About NigelNigel Kersten’s day job is Field CTO at Puppet where he leads a group of engineers who work with Puppet’s largest customers on cultural and organizational changes necessary for large-scale DevOps implementations - among other things. He’s a co-author of the industry-leading State Of DevOps Report and likes to evenly talk about what went right with DevOps and what went wrong based on this research and his experience in the field. He’s held multiple positions at Puppet across product and engineering and came to Puppet from the Google SRE organization, where he was responsible for one of the largest Puppet deployments in the world.  Nigel is passionate about behavioral economics, electronic music, synthesizers, and Test cricket. Ask him about late-stage capitalism, and shoes.Links:
Puppet: https://puppet.com

2020 State of DevOps Report: https://puppet.com/resources/report/2020-state-of-devops-report/

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: Your company might be stuck in the middle of a DevOps revolution without even realizing it. Lucky you! Does your company culture discourage risk? Are you willing to admit it? Does your team have clear responsibilities? Depends on who you ask. Are you struggling to get buy in on DevOps practices? Well, download the 2021 State of DevOps report brought to you annually by Puppet since 2011 to explore the trends and blockers keeping evolution firms stuck in the middle of their DevOps evolution. Because they fail to evolve or die like dinosaurs. The significance of organizational buy in, and oh it is significant indeed, and why team identities and interaction models matter. Not to mention weither the use of automation and the cloud translate to DevOps success. All that and more awaits you. Visit: www.puppet.com to download your copy of the report now!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. This promoted episode is sponsored by a long time… I wouldn’t even say friends so much as antagonist slash protagonist slash symbiotic company with things I have done as I have staggered through the ecosystem. There’s a lot of fingers of blame that I can point throughout the course of my career at different instances, different companies, different clients, et cetera, et cetera, that have shaped me into the monstrosity than I am today. But far and away, the company that has the most impact on the way that I speak publicly, is Puppet.Here to accept the recrimination for what I become and how it’s played out is Nigel Kersten, a field CTO at Puppet—or the field CTO; I don’t know how many of them they have. Nigel, welcome to the show, and how unique are you?Nigel: Thank you, Corey. Well, I—you know, reasonably unique. I think that you get used to being one of the few Australians living in Portland who’s decided to move away from the sunny beaches and live in the gray wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.Corey: So, to give a little context into that ridiculous intro, I was a traveling contract trainer for the Puppet fundamentals course for an entire summer back in I want to s