Lens AppIQ – Daniel Echegaray, Mirantis

This is Textron tv. Well, the great pleasure of being joined by Daniel Eddi, who is Team Lead Engineering lead with Mortis. How you doing Daniel?

Good, good. Thank you very much for having me here, mate. Pleasure to meet you.

Absolutely. Always love talking to somebody from engineering. Yeah, it's great chatting with you.

Awesome. Likewise. I know you recently introduced, um, lens Zap iq and that's what you're engineering lead of.

Um, and, and you have some great things to talk about. I'd love for you first talk about kinda what, what problems or what things that, uh, uh, app IQ is targeted helping development teams or others with? Yeah, absolutely.

The, the, that's true. So one of the challenges we see out there is that Kubernetes is, is really, uh, out there everywhere in the industry. If we see some of the reasons surveys, uh, from Chronosphere or the CNCF, like 97% of organizations are using Kubernetes.

Um, so there is no escape for it for developers. Um, so they either need to relate to it or accommodate or do do something about it, but end story short, they will end up using Kubernetes. And the challenge we see there is for developers is not an easy task.

The the learning curve is very steep. So to get there, understand what an application they develop is on Kubernetes, how does it translate to, is really hard. And troubleshooting the application gets complicated.

So at the end, they need to rely a lot in DevOps and in platform engineers to, to support their application, to understand what they are. And that definitely doesn't help organizations to scale up and brings developers to try to learn a lot about Kubernetes and DVD deviates them from their real task, which is adding value to the company, building their applications, you know, uh, optimizing, uh, their code and things like that. So getting into all these business or, or Kubernetes is, is just abstracting too much of their time.

And that is specifically is the, is the target the, the main problem that we wanna solve with Lens App iq, basically providing them with a tool that away Kubernetes and let them focus on what they need to do, support their application, extract a few concepts so they don't need to wrap their head, their heads around Kubernetes and, and let them do their job, which is basically understand what the app is. And this way we also, uh, kind of avoid all the workload to go into the platform engineer. So that's, that's basically the pain point we, we see there in the industry that, that we want to tackle.

Excellent. Well, I would definitely agree with you. Uh, Kubernetes is not going away, right?

Yeah. It's just gonna be more versus less. And it is, it's a lot as, as my kids would say, it's a lot.

It's A lot. There's, it is, it is. Got a steep learning curve and well, we might all wanna learn it and know more about it, except we don't have so much time, right?

To invest in. We kind of need just to know, just enough, enough, what do I need to know to be able to effectively use it and build my applications, kinda leverage it. So, so, um, lens App IQ is the product that you launched.

So tell us, how does it, how does it solve that problem? How does it help developers? Yeah, absolutely.

Uh, lens App IQ has two sides, right? One that is very focused on developers and another side that is also focused on platform engineers. And, and I'll go there in a second, but I agree with you and I want to leave something clear.

I'm not against Kubernetes at all. I think it's a wonderful tool, Makes the world go around. We're happy for Kubernetes.

That's the reason why it's out there. So we're trying, with Lens Up iq, we're trying to basically leverage what Kubernetes is and make it really easy the adoption so people can really thrive using it. So what what we're trying to do is, uh, lens App IQ is a web-based software as a service.

Okay? io, and it's up for, for signup. Anybody can sign up there, create their own account and onboard a couple of users.

So once you get there, it's basically a matter of connecting your cluster to it, installing an agent. When we do that, then we discover anything that is running in your cluster, and we translate that into applications. And because we do this logical computation of what an application is, and we abstract of the workload resources that are there and start doing these logical links between resources, what a pot is, what a replica set is, um, I don't know, uh, config maps and secrets, anything that is relevant, we compute that information and then we extract what is important for the developer environment variables, uh, what is the, the general status of their application, uh, logs from their application metrics and things like that.

So anything that is relevant for the, for the developers. So they don't need to think in terms of Kubernetes, the developer can focus on creating, developing a an OJS app, uh, I don't know, a React application, a Python application. Uh, they can figure out the deployment strategy to get it into the cluster.

But then what, how, how do they manage those application? How do they know the app is okay that the logs are, are, are just fine, that the memory and CPU consumption is, is of all good. That's what relays up IQ is.

We basically discover the application, we extract all the relevant information, and without talking in terms of Kubernetes resources, instead of what a, a deployment is and a replica set is and things like that, we basically just take the relevant information for the users so they can enjoy. Um, besides that, we also, um, basically when you install our agent in your cluster, we start tracking those resources. We start tracking those applications so developers can set up webhooks and, and an alerting system.

So if your application goes down, lens App IQ will let you know if your application got deployed, restarted, um, if there was a security scan performed to it or, or any event that it, that is impacting your application, you get notified by it. So you as a developer, you have full control in terms of what your application is doing, what is the general status of it, and every time something happened, you get informed. So as a developer, then you really own your application.

It's not you asking help from a platform engineer or a DevOp of, Hey, can you get me the logs of this app? I don't know how to get it. I don't know what's going on with my application.

How do I even get access to a cluster? So Lens Up IQ give all these facilities, so developers don't need to think about that. And, and initially I mentioned it has two sites.

The second side is it's also a tool focused for platform engineers because one of the challenges we see out there is when teams get to these problems of how do I enable developers, platform engineers tend to try to build an internal developer platform, try to enable certain tooling so the developers can basically consume their own applications. So with this tool, we're basically telling platform engineers don't do that. Just enjoy what we have for you, focus your job in maintaining infrastructure, optimizing other processes, and let us enable the developer so you can focus in what matter the most to you.

And on Lens App iq, then they can set up policies, um, to track resource consumption, to guarantee that the applications are following standards. And then with that information in hand, they can, even though they're enabling developers to maintain their own applications, they still have control to see and guarantee that they are doing the right things, that they are in compliance with their security standards, that their applications don't have security vulnerabilities that they have. They're following this, I don't know, resource consumption definitions and, and all recommendations basically from Kubernetes.

So that's what lends App IQ basically does. In, in a, in a big picture, It sounds like, um, it lends App IQ is try strike that balance of you. You don't wanna just turn Kubernetes over to some other group, platform, engineering, whatever it might be, operations, but you also don't want to have to maintain and run the whole thing yourself, right?

Uh, that's a whole nother le level of sophistication and skills. So give giving developers access to everything that they want to be able to look at what's going on logs and traces and et cetera. And also, um, the platform engineering folks to be able to standardize mo monitor security, make sure things are kind of the, nothing goes off the rails, if you will.

Sounds like that's kind of the balance you're trying to achieve, correct. That's, that, that's absolutely right. And then from, from a um, platform general perspective, they also have the ability, since our client, our agent is running in the cluster, they also have the ability to set up these alerts to get notified anytime an application is violating one of their policies.

So they, they still have control over the application. So yes, the main point of, of the solution is to enable application developers so they can focus on their apps without knowing Kubernetes so they can troubleshoot and own their application. But at the same time, we are not forgetting about platform engineers.

We understand, we acknowledge that they have, uh, a responsibility to guarantee that everything that runs on their cluster is akay. So we're helping them with doing that offering, uh, as a, as a feature in, in our tool to basically establish these set of policies and guarantee that the applications are basically in compliance. Very good.

I'm curious, so how do, how does this fit into the kinda larger e ecosystem of Mirantis Pro products? I mean, I think people may know who know you have kind of K Zeros and, and, uh, you know, you have your own Kubernetes engine, mk that's correct. And other desktop kind of, uh, lens Desktop, et cetera.

Yeah, I about your products, but a number of them. So there's a lot of, a lot of areas where you're, you're obviously providing Kubernetes capabilities and support and integration for the developers. Where does the lens, or how does Lens App IQ fit into that?

Yeah, absolutely. That, that's a great question because I think you're interpreting this like a hundred percent accurately. So we have these different surface areas.

We have MKM or anti Kubernetes engine as a way to run your, your Kubernetes clusters. We have other solutions out there. We have Lens to visualize from an infrastructure perspective, from a very Kubernetes centric, uh, view, what are your resources and, and try to, um, ease that process for, for DevOps.

Uh, and now we have Lens App iq. So as you see there, moving pieces there. So the big picture of this is try to accommodate the product.

So you have, you can have, for example, your your TI Kubernetes engine and you can have App App IQ overseeing the applications that you have there. And if you want to see things from an infrastructure perspective, then you can use Lens. And all these products are kind of interrelated with this.

I don't mean that to use Lens App iq, you necessarily need to use MKE Lens App iq. It's compatible with any official Kubernetes distribution. That Should be my next question.

Yeah. Um, you can connect, uh, a an EKS cluster, an EKS, uh, GKE, any, any, uh, official public distribution out there. Um, but definitely if you're using MKE, uh, that's an extra, uh, an extra way that you can basically leverage mirantis product.

Now with Lens, we have a deeper integration because we have now a new view in lens, a new tab called application from where you can ingest the application. The application concept doesn't really exist on Kubernetes. So this is a kind of an opinionated way for us to, again, try to make it easy for developers to, to understand and locate where their applications are.

But from lens perspective, you can enable really easy Lens App iq, basically a one click button. If you have admin privilege to your cluster, you can just click there, install our agents, and we will start exporting information to, to these web, uh, SaaS service. So your developers, instead of having access to the cluster, they can jump directly there to the web ui, start seeing the resources, start troubleshooting the application.

So as you can see, uh, these three pieces, they are kind of interrelated between each other with Lens and KE and Lens Hub iq. I think you went, went to my last question, which was what's the developer experience like both the install and once they're using it. So sounds like install hits, put these agents on your Kubernetes clusters.

Obviously they connect to the cloud service that you're gonna gather all the data to, and they visualize it from a separate web web interface, or does it build into the IDE? How, how does that work? Yeah, that's a great question.

So there, you can do both actually. So you can use Lens, uh, lens, and from there, from the IDE, you have certain what we call augmentations one, once you install the agent, you will start seeing new data that you would not have. If, if you don't install it, you will see these policy violations, you will see all the events that we're tracking, um, and, and so on and so forth.

Um, now the kind of experience that we are foreseeing is as a platform engineer, the person who has, or, or the developer that has actual admin privilege to the cluster will be the first one to, to initiate the setup. So they will go there, install the agent, as you perfectly stated, and then they can onboard developers, and the developers can go directly to the web. They don't even need access to the cluster.

They can go there, uh, sign in, uh, with a, you know, their email address and, and, and a lens IDE. Um, and then from there they can start immediately seeing their applications and, and, uh, looking at their logs, looking at the events, setting up web hooks and things like that. So there is one person that needs to do the hard work just to of installing the agent, and then the rest of the team basically can be onboarded really easily.

So that's kind of the, the, the experience in terms of users that, that, that we have at the moment. Okay, great. So where can folks go check out, uh, lens App IQ as well as the other great products from marant?

io. Uh, from there you can sign up, create your account, um, as, as soon as you do that, there is a, a free tier in which you're able to connect your, your cluster and try out the products, your applications. There are no limitations in terms of features.

The only limitation is, is in terms of the amount of clusters that you can connect on the free tier account. But definitely go there, try it out. Um, and, and yeah, you will be able to, to see all the features that we have for you.

com website. Well, thank you a lot, Daniel, been pleasure talking with you. Good luck.

Uh, congratulations on the launch of the product and I look forward to seeing more great things from you. Thank you, Mitch. Appreciate your time and again, once again, thank you everybody for joining.

You bet.