Enhancing Kubernetes Deployment with Octopus Deploy’s Colin Bowern

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv.

Our next guest up is from our good friends at Octopus Deploy, but he's never been on here before, so let's welcome him to Tech Drunk tv. It's Colin Bowron. Colin is SVP of Product at Octopus to play.

Colin, welcome to Text Drunk tv. It's a pleasure to have you on. Thank you, Alan.

That's great to be here. And, and Colin, you, well, let's start off with a little bit of the Colin story. I, I'll, I'll add Mike, you know what we spoke about off camera, which is originally from Canada and about 10 years.

You, you made the long migration to Oz, uh, New Zealand and, uh, been there for 10 years. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, escaped the snow, but, uh, also kind of just when I actually looked back on my history with Octopus, it's funny also about 10 years ago I first pitched Octopus while I was consulting to, uh, large banks and, uh, retail organizations in Toronto.

And, uh, fast forward 10 years, I'm now working for them leading a hundred plus SOC to Knots, building deployments, uh, and, and try to solve deployments. Bring hap pretty happy deployments to a million happy Deployers. That's amazing.

What a great story. Um, was it something you always wanted to do, which was kind of pick up and get away from the snow and Go Down somewhere like New Zealand? Oh, we, we honeymoon heroes our once in a lifetime trip and then just kept finding reasons to come back.

And it turns out we got actually a pretty vibrant, cool little tech scene, um, down here in New Zealand. Oh, there absolutely is. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I, I know there is. I, uh, yeah, I kind of felt the same way about Hawaii, but I was never able to make it happen.

Um, but anyway, congratulations to you and I'm glad, glad you're happy there. Um, Colin Octopus deploy, uh, you spoke a little bit about what they do, but you know, people in our audience may think they know or what have you, but how would you describe Octopus to them? Yeah, look, I'll, I'll use a few of the words our customers use.

So when I talk to customers that have, uh, been with octopus or brought octopus to their second, third, and fourth workplace, they often describe it as it was the tool that helped me hand the deploy button to others and others being the rest of the people on the team. Maybe people aren't as passionate about deployment, but need to get it done. It's part of their job.

Um, they like it because they can see their changes move through the environments. Um, everything's in calm, in orderly fashion. Their managers like it because they can see the, um, the processes being followed.

That process that it's used to qa, um, is gonna be the same process that goes to production. And I've got my ServiceNow change tickets. Um, everything's kind of just happening the way I want it.

And then I've got that kind of single pane of glass view that, um, I think all IT teams regard, you know, with their multiple tech stacks, multiple apps at various stages of maturity, um, you know, really value. And so, you know, hand the deploy button, see my changes, enforce my, my business practices and, and just have all that, that assurance of I know where things are at is just a, a big part of, you know, just that, that chaos of, you know, how do I get my changes into production? Um, so we try and bring common order to that, which hopefully results in happy deployments.

Deployments. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So, you know, we were talking again, I mentioned, we were talking off camera, Colin, my personal feeling with Kubernetes has been for eight years, seven years. It's just still too hard. It was too damn hard originally.

It's still hard, you know, for the average kind of admin and, and some admins relish that, right? Some admins love being, you know, the, the classic Brent from the Phoenix project, right? They're the only ones who could push that deploy button to, to use your phrase.

Um, but, you know, look, Kubernetes and Cloud native has become the defacto compute standard now, right? I mean, it's, you know, majority of of new deployments out there by a lot. Um, and people are doing it at scales that we really only kind of, other than maybe Google themselves, you know, that we've never, never seen before, whether it's, you know, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud dozens if not hundreds of clusters of Kubernetes clusters.

Um, you know, I mean, boggling the mind how scalable we're we're talking about. But at its core, it hasn't really gotten easier unless you're using a, a tool like Octopus Deploy. Um, I mean, is that kind of, I mean, it's a great, it's a great place for Octopus deploy to be in, but do you see it that way as well?

I wonder if that's what you're hearing. Yeah, absolutely. Look, we, we think we're entering kind of the early majority stage deployments of, uh mm-hmm, Kuber Kubernetes.

Um, I'd liken it back to when we went from machines to virtual machines. Um, you know, remember the question was always, well, will the database server work in a vm? Um, we're, we're kind of in about that era.

We're gonna have a few of those questions coming up. But one of the important points, uh, pieces at this point is in that early majority, how do you get the average application team who's not that passionate person who's willing to dig through the command line, dig through a thousand YAML files to find that one parameter they just want to deploy and go home? And so, you know, octopus has been doing deployments for 10 years.

Uh, we got our start in machines, but today we do Kubernetes and more. Um, and, uh, you know, what we try and do is bring all of those familiar concepts, environments, um, approvals, uh, visibility into what's happening. And I, I don't have to go figure out which command line shows me the status of my pod.

Um, you know, I can see all of that all in one spot. Um, and I can do it as well with familiar tools like Customize and Helm. I can use, um, a bunch of my contents, Jordan a get repo.

So I get all the goodness that the early adopters really wanted, but I'm getting the ease of use, um, that, you know, I actually really prefer as, as a later stage application team adopting it. And then from a platform engineering perspective, that lowers that bar to their alternate mission, which is driving adoption. 'cause I'm with you, containers are here to stay.

The, the compute density, um, and the stability guarantees you get outta the container package format. Um, it's, it's hard to, you know, put that genie back in the bottle. And so, you know, e even if Kubernetes is hard, that's now our job as a tech industry is to make it easy and not invent new concepts, not invent, you know, you need these 40 tools just to do the basic thing.

And, and that's what Octopus is trying to do. We're trying to take deployments and all our great expertise in deployments and make Kubernetes deployments even easier for those second, third, fourth, a hundredth application teams. Absolutely.

com 10 years ago, right? For a lot of people, DevOps was chef or puppet Ansible, right? And what was Chef and Puppet and Ansible Duma, whether you were using a cookbook or, or a script or, or what have you, you were able to deploy, right?

Pre-configured, you know, you had your sort of gold configuration and you could just, you know, spin up instances like that at a time when a lot of people really didn't know their way around an AWS interface. And a lot of people still don't know their way around an AWS interface. Um, but you know what?

Companies like Puppet and Chef and Ansible made it easy to deploy tens and dozens of instances like machine, you know, like machine work Yeah. Deploying machines, like machine work somewhere. That's something a double negative, but I mean, in many ways, octopus is doing this with Kubernetes.

Uh, absolutely. Yeah. That's, that's, that's exactly it is.

Um, yeah, we went to the, this era of declarative configuration that's the chef puppet Ansible, uh, world Mm-Hmm. Where we wanted to be able to then, you know, kind of treat our infrastructure, um, you know, as actually one of the old Datadog presentations, treat our infrastructure like garbage. Like, let's not get so precious about this machine that we've been fine tuning over years.

Let's just be able to just deploy new ones. If that one doesn't work, throw it away, deploy it again. I prefer to say cattle not pets, rather thans garbage.

There you go. But, okay. Yep.

Well, that, that one, but it caught, it caught my attention back 10 years ago because, Oh, I guess it did, obviously, You know, it was, you used to log into the servers, you used to go and hand change files. Sure. You know, back in the early two thousands, in the nineties.

Um, so, so we, we've now hit this era where we've accepted that actually, um, if it's not working, you just throw it down and reprovision it. 'cause we have that declarative state. Um, and, and this is where teams are.

They're, they're bought into that now. Uh, but what they want is they want it to be easy. They don't, they don't want to have to navigate through a bunch of command lines when production is on fire.

Um, they don't want to have to sit there and figure out, oh, what was the login to that test environment? I know that was different than the development environment. They just wanna be able to, they, they're looking for the easy button, um, to, to do that because I've got a, but a bunch of other things in my backlog, um, that have nothing to do with provisioning infrastructure, having to remember what's the subnet again.

Um, you know, do I have the right connection string? And that's, that's again where Octopus tries to make that really easy. We've been doing environments dev test, QA, prod, UAT, whatever environment you want, however many environments you want.

We've been doing that for years. And Kubernetes is just learning about environments. A lot of the tools these days are talking about environmental progression.

Well, so we're just bringing that capability. We've always had that familiar capability to these application teams deploying to Kubernetes. They need to do configuration management, like the values change by environment and be able to, to see that flow.

Um, we're doing that through turning into, uh, customize and making sure that, that, that integrates in as well. So we're bringing a lot of those familiar concepts so that those, those teams can, can just deploy and, uh, you know, reduce that time from please to thank you and get back to the next most important thing in their backlog. Absolutely.

So Colin, you guys recently announced an expansion of capabilities for Kubernetes that customers of Octopus Deploy will now, you know, having as part of their, part of their bag of tricks, if you will. Yeah. Um, let's talk about that.

Yeah. So, so um, uh, I think in one of the previous, uh, interviews I saw with you, you talked a lot about the, the rise of GI ops. I think it was Dan over at Codefresh that you're, uh, chatting with.

Mm-Hmm. Okay. Garfield.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and look, you know, we think there's a lot of great stuff in the principles behind GI ops. And so we've been looking at again, how to enable those in ways that the second, third, fourth, 10th hundredth application team, um, can, can engage with. And so, kind of over the last number of months we've been shipping a bunch of capability and it's time to kind of package that up and tell the story about how you can adopt some of that kind of, you know, kind of, uh, version controlled assets, um, you know, kind of pull, pull based, uh, behaviors inside octopus.

Um, and so we've, we've now got in the box first class support customized helm, um, being able to source YAML files and other assets from GIT repositories. Um, but you know, more importantly, we also solve a lot of the problems that we hear constantly from those second, third, and fifth teams, which is like, show me the status of what's happening inside the cluster. 'cause that's probably one of those kind of nuanced changes in moving to Kubernetes used to be able to watch deployment success because the executable ran Yes.

No, the database schema, uh, finished. Yes. No, with Kubernetes, it's like, here's my manifest.

And then you just wait. And, and so having that tool that can show you, well, here's what's happening inside the cluster, um, and here's what's happening to this pod, and oh, that resource didn't provision, um, that's actually really important. And you don't want to sit there in a terminal window and go refresh, refresh, refresh.

Um, you're just gonna sit there in the octopus window and it's gonna just pull that live now. Um, so kind of it's, it's the, the, uh, the UI over coup control apply, um, that, that, you know, most application teams out there really just expect and want. Um, so that's all there inside octopus.

Um, and great stuff. It's really just, you know, the continuation of our, our journey and making it easier for application teams everywhere to deploy containers. It's almost octopus shifts left.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, shifts left, but not the burden. You know, this, this is, this is really an important point for myself and, and the a hundred plus Octonauts trying to bring these happy deployments is, at the end of the day deployments is, is an event that should be a non-event, and it should just work.

And like, I love stories like one of our customers who is, who accidentally deployed on a Tuesday afternoon, 'cause somebody hit the button, they normally do Sunday deployments, and it just worked, you know, because they had built that hygiene factor of the process I used to deploy. The test is the same to production, and I do it enough times, you know, I deployed a test every day, um, that when they accidentally deployed to production on a Tuesday, like just worked. Um, yeah.

So, you know, that's, that's our, you know, we wanna reduce the stress, we wanna lower the bar, we want to bring the, um, all the upsides of container apps and Kubernetes, uh, to the rest of the enterprise. And, uh, that's, that's really our role in, in this is, is bringing it to the masses. Good.

Good for you, man. Um, anything else around this expansion of, of capabilities? Yeah, look, um, you know, I think the, the other, the other angle here, it's, it's, it, it would um, be, um, uh, uh, remiss of us to, to mention is it's Kubernetes and more, and, you know, we know inside the modern enterprise, there is a large portfolio of modern and heritage applications.

Um, and what people, you know, while people are, are evaluating potentially new tools in Kubernetes, um, they can't neglect the rest of the IP portfolio because the average bank is not going to containerize the banking system, uh, anytime soon. The airlines are not gonna move the Sabre ticketing mainframe, um, into containers. So I'm deploying to a wide range of technologies.

Um, and, and so that's again, uh, an area where, you know, both our strengths in, in where we've come from, but also where we're going actually blend really quite nicely. And that being able to see that, that, you know, all my projects, even the pieces where maybe I'm deploying kind of the main core service through to Kubernetes, but I'm, I'm doing database updates to an Oracle database. You can, you can still do all of that together.

Systems of record, systems of engagements. Exactly. Yeah.

To me, this all falls under what we call app modernization. Yep. Right?

Absolutely. We're modernizing and, and, and a lot of these app modernizations, I think part of it is recognizing, look, if it belongs in a Oracle database or on a Z system, leave it be on the Z system. But there are front end pieces of it and other pieces of that app that shouldn't necessarily use that Oracle base or, or, or maybe talk to the Oracle base, but that front end lives in Azure, though you, as we were talking, you could get Oracle on, on Azure now, but, um, or AWS or what have you.

Or, you know, and the same thing true for z mainframes to cloud and all of that, right? It's all part of the app modernization transformation that, that we're, you know, we're seeing and living in. Excellent stuff.

Go ahead. Uh, and I was gonna say, and, and you know, I think the o other exciting thing, we're seeing Kubernetes show up at the edge, you know, we've got a customer deploying to clusters in retail stores and hospitals. Um, yeah.

So that's a whole other area. I believe you talked to our CEO about multi-tenancy and some of our joy there. So, uh, yeah.

People Are, well, so I'm, I'm thinking 2024 is a big year for Edge with Wasm and all of this stuff. I'd, I'd like to, you know, we've been talking about the Edge for a couple years now, and I think it's time it starts, you know, we start seeing some real, real examples of it really kicking in there. Yeah.

Colin, for people who wanna get more information, where can they go on the web? com/kubernetes, and, uh, we've got, uh, all of the, the details of how we do that, but Octopus Play also does Kubernetes and more. Absolutely.

And I should mention Octopus will be in Paris at Cube card, is it March 18th or 19th to the 22nd? Something like that. Hopefully.

We'll, we'll catch up with you guys there. And we'd love to meet anybody doing any deployments to Kubernetes. We're, you know, we're, we're just generally a curious bunch.

So come tell us your deployment stories and how we can help help you get to the rest of your teams. All right, Colin, I appreciate you getting up early, early in the morning for us today to be on Text Drunk tv. Have a happy holidays and New Year and, uh, good luck to you and all of the, how do you call them?

Octa nods. Yep. Yep.

The a hundred plus Octa nods in research and development in Australia and New Zealand. Beautiful. All right, man.

Be well. Thanks. Cheers.

All Thank you. Colin Bauer, SVP product. Dr.

Puts deploy here on Tech Drunk tv. We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.

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