Paul Stovell, Octopus Deploy | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. We're back here.

We're live in Chicago at CubeCon, continuing our day two coverage here at CubeCon. We're gonna be here the rest of today, and I think we go till about two o'clock tomorrow afternoon. And then, uh, that'll put a wrap on Q con North America 2023.

I wanted to introduce you to, uh, well, you've been on Text Drunk tv, but I don't think we've ever been live and at that event before. No. Paul Stover.

Paul is the founder, CEO of Octopus Deploy, correct? That's right. All right, Paul, first of all, welcome.

Thank you. And I, I look, I know flying here, I've flown to Australia. I can only imagine flying from Australia.

Yeah. There's a bit of a jet lag going on there, right? It is, it is.

Yep. Did you fly nonstop Chicago to here or? No.

So, uh, we get direct flights to LA or San Francisco, so you pick one of those and then you wait usually for delayed flights and so on. And then it's about 20 hours round trip. So they do have, actually it is, I guess it's San Francisco to is nonstop to Sydney or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I'm trying to think. I thought there was a nonstop out of Newark Airport, but that wouldn't do you any good anyway.

No, no, not quite. Not quite way. New York.

Yeah. And that's a very long flight. That's like 20 hours, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, I've taken that flight. I know.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's two, there's the one from Newark to Australia, and then there's another one, Newark to Sydney.

Uh, not to Singapore. Yeah. Well, it used to go over the top, but with the wars and everything, it doesn't even go over the top anymore.

Yeah. That's a long flight to, I Think it's, if you haven't flown to Australia, it's a good way to just say, okay, now I've flew to Australia. Everything else is short.

Like, like you can been going New York to London, London as long, it's long That'ss what we say now. I mean, 'cause So we're based in Florida and we'll fly from Florida to let's say San Francisco. Wow.

It's about five and a half hours now for some people. That's right. That's all day for them.

Yeah. If you've done the Australian flight. Yeah.

It's a walk in the park. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Walk in the park.

Makes It easy. Anyway, enough about our flights. Let's talk about you and Octopus deploy.

Paul, before we get in Octopus, octopus deploy. Let's talk a little bit about your background. Yeah, Yeah.

So, uh, I think technical developers, uh, started Octopus back in 2012 as a hobby project, nights and weekends, you remember handed into a business and Yeah, we bootstrapped it. Um, so different to a lot of companies. Yeah.

A lot of companies in the DevOps space in particular, heavily venture backed, uh, round after round of fundraising, we took a very different path, bootstrapped, profitable all along the way. Um, and, and we are here and, uh, we're about 200 people, um, spread around the world. A lot of folks here in the US and then Australia, New Zealand, UK as well.

Yeah. Excellent. Um, and you know, you mentioned DevOps, but what exactly does Octopus deploy do?

Yeah. The best way to think about us is, uh, if you imagine, you know, the DevOps, um, infinity Circle and all the stages along that. So there's a lot of companies that try and do all of it in some, at some, you know, basic level of depth.

So you take GitHub, GitLab, you know, trying to do every part of those stages. We think generally in most companies, especially in enterprises, a lot of those things are solve problems except how they deliver and deploy software. So for the last 10 years, that's, that's where we've focused on, that's where all of our energy goes.

So helping enterprises to, uh, release, deploy, operate software at scale, particularly for the really complex deployments. Those sort of deployments that, you know, the the end-to-end tools, they're gonna help you deploy a web app to dev test production. Uh, but once you start deploying to remote sites all around the world, um, once you start having hundreds and hundreds of project teams trying to do deployments consistently within an enterprise, that's ours.

That's our cup of tea. Love it. com.

I love it. Okay. Now let's talk Turkey a little bit as we say here.

Right? Look, this is my, I don't know, sixth, seventh CubeCon for many people, I mean, the fact of the matter is it's technically cloud native con CubeCon slash cloud native com. And I think that was recognition that CubeCon was kind of the king of the hill.

Kubernetes was king of the Hill. Right. To many people, cloud native is synonymous Yeah.

With Kubernetes. But if you're involved in this community, you know, now that Argo Open Telemetry, Prometheus, this, I forget what is there, 140 something programs in CNCF stages. Yeah.

It's not just Kubernetes anymore. And, and, and, you know, don't shoot me, but some people are saying maybe it's not, all of Kubernetes isn't all that anymore. Right.

Maybe, you know, it's always been rather hard. Yeah. Um, and there are some fundamental issues around, you know, building your whole architecture around this.

And I'm not saying Kubernetes is going away, I'm not saying it's a failure, I'm just saying people are beginning, maybe see some of the warts Yeah. If you will. Yeah.

Around Kubernetes and talking to people at the show, you know, there are certain subjects or areas that they want to see movement on progress, evolution, modernization. Yeah. I'm wondering what are the kinds of things you guys see at Octopus?

Yeah. Around this. I, I think we are in a fortunate position because we help customers with Kubernetes, other cloud native things, serverless, et cetera, across all the clouds and the on-prem stuff as well, and the VMs and the data centers that they've built up over time.

And so we've sort of watched this play out where, you know, you start to talk to companies a few years ago and it's like, yeah, we're doing Kubernetes. There's, there's a team somewhere and they're experimenting with it, and we think we might standardize on it because there's something quite enticing about the idea of everything we do as a container. We've got one technology stack to learn.

Yes, it's very complicated, but it's gonna become the, the standard within our, within our company. But then when you talk to them also and you ask about like, where does AWS lambers fit in? Where do Azure websites fit in?

You know, there's, there's often space for those as well when they think about what does the future look like? So there's definitely, um, a future technology stack for companies that is more than just Kubernetes. Um, and then of course, being enterprises, they'll have virtual machines for a really long time as well.

I think one of the challenges is when you think about, because the fundamental architectural layer of where the software is running is changing. That doesn't change every year. Like technology moves fast.

But, you know, virtual machines, we've been doing that for a really long time, and now if we start to run things in containers on Kubernetes, that's gonna be something we do for a really long time. And the challenge there is a lot of the tooling that may have worked for one, you know, that, that when you, when you change that thing at the very bottom of the stack, everything else on top kind of has to find its place in the new world. And maybe it makes it, maybe it doesn't.

I think in, when it comes to software delivery, um, there's a, one of the things I think they're finding is that there's a lot of tooling that's sort of rediscovering stuff that was discovered a long time ago. So a great example, when we talk to folks using Argo, you know, they'll, they'll say, we love Argo, we love using GI ops. And then you talk to them in a bit more detail and it's like, but it's really hard to do dev test production stages.

The scaling is something that we're, that, that we're struggling with. It works for the Kubernetes part, but actually when you ask them like, what's your real deployment process? It's like, well, I send an email, I do a thing in service now uhhuh, then I change the thing in in yaml.

Um, then I do some database schema migrations. Like I, I call an API, you know, there, there's a, there's an orchestration that exists outside of that. And I think in there purely a cloud native community world, the, the answer is, well, let's reinvent all that with AK in front.

But there's, I I think particularly where we focus on the kind of more human elements of how software is delivered, but we find we deploy to Kubernetes just as easily as we deploy to other things, and it works really well. Agreed. Agreed.

Um, let's talk a little multi, let's, I, I want to peel back the onion a little bit on multi-tenancy and stuff, because that's not a problem we hear a lot about, but it's nevertheless a problem, right? And, and, and what, and let me just further refine that. When I talk about multi-tenancy, it's, it's not only, um, it's multi-home as well, right?

The whole idea, let me give you a little of my history. 2000 friends of mine were starting a company because we saw that that eventually applications were gonna be distributed, right? This is before containers, modern containers, before, uh, it's even before really the cloud.

But we knew that applications were gonna be distributed multi homes in different data centers around the world and, but connected and that you had to develop management platforms that were gonna allow you to manage these multi-home distributed applications. Yeah. We named that company.

Lattice Networks failed miserably. We were way ahead of our time. We wound up taking what was a little security piece we, we had developed for it and became a security company.

Yeah. That's my start. But that, but that world lives now 20 years later, 24 years later.

Yeah. Right. And that's kind of the world you are talking about too.

I I think there's, there's two parts, but I think you're right. I think in, you know, there was a period where, you know, is the cloud gonna be a place that real enterprises run software that's been settled? Right?

Of course. Absolutely. Of course.

Of course they do. And then it was, you, you would see a lot of announcements of like, you know, this, this car manufacturer is going all in on cloud A and then of course, six months later, they acquire a company that went all in on Cloud B. Cloud B.

Yeah. And so in every one of these enterprises, they have every one of the clouds. Yep.

And in some ways that's intentional. 'cause they want the ability to move between and kind of make the best of all of the clouds. Yeah.

They're in and in other ways it's purely accidental as, as happens in enterprises. So there's, there's, there's that software delivery challenge. I think there's another one, which is when you ask a customer, when we ask a customer, okay, you've got some software and describe to us what it does.

And then you say, what happens when you, when you get a new customer, what, what happens there? And if they say, well, the new customer signs up on the website, Aero goes into the database and everything just kind of does its thing. Okay.

That's the way you've designed that application is the, the software understands the nature that there's more than one customer. Right? Um, so you think of like an accounting system, a new, a new company signs up, they get their own space in the database, but it's one application.

But there's a very different class of that, which is, you know, when a new customer signs up, uh, or we open a new site, like we open a new restaurant or a new, um, you know, uh, um, hospital, something like that, uh, then like someone drives out and they install some hardware and they, and they do a bunch of things. Or there's in the cloud, in the SaaS product, there's, when a new customer signs up, we provision infrastructure for them. And once upon a time, I think, um, the idea that like a new customer signs up and we are gonna provision infrastructure, I mean, that's crazy talk because that meant we're gonna phone Dell, we're gonna wait, you know, a bunch of time for something to come.

We're gonna figure out how to rack mount it, find power for it, you know, so no one did that. Um, but then, uh, architecturally, I think Kubernetes has changed a lot of that. 'cause Kubernetes provides a lot, a lot of that density and it simplifies the software layer.

And so there's a lot of reasons to, to do multi-tenancy kind of in a Kubernetes native way. And so we focus a lot on those kind of deployments as well. That's, that's your spot.

Yeah. That Excellent. Um, what else is happening with the company?

We are very focused right now on two big things, obviously, you know, continuing the multi-tenancy thing. We were at multi-Tenancy Con that was here yesterday, run for the first time. Uh, yesterday or Monday.

Oh, sorry, Monday. Yes. Yeah, I know that that's, that's that jet lag.

I'm on Australian timestamp. I gotcha. Uh, And then, um, and then we talked about multi-tenancy, the focus there.

We, we are doing a lot of work on doing that at scale. So our customers keep scaling tens of thousands of, you know, tenants infrastructure there to point to. So we, we are working a lot on that.

The other part of course is, is Kubernetes, um, and in particular how we help customers go from, you know, doing GI ops and it works okay for operations workloads, but it doesn't, the jigsaw puzzle doesn't work with cd. You know, the, like, I'm, I'm changing a line in YAML about what image I'm running, but what Jira tickets were solved as part of that. What source code commits went in, how did it go between dev test and prod?

Am I really deploying the same thing? So we are very, we're very focused on that. We shipped a lot of things recently around integrations with things like, uh, customize, um, and uh, and being able to see the live status of Kubernetes objects as we are deploying them.

Uh, and the, the powerful thing there is particularly the, we talk a lot about platform engineering and I think the challenge is Kubernetes, like you said, is so complicated that people are trying to set up these platform teams that are gonna tackle the complexity of platform engineering. So our app developers can just build an app and, and ship it somewhere. Um, and we are very focused on helping make that work and make it work really well.

Yeah. Love it. com Of course.

That's, we gotta leave him with that. Paul, first of all, I appreciate you, man, making the long flight here. Ha.

Having done the flight, you know, but more than that, I hope you enjoyed Ju Con and we'll see you on text on TV where it's a little bit easier for you on the, on the hours. Sounds good. But keep doing what you're doing, man.

Thanks. We appreciate it. Thank you.

Test. All right. Octopus deploy here.

Live at CubeCon in Chicago. We are gonna take a break and we'll be right back.