Venkat Ramakrishnan, Pure Storage | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023

This is Textron tv. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Kon here in Chi-Town, Chicago 2023.

I am joined by Kott Rama Krishnan, welcome with, uh, pure Storage, right? Yes. Great.

And you're in charge of product and engineering? Yes. Yeah.

Cool. Um, so you wanna talk about something I wanna talk about, and that's platform engineering. You know, it's, it's, we've done some work in this area and, and in my mind it's really, I think the timing for platform engineering is perfect, because the focus on developer productivity and kind of reorienting, you know, DevOps is just about everybody else helping developers do their job.

It seems like platform engineering has really been good at adapting in ways that organizations need that function in their, in their company. Yeah, absolutely. Right.

I mean, uh, if you look at most of the modern enterprises, uh, one of the most precious resources they have are the, you know, as the developer, right? They wanna make sure the developer community is, uh, thriving, um, is able to, you know, move their products and the, and the experiences forward, and are able to get the most out of the infrastructure without being slowed down by the infrastructure, right? So, I always joke around if, like, you know, if data is a new oil, right?

Then developers or the new engines of the economy, right? I mean, so you really want every enterprise out there is a modern, uh, software enterprise, uh, a digital enterprise. And without the developers moving the, uh, you know, the the business forward, they're gonna get left behind, right?

So you have to look at it from that perspective that as to why platform engineering is so critical, uh, in the, even the, you know, post pandemic age, it was like, you know, it has really accelerated it. I mean, we were all part of the Kubernetes container community. You could see some of the early adopters, innovators trying to drive a platform story, consolidate the services, but as more and more folks were remote, as more of the, you know, tasks had to be consolidated and the more teams had to be consolidated across.

We saw over the last couple of years in the post covid era, the platform, uh, discipline, the platform engineering discipline has really taken a strong hold. And we see a lot of customers, uh, run, uh, platform engineering arcs that kind of centralizes all of the DevOps capabilities they had distributed before, but also brings a lot of control over, uh, cost, security, uh, governance, regulatory, uh, stuff, and all of that. So it gives them a one, a, a, a, a one step one, uh, one stop shop for like, everything that the developers need to build and run their applications, right?

And that's where Kubernetes really shines, right? I mean, that's like, if you really look, go back and look, I mean, the vision for Kubernetes and containers is that you enable developers to, you know, build, ship and run anywhere. But now all the tooling has matured, and all the organizations, many of the world's largest organizations have embraced it.

So we see a ton of adoption, a ton of, uh, uh, you know, growth there from the perspective of folks running their applications and, you know, kind of building these internal developer platforms and everything. Yeah. You know, we, we abstract things and kind of sim you know, containers simplify things to make parts of the, the, uh, pipelines more efficient and easier.

That complexity goes somewhere else, right? I mean, maybe it gets replaced by technology, but we still have to engineer the test development pla production environments we're gonna be in, and we want those to be the same or as similar as possible. That that's kind of one domain of platform engineering.

There's also developer portals and that kind of thing too. Are you focused more on the platform and platform engineering, or do you expand into other parts? No, that's great.

Uh, you know, we, our mission is to make the platform engineer's life easy, right? But we definitely, our consumers are developers, right? See, the platform engineering team exists to serve their application teams, you know, to help them build, ship and run fast, right?

So, but we are kind of essentially, you know, two major personas that we, uh, we build our products for. One, the top persona for us is a platform engineer. How, and they're our superheroes, I call them, you know, 'cause, you know, I just, I just came off a customer meeting and they just told me they have about 8 6500 to 8,000 developers on a, on a platform, which is building out about a hundred thousand bills a day.

Wow. And their team size is only eight people. Wow.

That, that's impressive. That's how lopsided the developer to platform engineer ratio is, right? I mean, there's the large development teams, really small platform teams.

So what they need is a lot of automation. They need a lot of observability. They need to be able to control, uh, uh, or, you know, like manage the platform through policies, through, through, through, through, through, uh, rules and, you know, like a rule-based automation and all of that.

So our job is to make, provide that to the platform engineering orgs, the platform engineers so they can have a quality of life, right? But at the same time, our customer's customer is also very important to us, and most of the time, and almost all the time, is the developers who are the customers of the platform, their application users are the clients of the platform. So we build it so that these application teams have visibility into what happens to the infrastructure.

They, they know how to, you know, like they, they know how to manage the infrastructure without having to file tickets so they can even, you know, make the underlying infrastructure behave the way they want. For example, inspector performance, or how the data is placed, how it is all backed up, how we can do a dr across, or how even like, you know, migrate between versions. So there are a lot of these things we let our, uh, developer community be able to control and manage so they can get the most out of their platform.

And we don't just stop there, right? You know, we have also let our developers, you, our platform teams protect the platform, you know, like at the data level, at an application level. But we have also surfaced those capabilities to the developers as well.

So if you're a developer using a namespace, you have, you know, your application running in a Kubernetes namespace, you can back it up, or you have the platform admin, you can back up the entire Kubernetes cluster, and you can also restore just the namespace if you want. So we kind of give different, you know, fine grain controls for both the users, and not just that we didn't stop there. So, you know, one of the toughest, uh, workloads to run any environment is a database, right?

And there's a lot of, you know, uh, fear, uncertainty and doubt about can a database really run in Kubernetes? If you go back to the early days of Kubernetes, right? Port Works is one of the companies that, you know, uh, emphatically said you can absolutely run databases on Kubernetes.

And they're actually best suited, especially the modern cloud native databases, they're best suited for running, uh, in Kubernetes because they need scale, they need agility, they need elasticity. And what better than a Kubernetes infrastructure to give you that Distribution, you know, all kinds of things. Exactly.

Right. So we have, we have been shipping Portex data services, which makes it so easy to automate about to 14 important databases. And we are continuing to add more, um, at and to run these databases anywhere from day zero to day two ops in install, upgrade, patching, all the way to, you know, doing DR for databases.

I mean, you can literally deploy a clustered Postgres in a matter of minutes, and you can set a DR policy. So where entire AWS, uh, region goes down, you can spin up in another region again in a matter of minutes, in like few minutes. RPO, right?

Let Me ask you where, uh, it may not be a fine line, but where does, uh, platform engineered job kind of end, start and end and, uh, developers begin? What, what is that sort of middle point where they intersect with each other? Because it is platform engineering is isn't just taking a bunch of stuff from developers doing it for 'em, right?

Developers still have to have their own way of, I might wanna spin up an environment, right? Create this for me. I don't want to open a ticket, you know, in like the old days.

So what, what does that kind of middle part work look like? Yeah, I think, uh, I think this goes with the principle that if you build it, you own it, right? I mean, like, that means a, a platform engineer is not going to do the developer's job for them, and neither is the developer, uh, is gonna do the platform engineer's job for them, right?

Where the line draws is like a platform engineer looks. If you look at the platform engineer's view of their day-to-day work, they're making sure, uh, their environment is up and stable. It's able to serve up apps.

People are able to deploy, uh, applications and get them running within a matter of, within the SLA they promised. Uh, and they're looking at it, the environment as a whole, right? But a developer's views, you know, they have a namespace and a few namespace and a provision for them.

They have authentication into that. Their view is very narrow. They're focusing on their application.

They're focusing on how performing their application is. They're focusing on the uptime of the application. They're focusing on how they can do code patch updates and, you know, security updates to their application, right?

They're making sure that application runs, you know, in, uh, uh, compliance with the platform's requirements, you know, it is secure. It has all the latest, uh, uh, you know, uh, CBEs patched, uh, you know, it's able to get the performance it needs. It's kind, kind of, they can, you know, it's backed up at their level, all of that, right?

So, so developer's scope is very narrow to their set of applications. Mm-hmm. Right?

But a platform engineer, uh, a developer doesn't go tell the platform engineer, you know what, you need to add more nodes in your Kubernetes platform, right? That's the platform. They don't wanna have to Yeah.

They don't have to. They they shouldn't be, right? Because it's invisible to them.

Right? So what Kubernetes essentially delivers is an invisible infrastructure to the developers, right? So, and for the platform engineer, the platform engineer is not gonna go to developer to say, you know what?

You should rewrite your code because, you know, this is how this platform works. Won't go Over well if they Do. Exactly.

And you know, we all know, you know, the biggest inertia in enterprise, especially in software and enterprises, that no developer wants to rer their application because it has to work for a different infrastructure, right? That's what a lot of infrastructure companies think. Oh, I have a new API, uh, all the application writers are gonna rewrite this, you know, added application use by new API, but good luck.

It. That's why Postex still surveys. We were having a raging debate yesterday.

You in one of the, you know, our, our, uh, community dinners. We had, you know, I was like, people were asking why is Postex still around? Why is like blocks still around, right?

But, but you know, because you have billions of apps out there work these interfaces and they work. Yeah. And I guess object is a new interface and we support it, but hey, I've seen like, and nobody's Gonna pay to move it.

Why? What's the value? So you're gonna see that you cannot dictate, a platform engineer cannot dictate the application developer to say, go change your app, right?

That's whole reason I talk about databases, right? I mean, you could offer a bunch of data services, but a developer is gonna come in, especially you're building a new age app, you're trying to like, bring in a new digital experience. They're gonna say, look, I'm gonna use this high speed database that can really do this many transactions that like, you know, uh, you know, like, or like few hundred nodes or few hundred, uh, you know, or billions of users.

And the data service you offer may not be, uh, scalable to deliver that. That's why we built this p data services, because we want to offer the most favorite databases for developers and make it easy for them to run so they don't have to get into wrangle with platform and the team and all of that on which data services they need to run for them, right? Because again, platform engineers are not database experts, right?

And DBAs are not platform experts, right? So we kind of wanted to marry that together and offer this to database teams, application teams, how we can run these modern databases and how you can simplify, again, that is the clear separation of responsibility, right? So I hope that answered your question.

Yeah, no, very good. Um, tell us a little bit about your, what does your product do? What's your approach to market?

How do you help platform engineers do their part of this ecosystem? Yeah, I mean, our product, as I mentioned, you know, we have a, you know, we have a complete data platform, right? It has like, you know, storage, backup, and data services.

We continue to add and expand it. So we kind of, we can engage with our customers in pretty much any stage of the journey, right? You know, like for example, if you are a customer starting out early of an enterprise customer, you're running a bunch of workloads, but hey, you are not ready to run data services.

You're not ready to run mission critical applications, but you are running, you know, a ton of apps in your data, in your, so we can start you with data protection, right? Or your Kubernetes data protection, like where you can back up and restore your Kubernetes clusters. You're always compliant with your security policies, your protecting your Kubernetes or the platform operations against ransomware attacks and all of the great stuff.

But we can go from there and then say, you know what? You could run all of your mission critical apps, including your complete application stack your databases, you know, get back up in DR with your OX enterprise data management software, right? And then the third thing is you can add to the platform and run any database of your choice up to, you know, the one that from our catalog that you can immediately spin it up and get your application teams to use it, right?

Our primary, uh, uh, mission is to serve the platform teams, right? As I mentioned. So we sell primarily to platform teams.

If you look at all of our large customers that run thousands of nodes of, uh, uh, port Works installs, right? They're all mostly platform teams, but almost always the developers are consuming that platform. Uh, the application, right?

So they're, we look at developers as a community of users that actually leverage the service that's available to them or provided to them. We are the platform team. Like, you know, it's kind of like, you know, if you're in a company, you know, the, it offers you a service.

And we as the employees of the company use that it, you know, for example, it could be email, it could be, it could be something like Slack, right? Same thing. You know, a platform team offers a whole bunch of services to a community of developers who are building apps and that what's driving the business and, you know, yeah.

So we sell to the platform teams consumed primarily by the application developers. Great. And is Port Works, is that a SaaS cloud offering or?

We have both. You on-Prem as Well, we have on-Prem as well as SaaS. Um, uh, you know, honestly, we have seen explosive growth in both, uh, uh, in both the deployments.

So You really have to be in both certain center parts. Exactly. Right.

Very good. Uh, can folks kick the tires, like with the cloud service, or how do folks learn out? Yeah, they can, what you can do with Port Works, yeah, they can go, like, you know, for example, we have an essentials version of Port Works.

com and you know, download our essentials version. We have backup as a service. There's a free tier version of the backup that they can go play with.

You can just sign up, self sign up, you don't need to contact us. You can just come onto a portal, self sign up, you know, point it to your, your Kubernetes cluster, your namespace, you can back it up, you know, as much as like, we have some upper limits, but it's pretty liberal. Uh, you know, then we have a trial version.

If they wanna play with the enterprise, the entire suite of the platform, then we can, they can download a trial. It's unlimited, uh, from a feature standpoint, but limited by a certain number of days for you to like, play with and run. And then, uh, you know, uh, feel free to ping us.

And we are happy to always chat. I always, uh, you know, we look at, we wanna be partnering with our customer's journey. Our mission is to make the platform engineer's life easy, right?

To give them the time back to let them manage complexity at scale and, uh, you know, to be able to deliver these services, uh, and keep their SLAs, but, you know, serve a large developer community. So again, we are on their side, you know, they're our superheroes and we're there to serve them. I'm sure they appreciate the help.

Right. Uh, tell us the URL again to go check this out. The web address, where they go.

com. com as well. Uh, and to check, check us out.

com as well. So, uh, you know, there's a ton of resources. If we have our YouTube channel, uh, which is Port Works, you can subscribe to it.

There's a ton of learning videos. com, there's also like, uh, uh, sandbox Labs that they can play with as well, so they can deploy immediately and run. So there's a ton of resources to kind of get up to speed.

com as well, and come and ask questions. Also, It's, it's always great to get in there, try it. Yeah.

See what it does, how it works. There's nothing like hands-on. Right.

Well, thank you, Ivanka. It's a very pleasure talking with you. Hope you have a good rest of the show.

And Yeah. Uh, if you're talking Kubernetes, you're at the right place, so, absolutely. I'm always happy and excited to be here.

Thanks for having me. You bet. It's always a pleasure to talk to Tunk.

Have you come back again? Always. Absolutely.

Yeah. It's an evolving area, right? It's in fast moving too.

So it's always good to keep up with what, And this show has gotten so much bigger and so much busier. Right. Pretty amazing.

It's an amazing Show. Amazing. It really is.

Well, thanks again. Thank you. We, we will be back with other great interviews, just like with Kott and talking about who knows what next.

We'll see. But I'll bet it's something to do with Kubernetes or cloud or both. So we'll be talking with you soon.

Don't go away. We'll be back in a few minutes.