Uma Mukkara, Harness | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022

This is texturing TV. Well, we're back. We're here at kubecon 2022 in Detroit Motor City Detroit City.

We have one more interview today. I'll say that in another one will pop up but we have one more interview today. I think it's our last but certainly will enjoy this talking with umamakada who is with harness.

You're also the founder of the litmus project and I think you're the primary on it as well. Correct? Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. Nice making you may share good to be here. Yes also bet that yourself because you've gone through an acquisition and you have more of a history than than I described.

Okay. Yeah. I know.

I found it litmus project with the idea of trying to do Cloud native chaos engineering for kubernetes ecosystem back in 2018. We've been doing a lot of work with the community to build this project for chaos and drinks. It's been going on well, We gave it to the foundation back in 2020 as a Sandbox project earlier this year.

We became an incubating project. Yeah, I know harness acquired as earlier this year. I'm now head of chaos engineering at harness.

It's been great, you know the whole idea of me coming to harnesses to. Deliver the chaos capabilities for the modern CD platforms. So yeah, it's been it's been a great journey.

What do you think? It was important for harness to acquire a company like yours and have someone heading up. I mean, it's a it's it's a great field a lot of interest in it.

People are adopting in different ways. So, you know, it's very well suited for hardness to have the chaos engineering is a feature in this platform because there's a very organic need for cloud native modern ecosystem. To put more Trust on the reliability, right?

So things are very very Dynamic and harnesses the vision of being a complete. software delivery platform right from where you code Deploy, and then in your test rate and then actually take care of reliability in production too. Right?

So chaos engineering is the technology that helps in making sure that you know, you can take care of reliability in devops, right? It's been getting a lot of traction people are looking for chaos engineering so I would say chaos engineering completes one important Gap in harness portfolio. So yeah, it's a kind of natural trade.

You know, it's interesting. I think many people know chaos engineering from chaos. Monkey an early days, right?

That's when I first heard the term, but the state of the art is Advanced far from that just kind of turning stuff off and trying to break things. How would you describe that today's state of the art of chaos? Yeah.

No great question. I love this question because you know, that's true chaos monkey from Netflix at that time. It was more of how to Do reliable streaming services right?

It was all in production. So only the experts can do chaos engineering. But it was lull for some time and about three four years ago.

There was a new Need for chaos engineering because Cloud native ecosystem is growing very fast. Right? So the need for chaos engineering now is not just in orbs but also for developers QA teams to do to make sure that you take care of reliability at the pre-proud level not necessarily in fraud and that's why we are actually seeing more and more adoption.

Right? So chaos engineering is known for Ops only but now the latest trend is I've been saying actually chaos engine is not just for Ops. That's my tag land right now.

My other tagline is chaos engineering is for masses that means you know even developers are going to See this chaos is a developer tool set right which helps in? Tackling reliability at the time of writing code, right? So yeah, that's the modern chaos engineering.

I would say has become so easy. You don't need to be an expert to do chaos, right? So, you know that that's what cloud native does to you.

Right? So become completely declarative. There's so many that image chaos experiments available.

So and average, you know, software experience user can introduce chaos engineering into the software development lifecycle and get the benefits out of it. How do you find organizations bring in chaos engineering I can imagine some managers some leave technical leaders saying we need to do that for cloud native resiliency issues others might say hey, I don't want anything in there messing around making things worse, right? Yeah.

I already got enough issues. Is it developers? Is it Ops people are usually being brought in by someone more senior in the hierarchy it I would say it's kind of both traditionally.

It's been you know a little bit higher in the hierarchy VP of Ops VP of Sr. Is they're the ones who say okay. I might need chaos engineering as a need but now, you know things are happening in a right shift right to as well.

Right? So people are more finding chaos engineering need in QA, right? So it's developers are clearly they're being Tasked with you have to make sure that things are taken care in terms of quality.

In QA also, you need to cover so many things right now because of the containerization so they're looking for chaos engineering. So I would say the software managers devops leads are the purchase personas for chaos engineering increasingly. I mean, the whole thing continues to remain true SRE is still need chaos engineering but it's not just say sorry and more and more.

We're seeing that the software engineering managers devops engineer leads. They are looking for chaos engineering and they are deciding, you know to to go and get a head start of chaos Engineering in their organization and then you know, multiple teams are taking it out. Okay.

you mentioned early chaos monkey being something that you had to be an expert to know how to Tell you design it tell it what to do to disrupt video streams. And today that sort of expert isn't required to do gas engineering. What does it take to do chaos engineering today today, you know, for example in harness gas engineering you just need to know how to put things together, right?

It's like a pseudo code right? I need to run this reliability test. So I need to break something and I need to check whether it's something is right or not, right?

That's how most of the cloud native kubernetes with stuff is it's declarative in nature. So you define ABC conditions, you know, the chaos operator will take care of you, right? So they just need to know the use case and a flow of the test case and then you know, you're good, right?

You don't really need to be an expert. So more of a declarative language so you can set up against anything you want. It's all only knowing about one thing great Indian Nationals or anything happen at the show that yeah, I know.

We are announcing honest chaos engineering availability in a limited form this kubecon. We've been part of harness for lost, you know eight months. We've been harder to work in bringing the chaos capabilities into harness platform as a module.

Yeah. I know we are announcing. This is the first Enterprise product that has both CD and CE the chaos engineering together.

Yeah. We'd like to announce the availability of harness chaos engineering. It's part of the Hunts platform.

Very good. Her's a great company a lot of developer tools open source things and yeah, yeah a lot of folks use it. Well any impressions of the show, you know, chaos engineering isn't new.

It was talked a lot about a different times in our industry. There's a lot of things that have come along too what you're kind of view on state of cloud native and where we are. Native, you know, it's grown big.

It's no more fancy thing. It's reality. There are so many adoption stories.

Now, the most of the talks are experiences of you know, the challenges best practices case studies that shows that cloud native has grown and I see, you know, various areas being talked within cubecon, for example, I was like dying to talk about chaos engineering at kubecon 4 years ago this kubecon we have about six to seven Chaos engineering talks one from Goldman Sachs, right? And then we had a full chaos day my harness for the entire day of chaos talks things like that, you know observability. I'll see you know, low-code no code stuff service measures.

There are many many areas that are being, you know nurtured and improved within some and then so many vendors so many Technologies, it's always a great learning, you know, the show has been great. It's amazing because we're having that same conversation with other people talking about Two and a half three years ago. We'd love to have people talking more about SRE or adoption of what Telemetry fast engineering Etc.

A lot of things have accelerated very quickly in just a few years. Yeah years since the beginning the pandemic three years ago. I guess it is now.

It's pretty let's continue. It's kind of shocking how things have changed so much. Yeah in a relatively short period of time I would say that is a role being played by cncf as a foundation.

nurturing creating and nurturing developing a community Used to be a great. It used to take a great skill now somebody like me with a lot of help from care. I mean the foundation I could start a project build a community around it find people talk like, you know kubecon is giving an opportunity to rock like this salt part of the foundation.

I think this is one of the good things that happened to the industries called I would have to give the credit to the foundation the early days you run your own. Yes starting art IRC Channel. Yeah, exactly exact people going and you're kind of you to do it all.

Yeah. It is a tremendous amount of support that they provide. Yeah.

Well if you're having a great show and thanks for spending some time with us. Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you. Great. Thank you.

Great Mercado with harness at a gas engineering. We are wrapping up for the day. I don't see anybody else lined up and we've got some hungry video production team members.

So I have a feeling we're gonna hit me a steakhouse here for soon. So thank You for joining us today. We've had some fabulous guests, Uma and others who have been with us, and I appreciate you that you spent time with us today, too.

Of course, you'll be able to catch this on replay on techstrong TV, so those videos will be posted soon. So hang tight you'll get to catch any that you might have missed and want to see we will be back tomorrow morning. We've got several interviews in the morning on Friday from kubecon to kind of wrap up our week here, and we'll see you on Tech strung dot TV.

Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thank you, Mitch.