Cloud Custodian – Kapil Thangavelu, Stacklet

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another tech start TV segment. I'm really happy to be joined by Kapil fung of Kapil sanghavalu.

And if I mispronounced that I apologize, but I gave up my best shot can peel we close? We're good. Good man.

Thank you. So Kapil is is with well, you feel why don't you introduce yourself? Hi, I'm the co-founder of stacklit and the Creator and lead maintainer for clock custodian.

Excellent. We're going to talk a lot about Cloud custodian in this interview Kapil, but I want to get out of the way. First though a little bit about statlett.

Sure, what you guys do? So sacklett is a company that which I'm CTO that we created in March of 2020 to help Enterprises adopt Clark custodian at scale and to help sort of further its feature development and capability set. So bringing sort of the out of the box value to organizations that they would otherwise have to do toil on with the open source as well as to help lead and direct teachers and roadmap around the open source.

Excellent. io for people want to get more information that is St. A c k l e t Indy that I and so a lot of what we do is so we build we build on top of the open source to build out a platform for executing doing governance as code at scale at Enterprise scale with ux visualization reporting.

We also build some additional components and capabilities for driving driving at real time asset inventories across the cloud as well as being able to do and richer Enterprise Integrations from service now jira Etc to being able to drive some of the behavior change capabilities of cloud custodian into the Enterprise. very good You know we look this is a model. that seemed be come popular, especially with the rise and Advent of like cncf and Linux foundation and so forth is you know you have for you you have a company in the old days before you had foundations a company like this would manage the open source.

Project themselves and and it was hard for the open source projects to get scale because potential competitors and and consumers and stuff would would be worried about well, it was kind of a big brother approach to managing these open source projects. He's open source projects were managed. Sometimes through the sole benefit of of the sponsor if you will, right and and now with you know, Linux Foundation Cloud native Computing Foundation CDF others you have much more of a real community that can coalesce Behind these projects while still affording a company like stocklet the ability to offer.

In some cases, you know call it a commercial version or an open core kind of freemium version as well as additional. resources and services that allow some of these open source projects to as you say operated scale operate, you know in a net and in the Enterprise if you will and It really you know, this is the model today. We didn't have this 15 years ago 10 years ago.

Yeah, I've been I've been involved in open source for sure. I don't know. Wow, 25 years now and you know, I've seen lots of different motions and ecosystems, you know project level foundations to Umbrella organizations and the form of Apache and it's you know, it's a lot of that's old is, you know, come again.

Let's say but the I think the key aspects for us at least it will Cloud custodian is that it is a successful open source project independent probably even prior to its movement into cncf with hundreds of contributors being in cncf has helped accelerate that and you know, now we have over 350 contributors a dozen maintain yours from half-dozen companies. And so that's really helped. I think you know solidify being in the foundation has helped solidify that notion of a neutral home.

And so we have competitors that are using the open source. We have lots of end user customers that feel empowered to contribute that that the underlying capability set isn't going to you know, be tied to the fate of a single organization and exactly we very much believe it up and source and so we're not necessarily just doing open up an open core play the policy language that that we give our customers is the exact same that is available in the open source, we do is provide for the the operations the maintenance. contouring digitalizations and Richard capabilities that surround it but that core policy language that we drive for governance's code is kind of financially derived from the open source and is the same as you Excellent, man.

So yeah, I want to talk about the news with cncf in one second. io is is the right site for that. That's right.

That is correct. And we're we're also, you know primarily and GitHub and discussions and slack but a simple Google should find it should take you more up. Yeah, absolutely.

All right. So the news or some of the news we want to talk about today is that cloud custodian has now been accepted into cncf as in incubation project or it's a project and incubation. I'm not sure quite what the wording is there.

incubating I think is the phrase or maybe I've seen both so it's hard to say. I got it I tripped on it too. But I mean for those who are familiar with cloud computing Cloud native Computing Foundation a Linux Foundation or open source sort of models.

Basically, there's three or four stages that a project. goes in or passes through hopefully, you know as part of a project managed by cncf one. I think the first one is called sandbox.

That's right. That's really early on and you know and things are getting started then they thank you patient which you know, and there are you know objective metrics that a project must meet to to land into the stages. But the next one that up is incubation.

We're obviously they're growing the project and it's you know being incubated and then eventually projects graduate and there's only like been a handful of projects that actually have, you know, reached the graduation tier of CNC. If I believe Prometheus is probably one of them link or D might be another I think kubernetes there's others but in any event, you know incubation is where a lot of projects kind of spend probably the greatest amount of time. But it's not sandbox.

It's not. That this it's not that this Baby's premature and incubator or something incubation generally means you have a project that has some pretty solid. foundational as you mentioned 350 Contributors in multiple maintainers in the cross, you know geographies and and cooperations and organizations.

So that's a pretty big deal. To to reach that level. Kapil what do you think?

It means? What do you think it means for the project from this point aren't? So, you know, it's interesting to contrast sort of like a student's Journey because I think it's a little bit unique in for some of the cncf products and sense that it was.

You know immature production used by thousands of global brands. For cloud governance, even before it went in the cncf being in the cncf has you know given us that umbrellas. We reference earlier to be have that neutral home and it's helped accelerate some of our growth and our adoption as organizations that are already members of the cncf feel free to contribute to it and new organizations that are becoming aware of it feel comfortable adopting it in production from the get-go.

But I mean my last year we hosted a clock custodian day and we had you know, HBO Max and jpmc talk and cap and others talk about sort of their production usage at scale of clarkstonian and and we're actually hosting another one of those shortly sitting day 2022 on October 18 where we'll have additional speakers coming including Intuit and Siemens and data bricks. So, you know a lot of sort of ducks. Usage for multiple years and hearing those stories from those users on how they're able to achieve some of their governance goals using clock studying, you know, moving into incubation in the cncf has you know has really helpful from unlocking sort of the the capabilities of the cncf which is sort of you know, what they what they help provide to the products is based on where this products are.

If I look at the key metrics for you know, the different stages of cncf, you know custodian has already mature project, you know, we're looking for we're excited to be an incubating but we're looking forward to graduation because we feel like that that's where we should be ultimately and we're looking forward to you know, presenting at kubecon taking advantage of some of the resources that cmcf on locks for each of these different levels to help us, you know, reach more users and help establish those back to standard Cloud governance. cool We should mention look the later this month. I think it's the week of the 24th is of course a kubecon cloud native cond up in Detroit.

And and now it's an official incubation project. You'll you know, the God custodian team will be there I could feel I'm not sure if you're planning. Yeah, I plan on being there.

What about the faculty boots and we'll also be the clock standing project will have a the project Pavilion and annual also be doing an event. We'll also have a few talks there link one on the computer track and we're all doing one on cloud native Bridge X Day on Sunday for those that are attending the day before and I believe one other talk on sort of worth project is and sort of an intro and deep dive into some of its capabilities. So if you're interested in you're coming to Khan, please come check out the schedule Wall Street hosting a an event a fun event Tuesday evening at a local game slash your whole.

Cool. Yeah, there's lots of events going on. We we had seen that what we'll be there broadcasting live.

So maybe we will catch up while we're out there. I want to turn back though to the cloud custodian event, which is next week. I believe the 18th from folks who are interested in one who may be registered.

That's a virtual event, right? Correct appeal. That's correct.

It's a virtual event roughly from 9:30 to three to four o'clock Eastern. Okay, for people who are interested in that you can sign up. io / events.

a little user organizations are going to be Talking about you know how they're using Cloud custodian to help them with their Cloud governance. Anything else you want to share with the audience about the event? Yes, so we'll have a bunch of end users talking about how they're using clock student to help them manage that skills across multiple public clouds.

We'll be purviewing some of the newer capabilities that are part of the open source, and one of those is going to the three one three of highlight which are going to be support for running policies on terraform. So a shift left capability Beyond The Run admission of mutating and validating machine controllers against kubernetes with the city and policies and then additional support for a new providers specifically tencent cloud. So and if interested in all those we'll have we'll have some additional deep Dives at clarkstuding day.

very good I think we hit most everything here. Is there anything we didn't you? Know, this is great.

Thanks. Thanks for inviting me to come talk. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at clock studying day and kubecon.

Absolutely, check it out. We'll see you there. Then.

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