Expanding Kubernetes Accessibility – Steve Rodda, Ambassador Labs

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We're here with Steve Rhoda. Who's the newly appointed CEO for Ambassador labs and they just received 20 million dollars in additional funding Steve. Welcome the show.

Hi, Michael. I don't think a lot of people know Ambassador Labs is not quite a household name just yet. But what attracted you to the company and what do you think is gonna be the opportunity around this whole kubernetes Space?

Yeah, so I mean I've been a developer my whole life. I've started coating an eight years old and my dad's 286 so that probably dates me a little bit. But you know, I've long since wanted to make software development easier more attainable like quicker faster, you know, I've been just passionate about you know, developer-based products and and things help speed that up.

So that's what drew me obviously kubernetes is huge. It's getting you know bigger by the minute it seems you know, and with that they're complexities and you know, they go all around at our exploding as well. So the fact that, you know, came across Ambassador looking to solve those problems, you know, it's simplify those things for the kubernetes developers life is really what brought me here.

So yeah. Yeah, and the 20 million dollars is coming from where and What's it gonna be allocated towards? Yeah, it's mostly from inside Venture Partners.

They were the ones who led the round and you know, it's doubling down on on our success thus far we have we have two products Edge stack and telepresence, you know, Edge sex API Gateway, so continued development on there and telepresences, you know, the thing that I think is really differentiates, you know, the company as a whole and we'll lead to the future of kubernetes kind of development. I think it'll revolutionize kind of how we test and deploy things so doubling down on on telepresence as well and making sure it, you know gets the investment that it needs and then look we are you know, we're not a household name yet. But in order to do that you go to this and marketing and the company as a whole and you know overall build out some of the plumbing and things like that now that we know we have product Market faith and can be successful in the space.

It seems like filing is a lot more focus on developers and kubernetes and especially productivity. It's taken a while to get to this point. So where do you think we are and are developers starting to make the shift at kubernetes because we've been talking about the platform for a while, but the developer Community kind of slow to come around.

Yeah, it's you know, it's it's an interesting question. It's one one. Obviously we talk about every day here at Ambassador right that you know, who's who's actually making the kubernetes decision.

Is it is it the developers is it what you know used to be devops the switch to get UPS like putting all of the kind of Ops all on the development side of things like who's who's leading the charges for all those kinds of Trends, which I think will you know, ultimately push the desire to have, you know, kubernetes face environments out there. So, you know everything we see in the market is it's it's trending that way and you know, we think that that's gonna that's gonna bring a whole new set of challenges to developers that you know are to win can help help fix and really kind of accelerate, you know developers kind of Life on our kubernetes and hopefully minimize that impact of maintaining maintaining and you know kind of the full stock if you will. Do you think developers are someone still in intimidated by kubernetes and part of the issue is it takes a while to set up the whole environment?

So by the time they have an idea then they think about what's involved in the setup and they decide to go do something else. Yeah, I think I think I mean absolutely it's intimidating but you know production environments operations it these things are you know, very has been an issue and it's like friction points from the dawn of software, right? So I like to call like kind of managing to the pendulum right?

Like, you know, I remember, you know, when we would work straight on production a lot of like Mission critical systems, I won't name any of them, you know, and then test kind of the impact of what would happen throughout and and you know For Better or Worse, you know, it was faster way to develop type of things but let all kinds of security challenges and you know, everything else amongst it like kubernetes kind of put you you know, in in a place where you can simulate those environments without obviously having to cause those problems, you know, and and we see like the largest companies that we have having two or three full scale kind of deployments that they have internally that They're testing to now in the largest companies, which is typically the ones that you know, we're talking to that do have more mature kubernetes deployments. You know, we don't see it everybody hosting the entire environments on their development machine which you know, you can do if you're smaller type of company or smaller type of application that you're building, you know, and if you try to do some of these larger ones that we're working with your machine would literally catch on fire. So and we actually had a customer say that so building tooling it helps you kind of Connect into remote environments helps you the developer kind of have, you know, the freedom and the power to change those environments and then like watch with the impact is before it all gets deployed out there.

Those are all the things that I think is gonna help speed up that Loop, you know down the road and get it from end and but it is still early days and if you can run on your machine, it makes a lot of sense outside of that, you know, you need need more. Going to to help make sense of it all. We hear a lot about the ship left and full stack and I guess my question to you is do you think that developers are going to run things end-to-end completely or are we looking for some sort of medium where the outside of the house can lean more to the left a little bit but the developers don't have the time they run everything themselves or even the desire.

But yeah, we're kind of a sales training this week and and somebody asks the question like why why are we shifting left? And and my answer to it was like what we're shifting left because we're on the right right now. So it's like when they get left, they'll say we should Square shift, right?

You know what I mean? So that's the way the kind of pendulum swings in the in the development world. So, you know, I think I'm more of a happy middle ground type of person.

I think that it's the the likely set of the future where this thing will settle when we start stop the pendulum swinging is that you know, you're developers are responsible for the microservices that they have. I mean, that's that's the big reason for the microservices in general right is that you're smaller complexity, you know, you kind of faster to work inside of a smaller box that's there so developers being responsible for you know, one microservice or one small tiny piece of the application is is probably where we're headed in my book. I mean, I have a crystal ball, but that's that's what I would think and then you know operation seems and that type of stuff are gonna be in charge of people architecture how they all fit together, you know, and the ultimate deployment security of those types of things.

So I think that's where we'll settle this kind of concept that developers are going to do everything. Throughout and can do like four jobs, you know before when they were doing one. I don't think is is likely but I think we'll find that happy medium.

How will we address that security challenge you just mentioned because at least in my experience most the developers when they were in College security was an elective and hardly any member took it. So what is the role of security and security team getting involved? How do we bring all this together?

Yes security and documentation, right? Those are the those the two electives to get folks folks generally don't do that much in in college. So look, I think there are some things that do need to shift left and should should be left as early on and and two things that people are understanding security needs to be first and foremost these days.

I think that's a good Trend that should stay and you know is important for developers to know from the front of the beginning and how to developers know things from the beginning. Well, you you bake it in from the start like whatever story you're working on or whatever the cases those kind of requirements have to be involved in the development from earlier on so The sooner those those things can't involved in better from security perspective. The other thing is just designed and complexity.

This is something I think is is a major problem. That's kind of gone away with you know, shifting left and shifting right too is keep and and agile in general, you know, as people have kind of forgotten about the big picture right like so what does the overall architecture look like? What does how does it interplay with each other?

What are the dependency maps? That kind of go through those like Concepts that you know, we did 20 some odd years ago, but through the kind of push to go faster and faster may have dropped off and so I think you know the answers those things are you know, you need to start that before you start developing and kind of go back to some of those practices. We'll help us shift left.

All right. Well, it's just imagine if you wouldn't for a moment that you have been appointed king of all things kubernetes for a day. Once that one thing you wish they would all kind of focus on and fix and make the developers life a little easier.

That's a that's a great question. So I think I think for for us in in terms of developing. It's it's you know, what is the kubernetes happy pass?

You know anytime you're you're dealing and in amounts of configuration and kind of an ambiguous sort of like do whatever you want with it type of type of deployments, you know, it creates challenges that are you know, unforeseen, especially when you're trying to roll out to multiple customers, so I would think you know not locking it down but at least defining what the happy path is a little bit more for you know, kubernetes and and those types of deployments would be would be helpful. All right. Hey Steve.

Congratulations on the new role in the funding. Yeah, thank you very much Michael appreciate the time and thanks for being on the show and sharing your knowledge and insights. Absolutely.

All right back to you guys in the studio.