Improving Release Velocity: A Look at Liquibase 5.0’s AI and DevOps Features

Hey everyone. We're back here on Tech Drunk tv. My next guest is Ryan McCurdy.

Ryan is VP of Marketing at Liquid Base. Ryan, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. Man, it's great to have you on.

Thanks, Alan. It's great to see you. Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure to see you again, Ryan. Um, you know what, before we jump into what we want to talk about, let's start with you. Right?

I introduced you as VP Marketing. You know, a lot of people say, oh, it's a marketing guy. You know, they used to say the same thing about me.

Oh, he is the biz dev guy. But, um, you know, there's a lot. It covers a lot of sids.

These titles sometimes give people a little taste of your, of your Odyssey and journey. Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for having me.

Um, I'm a huge fan of the show, huge fan of the channel generally. Um, thank you. So I've, uh, uh, been in, you know, I would say tech for the last, uh, 15 or so years.

Um, most of my career has actually been spent in cybersecurity. So, um, on the marketing side side of the specifically go to market, um, but worked at, you know, FireEye back in the day when they acquired Manian. Uh, I was really early at Lacework, uh, saw them from zero to a hundred million.

Uh, most recently I was leading marketing over to astronomer, um, uh, another, uh, data ops company. Um, obviously big, the Apache Airflow community in the open source space. And, uh, you know, that brought me over to Liquibase, uh, where, you know, a lot of my past experience, I think, lends itself well to, uh, what we're trying to deliver for our customers today.

There's no truth to the rumor that you bought the Coldplay tickets. Not, not part of that, not part of that. But, but, um, you know, that company has done something really, really outstanding in the space.

And, um, you know, the leadership over there, uh, knows how to build a great company. Absolutely. Yeah.

And, you know, well, as a marketing person, you know, this, what did they say? One, one bad, uh, review is worth 10 good ones, or something like that. One little stu you know, one ridiculous thing that happened there and, and people overlook how much they accomplished and what, what, what was done at the company.

But lets, that's history. We're here to talk about Liquid Base. Ryan, for our audience, who's saying Liquid base?

Hmm. I'm not, isn't that an open source project? Or is it, what, what is Liquid base give them?

What's the liquid base? Yeah, so, you know, liquid Base is extremely unique in the sense is, uh, is open source roots, um, the, you know, they're the owners of, uh, Liquibase, uh, open source, uh, which is really automating database change. Um, and from that, uh, came, uh, Liquibase the company.

Um, and you know, we're serving some of the largest banks in the world, some of the most regulated companies in the, in the world, helping them have a release velocity and database change velocity that matches. Um, and, you know, we see that, uh, as a huge opportunity in the market, um, and the company has been wildly successful. So, you know, my, uh, goal here really is, uh, helping continue and drive that success.

And, uh, we've had some really big announcements as of late. Absolutely. Well, let's, well you let that got out of the bag.

All right, let's dive right into it. You've got some big announcements, you some new product releases as well, I believe. Um, share, if you don't mind, Ryan.

Yeah. So, you know, Liquibase, you know, really carved out this market that we call database DevOps. Um mm-hmm.

And, you know, as part of our community product Liquibase, um, and what was Liquibase Pro, we, we, uh, took liquid-based pro to the next level. And, uh, uh, basically the evolution of that is now liquid-based secure, which is solving a big need in the market. So there's two major points to our update.

0 where we're splitting the distributions, uh, between, um, our community product and our commercial product now local base secure, that's a really big update. Our community product is now more modular, um, and more flexible for our development community. And our secure product now really leans and takes database DevOps to the next level, uh, with driving governance and compliance for our customers.

And we see that as a huge need in the market with a lot of the, the trends happening between AI, microservices and CICD, uh, to support them as, you know, they continue, um, really be secure at scale. And, um, it's a, it's actually a, a really important thing we're doing for the market. Um, we see this huge need where, um, database change is really critical to release velocity, um, now more than ever.

And the need for governance and compliance follows suit. And most companies, the database is actually this big blind spot. They don't know what change is happening.

A lot of that change gets moved into production, which creates compliance and security risks, also outages. And we're solving that for some of the biggest customers in the world. Love it.

Love it. Um, Ryan, you're right, liquid base has kind of defined the database DevOps market. Um, when we talk about fixing the last mile of DevOps though, right?

It's part of this database delivery gap, what do we, what are we really talking about? Well, you, you, you usually, you the database, um, it's often forgot about it. We know that it has to be updated before a release goes out.

And, uh, there's processor around that. Typically that process is manual. Um, our community product automates that change.

So your releases in your database change really acts as one, and you're able to achieve the velocity you want. So the database isn't this last minute stall that takes, you know, however long to update. So our community product solves the automation piece, but the problem is speed is only half the equation.

Um, and typically, you know, as you increase your database change through automation, you actually lose a lot of control, which has really created the need for liquid based secure. So, you know, we say speed without control is a liability. That's absolutely true.

And, you know, for all that unmanaged change that happen is happening now at a much more, really at an automated scale, um, we're able to secure that change and really take the risk, um, out of the things that get moved into production. So, you know, that comes across in terms of, uh, you know, audit evidence and really being able to provide the proof necessary, uh, to match whatever compliance frameworks companies are up against. But, you know, a lot of companies, they actually don't have a lot of visibility and control over what are the identities doing in your database.

Um, and you know, frankly what risk it moved into production, they just don't know. And you have your security tools, you know, your Prisma of the world, your Ws of the world that really operate at runtime. But once those risks are moved into production, it's too late.

And that's where these tools would catch 'em. So we're actually the only company in the world that are able to secure your database. So for all the companies that are thinking about AI and trying to adopt ai, but they're worried about an AI bot taking down their production database, which is happening by the way, we're able to prevent things like that.

So we're actually, um, we're doing some things really that are really incredible in the market. And that's, you know, part of what, um, our release is all about. Love it.

Good stuff. There's more to this release, so it's pretty big. What haven't we had so far?

Well, as part of our release, we also introduced a, um, new vs code extension. We call it liquid-based secure developer. So, um, prior to this, uh, you know, we really, uh, things, you know, setting up policies and different flows in liquor base, uh, took a little bit of time.

Now it's all really the click of a button, so you can do everything right from the VS code extension, which is available today. So it's really helping our developers, um, really get releases out quickly all from our vs code extension. So it's, it's really unique in that sense, um, helping customers achieve that developer productivity that they want, uh, even greater now.

And then also as part of the release, um, we introduced a, uh, AI change log generator. So basically you're able to describe it and deploy it. Um, that's in private preview for our customers, so we're really excited about that.

Um, those are kind of two of the big pieces, um, of our, of our release. And then lastly, we introduced new pricing. Um, we, you know, Liquibase is really unique because we are able to act as this governance layer across applications, but we've also extended that into data products.

So supporting your Snowflake and your Databricks of the world, we're able now to support really the data engineering community. And that required us to rethink our pricing and packaging. So now we're more application based rather than target or schema based.

Um, where maybe before we were penalizing more modern architectures, we're no longer doing that. So now we have really great attractive pricing packaging, supporting all facets of, of the market, both your application, CICD, as well as your data products now too. So, uh, we're really excited about our update and so far, um, the feedback has been great.

I love that. com? Just go to the front page of the website.

What, what should they do? Yeah, absolutely. com, we have of course all the information there.

0. Um, so that's a great place, uh, to get all, you know, the resources ne necessary. Um, and of course you can find us on Discord or Reddit too, um, that we're happy to, you know, entertain conversations there as well.

But, um, yeah, those are probably the best places. I love it. Hey, Ryan, I know you're busy.

Thanks for taking time out to come up on here. Come up on Text Drug tv, stay in touch with us. You know, in the open source world, there's just, it's changing so quick, right?

There's always new, new, new frontiers. So we'll be looking forward to you, uh, coming back and keeping us abreast and keep up the good work, right? The, the security piece of this is, I don't have to tell you how important that is.

You're a security person might make, and, uh, you know, sometimes it gets overlooked, overlooked in our, in our haste to go as fast as we can. And it, it can't be all right. You're absolutely right.

Thank you again, I appreciate it. All right. Ryan McCurdy, VP Marketing here at Liquid Base on Tech Drunk tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a minute.