Enabling Cloud Native Environments with Gou Rao

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.

Links

• Portworx: https://portworx.com/ 
• Portworx Blog: https://portworx.com/blog/
• Gou Rao Email: mailto:gou@portworx.com 

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 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 what we've been focused on over the past couple of years.

Emily: And when you talk to customers, do they tend to say, “Hey, we need to figure out a way to increase our development velocity?” Or do they tend to say, “We need a better solution for stateful applications?” What's the type of vocabulary that they're attempting to use to describe their problems, and how high-level do they usually go?

Gou: That's a good question. Both. So, the backdrop really is, “Increase my development velocity. Make it easier for me to put product out there faster.” Now, what does it take to get there? So, the second-order problems then become do I run in the public cloud, private cloud? Do I need help running stateful applications? So, these are all pillars that support the main theme here, which is increasing development velocity. So, the primary umbrella under which our customers are operating under is really around increasing the development velocity in a way that makes cost sense. 

And if you double-click on that and look at the type of problems that they're solving, they would include, “How do I efficiently run my applications in a public cloud? Or a hybrid cloud? How do I enable workflows that need to span multiple clouds?” Again because maybe they're using cloud provider technologies, like either compute resources, or even services that a cloud provider may be offering, so that, again, all of this so that they can increase their development velocity.

Emily: And in the past, and to a certain extent now, storage was somewhat of a siloed area of expertise. When you're talking to customers, who are you talking to in an organization? I mean, is it somebody who's a storage specialist or is it someone who's not?

Gou: No, they're not. So, that's been one of the things that have really changed in this ecosystem, which is the shift away from this kind of like, hey, there's a storage admin and a storage architect, and then there's a compute admin or BM admin or a security admin, that's really not who are driving this because if you look at that—that world really thinks in terms of infrastructure first.