The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Cloud Native I talked with Yong Tang, one of the maintainers of CoreDNS, about how the project started, how it’s evolved over the years and how the team decided to integrate it with Kubernetes. Links: CoreDNSYong Tang on LinkedIn

This week on The Business of Cloud Native, I talked with Brian Gracely about using Kubernetes for edge workloads as well as the difference between “cloud” and “edge.” HighlightsIs edge part of the cloud, is cloud a part of edge or are they completely separate but slightly related environments? What makes something a data center vs what makes something an edge device? How enterprises think of edge vs how Telcos think about edge. How the edge has gone from being a cost center to a competitive advantage for enterprises.Why Telcos have always thought of edge as a market opportunity. Why Kubernetes can help standardize environments and make it easier to deploy software to the edge, but there are still challenges to overcome. Why edge deployments require re-thinking many basic environmental factors like bandwidth and compute capacity. Why consistency at the edge is so important. Why you can’t ignore the physical conditions that make edge environments unique. LinksBrian on TwitterThe CloudcastRedHat OpenShift

In today’s episode of The Business of Cloud Native, I talked with Julien Pivotto and Richard Hartmann, two of the maintainers of Prometheus, about how the project started, how it’s evolved over the years (and how it’s stayed the same) as well as some novel ways Prometheus is used in the real world. HighlightsWhy both Julien and Richard got started with PrometheusSome surprising ways that Prometheus is used to monitor things beyond the software engineering worldHow Prometheus has evolved in technology and usage over the yearsHow Kubernetes and its relationship with Prometheus has changed the projectWhat assumptions ‘cloud native’ creates for potential Prometheus usersLinksJulien on TwitterRichard on Twitter

In this episode of The Business of Cloud Native, Chris Holmes talks about bootstrapping Decipher Technology Studies and their core product, intelligent service mesh Greymatter.io. He also talks about why it's so important for brownfield and greenfield apps to talk to one another and the many similarities between public sector and private sector organizations. Highlights: How Greymatter combines business intelligence and security controls.The difference between working with public sector customers and private sector / enterprise customers — and why there are more similarities than differences. How segmentation is sometimes necessary for any highly security-conscious organization, including both government organizations and financial services companies in the private sector. Why we need to respect legacy applications — because they tend to be the mission-critical applications that drive revenue. Why connecting brownfield and greenfield applications is critical, because not all ‘legacy’ apps will ever be moved to the cloud.What ‘returns’ a company is looking for when evaluating ROI on cloud migrations. What we mean when we talk about an “ROI” on security tools. Why Kubernetes’ terrible networking is part of why Chris could see that service meshes would be necessary even back in 2015. Links:Chris on LinkedIngreymatter.io 

This week on The Business of Cloud Native I spoke with Chris Psaltis, CEO and co-founder of mist.io. We spoke about why multicloud is necessary (and scenarios where multicloud is not necessary), where multicloud is headed in the future and the journey Chris and his co-founders have been on with Mist. HighlightsThe difference between using multicloud for legal / regulatory reasons or because of the company’s history and using multicloud strategically to improve developer velocity or improve customer experience. The complexity involved with pursuing multicloud and why many organizations are better off in just one cloud. Why being cloud agnostic from day one is not a good strategy in the vast majority of cases. Why no one seems to be able to correctly estimate how difficult it is to build a multicloud platform. Why ‘silos’ are the competitive alternative to a unified platform for companies How Mist went from working primarily with smaller teams before figuring out that they provided more value for large teams because the pain from multicloud management increases exponentially as the number of engineers, applications and environments increases. When the founding team decided to stop being consultants and start an open source technology startup. LinksMistChris on LinkedInChris on Twitter

This week on The Business of Cloud Native, I talked to Tzury Bar Yochay, founder and CTO of Reblaze, about building a cloud native security company before twelve thousand people were going to KubeCon. Highlights:Why your security measures have to keep up with hackers’ sophistication.The moment when Tzury decided to go from being a contractor for the defense industry to founding a company.Why the default path for startups is failure. Why open source is key to securing your cloud environment.How selling a security product to developers has evolved over time. Why lazy developers are good developers. Why selling software to developers is different from selling software to other types of professionals. Why he thinks the most brilliant developers tend to gravitate towards open source. Why security based on obscurity is a terrible, perhaps even evil, strategy. Links:ReblazeTzury on LinkedIn@tzury on TwitterTzury on GitHubCuriefense

This week, I talked with Karthik Ranganathan about the challenges going from employee of a large company to startup frounder and why he founded Yugabyte because he wanted a database that both was transactional and still could be highly available.Highlights: Why the ability to scale is important for any cloud native application, including for a cloud native database.Why Yugabyte is still open source and why being open source is important to the company. Why enterprises wanted an open source database to house their mission-critical data. Why the company went from an open core model to open source / managed service model. Why end customers care about open source. Why early-stage, small companies have trouble establishing trust and how being open source helps build trust. Why building around open source helps nudge customers to ‘buy’ instead of built it themselves. Why finding the right position and the right message is a major challenge at the beginning of the company. Links: Karthik on LinkedInKarthik on Twitter YugabyteYugabyte Slack

This week, I talked to Natalie Ledbetter, Head of People and Platform at Boldstart Ventures. We talked about how startups can approach team and culture building, including:How to prioritize your hiresCommon mistakes founders make when building a teamWhy you should always avoid brilliant jerks, even if they are very brilliantHow to divide responsibilities between foundersAnticipating growth and setting your team up so that it can scale as easily as possibleThe difference in skills sets between 'startup people' and employees you would want to hire later onLinks: Natalie on LinkedInNatalie on TwitterBoldstart Ventures

In this episode of The Business of Cloud Native, we talk about the hard business goals behind words like "freedom" as well as what it's like to go from engineer to CEO. My guest, Sirish Raghuram, is the CEO and co-founder of Platform9.Links: https://platform9.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/sirishraghuram/

In this episode of The Business of Cloud Native, Shawn Lankton talks about how Microsoft 365 and related applications fit into an organization's move to the cloud and why organizations need to pay attention to security for all their SaaS applications.  Links: https://www.coreview.comShawn on Twitter