces insight and not automobiles um

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and so how do you run that factory so it produces things that are good of good

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quality and then second since I had come from software I've been very influenced

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by by the devops movement how you automate deployment how you run in an agile way how you

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produce um how you how you change things quickly and how you innovate and so

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those two things of like running you know running a really good solid production line that has very low errors

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um and then second changing that production line at at very very often they're kind of opposite right um and so

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how do you how do you as a manager how do you technically approach that and

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then um 10 years ago when we started data kitchen um we've always been a profitable company and so we started off

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uh with some customers we started building some software and realized that we couldn't work any other way and that

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the way we work wasn't understood by a lot of people so we had to write a book and a Manifesto to kind of share our our

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methods and then so yeah we've been in so we've been in business now about a little over 10

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years oh that's cool and uh like what

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uh so let's talk about dat offs and you mentioned devops and how you were inspired by that and by the way like do

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you remember roughly when devops as I think started to appear like when did people start calling these principles

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and like tools around them as de yeah so agile Manifesto well first of all the I

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mean I had a boss in 1990 at Nasa who had this idea build a

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little test a little learn a lot right that was his Mantra and then which made

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made a lot of sense um and so and then the sort of agile software Manifesto

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came out which is very similar in 2001 and then um the sort of first real

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devops was a guy at Twitter started to do automat automated deployment you know

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push a button and that was like 200 Nish and so the first I think devops

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Meetup was around then so it's it's it's been 15 years I guess 6 like I was

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trying to so I started my career in 2010 so I my first job was a Java

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developer and like I remember for some things like we would just uh SFTP to the

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machine and then put the jar archive there and then like keep our fingers crossed that it doesn't break uh uh like

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it was not really the I wouldn't call it this way right you were deploying you

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had a Dey process I put it yeah

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right was that so that was documented too it was like put the jar on production cross your

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fingers I think there was uh like a page on uh some internal Viki uh yeah that

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describes like with passwords and don't like what you should do yeah that was and and I think what's interesting is

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why that changed right and and we laugh at it now but that was why didn't you

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invest in automating deployment or a whole bunch of automated regression

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tests right that would run because I think in software now that would be rare

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that people wouldn't use C CD they wouldn't have some automated tests you know functional

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regression tests that would be the exception whereas that the norm at the beginning of your career and so that's

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what's interesting and I think you know if we if we talk about what's changed in the last two three years I I think it is

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getting more standard there are um there's a lot more companies who are

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talking data Ops or data observability um there's a lot more tools that are a lot more people are

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using get in data and analytics than ever before I think thanks to DBT um and

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there's a lot of tools that are I think getting more code Centric right that

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they're not treating their configuration like a black box there there's several

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bi tools that tout the fact that they that they're uh you know they're they're git Centric you know and and so and that

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they're testable and that they have apis so things like that I think people maybe let's take a step back and just do a

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quick summary of what data Ops data Ops is and then we can talk about like what changed in the last two years sure so I

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guess it starts with a problem and that it's it sort of

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admits some dark things about data and analytics and that we're not really successful and we're not really happy um

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and if you look at the statistics on sort of projects and problems and even

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the psychology like I think about a year or two we did a survey of

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data Engineers 700 data engineers and 78% of them wanted their job to come with a therapist and 50% were thinking

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of leaving the career altogether and so why why is everyone sort of unhappy well I I I think what happens is

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teams either fall into two buckets they're sort of heroic teams who

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are doing their they're working night and day they're trying really hard for their customer um and then they get

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burnt out and then they quit honestly and then the second team have wrapped

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their projects up in so much process and proceduralism and steps that doing

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anything is sort of so slow and boring that they again leave in frustration um

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or or live in cynicism and and that like the only outcome is quit and

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start uh woodworking yeah the only outcome really is quit and start working

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and um as a as a manager I always hated that right because when when your team

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is either full of heroes or proceduralism you always have people who have the whole system in their head

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they're certainly key people and then when they leave they take all that knowledge with them and then that

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creates a bottleneck and so both of which are aren aren't and I think the

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main idea of data Ops is there's a balance between fear and herois

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that you can live you don't you know you don't have to be fearful 95% of the time maybe one or two% it's good to be

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fearful and you don't have to be a hero again maybe one or two per it's good to be a hero but there's a balance um and

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and in that balance you actually are much more prod