Narrator: You're listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a
podcast focused on advancing the humans of DevOps through skills,
knowledge, ideas, and learning, or the skil framework.
Kumar Chivukula: expectations from the prospects and customers
are huge, because they expect everything to them yesterday.
It's very hard and even though you want to do it, but sometimes
you need to understand balance between what is possible versus
what is not possible. And sometimes you have to say no.
Eveline Oehrlich: Welcome to our humans of DevOps podcast titled
with no code into the future. Today, we have with us a very
esteemed thought leader in the topic, continuous orchestration.
Our special guest is Kumar Chiku. Tula. I hope I said your
name correctly Kumar Hello.
Kumar Chivukula: Yes, how are you?
Eveline Oehrlich: I'm fine. How are you?
Kumar Chivukula: I'm good. Thanks for having having me. I
really appreciate your time and opportunity to talk to you.
Eveline Oehrlich: Yes, excited for you to be with us today. Let
me give our listeners a little bit of a background. And then of
course, I'll open it up to you because you might want to add
something. So Kumar is an experienced it and operations
leader with experience accelerating digital
transformation and business growth. With a customer first
mindset at companies like Adobe and Symantec. I think that's
where you were before. Today, he or you is the co founder and CTO
of UB Sarah, driving the mission to help companies deliver
software fast, safe and secure by a disruptive DevOps
solutions. All of that sounds fantastic. So thank you again,
Kumar, welcome and glad that you're here. Thanks for taking
time out of your I'm sure busy day. The first question of
course, before we get started, if our listeners who are of
course roles like DevOps engineers, app dev, folks,
security people, individuals, contributors, leaders, give them
about the 10,000 foot level of what does appsero really do?
Kumar Chivukula: Absolutely, thank you. So if you look at the
current market, right, DevOps is nothing new. It's been there for
quite some time, the recent explosion of the digital
transformation of all the kinds of press companies and multi
cloud adoption, and the technological changes that is
happening in the cloud, the way the rapid pace and the rapid
pace. Like way the cloud evolved from easy to instances, to the
containers to the micro services to the server less plus all the
languages, it's very hard for enterprises to keep up with
existing the software delivery management, it's very complex.
It's resource intensive, and it's challenging for them to
keep up with agility, velocity, and then also visibility. If you
talk about like CTOs and CIOs and CTOs like care for agility
velocity based on our survey, and then CISOs, and CIOs cares
for care for the visibility, governance doesn't mean that
they don't care what other things they do. But at the
highest level, that's what it is to solve the problem of how can
we continue to help agility velocity for the CTOs and CEOs
visibility and governance, and based on the practical
challenges that we've seen and the challenges that we see in
the current market and the gaps we started Apsara is that
continuous orchestration platform, what we do is we like,
as you rightfully said, in the early part of the introduction,
our mission and goal is to enable and empower enterprise
companies to make their software delivery faster, better and
secure. It's a very broad, bold statement loaded statement, I'll
just quickly unpack that. Our goal is to continue to protect
existing investment of the current enterprise companies.
And when we mean by the current investment, because people
already invested in the DevOps in the last three, four years,
we want to make sure that we invest we continue to protect
investment, and using our platform, accelerate the DevOps
and Dev SEC of journey in will, whether it be any cloud or
whether it be AWS, Azure GCP, or running in on prem, or working
across any technology stack or tool. So it just some summarize
it together. Our goal is to we continue to work with their
existing customers and have them keep the existing tool stack and
build the new code pipelines, which is one of the one of the
value proposition where they don't have to worry about
building the pipelines manually curate them and manage them at
scale as well and providing the end to end visibility with
respect to governance and where visibility with respect to doing
more with less. And that's the that's that's what we do. And
think about for the lack of better way to say that the way
the sales force solve the problem for the salespeople. We
want our opposite of platform we go and vision vision is to make
make it easy for the developers using offshore platform as well.
Eveline Oehrlich: So what I heard you say is that you are
protecting existing investments which is great because we do
know we are in a challenging situation right across the world
budgets aren't growing as much, I think between all the
different analysts is about maybe 5% or so in software and
in services. So that's great orchestration means to some
extent you are making and bringing things together, which
allows folks to actually improve their speed, reduce toil, and
improve the reliability and security of the services. So I
think that's probably an excellent, high level summary.
Now, you are yourself a CTO, CTO in a software company. Many of
our listeners probably have their own CTOs within their
companies, but they're not in software. But as a CTO in a
software company, what does that mean? What do you do on a day to
day basis?
Kumar Chivukula: Yeah, it's the title wise is the the next
startup company, we wear multiple hats, and from the from
the taking a step back and talk about what we do. Probably I'll
give my two cents. And I may not be the true for everybody, but
in the startup and working on a day to day basis, building the
product and setting the guidance and vision. And those are the
high level responsibilities of CTO making sure that but I'll
explain that in general, what I see. So as a CTO, your job is to
look at the future, look at the current pain points of the
customers and make sure that that the current technology
stack, also that the platform is aligning to that and making sure
that it is solving the problem, the biggest thing is on top of
the product, managing the product and technology roadmap,
we the CTO job is to make sure that alignment between sales,
marketing and product engineering is very important,
because it's very, otherwise, the CTO cannot just go and build
a team build the product and technology. And next thing you
know is after building the product into the platform,
there's no one to sell it and no one to understand what it is.
And alignment is absolutely critical. And that is one of the
biggest responsibility Besides building and managing the
technology stack and looking at Division, looking at the
innovation and whatnot. But that's the second set. The
second thing. Third thing is making sure that right people,
right people are in place to manage this thing because CTO
themselves as a city, we can't solve everything, you can only
solve so much. But you need to have a right set of people who
are managing the product, etc. People who are managing the
engineering, and then your reliability engineering SAS
platform, and you need to have a proper team that manages
architecture and design. So otherwise, it's very difficult
to bring it together and scale the platform as well. Their
highest level in the people in the product, people process
technology, and CTO plays a role in all of them in the initial
stages of the company, it's mostly around product and
people. And then when you start to grow into this one, and it
becomes a more process, and then the technology comes into play
along the way as well. So
Eveline Oehrlich: So you actually, and your role are an
orchestrator yourself, not just that your company does work in
the orchestration, you actually have the role of an orchestrator
as well amongst the different functions within your within
your organization. Now, you mentioned people and processes,
of course, people is the most important one and where I want
to go a little bit further, when you think about your day to day
job as CTO, I'm curious, what challenges do you face relative
to some of the people in the culture either within your
organization? Or what do you see within your installed base or to
clients? Because you said you do a lot of I'm assuming you're
doing a lot of conversations with prospects and clients? What
challenges do you have and see, relative to the human side and
the culture?
Kumar Chivukula: Yeah, the expectations from the prospects
and customers are huge, right? Because they expect everything
we done yesterday, it's very hard and even though you want to
do it, but sometimes you need to understand balance between what
is possible versus what is not possible. And sometimes you have
to say no and hard to say no in the middle of the conversation.
But we need to find a way to establish the relationship and
explain to the prospect and customer in terms of like how
they can need to align and how they need to think through this
one. Not everything needs to be done yesterday, not everything
is important. The prioritization, alignment with
respect to customer and also employees is one of the biggest
challenge that happens for many of the companies. Once you have
that alignment initial stages, it becomes easier but as and
when we add more customers, things are going to improve. But
once you build MVP once you have a product market fit once you
establish the go to market fit it the journey becomes easier,
which isn't we have an inflection stage of product
market fit to go to market fit and the initial stages were
building the product and headstone, building the product
and we're focusing on code to coding and testing and
validating and making sure the product is ready. And then
continue to add bells and whistles on top of it and add
security and add the reliability, the scalability, a
bunch of other features. That's where the journey comes in. But
the core product of core philosophy is not going to
change. The challenges are associated with it in terms of
like aligning the, the customer vision opposite, the opposite of
vision aligning customers. And also making sure that our team
is aligned to that is one of the critical component of the CTO
job. Because without that, it will be very hard, very hard for
either of the people to understand why we're not seeing
why we say no, or why we saying yes, people are not going to be
happy when you say yes to the customer come back with an
update, hey, we have to develop this new feature new capability
new, our new offering, and they want to understand why and why
not and what's ROI, what's the rate of return on investment,
these are the things we have to invest, and we have to manage
them. Because you don't want to build it for one customer,
right, and you don't want to accumulate technical debt, you
want to be very careful, managing the technical debt in
the company, and especially SAS company is very, very
challenging and very difficult as well. But if you have to have
build the culture in a way, you continue to draw the line, what
is the what what is the part of the product? What is not? What
is the core versus context? Once you do that becomes easier
conversation for, for having the challenges with challenge the
conversation with the customer, also with the employees as well.
Eveline Oehrlich: Great, I love what you said core versus
context, sometimes, in my role as an industry analysts, which
is my second job. When I go into briefings with some of my vendor
clients, they forget to share core, they only share context.
And that makes it sometimes very difficult. And then one other
thing you said, MVP, or minimum viable product, I heard
something just recently, which I really have adopted. I'm going
to call it a minimal lovable product instead of a minimal
viable product. Some of the enterprise clients loved when he
suggested that. Excellent, great.
Kumar Chivukula: Now a good minimum lovable product.
Eveline Oehrlich: Yeah, that's a new a new vocab. I mean, I'm
sure you heard about
Kumar Chivukula: it before. Yeah,
Eveline Oehrlich: I think I leveraged the aka stolen from
somebody else. But I don't I cannot remember. So I cannot
give that person credit. All right. So um, Sarah was founded,
I believe, in 2020. And with a vision, as you mentioned,
software developers and DevOps teams to achieve faster software
delivery through an orchestration platform and did
some research, of course on ops era. And I'm not a stranger to
you, because I covered or looked at, at your solution. When I was
doing research as an industry analysts. Looking at it, you're
the first no code, DevOps orchestration platform. So give
us a little bit more context in terms of, again, that
orchestration platform, and particularly in terms of no
code, right, because I think that's really what's intriguing
with regards to our listeners, because sometimes folks are a
little bit afraid to say no code, what do you mean, you're
replacing me? And others are saying, yes, that's great,
because I can actually do additional work which I can get
to when I have an orchestration platform. So that's kind of the
backdrop of my question.
Kumar Chivukula: Yeah, thank you for the question is a really
good question, actually. So there's always misconception
about the no code and low code and this whole concept, right?
So when we talk about no code, it's more not about replacing
people, it's about enhancing the ability of the existing DevOps
team and making sure that they accelerate the journey, because
otherwise, you end up doing that, in our survey, about
30 40% of the time they're managing the tools and managing
the pipelines. It's nothing wrong with it, but is it really
impeding them for them to help developers innovate and shipping
things faster, which is not a good thing as well as evaluate.
another data point is based on IBM and Gartner survey that was
done in 2019 2020. This was again, two, three years back 15
to 18% of the code that was written by the most of the
companies doesn't see light at the end of the tunnel, because
it is all done for internal development, nothing that has
been for customer. Imagine that 15 to 20% of the time that has
been gone, invested by the people, and the company is not
generating the value that is a product to the loss for the
company and revenue loss and opportunity loss. How can we
have them focus on things that they can help the company bottom
line, and also help accelerate the journey and make sure that
they continue to stay current with the technology, right? So
if you look at that, do those things then apcera will come as
a like for It's like another smart chatbot or smart Mini and
for them like where they can continue to accelerate the
journey by leveraging opposite orchestration platform. How do
we do that we as a core principle of apcera, we want to
build reusable micro services in the platform when what we mean
reusable micro services so that when we build a micro service,
or a petrol function, we want to make sure that it scales across
many and many enterprise customers. So as a in our in
order orchestration platform, we have three modules. One is tools
and automation. Second one is no code pipelines. Third one is
unified insights. We we explained previously, tool chain
automation will help the enterprise customer to protect
their eggs Testing investment by bringing the tools together,
once they bring the tools together using local pipelines
within the local pipelines, what we have is we built a bunch of
integrations in a microservices format. All the enterprise
customers have to do it instead of them worrying about the right
and the glue code integration code, or like Jenkins file, or
maybe writing the glue, groovy scripts that were maybe custom
in scripts what they have, they can leverage the existing
microservices that we have, and be able to build them as a part
of Lego set, we are given the Lego set, the DevOps team still
have to conceptually, the their, their own car, and to drive it
the Release car, right, we're not stopping them, we're not
going to drive the car for them, they have to drive it, that's
still the responsibility of ops, what we're doing is instead of
them building the car, then all by themselves, we're enabling
them to build the car glue to the reusable microservices, so
that they can make the journey faster, better and secure. And
then last, but not least in doing so they get to see the
visibility aspect of it. So for the for them to achieve all of
them in a scale. It's very cumbersome and difficult. You
need to have a ton of people to managing it like in my previous
life, and both Symantec and Adobe, and we used to spend a
boat to the world's largest software publishers, as you guys
know, we spend about 60% of the money that you spend on people
and 40 personal tools. It's the Yep, it's not easy for every
company to scale, invest that much money. And then there's
that many resources, we're talking about scale in the lines
of poleetical. If a million dollars per year just on
software delivery management, I'm not talking about software
development, software delivery management. So to bring it
together, the no code pipelines, what we talk about is like we
give you the templates, within the templates, you have
reasonable micro services, we let enable the enterprise
enterprise customers to take the templates build the templates
for their own use cases, whether it be sblc, which is a software
development lifecycle that includes across multiple
languages, multiple technology stacks, means stack, Java stack,
dotnet, stack, and so on. So forth, are SAS DevOps, which is
Salesforce, snowflake, Informatica, Adobe Experience
Manager, APG and so on, so forth, which is it DevOps. And
the third one is about intra intra as a code, all three
things can be possible by layer in the quality security gates,
we have a deeper integration to security stack and quality stack
as well, which is included that includes from the code time the
code commit is done, we want to make sure that we scan for
secret keys passwords, and ensure that no vulnerabilities
are there. No known vulnerabilities are there in the
builds and deployments, and the dynamic code analysis and making
sure the containers that are running, fully secured known
vulnerabilities are not there, or any any VMs are being
deployed that vulnerability management, we can also scan
them. So having these things as a security hygiene as part of
the CI CD pipelines along with quality hygiene, we'll help them
make the software delivery faster, but also make it secure,
and also improve the quality security posture significantly
for them. So imagine that we don't have any of these things,
they have to do it with hundreds 10s of people plus a person
leaves, and the second person wants to come in, we do it all
over again, because they don't want to talk to the code, again
understood a lot, but just bring it back, we have the new code
pipelines. What we mean by that is not to replace people. It's
about enhancing the existing journey that they have, by
taking the templates and the reusable micro services help
them build the pipelines at scale across SDLC SAS DevOps in
Frazer code.
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Eveline Oehrlich: Sounds like this actually will make if I am
in the software delivery role, my job a lot more fun, because I
do remember conversations with software developers who say, I
really like my job most of the time. But there are a few
aspects of it, which are really not fun. And I don't look
forward to those. And I think you as you just described some
of those tasks, if they are like a cookbook or a playbook or a
template, allow me to actually step out of the mundane tasks
and allow myself to actually bring things together. That's
one of the biggest challenge we see. And we found when we did
our upskilling that folks are really starting to disengage
with in connecting, not connecting with what they're
doing because some of the work they're doing is just not as
challenging and creative. So I see lots of opportunities there
now. Low code, and or no code All right, what's the
difference? I think the
Kumar Chivukula: there is a slight difference. And basically
how we want to use it. It's sometimes it's marketing term
and buzzwords in the industry. But low code or no code
development is like, for example, locode is called Give
an example of low code, like in the case of where some tasks
that needs to be done repeated way. And, for example, you want
to collect a application particularly, like, I'll just
give an example of the DevOps, you want to be in a position to
repeatedly use your static code analysis step across all CI CD
pipelines, you can do the low code, or no code way, low code
way is nothing but you just write a minimal code that can
work work across various tasks and leave it as part of the your
stepper microservice and create a template and use it across
multiple multiple pipelines. And that way, you know what to
expect, what are the conditions, what are the thresholds, what
are the gates and so on so forth, it's with a bit of a
little bit more customization or making it more meaningful to the
existing your own environment as well existing environment.
Whereas a look no code, that means that you just really like
doing the plug and play, basically, it's a plug and play
and think about is like, your Lego example, right? You are
given a set of Legos and the blueprint and the template. And
for you to construct the thing without you making the Legos and
deliver the with the model, where people like in the
different personas, like when you look talk to it DevOps, and
especially with SAS DevOps, it's basically the focus is more on
the configuration and making changes at the application
level. They don't want to be the coders, traditional coders, like
Java developers, or the good Golang developers, and so on so
forth. They care about having something in a plug and play in
a resort based approach, which is what low code development is
like, basically, they want to just take something that is out
there, create by clicking couple of visits, and be able to create
the pipeline for them. Whereas no code, low code is like where
we want to give them a little bit of opportunity for them to
tweak it with existing investment, and also be able to
help them bring the existing tools. As a result, we have to
give them a little bit of opportunity for them to tweak
the Legos that they have. So that I'm trying to give you that
like example of the DevOps context. So the they're in the
industry standard standard, they've kind of interchange in
some areas, and they people conveniently use it. But low
core to me is there isn't 100% locode is very hard to do it at
this point in this is not fully not there, but there are a
couple for a particular use case you can achieve the low code for
for a particular use case, you can you can achieve no code as
well depends on the use case. Depends on the persona.
Eveline Oehrlich: Great. Excellent. Okay, I want to shift
a little bit Toria installed base because I know you know
them well, because you do have conversations and you are the
owner to take those conversations and turn them into
products, which is a great, a great noble cause. What
challenges do you think? Let's maybe take the number one
challenge if you kind of go back and think about your last week's
conversations or last quarter, while the quarter is I don't
know what yours. It's just
Kumar Chivukula: the end of this month.
Eveline Oehrlich: Okay, so if you go back to the to the last
quarter, what would you say? is the number one challenge your
installed base? Or prospects today? Half? And how are they
solving them? Besides, of course, you are offering your
orchestration platform? That's of course one, right. But what
are some other challenges? I'm curious.
Kumar Chivukula: There are a few, but I think I'll highlight
a couple of them. Especially like in the, in the enterprise
sector, digital digital transformation is really key.
And people will expect it to transform because customer and
their end user expectations are different. Like nowadays, if you
asked me six years back, you can go back, go to the website and
just or maybe mobile app, just book a car and the car would
show up to the door, which is Tesla in this case, it's very
hard, I would have said no, and there's no way and it's
happening and especially with the pandemic, it's even changed.
We don't have to go to the car dealership and get the car and
then the car has to show up the car can show up to your door.
And it's very hard to even imagine that and that the this
type of innovation is happening and customer expectations have
changed and they like Amazon prime prime example right? You
just ship something, it shows up the doorstep without you going
and worrying about all of them. So the behavior and the customer
expectations have changed as a result enterprises are dealing
with digital transformation, they have to otherwise they will
be taken out of the business for them and how do they do it
without having the people then without having the platform
without having the way to manage the overall software delivery
management because they have to transform themselves from a
retail company to more of a software company or to maybe
manufacturing company to a software company, as Microsoft
CEO said famously into those data to those in depth tell
every company has to become a software guy Coming in, as a
result, that people are struggling with it in terms of
like trying to keep up with the pace of the digital
transformation and innovation that is happening in the market.
The second biggest challenge is how do we do it in a more in a
secure manner. Because that's another thing that is coming
into the play, it's not just the shipping the code, especially
with the cloud, we would develop something and just put it out
there in the cloud expect the cloud is secure, that's a wrong
assumption, you have to make sure that your data, your your
bills, your deployments, you have to protect it, there is no
other way around AWS and Azure and GCP, they will only give the
offer the utility computing and they'll give you the compute for
a cost. And they have to run, the enterprises have to run
their application, they have to manage the deployments as a
result coupled with software delivery management in the
digital transformation, along with because it's continuous
innovation, right? It's not like you just do the release once a
year, or once in six months, it's a continuous innovation
every week, every day. And sometimes every two weeks,
sometimes once a month depends on the company trajectory and
their adoption and their Agile transformation roadmap. So it
varies from there, it's hard to keep keep up with the pace of
innovation also managing with people with that. So it's we
continue to see that that is a digital transformation coupled
with the software delivery management along with DevOps.
devsecops is one of the one of the big no longer the nice to
have any more for four years. But it's nice to have now it's a
line item, everybody's talking about it, executives are talking
about it.
Eveline Oehrlich: Which brings me to my almost last question,
it's around skills, we at DevOps Institute are very passionate
about upskilling, and helping the different roles right, and
in the last five years have been conducting the research around
skills. And we're just at the point where we are releasing our
upskilling 2023. report in April. So I'm doing a lot of
research there. So if you have to give advice to our listeners,
and remember, those are their software developers, software
engineers, there are DevOps engineers there's SRE is, but if
there are a few things, you would say, hey, really focus on
this? What would that be?
Kumar Chivukula: It's the continue to when you when you're
in the technology field, it's not a the what environment is
changing around us. Right? So and continue to keep up with the
basic core elements of the right one is the one is the cloud
stack, because cloud is going to be there for next 10 years, I
continue to be there, it's the only wall which can change. But
keep up with the certifications and keep up with Cloud level
certification, there are a lot of free courses that offer both
AWS and Azure GCP. And also you can sign up for the course
Coursera Udemy. And then a lot of the videos are available in
in the internet, where you can just take advantage of them, and
then be able to upskill and continue to upskill. And like
attending the some of the trade shows, and wherever possible,
most of them are virtual now, thanks to pandemic and most of
the sessions used to be in person now the virtual so that
we have a lot more opportunity for people to learn from the
community. And effectively, a new kind of like you have to
transform into into more of SRE DevOps team no longer just doing
the configuration management did they have to have a language,
they have to at least understand the data structures languages,
and will be able to understand the algorithms is very, very
important. No, they don't have developed all of them. But they
will be dealing with the developers who speak the
language, having the idea about all of them and be able to
understand proficient in one language will be always helpful.
Because once you understand the language, it's easy to replicate
the knowledge across the rest of the languages that are going to
be there in the market. And it's like, to me, it's we continue to
keep up with the cloud vendors what they're doing, and then
basically, take one or at least one of one or two withdrawal
possible, which is one minimum, to certainly have a
certification in that so that way you will know and then you
will people recognize that people understand the value and
value that and then having keeping up with trade shows and
also continue to leverage advantage of the communities
communities are things that we have. Plus, obviously we have
now we are going to be taught to a Coursera Udemy and a bunch of
other things LinkedIn learning, they're all the things that
resources are available at a much cheaper rate than we used
to be before and is accessible individual so you can sign up
for a monthly plan. You can sign up for a yearly plan and put a
plan a plan together, what wins instructor led or like you can
do the self paced learning as well. So
Eveline Oehrlich: Fabulous. Fabulous Kumar, thank you so
much. I have one more question, but this is more of a fun
question. Yeah. So what is your favorite weekend activity? I'm
assuming you have sometimes a weekend.
Kumar Chivukula: Yeah, I do. Like obviously if a weekend
comes in, I want to spend time with the family as much as
possible and also like to me, I my fun time is mostly around,
catching up on Reading and especially I'm not really
reading books and books but I think I listen to a lot of
podcasts and listen to some videos and follow the some of
the blog posts and so on so forth and try to keep keep up
myself. And I try to take myself out and then go for do some
exercise and walk and long walks and when they have a free day,
the last one is about like catching up on sports and that's
just I like sports and public acceptance on the sports.
Eveline Oehrlich: Great, super. We have been with Kumar Chiba
Kula CTO for apcera, a DevOps orchestration platform Kumar,
thank you so much for joining me today on humans of DevOps
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