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The business case for cloud-native and Kubernetes
1.4k Plays3 months ago
In this episode of the Kubernetes Bytes podcast, Bhavin sits down with Danielle Cook - VP of Marketing, appCD and Co-chair, CNCF Cartografos Working Group, CNCF. The discussion dives into how technical individual contributors can and should think about a business case for cloud native adoption. They talk about the cloud native maturity model and also discuss the different things business leaders care about.
Check out our website at https://kubernetesbytes.com/
Cloud Native News:
- https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/chainguard-series-c
- https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/23/google-wiz-deal-dead.html
- https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/what-you-need-to-know-red-hat-openshift-416
- https://blog.kubeflow.org/kubeflow-1.9-release/
- https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-boston-2024/cfp
Show links:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-cook-/
- https://maturitymodel.cncf.io/
- https://community.cncf.io/cncf-cartografos-working-group/
- https://tag-app-delivery.cncf.io/whitepapers/platform-eng-maturity-model/
Timestamps:
- 00:01:36 Cloud Native News
- 00:12:07 Interview with Danielle
- 00:51:20 Key takeaways
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Kubernetes Bites
00:00:03
Speaker
You are listening to Kubernetes Bites, a podcast bringing you the latest from the world of cloud native data management. My name is Ryan Walner and I'm joined by Bob and Shaw coming to you from Boston, Massachusetts. We'll be sharing our thoughts on recent cloud native news and talking to industry experts about their experiences and challenges managing the wealth of data in today's cloud native ecosystem.
00:00:30
Speaker
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening wherever you are. We are coming to you from Boston, Massachusetts. Today is July 26, 2024. Hope everyone is doing well and staying safe. So let's
Hosts' Personal Travels and Return
00:00:42
Speaker
dive into it. I know we are we we skipped the last episode. I think ah both Ryan and I decided to take like a short summer break. Me personally, i I went to Japan with my wife. We we did Tokyo, Kyoto, went up Mount Fuji, and functionally didn't make it all the way to the summit because of the weather. There were thunderstorms there, so I made it like, I think 70-75% of the way up there, spent the night in one of those mountain hearts, and then hiked back down the next day. I definitely like wanted to go all the way to the summit, but
00:01:14
Speaker
I guess we have to leave something for the next time. so ah this is like I know we skipped an episode, but now we have an exciting episode planned for today and we have a packed schedule for the next ah few episodes as well. Before we introduce our guest for today's and today's show, let's dive into the cloud native news. I know usually summer is the time where things our companies don't announce as much, not many things are going on. ah People are either ah taking PTO or are busy building for the busy fall season. But that's not the case this time around. so We do have a few things that we want to talk about.
ChainGuard's Series C Success
00:01:55
Speaker
The first one being ah funding grounds. right Everybody knows that I love to talk about funding grounds and acquisitions. and Oh man, I missed the 2021 days when we had a lot of those going on. ah but But this week, it seems like we we had a ah few that I wanted to highlight. like
00:02:13
Speaker
First of all, ChainGuard started with the Kubernetes security ecosystem building out ChainGuard images that are really secure images to build your application on top of. That ChainGuard, they raised a CDC funding round worth $140 million dollars ah to build and scale their version of a software supply chain security platform. this basically triples their valuation bringing them up to 1.12 billion dollars so congratulations for being a unicorn it's difficult being a unicorn these days in terms of oh valuation so great job getting there um this also brings their total revenue or total money raised to 256 million dollars i think somewhere on their one of the articles they said that um they have
00:03:04
Speaker
um increased their ARR or annual recurring revenue by 170% year over year. ah But again, the the chain guard is still in early stages,
ChainGuard's Security Innovations
00:03:16
Speaker
right? So we don't know whether it was like $5 million to $8 million, or it was $50 million to $80 million. So that's obviously like ah things that that they won't share. But again, congratulations on the new money. We're excited to see vendors in this ecosystem ah continue to get investment so ah we can push the technology or keep pushing the technology forward.
00:03:36
Speaker
What change does is they build and package and patch and triage and harden and scan and secure every piece of code that they ship. So basically they have different versions of these images. That's the thing that I know them for where they basically say that you can find zero CVS in their image if you are using their base images and then ah ah things you can build on top. obviously becomes your own responsibility, but at least the base is secure. The platform is secure. I think they were sharing ah a couple of their customer testimonials. Snowflake, ah the big data platform company, saw an 18x ROI moving their FedRAMP high environment to reuse chain guard images. Another kind ah customer that they didn't name saw their vulnerability scan results drop from 18 million to 5 million in 30 days once they switched over their images. so
00:04:26
Speaker
ah They're building a lot of cool technologies, so I'm glad that they they got new money to to scale their own version of software supply chain and security platform.
Viz Security's Bold Move
00:04:35
Speaker
ah Next, sticking to the cloud native security space, I know you guys, ah we have spoken about with security a few times on this episode. They raised a billion dollars in funding. ah They were going to acquire ListWork. I don't think that worked out. They acquired another company. So Viz definitely knows how to remain in the news. I think two weeks back or three weeks back, we saw an article around ah Google Cloud is trying is ah has an offer for Viz security and they want to offer them $23 billion dollars for their cloud native security capabilities or cloud security capabilities and and acquire them. ah So that was going to be a big news, right? Like $23 billion dollars for an exit in current in today's market is definitely a big deal. But an even bigger deal is
00:05:21
Speaker
the VIS co-founders going and saying no to this deal. like I think from what I've heard on other podcasts, other venture capital-based podcasts that I follow, ah their ARR is almost around $500 million a year. They want to scale that to a billion-dollar ARR and then go public instead of trying to or just sell it to um ah the to Google Cloud. A couple of things that caught my eye, $500 million, dollars this was a 40x times revenue multiple, a big deal. ah even if their last if if Even if you look at their last funding round, ah they were valued at around that $11.5-12 billion, dollars so this was like two weeks year last funding round. It takes a lot of guts to say no to such an offer. I was talking to my wife, like if ah because the co-founders, I think, still own 9% of the company, which means that $23 billion, dollars each co-founder would have made $2 billion. dollars I was telling my wife, like if I get such an offer, I would
00:06:17
Speaker
happily give away my company and then just go sit at a beach or do something else or go sit at um on a mountaintop in a mountain cabin and just stay there. ah So, ah kudos to Wizz. I'm hoping that they use this momentum, turn around their ARR, grow their ARR and hit head for the public market. So, let's see. That's how that happens. In other
OpenShift's Latest Features
00:06:39
Speaker
technology news, ah Red Hat OpenShift ah it has a new release. 4.16 OCP or OpenShift version is now GA. A few things to highlight. Again, I linked the release notes for you to go and look at all the different features, but a few things that I wanted to talk about today were they with the 4.16 OCP release, they're now supporting Kubernetes version 1.29. I was surprised that they didn't support 1.30 yet, but
00:07:06
Speaker
I'm sure that that they have their own reasons, but yeah are Kubernetes 1.29 is the supported Kubernetes version. ah The Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service, long name for sure, but this was the the Stack Rock acquisition, like the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security offering that they had. the the The cloud version of that service, you used to be in tech preview for, I think, more than a year now. Now it has officially moved to GA. So you can use that to not just secure your OpenShift environments, but also the EKS, the GKE, and the AKS of the world. So ah that's something to look out for if you are in the Red Hat ecosystem and you have credits that you can use to use this solution. And then OpenShift virtualization, right that's always um of a big thing whenever Red Hat has a new release. like
00:07:54
Speaker
You could see the trend like two years back, OpenShift Virtualization maybe had a few bullets, ah maybe two or three bullets. Now they have like a whole section in the release notes. OpenShift Virtualization things to to highlight here is they added, ah they made your Metro DR or synchronous DR capabilities for OpenShift Data Foundation. ah generally available. So if you have two OCP clusters running ODF or FDF, whatever it's being called now, you can now have a synchronous disaster recovery solution where it's a stretched cluster. um they They also added more monitoring and observability um capabilities using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Manager or RACM or RHACM. You can now use, ah you could always use RACM to monitor multiple open shift clusters. Now RACM has a view where you can
00:08:41
Speaker
monitor virtual machines that are running across different OpenShift clusters. So it gives you that manager of manager kind of a view to allow you to manage your virtualization estate. So that's that's a new version of OpenShift. Another
Advancements in Kubeflow 1.9
00:08:55
Speaker
thing that um caught my eye was Kubeflow, the open source project around ML and AI from the CNCF now has a new version, version 1.9. And I think the the first thing that they announced was the ability to run a localized model registry to help you centralize management for your ML models, versions, different versions of those models and the artifacts associated with it. I think even though this functionality is still in alpha, according to the release notes, this is a ah ah huge step in the right direction. right
00:09:25
Speaker
ah I know we in the past episodes where we have spoken about AI technologies on on this podcast as well, we have asked guests around like, is there a version of a private registry or Docker hub or a query registry running on-prem which I can use to ah store my models without having to publish everything on Hugging Face? And Kubeflow has an answer. like The community is definitely building towards it because it's still and still in alpha, but I'm glad that there is a project in the open source ecosystem that is building that model registry for people to use. ah They added additional capabilities where they make it easier to fine-tune LLMs using custom data sets. So obviously if ah any open source LLMs that you are downloading from Hugging Phase, if you want to use the latest version, but obviously it's not trained on your data set and you want to fine-tune it, ah Kubeflow has enhancements on how it can make that happen for you. And it also announced ah better integrations with ah the Ray Project, Seldin, and K-Serve for serving those LLM models on your Kubernetes cluster. so
00:10:24
Speaker
Overall, good announcements are good enhancements and good features. Go check it out if you're looking. I'm trying to see if I can get somebody from the Kubeflow community on the podcast. If you are a listener ah who works with the community, let me know and we can have a discussion around Kubeflow. If not, we'll I'll try to find somebody. And then one final shout out. I
Call for Papers for DevOps Days
00:10:43
Speaker
know Ryan and I did. and on the show floor podcast from Boston DevOps Days last year. And that was a really great experience. It was my first Boston DevOps Days that I had been to a few before that. I had gotten and the chance to meet the community attend a few sessions and attend a few keynotes. I would say like if you are in the but Boston or great and but Greater Boston area, this is definitely an event that you should attend. um The thing that I'm calling out today is the CFPs for
00:11:12
Speaker
the opportunity to speak at DevOps stage is now open so ah that link will be open till 7 31 so end of July and the actual event is in October so ah if you have interesting things that you want to talk about that you feel other people can learn from feel free please submit that session using the link in the show notes. ah With that, let me talk about the guests that we have for today. So
Marketing Insights from Danielle Cook
00:11:36
Speaker
today I'm going to be talking to Danielle Cook. She's the VP of Marketing at AppCD, but she has been in the cloud native ecosystem for the past eight years, I think, and she is a co-chair of the CNCF Cartograph working group.
00:11:52
Speaker
um and they have been working on the cloud native maturity model things and the business value for having ah pursuing cloud native opportunities. So that's what the episode is going to focus on. So without further ado, let's let's get Danielle on the call. Hey, Danielle, happy Friday. Thank you for joining us on the Community Spites Podcast. Why don't you take a second again and introduce yourself to our listeners and what you do. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. um I'm Danielle Cook. I'm a CNCF ambassador. um I have been working in the cloud native world since 2016 at various different companies, storage OS, which became on debt, fair winds. Now I'm currently a VP at app CD. And I'm an organizer, a co-organizer of the CNCF cartograph of working group.
00:12:44
Speaker
Okay. So what is that working group? I can try to pronounce it, but I'm sure I'll butcher the names or cartographers. What does it do and why we needed that as a different working group? Yeah, so the Cartographers Working Group, we put it together in 2021 because um a number of us came together and realized it gets really hard to navigate the CNCF landscape. There's loads of different technologies. There's loads of people telling you, do this, do that, and whatnot. And while there is a trail map, it's very much focused on tech.
00:13:15
Speaker
And it's not prescriptive of like when you should be thinking around different things. So we came together because we wanted to provide tools for people to navigate this landscape, understand it better, educate themselves. um And you know things that we put together based on that are things like the cloud native maturity model. Okay,
Understanding the Cloud Native Maturity Model
00:13:37
Speaker
okay i can I think I remember seeing oh the Parthenon or something for from the cloud native, sorry, I think that was part of the cloud native maturity model, but then that image always gets crowded by the complicated CNCF landscape. So I think there is a definite need for this working group, right? because
00:13:57
Speaker
Even if they give me a trail map, but if they throw such a huge list of hundred plus projects that are part of the CNCF, I still need to know what to do, how to do, but then can I get the buy in and things like that. So let's talk about the cloud native maturity model, like what it is and when did you guys think about doing something like this and how can it help users? Yeah. So the cloud native maturity model was really put together because of everything we just talked about. it And when we were kind of thinking, what are the steps people need to take in order to be successful in the cloud native world? And you realize pretty quickly that, you know, there were key themes coming out. There were themes around like people, like what are people, what people do you need to hire? What, what, what cultural changes do you need to put in place in the organization?
00:14:48
Speaker
we then looked at like, there's policy changes that need to happen. And then there's a whole different process that needs to be implemented. And you know and then there's different technology and the landscape is big, but you don't you don't need every single tool. you um and so And then we we kind of looked at all those key themes and thought, okay, let's put this together. So if somebody's in their journey, they have I'm going to call it a map, but they have a resource that they can go, oh, yes, I am here when it comes to people. I need to get there. Or, you know, I have these policies, so I feel like I'm in this maturity, but I need to work on these next steps.
00:15:31
Speaker
The maturity model is not prescriptive in what technology you should use or how, you know, use this open source project, use this, but it does provide key themes around like, hey, you should be considering tools around this area at this point in your maturity. Okay. Okay. And so when did you guys start with this, right? Like, uh, when was this first, when was this version one out there? So we launched version one at KubeCon LA in 2021. So okay done we did did all the work and whatnot. And some of us were able to be in person at that event. Some some of the the team um couldn't travel into the US because of of course it was COVID times and you know it was a different world. um So we launched it then.
00:16:20
Speaker
Since 2021, we continuously update it. So the most recent time um we released it was at KubeCon in Chicago. So in ah October, 2023, yep, those are the years. yeah um And we're now working on the next version, the 4.0 version.
Ecosystem Growth and Challenges
00:16:41
Speaker
Okay. So I had a question, right? Like with 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, right? Who do you talk to? like Are you gathering information? Are you conducting surveys? like I know there are a few surveys throughout the year that I always keep an eye out for like data on community survey and the oh the one that Google does around ah around developers.
00:17:04
Speaker
ah Who do you talk to? How do you decide which ah what you should be what level an organization should be at to be called a certain level? So when we started with you know back pulling it together. We used the working group's knowledge. So we pulled from different maturity models that already existed. So for example, Fairwinds had a Kubernetes maturity model that we pulled content from. um We also had a few of the other members of the group have various forms of maturity model. So we pulled those together and really analyzed it at length, okay like
00:17:42
Speaker
several calls a week painstakingly going through. Is that right? Is this not right? Since then, what we do is we reach out to the tags within the CNCF. We look at the resources that they put together and then try and pull that information together. Okay. The next version, we are doing a number of end user interviews on how have they used the model? Where are they in the maturity? um you know It's an evolving process, right? We make it better every single time we put out a new version. Gotcha. And like you said, you have been in the cloud native space since 2016. I think that's a long, long time. ah Like Kubernetes has been around for 10 years, so being part of the ecosystem for eight is definitely a long time.
00:18:27
Speaker
how have your conversations across different companies that you work for, right? How do they look at this maturity model? What are the different levels and how are they using it internally in their organization? oh If you can shed some light around that. Yeah. So, you know, it's it's an interesting journey, right? So back in 2016, it was a Kubernetes. What? So it existed, right? But it is today is very different. And then all the open source tools around it are so different. I think what is always interesting to me is that being in this market for a while, I'm like, Oh yeah, this is old hat. But every time I go to an event, I speak to somebody who's new to the community. It's like, we're back to 2016, right? They are looking at it for the first time. They're trying to understand where to i go. What do I do? Like there's all this new way of working. Um, and
00:19:23
Speaker
You know, so it's, it's interesting to kind of watch. I see like it goes in waves, if you will, like a bunch of new people and then they settle into, and then a bunch of new people and they settle into it. So, you know, it is still, you know, as much as a lot of us who have been in the space a while think, oh, this has been around for a while. It hasn't. And, you know, there's still lots more to do. Okay. ah So what are, what are the different levels, right? As part of the maturity models? Yeah, so we outlined five main um levels and we really looked at, okay, you're going to start here with the understanding that you have already decided cloud native is a good option for you. And I think that's really important. We're not starting from evaluating cloud native. You've done that. You've decided you're going to move one application. You're going to move your entire you know systems over to cloud, whatever it might be.
00:20:17
Speaker
So we have five from there, which is the first stage is building. So that's where you're like, okay, I am now testing all the different technologies. I'm figuring out which application to move fast. Hopefully it's not business critical because you can have some learnings on the way. um You are probably running some proof of concepts. You're really figuring out what you want to do, but it's all pre-production. Level two is when you do actually start moving some applications to production. um Level three, we call that scale. This is where you're like, I like what I'm seeing. I'm happy with it. And so now I want to scale it across the business. And that might be, I'm going to scale it to these applications, not these ones. um We do like to call this the messy middle because
00:21:06
Speaker
it is where you know you might have just have a proliferation of tools and then you're like, whoa, what are we doing? Or you are still operating your existing systems that might not be cloud native and you're operating your cloud native system. So like, you're probably not saving any money here, um which you know is unfortunate. If you're going into this to save money, you are not going to be. oh And then level four is where you kind of fix all that. So that's our improve phase, where you look at all the decisions you made, um you revisit them, you start cleaning up things because you're you have you're reaching a sophistication. Now, but you might be there for one application and starting your journey on another application at level one, like it's going to vary, um but it's an interesting stage to be at. And some people never leave this stage. And I think that's really important. Some people never make it past the scale phase.
00:22:02
Speaker
um But level five, if you do make it there, you know, the cloud native ecosystem is constantly evolving. There's new technologies, there's new processes, there's new people to train. And so level five is really where you adapt to all the things that are changing in the environment. gotcha and Obviously, it's difficult to ah quantify how many organizations at the are present at each of these levels currently, so I won't ask you that, but at at what point do organizations are like, okay, I'm committed to this, I need to make this work, and ah maybe I need to contribute code back to open sources, start becoming a paid member of CNCF. like
Contributions to Cloud Native Community
00:22:44
Speaker
What level do you see those changes happening?
00:22:46
Speaker
so We kind of put the code contribution at level five. okay okay you're If you're adding back to the community. Now, we all know that all of this is you know opinions, right? And so like you might be at level two and you contributing back to the community and that is awesome. And you know there's so many different ways to contribute to the community and it's not just in you know, supporting the tech, but doing things like the economy and maturity model, so whatever it might be. oh So yeah, youre you could do it and and on all the ones. all
00:23:25
Speaker
Okay, that that that makes sense. so ah like One last question on the maturity model, and then we'll move on to like the topic that I'm excited about asking your opinion on. I've seen that there is definitely the cloud native maturity model, but then there is also the platform engineering maturity model. I think that also falls under CNCF. Why was there a need to create multiple of these? And but but how do you see them working together? So that is a great question. We actually worked so closely with the platform working group on there. So Abby and Colin were central to putting together that CNCF maturity platform maturity model. And so we came together because they they really liked the cognitive maturity model, but we were like, it's a higher level. It's something that you can use
00:24:16
Speaker
at a management level, at a tool that gives you the broad overview. But if you're building a platform, you need to go a layer deeper. And so we work together to go, what is that layer? um yeah They, of course, wrote the Maturity Model, but we are the Platform Maturity Model. But the Cartograph Us Working Group, we worked alongside them. And one of the things that we really tried to do is not to replicate people's work, but promote people's work within it. So within the Cloud Native Maturity Model, we are promoting the Platform Maturity Model. This is where you need to go. Go here.
00:24:51
Speaker
okay Likewise, like the AI working group, they're working on an AI maturity model. So all of that will be referenced. Yes, there will be so many maturity models. Please don't let it get to the point where it becomes a CNCF landscape. I don't want that. so sure yeah Okay, perfect. So ah the reason I had reached out to you was because I saw I wasn't able to attend communities community day event in New York City in person. But when the recordings came out, I was going through sessions I like and you all caught my eye right because it was on a different team completely. Like
Aligning Tech with Business Goals
00:25:26
Speaker
everybody else was like, ah ah one of our previous guests, Michael Cade was talking about canister and we had people, another previous guest,
00:25:34
Speaker
from the vCluster community. but ah He was talking about how vClusters work, but your talk was completely different. Like, okay, that is all tech, but we need to like make sure that we translate the tech somehow into things that businesses care about. So let me start there. like What are the things that businesses care about the most? And can you list a few ah that I should know as a technical architect? Absolutely. I mean, the main three areas that I think you know every business cares about is growth and profitability, right? Are we growing? Are we making more money? How can we demonstrate to this, to our board members, to the market sir efficiency? So are we doing things efficient? Are we growing and you know, streamlining all of our operations and then finally risk, right? We can see it with all the topical news items. Like it is risky out there and you don't want me
00:26:32
Speaker
but You don't want to be the one causing issues um if maybe you put an update out there and it doesn't work, just saying. Not today, everyone. So it's about risk management, right? Are we reducing our risk? Are we keeping security? And those are really like the key things that everything boils down to. And I think one of the reasons why I am very, you know, like we need to talk about these issues and we need to train this community on these issues is because if I want to use a new technology, if it doesn't map to those things, it's not going to happen. It's yeah it's not going to happen. right And we've seen that over the last and our year, 18 months, two years, where
00:27:16
Speaker
you know Yes, there was a ton of investment in this area, loads of people using cloud native technologies, and then people went, oh, we might need to recalibrate with the economy and all of that. And so they weren't investing in this area. And you're like, well, that's because we can't tie things back to growth. We can't fish sure efficiency or risk. I think that makes a lot of sense, right? Because, as you said, the timeline, 18 months back, we started hearing these conversations where there were so many zero interest rate projects or third projects that were spun up inside organizations because capital was really cheap. And organizations like, yeah, ah yeah we let's spin up a team of 10 more engineers and have them work on this. And it doesn't really matter if it doesn't contribute to one of those three things that you said.
00:28:01
Speaker
ah So yeah, this definitely like answers the question why it is important now. I think one follow up question on the care abouts, right? Does it change based on who I am pitching it to? Like, if it's a small 50% startup, am I pitching this new way of doing things to the CEO? And does that change? Like, my my presentation to him changes if I'm talking to the CFO or some other C-suite executive inside my company. Yeah, I mean, it definitely changes. Obviously, the size of company will um will be what they're focused on today. But you know if I'm talking to my CEO, then I'm going to be talking about this is helpful for our strategic growth. This is helpful for how we be maintain profitability. This is how we meet customer demands. And then I'm going to use metrics that associate with the customer demands. like
00:28:58
Speaker
you know That's what CEOs care about. CFO is on the other hand, like, right, we're looking at operational efficiency. How much money are we spending to do all of this? And, you know, I know one of the things that is so topical at the moment is cloud costs, right? Like, are we spending a ton of money on the cloud? Is the investment worth it? Can we, you know, right size at all? Can we make it more efficient? Can we save money? But importantly, can we show our CFO that? Like if I go in and I, you know, work my magic on, you know, my pods and classes and all that, and I'm like, oh, I'm saving some money. If I can't show anybody that, it's like, it didn't happen, right? I want to be able to show them that. And then, you know, you have your COO, they're looking at efficiency. So I think it's really important to understand
00:29:51
Speaker
what the company goals are at the higher level. So whether you are an individual contributor coming into the organization or you were leading a team, if you're not understanding the big picture of your company and can map every decision onto it, then you're at a disadvantage. like That should be a priority for you. So you're saying basically I need to pay attention to the all hands that the executive team and everybody underneath them. Yes, spot multitasking, write down those goals. Absolutely. That is like the perfect.
00:30:28
Speaker
yeah example ah okay So I think that ah without your previous answer clearly hints at like 10, maybe 10 years back. I don't know. oh It was, oh, I didn't even have a seat at the table and IT departments would just consider it a cost center. Like this is something that we have to invest in, have to do, but it doesn't really bring us any value. I think I would personally like to say that we have come a long ways, right? i Definitely does have a seat at the table. We are able to drive some of those growth initiatives and and help businesses do more with less bringing those efficiencies and reduce risks. I think I
Managing Infrastructure and Cloud Technologies
00:31:07
Speaker
want to go back to the the messy middle component that you just said, right?
00:31:12
Speaker
and that is Unless you are starting a new company today, you will have some sort of brownfield environments and brownfield deployments. like How do we handle that when we are building this business case? like ah Should we as architects just focus on greenfield? like okay If we are planning this new project over the next six months, nine months, we should use Cloud Native or should I also aim at, oh, if we do this, we can also bring add those same benefits to the brownfield deployments that we might already have. I mean, obviously, in ah you know if you are a startup organization, what are you coming to it new? You get this clean slate where you just get to do everything you want. The reality is that just like... Never happens. yeah It never happens. I think you guys have baggage from all the different organizations you've worked at.
00:32:03
Speaker
i think you know when it comes down to a Brownfield site or a Brownfield site um project, you have to, again, look at what the business goals are. And you have to understand like your fault tolerance and your security risk and what you're putting out there. Because not, and I i don't and' want to say this too loud, but not everything should be cloud native. like yeah right You're going to have to make certain decisions on that. But if it makes if you have a business goal where it makes really good sense, then you you should introduce it. But you need to be clear on what the goals are and how long it's going to take because it is not going to be quick. And anybody who believes like, hey, we're just going to take this app, we're going to make Cloud Native, roll it out, and we're going to be, you know,
00:32:55
Speaker
It's going to happen so quickly and we're all going to be you know sitting back and getting all the benefits. Like it's just not the case. Like you were going to spend more money in the beginning as you're trialing it, as you're running two different environments until you're happy with it. And you also need to translate all of those processes that you already have. You have to, the policies, like all of those things exist in a Brownfield world. And now you have to, you know, translate them over. And that's, that's not quick either. Now, I think once you do the legwork for, you know, your first application, your step like your second, second, third, it's good, it's going to get easier, right? You're going to have an app that you can follow. um And that's why we always say like, start with like non business critical apps. Okay. As you're journeying through the majority model and through your transition, because, you know, you don't want to
00:33:54
Speaker
you don't want the app that controls your entire business becoming a problem. Yeah, no, agreed, right? I think I have two follow up points. One is, ah I think having this ah unbiased attitude where you're not just thinking about the tech and thinking about it as a hammer that you can use and a hammer every nail in it and green field, brown field, I think that shows that that shows your maturity as an individual contributor to your executives, right? Like, okay, this guy understands what's important to the business, what's not, and he's not just telling us a story because
00:34:27
Speaker
He wants to put a specific technology on his resume and look for his next gig. He's actually responsible. He or she are actually looking out for the company. So I think that that makes a lot of sense. Like you should understand what's important to your business and maybe call it out in the proposal that you're building. This won't give us any any positive ah ROI till 18 months down the line. like We'll have to run both environments till we actually migrate everything over. This might not work. And the second thing that we brought up is ah that try it out with your non-mission critical applications. I think I like that because
00:35:03
Speaker
ah So I went to Red Hat Summit earlier this year and ah Delta Airlines is one of Red Hat's big customers, right? And they always like to talk about how Delta runs on Red Hat OpenShift ah service on AWS or Rosa clusters. I think looking at more details you will find out that it's lighting the in-flight Wi-Fi network and some other features run on Rosa and that have been modernized. But if you look at the CrowdStrike incident that happened this week, Delta was the one that was hit the most. They were still running things on virtual machines and Windows boxes.
00:35:35
Speaker
for crew scheduling and for airport terminal, like the the the the the kiosks that you might have. So all of those things did go bad. So maybe they are on this journey as well, along with us or not blaming data, guidelinesline I love them, but it's just like you start somewhere and then you eventually get to a point where you have modernized everything. So completely agree with what what you just said. Well, and that modernization requires, again, you to potentially be modernizing while you're still running the existing system so you can avoid situations like that. I mean, anytime I go into a place.
00:36:10
Speaker
And I have been at airports and I have been at car dealerships where they have like the dot .NET printers. I'm just like, what is happening here? Like, why am I not kept up to date? And it's usually down to software that has not been modernized. And it's like, there is a place for cloud native. just It's a big lift for a lot of organizations. you know yeah That dot matrix printer still i bring by brings back memory. Like my dad had one growing up, and he's an accountant. So in India, they had a different schedule for filing taxes. And 20 years back, they still had to file in person with paper copies. So a couple of days before the filing deadline, the printer would run continuously in respect of like, we'll just go on and on and on.
00:36:55
Speaker
So I can I can definitely see ah that brings like memories for sure. I'm going back to be rating the edges, ripping them off. Oh, yeah. Yeah. i Okay, coming back to the topic, right' sorry for taking us on that dot matrix tangent, but yeah ah to to build these business cases, right? ah
Building Business Cases for Tech Adoption
00:37:16
Speaker
I've seen a lot of vendors have TCO ROI tools. But whenever I've looked at a couple of these, it's like, oh, I'm solving it for storage on Kubernetes. ah I'm solving it for observability. Is there a tool? Is there a TCO ROI tool?
00:37:33
Speaker
from the CNCF or anything else that you might know where it helps me build a bigger picture or it's my responsibility as an individual to piece these things together and try to fit it in the best possible way. I think, I mean, I wish there was the overall one. I think you'd find if you tried to do one that encompass everything you need to do, you would never go that way. It's a lot because it comes down to um you know looking at the cost of people and their time and how much effort they're putting in. It comes into like, how do we culturally change the organization? And that, you can't calculate that in the ROI calculator.
00:38:17
Speaker
um I do think that vendors who put those out, like I think they're great. They're really useful when you are trying to purchase a bit of software. It helps you. I think you should ask for it if you're evaluating a technology because it's going to be helpful as you bring that to your boss and their boss and whatnot. And I think there's inspiration you can get from it to go, hey, I want to use this, but how could I apply this ah ROI calculator across more of what I'm doing. So I definitely use their useful tools. I think, you know, vendors are going to be biased because that is they want you to buy their software or use their you know open source tool. And so just knowing that, but also, you know, there's a lot of different ones out there that you can question and dig into, and you might find that they're really useful.
00:39:09
Speaker
Gotcha. Okay. No, I agree. Like our TCO ROI reports, even if it doesn't apply to everything, ah they are definitely helpful. They help you compare some things, maybe put you in that mindset where oh, these are the things I should be thinking about. Like some of them do have like soft costs where like just add salary for like five employees based on some US specific data and then they handle some of that. But yeah, I think it's about the mindset you should be thinking about um when when you're trying to build this case. so Right. like I love that, the mindset. It's the you know the business case. You're thinking about the cost. so it will It's a tool that will help you. Yeah. and so like Talking about business cases, right what's the time horizon? like Am I building it for every small project? like oh I want to take in i think start using KI1 or I want to switch to STO. Should I be building it for that? Or it should be like,
00:40:04
Speaker
year or 18 months where I'm going cloud native, I'm adopting communities here that here are the benefits. Like what what should we be thinking about in terms of timeframe? So in the maturity model, we talk very early on about creating that a compelling business case for doing this. And be realistic with all of your leadership at your organization, that this is a journey and it's going to take a while. Now, I am very conservative when it comes to this. And I'm like, say longer, right? Don't commit to short term goals. But I do think that there are, you know, there's the bigger goal of we're going to do this, we're making this transition. And then there's the shorter term goals. So like within the maturity model, at one point, we talk about different requirements, we give some examples of some organizations and we say, okay,
00:40:54
Speaker
ACME organization, they have to demonstrate security and compliance within the supply chain. And so, you know, they have different KPIs, like zero policy violations and whatnot, and then they can to sell to an enterprise. They can show that. So that could be a short term goal within your longer term goal of like, we're going to do this so we can demonstrate that and we can get this done in a few months. um Likewise, like we have an example of, you know, if you want to meet some of your customer demands at an enterprise like you know, you have to scale to deliver services to 20,000 locations. So you need to be measuring scalability, how does that support you on that? And you might be like, this is going to be six months to a year goal. And so, um you know, and then we give another example around revenue target. So like, we want to improve our customer retention rates. So we are, um we're going to be looking at that and
00:41:52
Speaker
We are going to put out new features and are they going to like it? And that is going to be measured over time and have individual metrics that we can track and whatnot. So it's not one goal. It's mapping to those business goals about who you're trying to sell to, what you're trying to achieve. No, I think that kicked off like a different train of thought in my head because ah just this week I read something where all public agencies or public sector government agencies in Switzerland are now mandated or required to use open source software. So when you were talking about, I need to meet these KPIs and have like a secure supply chain because the Biden government had and enforced a law where everybody needed needed an S-POM. I think these policy, compliance with these policies, I think you should as an architect or as ah as a person who's building this, you need to ah be aware of these policies, maybe ask questions to your legal team or to your compliance team, see what what rules have changed and try if you see if you can fit those into your business case. right Because if yeah as you said, if you're trying to align with the priorities that my execs have, you have an easier opportunity to get projects approved and get the funding that you need to try out the cool tech products.
00:43:07
Speaker
but Absolutely, because everyone in the a boss, right? Even the CEO does, whether it's the board or their investors, way everyone has that. So it's caring about what do they care about? and And how can I think about that in my everyday job so that we're all mat, like, you know, drumming, stomping, moving to the same beat, whatever it might be. In the same direction, you know, if we are from Boston, Daniel, come on, we need to suffer. but
00:43:39
Speaker
yeah and Okay, I think we have a few more questions remaining so ah you initially you spoke about OpEx and CapEx and if we can get something like there is a different way things are put on the financial statements like CapEx goes under a Your capital expenditures go on a different bucket. Operational expenditures
Financial Considerations in Tech Adoption
00:44:00
Speaker
are basically, they hit the financial ah statements as soon as the cloud vendor gives you a bill. Can you expand more on like how we should be thinking about these? And if I'm an on-prem shop, just going for infrastructure vendors that have like a pay as you go service, will that help me? Or how should I be thinking about these different models and and making it part of the strategy?
00:44:24
Speaker
Well, this is where I have to say, I am definitely not your financial expert because every CFO I've worked with, I've opened with that. I'm like, I struggled to add. And they're like, okay, got it. ah I want to come out with that. But again, I think it comes down to your business will have ah cap a CapEx or OpEx model, right? and And that's how they're going to run it. And so you need to understand what makes sense for them. If you're a company who is trying to raise a round of funds, you might need to look at your CapEx, OpEx in a very different way to an organization that is
00:45:07
Speaker
you know, gigantic and, you know, cloud costs are soaring and whatnot. So they're going to like go back to their own data center, right? like those yeah it it It varies, but I think it's important that you understand for investments and if they're CapEx, if they're OpEx, sit down like ask your, you know, you might not have access to your CFO, but you might have access to people on the finance team. Ask them what they care about and why they care about what, when do they want it on the books? When do they not want it on the books? Because that will help you as you recommend, Hey, we're going to, you know, I want to purchase this. I want to buy this. I want to spend this time on this person doing this thing. Um, and whether it's something that's going to be, um,
00:45:53
Speaker
looked at over 18 months or like put on the balance sheets or it's just like an immediate one-off. ah You need to, you you'll be looking at your ah ROI that way. Okay. No, I think it makes sense, right? ah ah People who have been in IT for a while understand that, oh, once you buy and something on CapEx, three years, five years, there's a depreciation cycle and Once you have paid for it, everything else seems kind of free. Like, oh, I need to add two more users. and That's okay. Like I already paid for my servers or storage. I have enough capacity or enough bandwidth to to support more. But if you're thinking about cloud, adding two users, adding 20 users or buying 20 Slack seats or Salesforce accounts, all of those things add up. So as you said, right, like sit down with your financial team. Like I used early in my career, I used to hesitate because I was always like, Oh,
00:46:44
Speaker
ah they seem strict enough or they don't seem inviting enough to talk about finances, but I'm over it and I can say like definitely talk to those people. Those people want you to come and ask questions, they'll sit down with you for lunch, explain how things work, and they are super receptive. Again, you might have ah somebody in your organization who doesn't work that way, but I'm talking about majority of folks. who you will If you sit down with the majority of people that you're reporting up to or you're trying to work with to buy different tools or to get project sent off and you go, what do you care about?
Aligning IT Work with Business Objectives
00:47:18
Speaker
What are the things you're concerned about? They're going to tell you because they want people and that will just help you be a better technologist because you'll think broader, bigger picture.
00:47:31
Speaker
Okay, and one last question. right ah Actually, not I take that back. This is not the last question. Who should be like doing this? If I am a new college grad, obviously, like that's too early for me in the cycle. But if I'm a junior SC1, SC2 developer, or if I'm a junior in infrastructure architecture, should I be the one working on this and trying to push this? Or I should focus on doing what's best for me at this stage in my career and learn the tech. And if you are at that senior or principal or staff position, that's where you should be thinking about this. Are there what have you seen in the community? ah I would argue that everybody needs to think about it. Even your graduate, right? coming out school And the reason for that is because it's only going to help you. You are only going you are going to be a better technologist. Now, I'm not saying that means you spend weeks of your you know days or weeks doing it.
00:48:24
Speaker
But if you have the opportunity to join in all hands and they are you know people are presenting on what the business plan is, pay attention to it. Make some notes down so that next time you want something or you want to try something, you're like, hey, this would map to this goal. That's only going to help you because the more you move up in an organization, the more you have requirements to constantly be creating that business case for anything, right? It's not just about acquiring tech, it's about getting new people on your team, hiring new people, um getting them to focus on a whole new project, investing in a whole new area, adding new feature, all of those things. The more you can align to what senior, top level, your managers, the better you're gonna be.
00:49:15
Speaker
so Okay, no, I think that's some great advice. Okay, this is my last question. Like, ah where can users learn more about what the car but carto-cross is? Sorry, I'll get it eventually. I struggle to say it, and I've been saying it since 2021. How can if people learn more about what's going on in the working group? How can they help? And you said you were conducting interviews with the community for the version four of the maturity model. How can people help with that? Yes.
Contributing to CNCF Cartograph
00:49:43
Speaker
So we have, we are always recruiting members of the cartographers working group. So if you think that this is an amazing topic and you want to be part of the next version of the maturity model, then you can hit us up. Well, first of all, you can read the maturity model at the CNCF. This is really horrible, but I think it's maturitymodel.cncf.io or it's cnmc.io. So
00:50:09
Speaker
good life find that and add it to the show about andri on that one yeah just didn't roll off the time We have a Slack group on the CNCF channel. It's Cartographos. ah You can join that. You can reach out to me directly on the CNCF Slack channel, or you can email me. I'm Danielle at appcd.com. um totally want all the feedback on the maturity model, but also if you are an end user in this community and you want to give us your thoughts, I would love to speak to you. And you know it wouldn't just be me. We have a number of people in our membership and we just want to make sure that people who are in the cloud namespace can follow this journey, follow this ride, and that we all as practitioners have a whole ecosystem and industry that we're proud of.
00:51:01
Speaker
Yep, no, I think that's that's a perfect way to end this episode. ah Thank you so much, Daniel, for your time today. this This discussion is going to be super helpful. So we might have to call you back next year when the Ford Auto model is out to to dive into like how things have changed. But thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. OK, that was a great, and great episode, right? ah Definitely an interesting discussion. I know we always like to focus on the tech and how things work. And we are curious people like that. But ah as Danielle pointed out, right, like tech alone isn't sufficient. Like we have to make sure that we are able to convince the stakeholders ah to invest and in in cloud native technologies. And we can only do that if we are able to talk in that same language. Like if you are able to present
00:51:48
Speaker
um build a business case and present to the execs in your organization around how adopting cloud native technologies or how modernizing your infrastructure is going to, as she had listed things of like, how is it going to grow your business? How is it dr going to bring efficiencies? And then how is it going to help reduce risk for your organization? Remember these three pillars, like growth, risks, and efficiency. And these can be done in a few different ways, like ah building, adopting the cloud and ah ah ability to scale on demand or or make developer experience easy for your developers. All of that is going to help ah have them have the developers move faster, build better things quickly, that helps you grow. ah By building a platform with all the different discussions that we have had around platform engineering, by building those golden and parts, you're being bringing efficiencies, you're reducing churn when it comes to your employees, you're enabling new people to we get productive faster. So that's bringing efficiencies.
00:52:47
Speaker
And then for the risk part, right like security definitely is one of the big things. ah How can you use the cloud native stack to comply with certain standards to maintain ah compliance with things like GDPR or FedRAMP or HIPAA based on the industry that you are in or the geography that you are in. So make sure that you are thinking in these things like have that mindset ah The business case mindset and as daniel corrected me during the episode right it's not about the level that you are in everybody can be doing this and making themselves more relevant inside the organization while also focusing on the text so again a great ah episode for me i hope you guys found it interesting as well if you did i would really appreciate if you can share it with your friends your colleagues
00:53:29
Speaker
yeah Even your friends, let's see if they want to, I have friends in the ecosystem that are not using communities today and I push them or I initiate discussions around, oh, you could do this with communities. Maybe you you share this podcast with them and they can find something interesting that can help them on this journey or start at that level one of the maturity model. um With that, um do you make sure that you um go and ah subscribe to our YouTube channel. Give us some likes there. leave ratings for us. If you have episode suggestions, you can join our Slack from our website, KubernetesBites.com. And with that, it brings us to the end of today's episode. I am Bhavan, and thank you for joining another episode of the Kubernetes Bites Podcast.
00:54:15
Speaker
Thank you for listening to the Kubernetes Bites Podcast.