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Good afternoon, Cloud Natives. And welcome back to Chicago, where we're here for cloud native con C con 2023. Very exciting to be back. The last show from CNCF this year. My name is Savannah Peterson. I'm joined here by my cube co-host. Rob Rob, What do you think this is now your second cup con with us?
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It is. It is. And I think this one is just great energy. And I think again it's talking about He is having that Linux like moment, which is really excellent. I know. I do feel like we're celebrating that a little bit today, which is which is very exciting. Speaking of celebration,
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it's always a joy to have Cube alumni on the show. Oh, my goodness. Two very familiar faces. Me. Thank you so much for being here. Me? I'm going to start with you because you somehow drew the great straw of having your booth be the background of our set.
00:55
We appreciate you. You're making all our colours pop. Everyone's nice and vibrant. This is awesome. How are you feeling? How does it feel about the show today? You know, I'll tell you, Savannah, springtime weather in Chicago in November. Deep dish pizza and kuber paradise all in one place.
01:10
It doesn't get better than this, that's for sure. Chef's kiss. Wow! Couldn't have said it better myself. What about for you to teach? Last time we had, we had the Ford Booth right behind you. So I mean, we're in good company. Either way, I think this is awesome.
01:21
And everybody is coming back, as you were saying earlier, and it's great to see all the energy I'm like. I'm glad to see everybody back, and hopefully we can make things happen again and keep them happening. The momentum, it really does feel like we're building up again and not in this kind of tempered in between land.
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So you two have been working together for a while, so please tell me a little bit about the partnership. I think we started communities. I think we started, you know, cloud native journey or transformation way back in 2017. And it always our community journey was always tethered around state full stuff, right? So we were always like state has been an
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important part. State has been a curse in communities as well. I was telling me yesterday that if only we do not have faces, life will be so fun. But here we are. Storage is the key integral part, and I think there is hardly anything we can do in communities without having storage.
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And that is what has brought us together. And we have been still together, a lot of problems to solve and hoping to actually make it simpler and easier for everybody going forward. We will see developer productivity definitely a key theme of the show. Everyone wants to make it easy, and the need for storage is only going to go up exponentially as we continue to increase the
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data and everything else that's going on. How are you all thinking about that at art works Well, first of all, I must say that you know, it's a pleasure to be back on the Cube with Satish. You know one thing. I just want to say that there is like a chemistry, that being a serial start up person here. People attribute a lot of innovation to start
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ups, right, and and there's a lot of start ups at at at Kon here, but the reality is a lot of innovation happens because we find innovation partners in our customers and and Satish notice what he just said he started in 2017. You know, that is like a whole generation ago or two generations ago. Yeah, exactly. For for for and it is really important.
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One of the models that we've always had at Port Works has been sort of this co creation model with customers. And, uh, Savannah. Customers like SAT and Ford are examples of our co creation model, right? A lot of innovation happens because there are there is a partner for a start up or for an early innovation company that says,
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Hey, I'm going to try and take a chance and innovate with you. And Ford in particular is really unique, as you can imagine, because it is a large industrial company that builds real, you know, killer products, world leading products and at the same time taking having the ability to innovate. And, you know,
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a major technology platform like Cerna is something that we are very excited to be doing jointly. Obviously, there are many people who partner with Ford, but we are happy to be one of the folks who provide sort of the underpinnings for their data. Part of the app and data equation, which includes, you know, storage, disaster recovery includes backup and things like data
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in the future. I mean again, to your point. It's real stuff, right? Real factories, real things like assembly lines. If they stop, you're losing money, that kind of thing. So that all of you know what was said there around DR and storage that has to be rock solid for you to be able to go and run all of these different applications that you
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containerized? Absolutely. I think, as I said, Uh, no, no matter every everything the buzz is around 12 factor cloud native and everything. At the end of the day, there is stayed somewhere quality of caching system messaging systems. We've been affectionately calling them a stable stakes because we all have to have them.
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You know, I'm like without them, we can't do and and the other aspect is like continuity of business quality and cost is an important theme for us. Developer experience is an important thing for us, and it's all based on the fact that we are able to actually sustain this kind of innovation over a long period of time. But every year, every time I come to Kan, I'm like one of the consistent themes like How can
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I do better? How can I cut the time even shorter? Right? Previously we were doing like cluster in a month. Maybe next time we talk about clustering, like how about in a week? Next time we talk about Cluster in a couple of hours, right? So that speed of innovation is like growing
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such a fast clip. But at the same time, how do we actually keep up and deliver to the customer expectations that has becoming more and more interesting and challenging for all of us to see new solutions propping up all over the place behind us? So glad to see what's going on here. So how I would imagine partnerships like court works are extremely important for you.
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Are you on the show floor right now looking for potential partners who may be able to help other aspects of your innovation, both of you as you continue to scale? Well, I mean, you know, one of the things that companies like Ford and teams like Satish have done is really formalised this platform engineering concept. Now, what used to be called Dev Ops is really kind of morphed now into platform engineering.
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And to that end, I think Savannah, when you asked about partners, right? Platform engineering itself is a very broad area, Right, So there is obviously kuber app. Orchestration is one part of the platform. So there are sub platforms within platform engineering. One of them is the actual orchestration of the APP.
07:27
There are security parts of this platform. There is data parts of the platform like port works. There are parts of the platform that have to do with observ. So one of the nice things that we are seeing, I think as the industry matures is that companies like us, we are here not just to kind of play our part, but also to kind of partner with other platform
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companies. Right. So there is sort of a partnership between sub platforms within platform engineering, And this is, uh, a a big change that I've seen in our own operation right before we would we would sort of we would operate more as hustlers. So I think it's really interesting you've had this long relationship you know,
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there's a lot of serendipity and collaboration here, but with with true shared goals. And obviously there's still competition. We live in a capitalist economy. It's not like that's gone away. But there's a very strategic plays going on, like you two working together that I think are really gonna be the magic. I think the important thing is like we've been talking about,
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like it's not just on premises and cloud. We have been doing a lot of stuff in Google Cloud recently. I like a lot of stuff in a lot of stuff in Cloud Run and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, what we are talking about is like enablement of developers and velocity of delivering services at a particular price point and at a particular quality.
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I think that's the most important part is like, you know, we can't forget that, you know, price and quality is the cost and quality are too important point for all of us. I like everything we do from our vehicles. I was just going to say this is the thing with Ford. I drive a Ford, so this is what you're known for you are known for quality that the
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mainstream consumer can access, which is amazing. And that's what we are trying to build more and more of and saying that. How do we actually go to the next level and provide experiences? Right? Experiences from for our developer portals to developers and also the customers and consumers who like our products and services is is
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do you feel when you talk? And I love this because I can feel your chemistry here, but I can sense your passion. Is this something that you and the team are thinking about when you're selecting partners like court works, to make this as easy and to decrease the cognitive load? One of the stats we had just to throw it out there was 76% of developers reporting too much
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cognitive load in their in what they're doing right now. And I would imagine it's sort of your job to be the antidote to that. Yes, I think one of the things that what I would say is like, uh, we tried shifting left, Yeah, and like, there's a lot of people who are saying we should shift right And there was an interesting blog post.
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I recently read about it and like shifting down about it, right, So we have been, like experimenting with all of this stuff. We call it an opinionated stack, and we are building our own frameworks around all of this stuff. The idea is that how can I build a framework or less complex solutions? Do I need to know every iota of things within
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communities to be successful? Or do I need to know just enough to be successful? Right. The idea, If you think about it, the idea of like the cloud foundries of the world or the app engines of the world, it's kind of coming back because it's great to see a lot of bells, whistles, knobs and levers provided by communities.
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But sometimes it's also overwhelming, Right? How do you know that? You know, I zoom in what we are. At least some parts of my team are working on is like, How do I reduce that cognitive load by shrinking? Saying that these are the most essential building blocks that you need to focus on,
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and the rest of this how do we focus on creating business value? Right. So what's the fun in actually saying Everybody is a community engineer. Question becomes interesting is like I created more value on top of communities because communities is at the end of the day. You know, I'm like, I think I heard Kelsey talking about and like,
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you want to be boring Right? Makes perfect sense because once you make the underpinnings boring, you can make value on top of it. Exciting. It's kind of the intel inside. I see that future for us, you know, CTIs inside the ma you know. But that's the truth, though. I mean, at the end of the day,
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it is. It is a change. It is a shift in what we're capable of doing and what companies are able to build. But it is at the same time, I. I think some of the trends and I think you started to hit on it. And is it Dev Ops coming to platform or Dev Ops coming to IT, which becomes platform engineering to simplify that out?
11:56
It seems like there's one of the things that we heard about in Amsterdam was everybody was talking platform engineering. Now it's a little bit more of a under tone of everything everybody's talking about almost because it's become real and people are embracing it. In fact, somebody reach anymore. Well, somebody reached out to you early and like, Oh,
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are you hearing anything about platform engineering? II, I go, Yes, I hear about people, you know, retooling their teams to do that. Are you seeing that across? You know, let me let me give you an example of this right Poss mission right from the inception of the company has been very simple. It is to improve developer velocity.
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Now you think about that, right? What has platform engineering done? GR has a great phrase. They call it creating a paved road. Right? So the cup journey for a developer does not need to be as exciting and bumpy every year as it has been for the last 67 years. By creating a paved road, you actually hide the complexity as Satish was talking about making
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it a first of all a ride. You know, you don't really need to know all of the details and experience every bump on that road. We will kind of take the data bumps out for you as port works and actually that analogy. You know, it's like fresh asphalt. You drive a car, you ride your bike and it's all just we had We had a customer dinner
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yesterday and I'm going to steal one of your phrases. He used a beautiful phrase. He got up on stage and talked to some of our customers in the audience. And he said one of the things that he tells his his developers is experiment freely. But deploy responsibly and I love that feels
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like a T shirt in the making that really is. Look at look at the beauty and the contrast of those two phrases, right. He allows the developers to experiment with all kinds of stuff that they need to be able to innovate. But at the same time he is creating guardrails and creating that paved road to allow them to develop responsibly. And they can go with the assurance that it is
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going to run smoothly. And it's that type of combination of data resilience that companies like us provide and other people provide security, resilience, security, protection. Those are the kinds of things that make modern platform engineering really allow cer to become more invisible. But allow more and more developer velocity.
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It's a great It's a great uh uh phrase that II I really love. And I'm sure that, you know, even from your side, it it's, you know, from a Ford perspective, you don't want the developers worrying about that stuff, about the resilience, about the underpinnings. You want that smooth, paved road because that gets them to productivity faster.
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And they're thinking about you know, the building better code versus Hey, how do I go? And, you know, tie these things together and mesh them up and make sure that they are resilient and, you know, make sure that they're cyber resilient for that matter and that I can get back my you know, minimally viable company. If something goes bump in the night or the
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factory doesn't go down or these other things is that really how you have focused your That's exactly what we are talking about, right? So we call it like we gave it a name like opinionated stacks. That's what we call internally. The idea is that to pave those roads around set set of technologies, right? So if it is Google, we are talking about cloud.
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If you like communities. We are talking about K native, but the idea is that the same set of attraction should work everywhere, right? It should work in my plants. It should work on Prem. But it should also work in cloud. And that's the beauty of communities is that these abstractions are portable,
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right? The very reason everybody is working so hard is to make these abstractions so that not everybody has to learn all of those things or relearn the same things. The idea is that learn it once and apply it many places. Like I think the old adage of right one run anywhere from Java.
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Kind of coming to the infrastructure is like learn once and apply everywhere. So that's the kind of norms that we are trying to portray and reduce the, you know, cognitive burden, as you were saying earlier. Like, how can I make them productive sooner, Faster, Better? Yes, that's the goal. And it'll make them happier too,
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not reinventing the wheel every time I love it. All right, Last question for you both. A little bit of a lightning round since you're veterans and VIP S here on the Cube. So I'm gonna start with you. What do you hope you can say next time you're sitting next to me up here, I think if next time, if I can say that Hey,
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if I can go from, like, take a brand new developer coming in on board it to the team and started committing to the depositories in the first day, How about that day one he comes in and then he needs to actually start committing. And first PR N Here is the code that is running out there in the production. Wouldn't that be awesome? Goes home and tells the family at the end of
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the day, smashing first day. I absolutely love that. What about you? Me? You know, it's very simple. It's I want to be able to say and I think I'm already saying it. Data on CER is a reality, right? So people used to think of communities really
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in its first avatar as a as a app orchestrator. But the reality is apps and data go hand in hand. There is no such thing as an app without its counterpart and data. And I think the world is coming to realise that data is something that needs to be managed also under C, so that you manage app and data together and that travel together.
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And so you know, there are many, many customers now, like Ford, who are beginning to recognise that databases and data services storage. All of those things need to be managed underneath coti and not outside of co. And I think by the next Cup this should be something that is common knowledge across the industry. I love that we will check in in Paris and see
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if that's the case. Absolutely. Thank you so much for being here. It's truly a pleasure each and every time to have you on the show. Rob your opinion and expert analysis is always appreciated. And thank you all for tuning in from home from work from Mars, wherever you happen to be. Here we are in the P,
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the Paris of the Prairie, Chicago, Illinois, Keep on cloud, native K. My name is Savannah Peterson, and you're watching The Cube, the leading source for emerging tech news
