What’s in Store for Kubernetes in 2023 – Danielle Cook, Fairwinds

This is Textron TV. Hi everybody, Mike Rothman here with another tech strong TV interview. I'm just ecstatic this morning to be able to welcome Danielle cook to the show who's CMO Fairwinds, you know, you've seen her on all sorts of stuff with tech strong before they do all sorts of activities with us.

So we're pleased to welcome you to the show Danielle. Hey, how you doing this morning? I'm very good.

Thank you for having me excited to be here with you. Yeah. Yes what we want to talk about today, you know, what kind of at the beginning of 2023 and you know, kubernetes is one of these, you know Technologies and everybody's talking about so I want to talk about that right?

I want to talk about, you know, kind of what we see for kubernetes in 2023 wanna, you know, kind of relay that and and substantiate that with some, you know, recent data that we've gathered with our Pals at Fairwinds. We just will be issuing a pulse meter in the very near term Focus specifically on kubernetes or excited about that. It's one of the subjects of our Cloud native friends.

That we introduced it predict a couple weeks ago just really about how the maturation of kubernetes is something that we're really expecting to see in in 2023. So do you read that do you do you see that Danielle? I mean what is from your standpoint the state of kubernetes in in 2023, you know, the state is interesting you have organizations that are so mature and they're doing all the coolest things and they've adopted all the you know, cncf Cloud native open source, they are, you know out there and it is the poster child for kubernetes.

Then you have organizations that are just coming to that and the mix is interesting and even at large Enterprise organizations, you have people who you know team smaller teams that are trying it out and testing it and maybe they have one or two AppSec and production on it. And then you have startups that it's their entire business is built on kubernetes. So I find it really interesting Evolution.

We're going through and how you know going to some of the Events around kubernetes. You see people it's like this this trend of oh, it's all the newbies. Okay.

Now they're sophisticated. Oh, it's the newbies now. It's sophisticated and I think we're continuing to ride that Trend at the beginning of this year.

Yeah. I think that's right and and the data really supports that so one of the questions we asked of the community is you know, how many production AppSec are you operating in kubernetes now it was you know decent mix you have 25% that we're none right 15% that were one six percent two 15% three to five thirty one percent six or more, right? And I think that's interesting right?

That's it. That's a snapshot of the end of 2022. Right?

If we look at it. What be the end of 2023, I would expect that those numbers are you know, kind of significantly different again, they're gonna be folks that are just not getting there. So the nun may not, you know work as much but I think you know five three to five six or more gonna be substantially larger just because folks are learning right folks are starting to, you know, get their arms around.

What this is they're starting to understand the distributions. They're starting to understand, you know, kind of the managed offerings from the cloud providers that allow them to you know, get up and running a lot faster and and really Shield them from a bunch of the complexity there, but it gets back to you know, what are some of the things that you think we need to improve on to really allow and enable, you know, both more folks on board with kubernetes, but also really to scale the environment up or there's some things that you know, you think just have to have that have to happen say that yeah, I think you know, you can still you can you can just spin up a cluster right and you can try using kubernetes and you can do it on gke and you know a cast and whatnot, but it's if you want to use it and put it in production. You have the challenges around do you have security implemented?

Do you have role-based access control? What are your costs associated with it and you know are the people who are using the platform that you've created doing the right things do they even know how to configure kubernetes? And I think that's the challenge that we've seen as developers are becoming, you know, the people who need to be doing these end to end, you know.

Development Cycles where platform engineering or the devops teams are going okay. We need to arm them to do the right thing. So, you know certainly with you know, some of the questions we were asking in pulse meet are it's do you have guardrails in place?

Do you have security controls in place? Do you have cost controls in place? And we're seeing people don't have these things if you want kubernetes to work and you want your platform to work you need those things in place.

That's right. And we take a lot of that stuff for granted, right, you know kind of it, you know, so I was just doing it another webinar before we jumped on and it was really about you know, kind of multi-cloud and how do you decide what workload goes to do, you know what cloud provider and and I would tell stories because I'm an old guy, right, you know the old beta Center and you know, we didn't have the the reliability that you get out of the cloud providers, you know would be something that everybody would you know, give an arm, you know a limb for you know back in the day of Our Own data centers and we're bitching about you know, is it four nines or is it four nines? It's like On that front, but but your point is is exactly what well, you know kind of taken from the standpoint again, when we ask folks.

What are your biggest challenges right 24% that security right, you know, another 16% said, you know interruptions from troubleshooting because they hadn't worked out that operational motion around, you know, kind of kubernetes. So so what we have is you again when you think I'm I'm being over right, you know, Jeffrey Moore and the adoption curve and you know kind of crossing the chasm and all those things. We're we're still very much in an early Market, you know from a lot of you know, kind of kubernetes adoption stay put the early adopters the folks that can throw people at it wrote skills at it, you know kind of have things that they cook themselves and build it up, you know, that's that's who is you know, kind of running significant, you know, kubernetes infrastructure.

Now, you've got the late majority, right and then the laggards, I mean, it's probably gonna be a little while before they get there and not until they get a lot of those capabilities, right the guard rails, you mentioned the automation, you know kind of the it kind of Accessible to normal people, right, you know as opposed to you know, these phds that can go and just you know, jump into the source code and and make changes as they need to well and kubernetes the back to the security part, you know, it's not secure by default. Like it does have some stuff that you know provides some security layers, but you know, you don't want to configure something wrong or you know run a containers root or do something that just seems like okay spin it up go with the defaults and suddenly you can you know, there's risk involved and that's what needs to happen and the troubleshooting comment you mentioned too. There are teams that are just spent platform engineering teams who are just auditing kubernetes and that's how they're spending their time and if they could automate that.

To make sure that things are just happening before anything reaches production that's going to save them time and they're gonna be able to do more Innovative things and everyone's happier. That's right. Hey, you know and and kind of the state of where we are never is more apparent than when you ask folks how much time they spend auditing stuff because that's a level of maturity.

Right? I mean when you've got your processes and the internal Auditors are there and they just, you know, then you've got that that's a thing we've operationalized that technology. So we actually did ask that right and you know 31% said they don't know.

But pretty addictive by I don't know I don't. And the people who said you know that they were spending four to five days a month auditing it. We had one company a customer of insights where our fairings insights where they were able to reduce the amount of time.

They were auditing by one to two weeks every time they wanted to deploy some code and that's a lot of time that an organized is organization spending auditing and it's like where can that time be better spent and where can that resource be better spent so that you can stay on track to be innovative? You know and in the auditing is obviously what's what's up and running on that, you know also think about kind of the onboarding and we want to start increasing the velocity of applications that are rehomed you know, refactored, you know migrated over to kubernetes. And again, that's kind of the hard thing because you talk to some of these customers and they go yeah, we did about 10 last year, right?

This is a big environment, right? You know, we did 10 and you know, that's great. So what do you plan to do this year 200?

You're like what? Okay, how you gonna do that? Right and that's when they go don't know or you know, then they're like, well, we got to start investing in automation.

We've got, you know platform engineering spending up we're looking at tool sets that are gonna help us, you know, really reduce the drag both from a posture standpoint. So we understand what we're deploying and then an auditing and you know kind of policy compliance standpoint is where operating these environments so that's kind of where you know, folks really want to do this, right? They really want to get and expand their their use of the capabilities, but right they don't have that surrounding stuff around quite yet.

So what are a couple things that that folks should look at Danielle when when they really want to start scaling up their kubernetes environments what are things that you think that you know, you you're just not gonna get there. If you don't have, you know, kind of this stuff in place. Well, you absolutely need to be running kubernetes best practices and you know, a lot of organizations don't know what those are.

So you need to look at tools and there's open source. Available like Polaris that Fairwinds provides it look provide you with a list of hey, these are the best practices. Are you checking for this configuration that do you have limits.

Do you have CPUs that do you have these security configuration sets? So you need to be doing that you need to be doing that early in the process. So it should be involved in your development lifecycle.

You should be checking every stage of you know going from you know, coding to when you're going to staging before you get production. These things should be part of your process. One of the big things that we're looking at now and especially topical given the markets is what about your cost?

So inevitably a developer wants to use kubernetes. They're building their platform. They're not setting limits to you know, they're memory or CPU usage.

They're just letting it go wide open. So as you scale, that could be a huge Cloud bill. So you have the challenge of I need to make sure I set the right limit so that I don't have outages in my application and I need to set it so that I'm not wasting resource and I think as you know in this market in 2023 is organizations are looking at their Cloud spend and how they can reduce it.

Kubernetes is a black hole and it can't be anymore people need visibility into this. Yeah, and and just a wrap wrap up, you know kind of the questions that that we did ask right. We actually kind of thought about that, right?

So as your kubernetes environment grows your costs question mark right 26% say staying within the plan budget, right 18 percent increase Beyond budget nine percent nearly out of control. Right not that does not good and 34% say don't know right so that gets right to the heart of the point that that you just made we can't build this into an Enterprise utility. Right something that can take and platform hundreds of applications over the next couple of years.

If we don't have the visibility, right if we don't have the security, we don't have these processes operationalize to the point where you know, we know predictably what's gonna happen. We don't have enough people. We certainly don't have enough resources.

We're in an environment where funding is not, you know, kind of falling off trees like it used to for all the projects that we're there. So again in 2023, it's really about scale. It's about operationalizing and if you don't have tools if you don't have a lot of the you know, kind of visibility, I think it's gonna be really hard and I would I would guess you would agree with that.

Absolutely. I mean you're Finance. Team is going to be knocking on the door going.

Why is your Cloud Bell look like this what's happening and instead if you can be proactive and say hey, look at what I'm doing for our Cloud bill. Look at how I monitoring it based on our usage of kubernetes and look at how I'm right sizing it to make sure that we are not wasting resource. You're going to be the finance teams hero.

That's right. And that's what we all want to at the end of the day. All we want to be is the hero right?

Who could I be the hero for and most days it's knowing but you know, that's a different issue that we have to deal with. So they'll cook. Thank you so much for being on the show.

So great time. Thank you for supporting the pulse meter. So the pulse meter is a paper.

We will have an infographic that will have the next week or so. You'll be able to get that on the text wrong side. I know you be able to get it from Fairwinds as well.

You'll run some campaigns around that I would assume. com. We do have Fairwinds insights who that does the kubernetes governance platform that really is a paved road to getting your applications to production with security checking security off checking off the cost and providing those guardrails so that you're developers are able to ship those applications faster and your platform Engineers can save themselves some time which you know, Stop being a help desk exactly.

Stop being helped us with that. Thanks again, Danielle great to see you. And now we will send it back to the studio.