The Business of Open Source

The conversation covers: The difference between cloud computing and cloud-native, according to AJWhether it’s possible to have a cloud-native application that runs on-premise The types of conversations that AJ has with customers, as VP of product. AJ also talks about the different types of customers that DigitalOcean serves.How the needs of smaller teams tend to differ from the needs of enterprise users — and the challenges that smaller teams face when learning and implementing cloud-native applications. Making decisions when using Kubernetes, and how it can be overwhelming due to the sheer number of choices that you can make. Some of the main motivations that are driving smaller companies to Kubernetes. AJ also explains what he thinks is the best rationale for using Kubernetes.Popular misconceptions about cloud-native and Kubernetes that AJ is seeing.Why customers often struggle to make technology decisions to support their business goals. AJ’s advice for businesses when making technology decisions.Why startups are encouraged to start by using open source — and why open source wins in the end when compared to proprietary solutions.LinksDigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/apurvajo LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apurvajo/ TranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I'm chatting with AJ. AJ, can you go ahead and introduce yourself?AJ: Hey, I'm AJ. I’m vice president of product for DigitalOcean. I've been with the company for about 15 months. Before that, I spent about a couple of decades with Microsoft. I was fortunate to work on Azure for the last decade, and I had the opportunity to build some cloud services with the company.Emily: And thank you so much for joining us.AJ: Thank you, thank you for having me.Emily: I always like to start out by asking, what do you actually do? What does a day look like?AJ: [laughs]. It’s an interesting question. So, yes, the day is usually all over the place depending on the priorities and things that are in motion for a given quarter or a week, per se. But usually, my days involve working with the team around the strategic initiatives that have been planned, driving clarity around different projects that I [unintelligible]. Mainly working with leadership on defining some of the roadmap for the product as well as the company. And yeah, and talking to lots of customers. That's something that I really, really enjoy. And every other day I have a meeting or two talking to our customers, learning from them, how they use our products and how can we get better.Emily: I'm going to ask more about those conversations with customers because that's what I find really interesting. But first, actually, I wanted to start with another question. What do you see as the difference between cloud computing and cloud-native?AJ: The difference essentially, in a way, the cloud computing is a much bigger umbrella around how we as a technology industry are enabling other businesses to bring their workload to a more scalable, more efficient, more secure environment versus trying to host, optimize, or do things by themselves. And the cloud-native, in a way, it's a subset of a cloud computing where not necessarily you always have to have existing workloads or something that is prior technology that has been already built and you're looking for a place to host. In a way, when you're building something out, new, greenfield apps and whatnot, you're starting from scratch, you're building your applications and solutions that are cloud-native by definition. They're built for Cloud; they're born in Cloud, and are optimizing the latest and the greatest innovations that are present and as future-looking to help you scale and succeed your business, in a way.Emily: Do you think it's possible to have a cloud-native application that runs on-premise?AJ: There's a lot of [laughs] innovations happening in pockets, and especially from the top providers to enable those scenarios. But at the end of the day, those investments are essentially driven to help people and companies, especially on the larger scale, to buy some time to completely move to the public cloud where the industry takes their time to come up with the compliance, security requirements and [unintelligible]. So, you'll start to see—you might have heard about some of the investments these top cloud provid

The conversation covers: Gou’s role as CTO of Portworx, and how he works with customers on a day to day basis.Common pain points that Gou talks about with customers. Gou explains how he helps customers create agile and cost-effective application development and deployment environments.The types of people that Gou talks to when approaching customers about cloud native discussions.Why customers often struggle with infrastructure related problems during their cloud native journeys, and how Gou and his team help.Common misconceptions that exist among customers when exploring cloud native solutions. For example, Gou mentions moving to Kubernetes for the sake of moving to Kubernetes. Gou’s thoughts on state — including why there is no such thing as an end-to-end stateless architecture.Some cloud native vertical trends that Gou is noticing taking place in the market. The issue of vendor lock-in, and how data and state fit into lock-in discussions. Gou’s opinion on where he sees the cloud native ecosystem heading.LinksPortworx: https://portworx.com/ Portworx Blog: https://portworx.com/blog/Gou Rao Email: mailto:[email protected] TranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, I'm your host Emily Omier, and today I am chatting with Gou Rao. Gou, I want to go ahead and have you introduce yourself. Where do you work? What do you do?Gou: Sure. Hi, Emily, and hi to everybody that's listening in. Thanks for having me on this podcast. My name is Gou Rao. I'm the CTO at Portworx. Portworx is a leader in the cloud-native storage space. We help companies run mission-critical stateful applications in production in hybrid, multi-cloud, and cloud-native environments.Emily: So, when you say you’re CTO, obviously that's a job title everyone, sort of, understands. But what does that mean you spend your day doing?Gou: Yeah, it is an overloaded term. As a CTO, I think CTOs in different companies wear multiple hats doing different things. Here at Portworx, technically I'm in charge of this company strategy and technical direction. What does that mean in terms of my day to day activities? And it's spending a lot of time with customers understanding the problems that they're trying to solve, and then trying to build a pattern around what different people in different industries and companies are doing, and then identifying common problems and trying to bring solutions to market, by working with our engineering teams, that sort of address, holistically, the underlying areas that I see people try and craft solutions around, whether it's enabling an agile development environment for their internal developers, or cost optimization, there's usually some underlying theme, and my job is to identify what that is, and come up with a meaningful solution that addresses a wide segment of the market.Emily: What are the most common pain points that you end up talking to customers about?Gou: Over the past, I think, eight-plus years or so—I think the enterprise software space goes through iterations in the types of problems that are being solved. Over the past eight-plus years or so, it really has been around this—we use this term cloud-native—enabling cloud-native environments. And what does that really mean? In talking to customers, what this is really meant recently is enabling an agile application development and deployment environment. And let's even define what that is. Me as an application developer, I have to rely on traditional IT techniques where there's a separate storage department, compute department, networking department, security department, and I have to interact with all of them just to develop and try out an application. But that really is impeding me as a developer from how fast I can iterate and build product and get it out there, so by and large, the common underlying theme has been, “Make that process better for me.” So, if I'm head of infrastructure how can I enable my developers to build and push product faster? So, getting that agility up in a sense where it makes—cost-wise, too, so it has to make cost sense—how do I enable an efficient, cost-efficient development platform? That has been the underlying theme. That sort of defines a set of technologies that we call cloud-native, and so orchestration tools like Kubernetes, and storage technologies like, hopefully, what we're doing at Portworx, these are all aimed at facilitating that. That's been sort of wha

The conversation covers: Why Kevin helped launch Single Music, where he currently provides SRE and architect duties.Single Music’s technical evolution from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes, and the key reasons that drove Kevin and his team to make the leap.What’s changed at Single Music since migrating to Kubernetes, and how Kubernetes is opening new doors for the company — increasing stability, and making life easier for developers.How Kubernetes allows Single Music to grow and pivot when needed, and introduce new features and products without spending a large amount of time on backend configurations. How the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted music sales.Single Music’s new plugin system, which empowers their users to create their own middleware.Kevin’s current project, which is a series of how-to manuals and guides for users of Kubernetes.Some common misconceptions about Kubernetes.LinksSingle MusicTraefik LabsTwitter: https://twitter.com/notsureifkevin?lang=enConnect with Kevin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/notsureifkevinEmily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I am chatting with Kevin Crawley. And Kevin actually has two jobs that we're going to talk about. Kevin, can you sort of introduce yourself and what your two roles are?Kevin: First, thank you for inviting me on to the show Emily. I appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit about both my roles because I certainly enjoy doing both jobs. I don't necessarily enjoy the amount of work it gives me, but it also allows me to explore the technical aspects of cloud-native, as well as the business and marketing aspects of it. So, as you mentioned, my name is Kevin Crawley. I work at a company called Containous. They are the company who created Traefik, the cloud-native load balancer. We've also created a couple other projects, and I'll talk a little bit about those later. For Containous, I'm a developer advocate. I work both with the marketing team and the engineering team. But also I moonlight as a co-founder and a co-owner of Single Music. And there, I fulfill mostly SRE type duties and also architect duties where a lot of times people will ask me feedback, and I'll happily share my opinion. And Single Music is actually based out of Nashville, Tennessee, where I live, and I started that with a couple friends here.Emily: Tell me actually a little bit more about why you started Single Music. And what do you do exactly?Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. So, the company started out of really an idea that labels and artists—and these are musicians if you didn't pick up on the name Single Music—we saw an opportunity for those labels and artists to sell their merchandise through a platform called Shopify to have advanced tools around selling music alongside that merchandise. And at the time, which was in 2016, there weren't any tools really to allow independent artists and smaller labels to upload their music to the web and sell it in a way in which could be reported to the Billboard charts, as well as for them to keep their profits. At the time, there was really only Apple Music, or iTunes. And iTunes keeps a significant portion of an artist's revenue, as well as they don't release those funds right away; it takes months for artists to get that money. And we saw an opportunity to make that turnaround time immediate so that the artists would get that revenue almost instantaneously. And also we saw an opportunity to be more affordable as well. So, initially, we offered that Shopify integration—and they call those applications—and that would allow those store owners to distribute that music digitally and have those sales reported in Nielsen SoundScan, and that drives the Billboard Top 100. Now since then, we've expanded quite considerably since the launch. We now report on sales for physical merchandise as well. Things like cassette tapes, and vinyl, so records. And you'd be surprised at how many people actually still buy cassette tapes. I don't know what they're doing with them, but they still do. And we're also moving into the live streaming business now, with all the COVID stuff going on, and there's been some pretty cool events that we've been a part of since we started doing that, and bands have gotten really elaborate with their live production setups and live streaming. To answer the second part of your question, what I do for them, as I mentioned, I mostly

The conversation covers: An overview of Ravi’s role as an evangelist — an often misunderstood, but important technology enabler. Balancing organizational versus individual needs when making decisions.Some of the core motivations that are driving cloud native migrations today. Why Ravi believes it in empowering engineers to make business decisions. Some of the top misconceptions about cloud native. Ravi also provides his own definition of cloud native.How cloud native architectures are forcing developers to “shift left.”Linkshttps://harness.io/Twitter: https://twitter.com/ravilachHarness community: https://community.harness.io/Harness Slack: https://harnesscommunity.slack.com/TranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, I am your host Emily Omier. And today I'm chatting with Ravi Lachhman. Ravi, I want to always start out with, first of all, saying thank you—Ravi: Sure, excited to be here.Emily: —and second of all, I like to have you introduce yourself, in your own words. What do you do? Where do you work?Ravi: Yes, sure. I'm an evangelist for Harness. So, what an evangelist does, I focus on the ecosystem, and I always like the joke, I marry people with software because when people think of evangelists, they think of a televangelist. Or at least that’s what I told my mother and she believes me still. I focus on the ecosystem Harness plays in. And so, Harness is a continuous delivery as a service company. So, what that means, all of the confidence-building steps that you need to get software into production, such as approvals, test orchestration, Harness, how to do that with lots of convention, and as a service.Emily: So, when you start your day, walk me through what you're actually doing on a typical day?Ravi: a typical day—dude, I wish there was a typical day because we wear so many hats as a start-up here, but kind of a typical day for me and a typical day for my team, I ended up reading a lot. I probably read about two hours a day, at least during the business day. Now, for some people that might not be a lot, but for me, that's a lot. So, I'll usually catch up with a lot of technology news and news in general. They kind of see how certain things are playing out. So, a big fan of The New Stack big fan of InfoQ. I also like reading Hacker News for more emotional reading. The big orange angry site, I call Hacker News. And then really just interacting with the community and teams at large. So, I'm the person I used to make fun of, you know, quote-unquote, “thought leader.” I used to not understand what they do, then I became one that was like, “Oh, boy.” [laughs]. And so just providing guidance for some of our field teams, some of the marketing teams around the cloud-native ecosystem, what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, my opinion on it. And that's pretty much it. And I get to do fun stuff like this, talking on podcasts, always excited to talk to folks and talk to the public. And then kind of just a mix of, say, making some sort of demos, or writing scaffolding code, just exploring new technologies. I'm pretty fortunate in my day to day activities.Emily: And tell me a little bit more about marrying people with software. Are you the matchmaker? Are you the priest, what role?Ravi: I can play all parts of the marrying lifecycle. Sometimes I'm the groom, sometimes I’m the priest. But I'm really helping folks make technical decisions. So, it’s go a joke because I get the opportunity to take a look at a wide swath of technology. And so just helping folks make technical decisions. Oh, is this new technology hot? Does this technology make sense? Does this project fatality? What do you think? I just play, kind of, masters of ceremony on folks who are making technology decisions.Emily: What are some common decisions that you help people with, and common questions that they have?Ravi: Lot of times it comes around common questions about technology. It's always finding rationale. Why are you leveraging a certain piece of technology? The ‘why’ question is always important. Let's say that you're a forward-thinking engineer or a forward-thinking technology leader. They also read a lot, and so if they come across, let's say a new hot technology, or if they're on Twitter, seeing, yeah, this particular project’s getting a lot of retweets, or they go in GitHub and see oh, this project has little stars, or forks. What does that mean? So, part of my role when talk

The conversation covers:Some of the pain points and driving factors that led Jón and his partners to launch Garden. Jon also talks about his early engineering experiences prior to Garden.How the developer experience can impact the overall productivity of a company, and why companies should try and optimize it.Kubernetes shortcomings, and the challenges that developers often face when working with it. Jón also talks about the Kubernetes skills gap, and how Garden helps to close that gap. Business stakeholder perception regarding Kuberentes challenges. The challenge of deploying a single service on Kubernetes in a secure manner — and why Jón was surprised by this process. How the Kubernetes ecosystem has grown, and the benefits of working with a large community of people who are committed to improving it. Jón’s multi-faceted role as CEO of Garden, and what his day typically entails as a developer, producer, and liaison. Garden’s main mission, which involves streamlining end-to-end application testing. Links:Company site: https://garden.io/Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonedvaldKubernetes Slack: https://slack.k8s.io/Transcript:Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host Emily Omier. And today I'm chatting with Jón Eðvald. And, Jón, thank you so much for joining me.Jón: Thank you so much for having me. You got the name pretty spot on. Kudos.Emily: Woohoo, I try. So, if you could actually just start by introducing yourself and where you work in Garden, that would be great.Jón: Sure. So, yeah, my name is Jón, one of the founders, and I’m the CEO of Garden. I've been doing software engineering for more years than I'd like to count, but Garden is my second startup. Previous company was some years ago; dropped out of Uni to start what became a natural language processing company. So, different sort of thing than what I'm doing now. But it's actually interesting just to scan through the history of how we used to do things compared to today. We ran servers out of basically a cupboard with a fan in it, back in the day, and now, things are done somewhat differently. So, yeah, I moved to Berlin, it's about four years ago now, met my current co-founders. We all shared a passion and, I guess to some degree, frustrations about the general developer experience around, I guess, distributed systems in general. And now it's become a lot about Kubernetes these days in the cloud-native world, but we are interested in addressing common developer headaches regarding all things microservices. Testing, in particular, has become a big part of our focus. Garden itself is an open-source product that aims to ease the developer experience around Kubernetes, again, with an emphasis on testing. When we started it, there wasn't a lot of these types of tools around, or they were pretty early on. Now there's a whole bunch of them, so we're trying to fit into this broad ecosystem. Happy to expand on that journey. But yeah, that's roughly—that's what Garden is, and that’s… yeah, a few hop-skips of my history as well.Emily: So, tell me a little bit more about the frustration that led you to start Garden. What were you doing, and what were you having trouble doing, basically?Jón: So, when I first moved to Berlin, it was to work for a company called Clue. They make a popular period tracking app. So, initially, I was meant to focus on the data science and data engineering side of things, but it became apparent that there was a lot of need for people on the engineering side as well. So, I gravitated into that and ended up managing the engineering team there. And it was a small operation. We had more than a million daily active users yet just a single back end developer, so it was bursting at the seams. And at the time running a simple Node.js backend on Heroku, single Postgres database, pretty simple. And I took that through—first, we adopted containers and moved into Docker Cloud. Then Docker Cloud disappeared, or was terminated without—we had to discover that by ourselves. And then Kubernetes was manifesting as the de facto way to do these things. So, we went through that transition, and I was kind of surprised. It was easy enough to get going and get to a functional level with Kubernetes and get everything running and working. The frustration came more from just the general developer experience and developer productivity side. Specifically, we found it very difficult to

Some of the highlights of the show include: The challenges that CERN was facing when storing, processing, and analyzing data, and why it pushed them to think about containerization. CERN’s evolution from using mainframes, to physical commodity hardware, to virtualization and private clouds, and eventually to containers. Ricardo also explains how the migration to containerization and Kubernetes was started.Why there was a big push from groups that focus on reproducibility to explore containerization. How end users have responded to Kubernetes and containers. Ricardo talks about the steep Kubernetes learning curve, and how they dealt with frustration and resistance. Some of top benefits of migrating to Kubernetes, and the impact that the move has had on their end users. Current challenges that CERN is working through, regarding hybrid infrastructure and rising data loads. Ricardo also talks about how CERN optimizes system resources for their scientists, and what it’s like operating as a public sector organization.How CERN handles large data transfers. Links:Email:[email protected] Twitter: https://twitter.com/ahcorportoCERNTranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.Emily: Welcome to the Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and today I'm here with Ricardo Rocha. Ricardo, thank you so much for joining us.Ricardo: It's a pleasure.Emily: Ricardo, can you actually go ahead and introduce yourself: where you work, and what you do?Ricardo: Yeah, yes, sure. I work at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. I'm a software engineer and I work in the CERN IT department. I've done quite a few different things in the past in the organization, including software development in the areas of storage and monitoring, and also distributed computing. But right now, I'm part of the CERN Cloud Team, and we manage the CERN private cloud and all the resources we have. And I focus mostly on networking and containerization, so Kubernetes and all these new technologies.Emily: And on a day to day basis, what do you usually do? What sort of activities are you actually doing?Ricardo: Yeah. So, it's mostly making sure we provide the infrastructure that our physics users and experiments require, and also the people on campus. So, CERN is a pretty large organization. We have around 10,000 people on-site, and many more around the world that depend on our resources. So, we operate private clouds, we basically do DevOps-style work. And we have a team dedicated for the Cloud, but also for other areas of the data center. And it's mostly making sure everything operates correctly; try to automate more and more, so we do some improvements gradually; and then giving support to our users.Emily: Just so everyone knows, can you tell a little bit more about what kind of work is done at CERN? What kind of experiments people are running?Ricardo: Our main goal is fundamental research. So, we try to answer some questions about the universe. So, what's dark matter? What's dark energy? Why don't we see antimatter? And similar questions. And for that, we build very large experiments. So, the biggest experiment we have, which is actually the biggest scientific experiment ever built, is the Large Hadron Collider, and this is a particle accelerator that accelerates two beams of protons in opposite directions, and we make them collide at very specific points where we build this very large physics experiments that try to understand what happens in these collisions and try to look for new physics. And in reality, what happens with these collisions is that we generate large amounts of data that need to be stored, and processed, and analyzed, so the IT infrastructure that we support, it’s larger fraction dedicated to this physics analysis.Emily: Tell me a little bit more about some of the challenges related to processing and storing the huge amount of data that you have. And also, how this has evolved, and how it pushed you to think about containerization.Ricardo: The big challenge we have is the amount of data that we have to support. So, these experiments, each of the experiments, at the moment of the collisions, it can generate data in the order of one petabyte a second. This is, of course, not something we can handle, so the first thing we do, we use these hardware triggers to filter this data quite significantly, but we still generate, per experiment, something like a few gigabytes a second, so up to 1

Highlights from this episode include: Key market drivers that are causing Cloud Comrade’s clients to containerize applications — including the role that the global pandemic is playing. The pitfalls of approaching cloud migration with a cost-first strategy, and why Andy doesn’t believe in this approach. Common misconceptions that can arise when comparing cloud TCO to on-premise infrastructure.How today’s enterprises tend to view cloud computing versus cloud-native. Andy also mentions a key requirement that companies have to have when integrating cloud services.Andy’s thoughts on build versus buy when integrating cloud services at the enterprise level.Why cloud migration is a relatively safe undertaking for companies because it’s easy to correct mistakes.Why businesses need to re-think AI and to be more realistic in terms of what can actually be automated. Andy’s must-have engineering tool, which may surprise you.Links:Cloud Comrade LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cloud-comrade/Follow Andy on Twitter: @andywaromaConnect with Andy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyw/TranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I'm here with Andy Waroma. Andy, I just wanted to start with having you introduce yourself.Andy: Yeah, hi. Thanks, Emily for having me on your podcast. My name is Andy Waroma, and I'm based in Singapore, but originally from Finland. I've been [unintelligible] in Singapore for about 20 years, and for 11 years I spent with a company called SAP focusing on business software applications. And then more recently, about six years ago, I co-founded together with my ex-colleague from SAP, a company called Cloud Comrade, and we have been running Cloud Comrade now for six years and Cloud Comrade focuses on two things: number one, on cloud migrations; and number two, on cloud managed services across the Southeast Asia region.Emily: What kind of things do you help companies understand when you're helping with cloud migrations? Is this like, like, a lift and shift? To what extent are you helping them change the architecture of their applications?Andy: Good question. So, typically, if you look at the Southeast Asian market, we are probably anywhere between one to two years behind that of the US market. And I always like to say that the benefit that we have in Southeast Asia is that we have a time machine at our disposal. So, whatever has happened in the US in the past 18 months or so it's going to be happening also in Singapore and Southeast Asia. And for the first three to four years of this business, we saw a lot of lift and shift migrations, but more recently, we have been asked to go and containerize applications to microservices, revamp applications from monolithic approach to a much more flexible and cloud-native approach, and we just see those requirements increasing as companies understand what kind of innovation they can do on different cloud platforms.Emily: And what do you think is driving, for your clients, this desire to containerize applications?Andy: Well, if you asked me three months ago, I probably would have said it's about innovation, and business advantage, and getting ahead in the market, and investing in the future. Now, with the global pandemic situation, I would say that most companies are looking at two things: they're looking at cost savings, and they are also looking at automation. And I think cost savings is quite obvious; most companies need to know how they can reduce on their IT expenditure, how they can move from CAPEX to OPEX, how they can be targeting their resources up and down depending on the business demand what they have. And at the same time, they're also not looking to hire a lot of new people into their internal IT organization. So, therefore, most of our customers want to see their applications to be as automated as possible. And of course, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and everything else helps them to achieve that somewhat. But first and foremost, of course, it's about all services that Cloud provides in general. And then once they have been moving some of those applications and getting positive experiences, that's where we typically see the phase two kicking in, going into cloud-native microservices, containers, Kubernetes, Docker, and so forth.Emily: And do you think when companies are going into this, thinking, “Oh, I'm going to really

Some highlights of the show include:The company’s cloud native journey, which accelerated with the acquisition of Uswitch. How the company assessed risk prior to their migration, and why they ultimately decided the task was worth the gamble.Uswitch’s transformation into a profitable company resulting from their cloud native migration.The role that multidisciplinary, collaborative teams played in solving problems and moving projects forward. Paul also offers commentary on some of the tensions that resulted between different teams.Key influencing factors that caused the company to adopt containerization and Kubernetes. Paul goes into detail about their migration to Kubernetes, and the problems that it addressed. Paul’s thoughts on management and prioritization as CTO. He also explains his favorite engineering tool, which may come as a surprise. Links:RVU Website: https://www.rvu.co.uk/Uswitch Website: https://www.uswitch.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/pinglesGitHub: https://github.com/pinglesTranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and today I am chatting with Paul Ingles. Paul, thank you so much for joining me.Paul: Thank you for having me.Emily: Could you just introduce yourself: where do you work? What do you do? And include, sort of, some specifics. We all have a job title, but it doesn't always reflect what our actual day-to-day is.Paul: I am the CTO at a company called RVU in London. We run a couple of reasonably big-ish price comparison, aggregator type sites. So, we help consumers figure out and compare prices on broadband products, mobile phones, energy—so in the UK, energy is something which is provided through a bunch of different private companies, so you've got a fair amount of choice on kind of that thing. So, we tried to make it easier and simpler for people to make better decisions on the household choices that they have. I've been there for about 10 years, so I've had a few different roles. So, as CTO now, I sit on the exec team and try to help inform the business and technology strategy. But I've come through a bunch of teams. So, I've worked on some of the early energy price comparison stuff, some data infrastructure work a while ago, and then some underlying DevOps type automation and Kubernetes work a couple of years ago.Emily: So, when you get in to work in the morning, what types of things are usually on your plate?Paul: So, I keep a journal. I use bullet journalling quite extensively. So, I try to track everything that I’ve got to keep on top of. Generally, what I would try to do each day is catch up with anybody that I specifically need to follow up with. So, at the start of the week, I make a list of every day, and then I also keep a separate column for just general priorities. So, things that are particularly important for the week, themes of work going on, like, technology changes, or things that we're trying to launch, et cetera. And then I will prioritize speaking to people based on those things. So, I'll try and make sure that I'm focusing on the most important thing. I do a weekly meeting with the team. So, we have a few directors that look after different aspects of the business, and so we do a weekly meeting to just run through everything that's going on and sharing the problems. We use the three P's model: so, sharing progress problems and plans. And we use that to try and steer on what we do. And we also look at some other team health metrics. Yeah, it's interesting actually. I think when I switched from working in one of the teams to being in the CTO role, things change quite substantially. That list of things that I had to care about increase hugely, to the point where it far exceeded how much time I had to spend on anything. So, nowadays, I find that I'm much more likely for some things to drop off. And so it's unfortunate, and you can't please everybody, so you just have to say, “I'm really sorry, but this thing is not high on the list of priorities, so I can't spend any time on it this week, but if it's still a problem in a couple of weeks time, then we'll come back to it.” But yeah, it can vary quite a lot.Emily: Hmm, interesting. I might ask you more questions about that later. For now, let's sort of dive into the cloud-native journey. What made RVU decide that containerization was a good idea and that Kubernetes was a good idea? What were the motivations and who was pushing for it?Paul: That's a really good question. So, I got involved about 10 years ago. So, I worked for a search marketing startup that was in London called Forward Internet Group, and they acquired USwitch in 2010. And prior to working at Forward, I'd worked as a consultant at ThoughtWorks in London, so I spent a lot of time working in banks on continuous delivery and things like that

Some of the highlights include: Why Vodafone moved to a cloud native architecture. As Tom explains, the company was struggling to manage operations across more than 20 markets. They also needed to improve the customer experience, and foster customer loyalty. Why their business and engineering teams were both in favor of cloud native.The benefits of deploying daily operational activities around a single cloud native platform. An overview of where Vodavone currently is in their overall cloud native journey. Tom also explains how cloud native conversations have changed inside of the company throughout their journey, as various business units have caught on to the benefits of the cloud.Vodafaone’s transition from outsourcing roughly 97 percent of their operations, to bringing 95 percent in house. Tom explains how this has improved efficiency and expedited time to market.The challenge that Vodafone faced in trying to apply legacy network security solutions to distributed and dynamic systems. Tom’s thoughts on why Vodafone’s cloud native transition and modernization efforts have been crucial to their success over the last five years. Links:Vodafone Group: https://www.vodafone.com/Connect with Tom on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tom-kivlin-5b469321The Business of Cloud Native: http://thebusinessofcloudnative.com Tom’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomkivlinCNCF GitHub: https://github.com/cncfCNCF Slack: https://slack.cncf.io/Kubernetes Slack: http://slack.kubernetes.io/TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I am chatting with Tom Kivlin. Tom, thank you so much for joining us.Tom: You're welcome. No problem.Emily: Let's just start out with having you introduce yourself. What do you do? Where do you work, and what do you actually do during your workday?Tom: Sure. So, I'm a principal cloud orchestration architect at Vodafone Group. I work in the UK. And my day job consists of providing guidance and strategy and architectural blueprints for cloud-native platforms within Vodafone. So, that's around providing guidance to the software domains that are looking to adopt cloud-native architectures and methodologies and also to the more traditional infrastructure domains to try and help them provide their services in a more cloud-native manner to those modern teams.Emily: And what does that mean when you go into the office—or your home office, go into your dining room where your laptop is, I don't know—what do you actually do? What does an average day look like?Tom: It can vary. So, depending on the activity at the time, it could be anything from preparing a global policy that needs to go through the senior technology leadership team, to preparing some extremely detailed requirements for selection process or creating some infrastructures code, or the code artifacts for the deployment of cloud-native services, whether that's in our lab, or to help our services teams within Vodafone.Emily: Tell me a little bit more about what pain made Vodafone think about moving to cloud-native and Kubernetes.Tom: Primarily, it was the challenge of having 25 different markets, or 23 now. We launched a digital strategy to—so back in 2015, we launched a five-year strategy, which we wanted to massively increase the rollout of 4G, of converged network offerings, of improved customer experience. And we found that the traditional way of managing software was not supportive enough in our ambition. And so, having to choose cloud-native technologies, things like Kubernetes, but also the modern operating models, that was the driver: it was to improve our customer experience, and our customer-affecting KPIs, really.Emily: And when you say it wasn't supportive enough, what do you mean specifically?Tom: So, things like time to market, for example. So, if we wanted to offer a new service—so one of the things that 4G started the drive towards was a more granulated service offering to consumers, and so lots of different things could be offered. And if it took you six months to think of an idea and then have to go through—or even longer than six months to get to the point where that could be offered to customers, even if it was just a very minor feature within an existing product, then that's not going to engender customer loyalty. And so, things like the cloud-native mindset, where there's a much closer link between the engineering teams and the customer, there are much shorter periods of time between ideas coming in from the customers and then being delivered back to the customers as product features, that sort of time to market was really enabled by cloud-native technologies and mindsets.Emily: And how does having two dozen, more or less, different markets, how does that play into the decision A) to move to cloud-native in g

This conversation covers: Why many businesses are shifting away from analyzing total cloud spend (CapEX vs. OpEX) and are now forecasting spend based around usage patterns.The difference between cloud-native, cloud computing, and operating in the cloud. The delta that often exists between engineering teams and business stakeholders regarding costs. Travis also offers tips for aligning both parties earlier in the project lifecycle.Common misconceptions that exist around cost management, for both engineers and business stakeholders. For example, Travis talks about how engineers often assume that business teams manage purely to dollars and cents, when they are often very open to extending budgets when it’s necessary.Tips for predicting cloud spend, and why teams usually fall short in their projections.Why conducting cloud cost management too early in a project can be detrimental. Comparing the cost of the cloud to a private data center. The growing reliance on multi-cloud among large enterprises. Travis also explains why it’s important to have the right processes in place, to identify cross-cloud saving opportunities. How IT has transitioned from a business enabler to a business driver in recent years, and is now arguably the most important component for the average company.Links:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TravisWRehlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-rehl-tech/Main Company Site: https://cloudcheckr.com CloudCheckr All Stars: https://cloudchecker.com/allstars TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of cloud-native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to the Business of cloud-native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and I'm here today with Travis Rehl, who is the director of product at CloudCheckr. Travis, I just wanted to start out, first of all, by saying thank you for joining me on the show. And second of all, if you could just start off by introducing yourself. What you do, and by that I mean, what does an actual day look like? And some of your background?Travis: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. So yeah, I'm Travis Rehl, director of product here at CloudCheckr. What that really means is, I have the fun job of figuring out what should the business do next in relation to our product offering here at the business. That means roadmap, looking at the market, what are customers doing differently now, or planning to do differently over the next year, two years or so, on cloud? What their cost strategies are, what their invoicing and chargeback strategies are, all that type of fun stuff, and how we can help accommodate those particular strategies using our product offering. Sort of, day to day, though, I would say that a bunch of my time during the day is spent talking to customers, figuring out where they are in their cloud journey, if you will, what programs or projects they may have in flight that are interesting, or complicated, or they need help on. Especially making any sort of analysis help in particular, and then lastly, taking all that information and packaging it up neatly, so that the business can make a decision to add functionality to our product in some way that can assist them move forward.Emily: The first question I wanted to ask is actually if you could talk just a little bit about the distinction between cloud-native, and cloud computing, and operating in the cloud. What do all of those things actually mean, and where's the delta between them?Travis: Sure. Yeah so, it's actually kind of interesting, and you'll hear it a little bit differently from different people. In my background, in particular—I used to run an engineering department for a managed service provider. And so we used to do a lot of project planning of companies as to what's their strategy for their software deployment of some kind on cloud. And typically the two you see for, say, cloud-native versus operating in the cloud, operating on the cloud is very atypical. You'd associate that to something like lift and shift—probably hear about a lot—the concept of taking your on-prem workload and simply cloning it, or taking it in some way and copying in some way, on to the cloud-native vendor in particular. So, literally just standing up servers of clones of hard drives and so forth, and emulating what you had on-prem, but on the cloud. That's a great technique for moving quickly to cloud. That's not a great technique if you want to be cloud-native. So, that's really the big segue for cloud-native, in particular, is you want to build a software solution that takes advantage of cloud-only technology, meaning serverless compute resources, meaning auto-scaling different types of services themselves, stuff you probably didn't have when you're on-prem originally, that you now have, you can take advantage of on the cloud. That's almost like a redesign, or reimplementation around those models that cloud itself provides to you. That, to

Some of the highlights of the show include: The difference between cloud computing and cloud native.Why operations teams often struggle to keep up with development teams, and the problems that this creates for businesses.How Dave works with operations teams and trains them how to approach cloud native so they can keep up with developers, instead of being a drag on the organization. Dave’s philosophy on introducing processes, and why he prefers to use as few as possible for as long as possible and implement them only when problems arise. Why executives should strive to keep developers happy, productive, and empowered. Why operations teams need to stop thinking about themselves as people who merely complete ticket requests, and start viewing themselves as key enablers who help the organization move faster. Viewing wait time as waste. The importance of aligning operations and development teams, and having them work towards the same goal. This also requires using the same reporting structure. Links:Company site: https://www.mangoteque.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmangot/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveMangotCIO Author page: https://www.cio.com/author/Dave-Mangot/TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and today I am chatting with Dave Mangot. And Dave is a consultant who works with companies on improving their web operations. He has experience working with a variety of companies making the transition to cloud-native and in various stages of their cloud computing journey. So, Dave, my first question is, can you go into detail about, sort of, the nitty-gritty of what you do?Dave: Sure. I've spent my whole technical professional career mostly in Silicon Valley, after moving out to California from Maryland. And really, I got early into web operations working in Unix systems administration as a sysadmin, and then we all changed the names of all those things over the years from sysadmin to Technical Infrastructure Engineer, and then Site Reliability Engineer, and all the other fun stuff. But I've been involved in the DevOps movement, kind of, since the beginning, and I've been involved in cloud computing, kind of, since the beginning. And so I'm lucky enough in my day job to be able to work with companies on their, like you said, transitions into Cloud, but really I'm helping companies, at least for their cloud stuff, think about what does cloud computing even mean? What does it mean to operate in a cloud computing manner? It's one thing to say, “We're going to move all of our stuff from the data center into Cloud,” but most people you'll hear talk about lift and shift; does that really the best way? And obviously, it's not. I think most of the studies will prove that and things like the State of DevOps report, and those other things, but really love working with companies on, like, what is so unique about the Cloud, and what advantages does that give, and how do we think about these problems in order to be able to take the best advantage that we can?Emily: Dive into a little bit more. What is the difference between cloud computing and cloud-native? And where does some confusion sometimes seep in there?Dave: I think cloud-native is just really talking about the fact that something was designed specifically for running in a cloud computing environment. To me, I don't really get hung up on those differences because, ultimately, I don't think they matter all that much. You can take memcached, which was designed to run in the data center, and you can buy that as a service on AWS. So, does that mean because it wasn't designed for the Cloud from the beginning, that it's not going to work? No, you're buying that as a service from AWS. I think cloud-native is really referring to these tools that were designed with that as a first-class citizen. And there's times where that really matters. I remember, we did an analysis of the configuration management tools years back, and what would work best on AWS and things like that, and it was pretty obvious that some of those tools were not designed for the Cloud. They were not cloud-native. They really had this distinct feel that their cloud capabilities were bolted on much later, and it was clunky, and it was hard to work with, whereas some of the other tools, really felt like that was a very natural fit, like that was the way that they had been created. But ultimately, I think the differences aren't all that great, it just, really, matters how you're going to take advantage of those tools.Emily: And with the companies that you work with, what is the problem or problems that they are usually facing that lead them to hire you?Dave: Generally the question, or the statement, I guess, that I get from the CIOs and CTOs, and CEOs is, “My production web operatio

This conversation covers:How Frame.io was faced with the decision to be cloud native or cloud-enabled — and the business and technical reasons why Frame.io chose to be cloud native. How Abhinav successfully built a world class cloud-native security program from the ground up to protect Frame.io users’ sensitive video content. Abhinav also talks about the special security considerations for truly cloud native applications. Cloud native as a “journey without a destination.” In other words, there is no end point with cloud native transitions, because new technologies are always being developed.Why Abhinav is a firm believer in both ISEs and GitOps, and why he thinks the industry should embrace both of these strategies.The challenge of not only maintaining security in this type of environment, but also communicating security issues to various stakeholders with different priorities. Abinhav also talks about the role that specialists like AWS and machine learning experts can play in furthering security agendas.Common misconceptions about cloud native security.Frame.io’s decision to roll out Kubernetes, and why they are also considering adding chaos engineering to fortify against unexpected issues.Tool and vendor overload, and the importance of trying to find the right tools that fit your infrastructure. Links:Frame.io: https://frame.io/Connect with Abhinav on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/absri/The Business of Cloud Native: http://thebusinessofcloudnative.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I am chatting with Abhinav Srivastava. Abhinav, can you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us about where you work, and what you do.Abhinav: Thanks for having me, Emily. Hello, everyone. My name is Avinash Srivastava. I'm a VP and the head of information security and infrastructure at Frame.io. At Frame, I am building the security and infrastructure programs from ground up, making sure that we are secured and compliant, and our services are available and reliable. Before joining Frame.io, I spent a number of years in AT&T Research. There I worked on various cloud and security technologies, wrote numerous research papers, and filed patents. And before joining AT&T, I spent five great years in Georgia Tech on a Ph.D. in computer science. My dissertation was on cloud and virtualization security.Emily: And what do you do? What does an average day look like?Abhinav: Right. So, just to tell you where I answer the question where I work: so I work at Frame.io, and Frame.io is a cloud-based video review and collaboration startup that allows users to securely upload their video contents to our platform, and then invite teams and clients to collaborate on those uploaded assets. We are essentially building the video cloud, so you can think of us as a GitHub for videos. What I do when I get to office—apart from getting my morning coffee—as soon as I arrive at my desk, I check my calendar to see how's my day looking; I check my emails and slack messages. We use slack primarily within the company doing for communication. And then I do my daily standup with my teams. We follow a two-week sprint across all departments that I oversee. So, a standup gives me a good picture on the current priorities and any blockers.Emily: Tell me a little bit about the cloud-native journey at Frame.io? How did the company get started with containers, and what are you using to orchestrate now? How have you moved along in the cloud-native journey?Abhinav: We are born in the cloud, kind of, company. So, we are hosted in Amazon AWS since day one. So, we are in the cloud from the get-go. And once you are in the cloud, it is hard not to use tools and technologies that are offered, because our goal has always been to build secure, reliable, and available infrastructure. So, we were very, very mindful from the get-go that while we are in the cloud, we can choose to be cloud-native or just cloud-enabled. Means use tools, just virtual machines, or heavyweight virtual machines, and not to use container and just host our entire workload within that. But we chose to be cloud-native because, again, they wanted to boot up or spin up new containers very fast. As a platform we, as I mentioned, we allow users to upload videos, and once the videos are uploaded, we have to transcode those videos to generate different low-resolution videos. And that use case fits with the lightweight container model. So, from the get-go, we started using containerized microservices; orchestration layer; From AWS, their auto-scaling; automation infrastructure as a code; monitoring. so all those things were, kind of, no brainer for us to use because given our use case and given the way we wanted to be a very fast uploader and transcoder for all of o

In this episode of the Business Cloud Native, host Emily Omier talks with Jon Tirsen, who is engineering lead for storage at Cash App. This conversation focuses on Cash App’s cloud native journey, and how they are working to build an application that is more scalable, flexible, and easier to manage.The conversation covers:How the need for hybrid cloud services and uniform program models led Cash App to Kubernetes. Some of the major scaling issues that Cash App was facing. For example, the company needed to increase user capacity, and add new product lines. The process of trying to scale Cash App’s MySQL database, and the decision to split up their dataset into smaller parts that could run on different databases.Cash App’s monolithic application, which contains hundreds of thousands of lines of code — and why it’s becoming increasingly difficult to manage and grow. How Jon’s team is trying to balance product/ business and technical needs, and deliver value while rearchitecting their system to scale their operations.Why Cash App is working to build small, product-oriented teams, and a system where products can be executed and deployed at their own pace through the cloud. Jon also discusses some of the challenges that are preventing this from happening.How Cash App was able to help during the pandemic, by facilitating easy stimulus transfers through their service — and why it wouldn’t have been possible without a cloud native architecture. Links:Cash App: https://cash.app/Square: https://squareup.com/us/enJon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tirsen?lang=enConnect with Jon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tirsen/?originalSubdomain=auThe Business of Cloud Native: http://thebusinessofcloudnative.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. My name is Emily Omier, I'm here chatting with Jon Tirsen.Jon: Happy to be here. My name is, as you said, Jon Tirsen, and I work as the engineering lead of storage here at Cash App. I've been at Cash for maybe four or five years now. So, I've been with it from the very early days. And before Cash, I was doing a startup, that failed, for five years. So, it's a travel guide in the mobile phone startup. And before that, I was at Google working on another failed product called the Google Wave, which you might remember, and before that, it was a company called ThoughtWorks, which some of you probably know about as well.Emily: And in case people don't know, the Cash App is part of Square, right?Jon: Yes. Cash App is where we're separating all the different products quite a lot these days. So, it used to be called just Square Cash, but now it has its own branding and its own identity, and its own leadership, and everything. So, we're trying to call it an ecosystem of startups. So, each product line can run its business the way it wants to, to a large degree.Emily: And so, what do you actually spend your day doing?Jon: Most of my days, I'm still code, and doing various operational tasks, and setting up systems, and testing, and that sort of thing. I also, maybe about half my day, I spend on more management tasks, which is reviewing documents, writing documents, and talking to people trying to figure out our strategy and so on. So, maybe about half my time, I do real technical things, and then the other half I do more management stuff.Emily: Where would you say the cloud-native journey started for you?Jon: Well, so a lot of Square used to run on-premises. So, we had our own data centers and things. But especially for Cash App, since we've grown so quickly, it started getting slightly out of control. We were basically outgrowing—we could not physically put more machines into our data centers. So, we've started moving a lot of our services over to Amazon in this case, and we want to have a shared way of building services that would work both in the Cloud and also in our data centers. So, something like Kubernetes and all the tools around that would give us a more uniform programming model that we could use to deploy apps in both of these environments. We started that, two, three years ago. We started looking at moving our workload out of our data centers.Emily: What were the issues that you were encountering? Give me a little bit more details about the scaling issues that we were talking about.Jon: There two dimensions that we needed to scale out the Cash App, sort of, system slash [unintelligible] architecture. So, one thing was that we just grew so quickly that we needed to be able to increase capacity. So, that was across the board. So, from databases to application servers, and bandwidth, everywhere. We need to just be able to increase our capacity of handling more users, but also we were trying to grow our product as well. So, at the same time, we also want to build and be able to add new fea

Emily and Dejan cover the following points:8x8’s journey to a leading cloud technology provider.Why 8x8 decided to migrate to Kubernetes, a move that gave them the flexibility to run workloads wherever they want.Dejan’s thoughts on the Kubernetes migration, and how it’s helped the company improve its operations. For example, Kubernetes has helped 8x8 migrate away from several legacy systems.The biggest challenges and surprises that the 8x8 team experienced during their migration journey, such as getting engineering teams to embrace a culture built around monitoring, observability, and documentation.How 8x8 has avoided “feature bloat” and maintained a product that performs at a high level, while staying true to the features that are important for its core customer base. The strategy of obtaining buy-in from stakeholders and fellow executives by focusing on business problems, instead of technical issues. This included cost, velocity of innovation, global scale, and so on.How 8x8’s cloud-native architecture has made it faster and easier to scale. TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, and I am talking with Dejan Deklich, from 8x8.Dejan: So, I'm the Chief Product Officer at 8x8. To give you an idea, 8x8 is now 16 or 1700 employees worldwide, 450 million in revenue, give or take, offices all over the world, customers all over the world. I'm responsible for all product management, engineering, QA, project management operations for all the products worldwide for 8x8.Emily: Can you give me a little bit of an idea of 8x8’s history in the Cloud?Dejan: So, 8x8 has been around, probably, a lot longer than most companies you're talking about. We've been public 30 years, give or take. We have been in the business of communication and collaboration since early 2000s. As you can imagine, we have gone through so many different tech stacks, architectures, and so on, that it is pretty amazing. We have, in the last several years, done a massive cleanup and rebuild of our software stack. We rebuilt pretty much all of the mobile apps, desktop apps, web apps. We rebuilt the platform starting with billing and provisioning all the way down to how the voice traverses the world. So, it's been a incredible couple of years, incredible journey where I would argue we have gone from the early versions of hosted service to early versions of Cloud, maybe 10 years ago, and we are now what I would like to call a proper cloud technology company. And it's been a very interesting, difficult journey. We learned a lot. We messed up a lot of things, then we learned some more than they did it correctly.Emily: When you first moved to Kubernetes, and the modern public cloud, what was the rationale? What were their business reasons?Dejan: Those multiple steps there. We moved to public cloud I don't know, five, six, seven years ago. We ran a lot of things in Amazon. And to be fair, we still also have data centers around the world. So, let me explain quickly what we actually running because I think it's important. So, we have, I think 16 data centers around the world, and then we run in pretty much every region of Amazon, we use Google Cloud extensively, and we have now shifted a lot of workloads to Oracle Cloud. At the same time, business is threatening me with Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud as something that might be coming our way in the next couple of quarters. So, data centers are there because on the networking layer, the Cloud does not yet give us what we need for the realtime voice and video transmission. We actually are the best voice provider in the industry. We have proven that, and that's where your milliseconds really matter, therefore networking still sits in data centers. As soon as the backbone can be moved into Amazon, and we are told that could happen in the next three to four years, we will move likely everything to the Cloud. So, what we have generally in the Cloud are different applications, and the reason for that is simply the velocity of deploying and scaling them. So, what matters to us is, on one hand, the global reach: we have customers in 150 countries around the world. We have to have data centers close to the customers. And the applications need to be as close to the customer as possible, therefore all the different regions of Amazon, and Google, and whatnot. So, as you can imagine, managing all of that, monitoring all of that is a non-trivial exercise. So, we moved to Kubernetes, in large reason, simply because it is one underlying framework that allows us to run workloads wherever we want. So, to give you an idea, we launched a video meetings product to compete with Zoom. We had, on launch, a couple of hundred thousand users, nothing really. And then, this COVID-19 happened, and within a period of weeks, we now hit 15

Some of the highlights of the show includeThe diplomacy that’s required between software engineers and management, and why influence is needed to move projects forward to completion.Driving factors behind Ygrene’s Kubernetes migration, which included an infrastructure bottleneck, a need to streamline deployment, and a desire to leverage their internal team of cloud experts.Management’s request to ship code faster, and why it was important to the organization. How the company’s engineers responded to the request to ship code faster, and overcame disconnects with management.How the team obtained executive buy-in for a Kubernetes migration.Key cultural changes that were required to make the migration to Kubernetes successful.How unexpected challenges forced the team to learn the “depths of Kubernetes,” and how it helped with root cause analysis.Why the transition to Kubernetes was a success, enabling the team to ship code faster, deliver more value, secure more customers, and drive more revenue. Links:HerdX: https://www.herdx.com/Ygrene: https://ygrene.com/Austin Twitter: https://twitter.com/_austbotAustin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austbot/Arnold’s book on publisher site: https://www.packtpub.com/cloud-networking/the-kubernetes-workshop Arnold’s book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Kubernetes-Workshop-Interactive-Approach-Learning/dp/1838820752/TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. My name is Emily Omier, and I am here with Austin Adams and Zack Arnold, and we are here to talk about why companies go cloud-native.Austin: So, I'm currently the CTO of a small Agrotech startup called HerdX. And that means I spend my days designing software, designing architecture for how distributed systems talk, and also leading teams of engineers to build proof-of-concepts and then production systems as they take over the projects that I've designed. Emily: And then, what did you do at Ygrene? Austin: I did the exact same thing, except for without the CTO title. And I also had other higher-level engineers working with me at Ygrene. So, we made a lot of technical decisions together. We all migrated to Kubernetes together, and Zack was a chief proponent of that, especially with the culture change. So, I focused on the designing software that teams of implementation engineers could take over and actually build out for the long run. And I think Zack really focused on—oh, I'll let Zack say what he focused on. [laughs].Emily: Go for it, Zach.Zach: Hello. I'm Zack. I also no longer work for Ygrene, although I have a lot of admiration and respect for the people who do. It was a fantastic company. So, Austin called me up a while back and asked me to think about participating in a DevOps engineering role at Ygrene. And he sort of said at the outset, we don't really know what it looks like, and we're pretty sure that we just created a position out of a culture, but would you be willing to embody it? And up until this point, I'd had cloud experience, and I had had software engineering experience, but I didn't really spend a ton of time focused on the actual movement of software from developer’s laptops to production with as few hiccups, and as many tests, and as much safety as possible in between. So, I always told people the role felt like it was three parts. It was part IT automation expert, part software engineer, and then part diplomat. And the diplomacy was mostly in between people who are more operations focused. So, support engineers, project managers, and people who were on-call day in and day out, and being a go-between higher levels of management and software engineers themselves because there's this awkward, coordinated motion that has to really happen at a fine-grained level in order to get DevOps to really work at a company. What I mean by that is, essentially, Dev and Ops seem to on the surface have opposing goals, the operation staff, it’s job is to maintain stability, and the development side’s job is to introduce change, which invariably introduces instability. So, that dichotomy means that being able to simultaneously satisfy both desires is really a goal of DevOps, but it's difficult to achieve at an organizational level without dealing with some pretty critical cultural components. So, what do I spend my day on? The answer to that question is, yes. It really depends on the day. Sometimes it's cloud engineers. Sometimes it's QA folks, sometimes it's management. Sometimes I'm heads-down writing software for integrations in between tools. And every now and again, I get to contribute to open-source. So, a lot of different actual daily tasks take place in my position.Emily: Tell me a little bit more about this diplomacy between software engineers and management.Zach: [laughs]. Well, I'm not sure who's going to be listening i

Some highlights of the show includeThe challenges of operating digital commerce at scale, including the need for resource pooling and resiliency — and how this caused Ant Financial to re-think their infrastructure. Ant Financial’s former approach to scaling, which was mostly manual, and highly resource-intensive. How Kubernetes is expediting cloud development for Ant Financial.Haojie’s thoughts on the global engineering skills gap, and China’s growing cloud computing market including driving factors and barriers. Why Ant Financial’s migration has largely been a success — and why achieving operational security is now a top priority for the company. How Ant Financial is managing disconnect between its engineers and business leaders. The company’s ongoing mission to migrate its systems and applications away from legacy architectures.LinksLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haojiehang/https://www.investopedia.com/tech/worlds-top-10-fintech-companies-baba/TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: So, I always start the same way. Can you introduce yourself?Haojie: Hey, my name is Haojie Hang. I'm a product manager in the CTO office at Ant Financial. I work on the product and strategy side for, basically, the CTO and the other executive leaders, as well as leading a small product teams within the org to look at the frontier technology in the cloud and other infrastructure businesses.Emily: And can you tell me a little bit more about what Ant Financial does? And then, also, what do you do on a day to day basis? What do you do when you get into the office?Haojie: Yeah, I'll do a quick introduction about the Ant Financial business. It's not just one business or two business, it's a group of businesses that we innovate and we do, mostly in China, but we're also expanding very rapidly all over the world. So, Ant Financial is basically a group of businesses including credit for both consumers and the enterprise, as well as loan businesses, both consumer and enterprise businesses. We say that the parent organization is basically, we call it Alipay, it’s the earliest business we do since 2004 when the business was basically born from Taobao, which is our parent company. So, in short, the Ant Financial Business has a lot of presence in the business of payments business, remittance, credit card, loans, securities, and many other businesses like intelligent technology, blockchain, pretty much everything you can imagine in the FinTech and financial services, we’re in there.Emily: Tell me a little bit more about the cloud-native journey for Ant Financial. When did it start? Why did it start? What was some of the motivations behind moving to cloud-native?Haojie: Yeah, it's actually quite interesting. I joined Ant Financial in 2008, but actually, the entire company started to look at cloud-native technology quite early, in 2012. So, back then, people were just looking at these technologies around the world, mostly from the US, they look at this open-source community, look at what other companies are doing, how to use the cloud-native technology to help with their business in the peak time, so during event. There’s online promotion event we're doing every year, called Double 11—Shuāng shíyī in Chinese. Every year, so we have a large amount of promotional events happening online, trying to help merchants and the customer is trying to sell and buy stuff in our Tmall and Taobao platform in very, very discounted price. So, for that promotion event online, we have to think about the resilience, the resource pooling, oftentimes the visits has to increase multiple times, sometimes over 100 times the increase compared to the normal time. So in that case, we have to think about how we can be very resilient and efficient infrastructure to support that business needs. So, this is a very large topic. And then, back then, there was a lot of focus and study in our cloud computing department. So, we started looking at this technology called Mesos in 2012. And then, we do a lot of experiments around this technology, but from the business perspective, it's still hard to justify the benefits of moving to Mesos completely. So, we have multiple teams doing a lot of research in Mesos, in Kubernetes, sometimes in our own technology stack, but there's not enough proof or enough confidence for us to move completely over to that technology, until the emergence of Docker container, this Docker technology. Then we started to look at our container infrastructure, really do the investigation around this technology, and understand why this is taking over so quickly over the world, from the business perspective, and from the technology perspective. If you look at the community of Docker, the thing does not really happen until 2015. But we are already in the game for about a year or two. So, we're actually quite hap

Some of the highlights of the show includeHow containerization enabled Nav to spread roughly 250 virtual machines across multiple environments, while drastically reducing infrastructure spendTravis’s thoughts on buying cloud native software tools versus building them, and what engineers should consider during this processThe difficulty of finding security solutions that work inside of a cloud-native ecosystemWhy companies should expect to encounter unique challenges when migrating to KubernetesWhy companies need to understand their end goal, and determine an overall objective before beginning a migrationTravis’s must-have engineering tool, and why he can’t live without it LinksLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stmpy/Twitter: https://twitter.com/stmpy TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native Podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I’m Emily Omier, your host. And today I’m here with Travis Jeppson. Travis is currently at Kasten, but he’s also going to talk about his time as a director of engineering at Nav.Travis: At Nav, my role shifted quite a bit while I was there. I started as a software developer, writing Ruby back end applications for them, and then shifted into—actually within a month of being there, they shifted me over to the operational side because I had previous experience working with containerization, and also in infrastructure. So, they quickly moved me over into that realm and from there, I worked there for about a year until they told me, go spin up a team and get things moving. Help us move to containerization. Help us move to a more modern infrastructure and stuff. And so, about a year after that I became a director of engineering to where I had our ops team that had spun up, and then I also acquired both our QA team and our IT team that was there. And then, about a year after that, I ended up acquiring a little bit more than that. So, I ended up with a fair amount of our front end and some of our backend teams as well, and where they moved me into the senior director position. So, a day in the life, towards the end of when I was at Nav was a lot of working with the teams, helping them to do a lot of architectural perspective, and changes, and outlook to where we were trying to get as far as the company is concerned. We were building a product that we could address both first-party customers where they would log in to the Nav website directly, as well as working with partners so that we could issue out Nav functionality to those partners that they could incorporate to their pages as well. And so, we worked very hard to try to segment those two pieces together so that what we were building could be dispersed between both first-party customers and our third-party customers. And so, towards the end of my time there, it ended up being a lot of working within all of engineering to help facilitate those purposes. Then, just about six months ago, I ended up shifting my role over to a company called Kasten. And, Kasten is strictly working within the Kubernetes ecosystem. So, we do data management for Kubernetes based applications, and I am the site lead in Utah for Kasten, and so my day in and day out, a lot is, it's, kind of, all over the place. Sometimes it's working with engineering to help figure out some things going on there, sometimes it's working with brokers to help find office space for it. And sometimes it's dealing with insurance. It ended up being quite dynamic. But overall, I'd say most of my time is really spent more on the engineering side, just from the perspective of having worked at Nav and having been a consumer of a lot of these technologies, I think that they really appreciate my insights that I'm able to give there. So, I end up working, a lot, with the engineers to help facilitate what we're doing.Emily: Sounds like you end up serving as a bridge from having been an end-user. But do you think that there is common miscommunications that happen, or what do those conversations sound like? Why is that experience valuable?Travis: Yeah, so I don't know if it's as much as a miscommunication as much as what are customers looking for? And what are they trying to achieve? And why are they purchasing different software solutions? And what makes sense for them, more than anything. And I think that, having been a consumer of those products, I was more or less on the front lines there. When I was building our operational team at Nav, that was basically what I was doing is trying to figure out what things are we going to spend time on? And what things are we going to build ourselves, or what things do we need to just go find a solution for and bring them in-house? And the funny thing is when I was doing that for Nav is actually when I was introduced to Kasten and to the CEO here. And so, that ended up changing the way my career went. But ov

Some of the highlights of the show includeWhy Adform decided to move to a cloud native architecture and Kubernetes specifically Who was the driving force behind the move to Kubernetes?Was the switch purely an engineering decision or did it involve people outside of engineering?Positive and less positive surprises that come with switching to cloud native Organizational and technical problems Edgaras has facedWhat’s next for Adform on their cloud journeyLinksLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apsega/Twitter: https://twitter.com/ApsegaTranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native Podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I’m Emily Omier, your host. And I’m here today with Edgaras Apsega, lead IT systems engineer at AdForm. Edgaras, what I’d like to do is just start out with you introducing yourself.Edgaras: I’m Edgaras. I’m working in the Adform. For anyone that doesn't know, Adform is one of the leading advertising technology companies in the world, and provides the software used by buyers and sellers to automate digital advertising. And, probably one of the most interesting parts of our solution stack is demand-side platform that has real-time bidding. And, what it means is that when that page is loading for some kind of internet users, behind the curtain, there's actually a bidding process that takes place for the placeholders to show ads. So, basically, you're doing low latency stuff. And, in Adform, I'm a lead systems engineer for the cloud services team. Our team consists of eight people, and we are providing private cloud storage, load balancing, CDN, service discovery and Kubernetes platforms for our developers that are in [00:01:36 unintelligible] production services. So, to better understand the scale that our team is working on, first of all, you can see that we are not using public cloud and we have our own private cloud that has six regions, more than 1500 physical servers, and there are more than 4000 [00:01:55 unintelligible]. And, for Kubernetes, we have seven clusters, more than 50 physical machines and around 300 constantly running [00:02:05 pods]. So, we can say that we prefer bigger clusters with bigger resources sharing pools. And you asked, how do I spend my daily work, right?Emily: Yeah. So, when you get into the office or—right now you're not going into the office—get into your table or your [laughs] home office, what are the first couple things that you do, or…Edgaras: Yeah, so, when I arrive at work, or, like, at these times, just get off the showers straight into work desk, [laughs] actually, I'm most productive in the mornings and evenings. So, in the mornings, when I go to my work desk, I try to do as much as I can. My sprint plan tasks, and then I scroll through the Slacks, emails, and the tickets assigned to me because we have a development team in another region. So, instantly in the mornings, we have some kinds of support tasks that we need to do.Emily: Let's go ahead and talk about what this is all about, the business of cloud native, and tell me a little bit about why Adform decided to move to a cloud native architecture. Why did you decide to use Kubernetes, for example?Edgaras: I'd say, actually, there were two parts. At first, we moved from traditional and, let's say, old-fashioned monitoring solutions to Prometheus, and its integration with service discovery solved lots of operational time for constantly managing and configuring monitoring and alerting for our, quite often, changing infrastructure. And the second part is the adoption of Kubernetes and all of the together coming parts like continuous integration and delivery. So, why we moved to this kind of architecture? It was because the biggest pain points for developers were to maintain actually their virtual machines. And rolling out new software releases in an old-fashioned way, took just lots of time for new software releases to reach production. So, we were looking at the new solutions that were available in the market, and Kubernetes was actually one of them. So, after successful proof of concept, we have selected it as our main application scheduler and orchestration tool.Emily: What would you say was, like, the business value that you were hoping to get out of Kubernetes, out have the ability to release software faster, for example?Edgaras: Yeah. So, actually, we wanted to remove the operational time from our developers so that they could spend more time coding without taking care of all of the infrastructure surrounding parts, like the application operating system management, [00:04:58 unintelligible] monitoring, alerting, logging, and so on. So, basically what, I'm saying is that the business value was for the developers to be able to ship features faster, and have a more stable platform that scales application [00:05:15 unintelligible] as well. So, in addition to tha

About Emily OmierEmily Omier is a content strategy consultant who helps companies leverage content to build thought leadership, increase website traffic, grow their mailing list and book more demos. She has worked with CloudBees, Portworx, Plutora, Armory, and is a regular contributor for The New Stack. She graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and lives in Portland, Oregon.