Itiel Shwartz, Komodor | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022

This is Textron TV. Hey, welcome back. Welcome back to a kubecon 2022 here in Detroit Motor City Detroit City, you know the conference is going to extremely well folks are very excited.

We're having great conversations speaking a great conversations ATL switch. Welcome good to have you from Commodore. Hey happy to be here.

Yeah. Nice. So for folks who don't may not know Commodore know you tell us a little bit about the company yourself.

Yeah. Sure. So Commodore is a kubernetes Travis shooting platform.

Basically, we allow developers devops history platform engineer anyone who are having difficulties with kubernetes. To find them much faster to investigate them very easily and then also to remediate from within our platform. So we take a lot of the complexity that is kubernetes and really reduce and like simplify.

So that's Commodore in like one sentence. Yeah, so yeah often here kubernetes very complex or gets complex faster. You're the other half of the sentence of and yeah, you can help.

Yeah. Yeah exactly. You know, I think you can see like here in the conference on one hand like the ecosystem is amazing.

Right and there are more to it's more add-ons more services around kubernetes, but on the other hand, we see how complex it is becoming and we're also seeing like a very big Trend our flag platform engineers and I can trying to make the developers developers also to like a self-sufficient state. And from what hand we have our eyes in the complexity of kubernetes on the other hand. We have people who are usually less experienced in.

the system and like infrastructure that are now supposed to be responsible for their services in kubernetes and I will say that it's like a suit trends that are a bit like counterintuitive like I think to like Commodore really helps but without that we see our like our very big struggle in the hand of between those two groups. I'm curious your perspective. You mentioned platform Engineers kind of the new new thing after SRE.

It's got taken off. There's a lot of different perspectives on it. Some people see it.

It's kind of like Cloud engineering take into the next level other times. It's you know, sort of operational roles around infrastructure like kubernetes. What's your experience how people are adopting that the platform engineer like I think a lot of buzz like, let's be honest here like I think We have that once in a while now.

Yeah, but I don't know like I think. Having a team dedicated to help other developer in the organization to be more efficient make sense. Right?

Like it's like, you know devops and like S3, like it was always there. So now it's like I feel it's a bit of rebranding. I think that for a large cost like large companies.

it is like something that is a bit of a game changer like tools like backstage or other tools like if you have 500 developer it might make a lot of sense to. adopt one of those tools and really do something for yourself, but I see a lot of the small teams like 100 developers trying to understand what should they do as platform engineer? And the reality is like take something out of the shelf and understand like what's the best way to make other people more efficient that pretty much it but you know, I think that we are really seeing people trying to understand.

What is it? Yeah, things are getting big enough complex enough. No one person has it all in there.

Yeah, that's for sure that's possible. We'll talk a little bit about So I know you really some open source software on GitHub that trending really well. Tell us about that.

Yeah, so we released it like Sunday at day before cubeconomy, maybe on the day of the event. It is called Helm dashboard. It is basically a dashboard for him like a very self-explain name.

As like long really long time user of him like six years something like that. And I really like him on one hand. I think it's like a project that like single-handedly increase the adoption of kubernetes.

Thanks to Charles and you know, every company has a chart inside we can can do it without it. Yeah, but on the other end. It's CLI and like operation of film.

Is like quite bad I will say like again, even I really like the project and Helm dashboard allowed the users to very easily understand what is currently being deployed. How did they change over time? What resources these handshot created are the healthy are they not healthy?

We try to be it's like a health plugin very easy installation like Helm install plugin. And I see like a really we hit like 500 Stars 18 in like two or three days. Right?

So we're getting a lot of like positive feedback mainly because almost everyone is using Helm but like no one or almost no one really enjoyed. So it helped I really have hope this project will make life easier for like developers and like their home dashboard, right? Yeah.

Check it out. What let's go back to the kind of kubernetes complexity. What do you find?

One of the first tumbling blocks that we're come up Commodore really can make a difference for people adopting or rolling out kubernetes or yeah scaling it. Whatever the issue might yeah, I will say like to to maintain that we really help it. The first off is a correlation like kubernetes is a bit like a very complex like Lego right like you have your application, but then you have the Ingress you have the volume you have the load balancer.

You have the configurement. There are a lot of different. Phoenix that composed the application in reality and the tinco model condo is doing extremely well at least to take all of those different parts into like one logical unit.

So I think that by itself is like a really big and a really big like differentiator versus like other tools or like doing Cube CTL alone and so on. The other thing that we provide is a full cluster history. How did it change over time who changes the config map change or the English change or was it a change that wasn't done via like a full request like directly on the cluster.

I will say that once, you know, the timeline the investigation process is a much much easier. So this is like the second team that we do extremely well. Excellent.

Very good. What? It does is are you providing us as a SAS?

Is it open source downloadable? How do people? Yeah, that's like a self-service sauce.

Like you have 14-day free trial and if you want like a week or two more feel free to talk with me and but that's that's in terms of Of how do you adopt it? We are trying to take parts of the platform in order to do open source, like giving back to the community the handles for these example. We release their valid Cube that allow developers to easily validate yaml files as an open store six months ago and also gain like quite a nice fan base in popularity.

But that's pretty much it and we have an agent installed using a Helm chart on top of each one of the cluster our customers having and this is how you install us. Be good shows going well for you. Yeah.

Yeah, I think there's like a good vibe. Very large venue right very large venue, but good vibe. We're happy.

We meet a lot of potential customers we hear they're like a horror stories about the complexity of kubernetes. So, you know, I really enjoy the conference so far. Well, I noticed people seem to be spending a lot of time when they're visiting boots.

They're engaging in conversation not just sort of trolling walking by. Yeah. I mean there's that too but I see a lot more in-depth conversations people.

Really? Yeah looking for this, right? Yeah.

I will say that comparing to Valencia Cuba. For example, I feel at least that a bit more like bigger companies are here like at least that's what we are seeing and not a lot of like, yes small medium companies. Maybe it's only like on our area of the conference about this is something we are seeing but yeah, like a lot of very insightful convers.

And with people who really try to learn try to understand and like to improve their system. Well a lot more people traveling now. So yeah part of the truth.

Why I tell very nice working. I mean talking with you and congratulations on the helm dashboard. Yeah, so I can see why it might become really popular.

Yeah, feel free to start it and try. Yeah, you have structure start, you know, the equivalent of like right? Well, thanks for joining us and we stop by your booth and check out Commodore and you're saying it's a Comm or is it that I know both smart idea good good talking with you.

Hey, we've got more interviews great ones just like this one, which I feel and we look forward to having you come back with this. So don't change the channel to change the station the website. Just hang in there.

We'll be right back here with another great interview.