The Business of Open Source

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. And so when Uswitch came along, there were a few issues around the software release process. Although there was a ton of automation, it was still quite slow to actually get releases out. We were only doing a release every fortnight. And we also had a few issues with the scalability of data. So, it was a monolithic Windows Microsoft stack. So, there was SQL Server databases, and .NET app servers, and things like that. And our traffic can be quite spiky, so when companies are in the news, or there's policy changes and things like that, we would suddenly get an increase in traffic, and the Microsoft solution would just generally kind of fall apart as soon as we hit some kind of threshold. So, I got involved, partly to try and improve some of the automation and release practices because at the search start-up, we were releasing experiments every couple of hours, even. And so we wanted to try and take a bit of that ethos over to Uswitch, and also to try and solve some of the data scalability and system scalability problems. And when we got started doing that, a lot of it was—so that was in the early heyday of AWS, so this was about 2008, that I was at the search startup. And we were used to using EC2 to try and spin up Hadoop clusters and a few other bits and pieces that we were playing around with. And when we acquired Uswitch, we felt like it was quickest for us to just create a different environment, stick it under the load balancer so end users wouldn't realize that some requests was being served off of the AWS infrastructure instead, and then just gradually go from there. We found that that was just the fastest way to move. So, I think it was interesting, and it was both a deliberate move, but it was also I think the degree to which we followed through on it, I don't think we'd really anticipated quite how quickly we would shift everything. And so when Forward made the acquisition, I joined summer of 2010, and myself and a colleague wrote ...

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 general, and managing the IT infrastructure?Tom: So, one of the things that's really driven it is trying to simplify and reuse artifacts. So, if you've got 23 markets all doing a different thing, then there's obviously a lot of duplication happening across the group, whereas if everyone's using the same technology in the same platforms—take Kubernetes as the example—everyone can write their software for that platform. Everyone can write their operational ecosystem around that platform. So, the deployment artifacts, the pipelines, the day two operational activities, they can all be based around that single cloud-native platform. And so, that enables a huge amount of efficiency from the operational side. And that in turn allows those engineering teams to focus on things that are adding value to the business and the customer instead of having to focus on fairly low-level tasks that are just keeping the lights on, if you like.Emily: What's different for each one of those markets?Tom: So, it might be something like language, it might be something as simple as that. It may be that the offerings are slightly tweaked. So, rather than, I don't know, as an example, rather than Spotify being included as a kind of add on, it might be some other service that's more relevant to that market. It may be that there are particular regulatory requirements that are specific to a market that needs to be considered within the product design and the engineering of it. And so, having a cloud-native response allows sharing and reuse of artifacts where we can, but still allows for that customization where it's required.Emily: Where would you say Vodafone is in the cloud-native journey? Do you feel like you've, mission accomplished?<...

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 me, is the big difference. And I see oftentimes that gap-wise, many companies who are starting on-prem, they will do the migration to cloud first, the lift and shift model, and then they will decide, “Hey, I want to redesign pieces of it to make it more cloud-native.” And then you'll see startups who don't have on-prem at all, they will just go into cloud-native from the get-go.Emily: Of course, CloudCheckr specializes in helping with costs among some other things, but how do costs fit into this journey, and what sort of cost-related concerns do companies have as they're on this cloud journey?Travis: Yeah, so there's a few. I would actually say that years ago—just to clarify, the discussion has changed over the last few years—but years ago, it started with CapEx versus OpEx costs, specifically for purchasing of your IT services. On-prem, you'd probably purchase up-front a bulk number of VMs or servers or otherwise, for a number of years, and so be a CapEx cost. When you moved over to cloud and more of this, usage-based, model kind of threw a lot of people for a loop when it came to more OpEx usage space models. AWS, Azure, GCP have helped in that regard with things like reserved instances for companies who are more CapEx oriented as well, but in terms of the initial years ago, a big hurdle was communicating that difference and how the business may pay for these services. And a lot of people were very interested in moving to OpEx back then, in particular. When it came to how do you take into account all these cost-related changes the business may go through, one of the big ones that I see most recently is around the transference and storage of data. In the past, it would have been about how much money total am I going to spend on the cloud itself. Now, it's about what am I forecasting to spend based off of those usage patterns. It's a bit easier to forecast those things when you have servers that run for a period of time, but when you have usage patterns for data ingestion, for data transfer, for servers spinning up and spinning down and scaling out horizontally, ...

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 operations team can't keep up with my development teams.” And there's a lot of reasons why those kinds of things can happen, but with the dawn of all these cloud-native type things, which is pretty cool, like containers, and all this other stuff, and CI/CD is a big popular thing now, and all kinds of other stuff. What happens, tends to be is the developers are really able to take advantage of these things, and consume them, and use them because look at AWS. AWS is API, API, API. Make an API call for this, make an API call for that. And for developers, they're really comfortable in that environment. Making an API call is kind of a no brainer. And then a lot of the operations teams are struggling because that's not normal for them. Maybe they were used to clicking around in a VMware console, and now that's not a thing because everything's API, API, API. And so what happens is the development teams start to rocket ahead of the operations teams, and the operations teams are running around struggling to keep up because they're kind of in a brand new world that the developers are dragging them into, and they have to figure out how they're going to swim in that world. And so I tend to work with operations teams to help them get to a point where they're way more comfortable, and they're thinking about the problems differently, and they're really enabling development to go as quickly as development wants to go. Which, you know, that's going to be pretty fast, especially when you're working with cloud-native stuff. But I mean, kind of to the point earlier, we built—at one of the companies I worked at years ago—what I would say, like, a cloud environment in a data center, where everything was API first, and you didn't have to run around, and click in consoles, and try to find information, and manually specify things, and stuff like that; it just worked. Just like if you make a call for VM in AWS, an EC2 instance. And so, really, it's much more about the way that we look at the problems, then it is about where this thing happens to be located because obviously cloud-native is going to be Azure, it's going ...

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 our customers.Emily: This actually leads me to another question: have you guys seen a lot of scaling recently as a result of stay-at-home orders and work from home?Abhinav: Right. So, we are seeing a lot more people moving towards remote collaboration tools who are actually working in the production house since they have to work from home now. So, they are now moving to these kind of tools such as Frame.io. And we do see a lot more customers joining our platform because of that. From the traffic perspective, we did not see much increase in the web traffic or load our infrastructure, because we have always set up the auto-scaling and our infrastructure can always meet these peak demands. So, we didn't see any adverse effect on our infrastructure from these remote situations.Emily: What were some of the other advantages? Like you were talking about that you had the choice to be either cloud-enabled or truly cloud-native? What were the biggest, you know—and I'm interested, obviously in business rationale to the extent you can talk about it—for being truly cloud-native?Abhinav: So, from business perspective, again, a goal was to [basic] secure available and reliable production infrastructure to offer Frame.io services. But cloud-native actually helped us to faster time to market because our developers are just focusing on the business logic, deploying code. They were not worried about the infrastructure aspect, which is good. Then we’re rolling out bug fixes very quickly through CI/CD platform, so that, again, we offer the better [good] services to our customer. Cloud-native helped us to meet our SLA and uptime so that our customer can access their content whenever they would like to. It also helped us securing our infrastructure and services, and our cost also went down because we were scaling up and down based on the peak demand, and we don't have to provide dedicated resources, so that's good there. And it also allowed us to faster onboard developers to our platform because we are using a lot of open source technologies, and so the developers can learn q...

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 features at an increased pace. So, we want to be able to add new product lines in the Cash App. So, for example, we built the Cash Card, which is a way you can keep your money in the Cash App bank accounts, and then you can spend that money using a separate card, and then we add a new functionality around that card, and so on. So, we also needed to be able to scale out the team to be able to have more people working on the team to build new products for our users, for our customers. Those are the two dimensions: we needed to scale out the system, but we also needed to have more people be able to work productively. So, that's why we started trying to chop up—we have this big monolith as most companies probably do, which that's I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of lines of code in there. But we also wanted to move things out of that, to be able to have more people contribute productively.Emily: And where are you in that process?Jon: Well, [laughs], we're probably adding still adding code at an exponential rate to the monolith. We're also adding code at an exponential rate outside of the monolith, but it just feels so much easier to just build some code in the monolith than it is outside of it, unfortunately, which something we're trying to fix, but it's very hard. And it is getting a little bit out of hand, this monolith now. So, we have, sort of, a moratorium on adding new code to the monolith now, and I'm not sure how much of an effect that has made. But the monolith is still growing, as well as our non-monolith services as well, of course. Emily: When you were faced with this scaling issue, what were the conversations happening between the technical side and the business owners? And how is this decision made about the best way to solve this problem is x, is the Cloud, is cloud-native architecture?<...

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 million users. The only way you can scale a system like that is if you have a properly built underlying architecture, everything horizontally scalable. I was blown away, everything really worked. People were super busy, but by having proper cloud architecture, we were able to actually scale, and fulfill the demand that we have seen worldwide. Now, the nice thing is, as you put more and more workloads on top of Kubernetes, you can shift them between clouds as you want, or data centers as you want. And I think that's number one reason why we went with Kubernetes. I love Amazon, I love Google, and nothing makes me happier than writing them a million-dollar checks, but I also want to be able to move the workloads wherever I can run them cheaply. And, to me, that's very important. I don't have unlimited budget; I have to be able to play the game and get the most compute and the most bandwidth for the lowest cost that I can, and Kubernetes lets me do that.Emily: And would you say that Kubernetes was a technical decision or a business decision or both?Dejan: That's a good question. I think normally, the way we operate at 8x8, you start with the business problem. The business problem was we don't want to be locked into one cloud. We want to be able to run wherever we want to run, and on top of that, we have customers in Europe who are not very friendly towards Amazon, and want us to run on other clouds. And then, we took a peek: what can we do? What's the fastest and easiest way to do it? Turned out it was Kubernetes, so that's the way we went.Emily: What did the move to Kubernetes, what was it like? What were some of the surprises?Dejan: It was very interesting. It is still very interesting. So, on one hand, the good thing was we have already broken the monoliths in the past God knows how many years, into services. But to get things running properly in Kubernetes, you have to go a bit deeper, you actually have to really clean up your code, and so on, and so on. So, one thing that I thought was incredibly useful was this allowed us to, for the first time in 8x8 history, create a proper template for a service where all yo...

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 in this amazing audience of ours, but I assume, because people are human, that they have capital O-pinions about how things should work, especially as it pertains to either software development lifecycle, the ITIL process of introducing change into a datacenter, into a cloud environment, compliance, security. There's lots of, I'll call them thought frameworks that have a very narrow focus on how we should be doing something with respect to software. So, diplomacy is the—well, I guess in true statecraft, it's being able to work in between countries. But in this particular case, diplomacy is using relational equity or influence, to be able to have every group achieve a common and shared purpose. At the end of the day, in most companies the goal is actually to be able to produce a product that people would want to pay for, and we can do so as quickly and as efficiently as possible. To do that, though, it again requires a lot of people with differing goals to work together towards that shared purpose. So, the diplomacy looks like, aside from just having way too many meetings, it actually looks like being able to communicate other thought frameworks to different stakeholders and being able to synthesize all of the different narrow-focused frameworks into a common shared, overarching process. So, I'll give you a concrete example because it feels like I just spewed a bunch of buzzwords. A concrete example would be, let's say in the common feature that's being delivered for ABC Company, for this feature it requires X number of hours of software development; X number of hours of testing; X number of hours of preparing, either capacity planning, or fleet size recommendations, or some form of operational pre-work; and then the actual deployment, and running, and monitoring. So, in the company that I currently work for, we just...

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 happy about our original strategy, but it's just in terms of the research. We're actually a little bit behind in terms of moving to this cloud-native architecture. But as you can see, that I had an interview with CNCF. So, we are very happy about the results that we have right now. Pretty much the entire architecture we run within Ant Financial is, basically, on Kubernetes ecosystem. It's not just using the open-source version of it. We're doing a lot of customization around this open-source framework. Yeah, I can talk more about the details.Emily: Yeah. Well, let's back up just a little bit. I’m curious what you were doing to manage this scaling before? And how did that change? And what about the whole process changed? Like, how stressful is it now, compared to before?Haojie: The process was very manual, I would say. We have extremely large team of engineers, and DevOps, security teams. And oftentimes their responsibility are overlap. So, some engineers are doing security work, some engineers are doing basically operational work. I would say, some people really hated it because they have to be on the computer, look at monitor 24/7, making sure transactions succeeded. When the peak time happens, there's nothing wrong with it. Sometimes they have to keep their phone open 24/7, basically to make sure this thing will not fail, right? And then, just many parts of work has to—so in the previous way, the way we do this operation is quite manual. We don't have a mature system or methodology telling us what we should do first, we should do second, and what's what would you do after this. So, basically the collaboration chain was not there. Therefore, when issue happens, our operation team has to respond very quickly. But then, how can we quickly identify the problem, and make it a problem? That's a problem, right? So, we have to make sure every time we respond, we respond in a very effective manner. That's the problem. In the previous process when something unexpected happen, who had to engage with the entire team from product, engineering, operation, security, everybody has to get up and look at the problem together, which was quite inefficient. So, after we moved to this cloud-native architecture—it's not the standard cloud architect, it's, kind of—we have a lot of innovation on...

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 overall, I think what Kasten—what those conversations really end up becoming is what are customers trying to do, and where are they trying to go?Emily: Yeah, and in fact, that is exactly what I want to talk about more on this podcast. So, tell me a little bit about what your experience at Nav was. What were you looking for? What did you want to prioritize? What was the company hoping to get out of moving to containers?Travis: So, I would say maybe the piece that really facilitated a lot of the progress in that sense was starting to understand our infrastructure spend. And then, to couple with that was also trying to become more agile. More agile in the sense of being able to push on demand, where previous to that we were pushing—you know, when we push our code, we did it on a bi-weekly basis—well, every other week, and it was always very cumbersome. If we have pictures of us in the early days of Nav, where there would be 10 engineers around someone’s desk, and they were the one person that was pushing the code into production, just waiting for the other shoe to fall, or waiting for something to happen. And so, when I started doing operational things for Nav, it started addressing those two things. What can we do to help control our infrastructure, and to understand it a little bit better? And how can we also create more of a dynamic infrastructure? Like, Nav is very much a US-based company. And so, the traffic that we're getting onto our website was regional very, very much. And so, there would be periods where it would be very busy, and then there'd be periods where it wasn’t. And the way that our infrastructure was designed, and a lot of times the way that they are designed, especially with virtual machines, is that you're building for capacity. You're building to be able to handle that load, and that has to stay there all the time, regardless of whether that capacity is being used or not. And so, that was one of the biggest questions, and that bill was—we were completely in the clouds. We were completely in AWS, but that bill continued to get more and more expensive every month. To the point of where it warranted the executive team to come down and say, “This needs to be fixed. This is going at an outrageous pace, and we need to be able to figure out how to control this.” And so, that's when they came to me and said, “Okay, get a team spun up, and let's figure out how to control this.” And so, I would say that those wer...