Exploring Platform Engineering at KubeCon Salt Lake City | KubeCon SLC 2024

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. We're back here at K Con Salt Lake City.

This might be, I think, our last interview here of day one. We saved some of the best for last, really, uh, it's been a great day. You know, I don't know how much you guys see besides just the speakers, but there's a lot.

We're in a right in the middle of the floor and there's just the whole world walks by here. Um, but there's an energy of, and that's something in CubeCon that you don't see in a lot of other shows and that so true. I forget from one cube Todd, to the next, how the energy of this community, how, you know, electric it is.

Anyway, let me introduce you to our two speakers that we have here today. To my immediate left is a woman who is show he's nice enough to be on our DevOps on Bounce series and some of our other text Drunk TV series. Uh, she's Adriana, Ella, Adriana, well if you've ever seen her in any of our series, uh, was working at one company.

She's recently, recently joined a new company. She'll tell you about it in a second. She's also very involved in the Open Telemetry Pro project, but also she presented here at, uh, CubeCon yesterday.

Yep. On Zero Day. And this gentleman right here is a Adrian's partner in presenting Marino.

Wa J Wi. J Wi, yes. Got it.

Marino, wi j Marino. Welcome. And it's nice to have you here.

Thank you. Thank you. So Marino, I know a lot about Adriana, I kind of filled it in.

We'll let her fill in, but I don't know as much about your background, so why don't you share if you can. Yeah, absolutely. So I been in the tech space for probably about 20 years now.

More than that actually. Uh, spent a lot of time, you know, working in the op space, moving up in the ranks towards architecture and you know, spent a little bit of time in the developer relations space as well recently. But I've moved back into professional services and it's been fun.

So I currently work as a staff solutions architect at a company called Kong. You might know them. They do API management, No Kong very well.

Oh Yeah. And they're in the service mesh game as well. Yes, which is where I live.

I live in the intersection of network, working in service mesh and Kubernetes. So, uh, a little bit about me. I'm based outta Canada, in Toronto as well, or actually not really Toronto.

I'm really more like outside of it in Whitby, but close enough because everyone knows where Toronto is. I hear you. And uh, you know, I've been there all my life.

But one of the cool things that I've noticed about that space is it's got a very vibrant tech community. Toronto always has. It Does.

So, you know, I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much. Thank You Marino.

I appreciate it. No, we've covered Kong, both the open source aspects and commercial. Actually there, I'm trying to think of his name.

There was like a Dere person at Kong. He lived in New Jersey. Tall blonde, sort of like Ivan Drago Victor Gamma Victor my favorite.

That's Victor. Victor, yep. So Victor, I think one season him and his family moved down to Florida and he used to come in our office like twice a week.

Oh wow. Record his podcast and everything in our studio. His videos are awesome.

Yeah. Well we fantastic. We used to do his videos.

Wow. That's why. Yeah, no, I mean we, we helped him a lot with his videos.

But yeah, Victor was great and, and that really, you know, we got to get an inside look at you Will, if you will, at k. So, good stuff. Adriana, before we jump into what you guys presented on, I mentioned that you recently changed jobs.

Why don't you give us a little insight there? Yeah, so, uh, I was previously, so I'd been originally hired by LightStep, which was acquired by ServiceNow. So, uh, I just, and it was my first, um, developer advocate, uh, gig actually.

And I just recently, um, moved out of that role into a, a, my second developer advocacy role at Dynatrace. Congratulations. Thank you.

You know, we, we had Dynatrace here earlier today and I just did a, uh, interview with Dynatrace. It was interesting. This guy was, I think, um, over in Europe.

Been with Dynatrace about 17 years. Oh wow. Worked his Way up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Might have been chief product. Was he the product officer?

I probably up in Dynatrace, but it was so interesting to get his perspective. 'cause in today's day and age, when do you get people who are there 16, 17 years, right? Yeah, Absolutely.

And um, so it was, it was a good interview. Anyway. Congratulations on the new role.

Thank you. They've got a, you know, they made a good choice. Thank you.

There. So good for that. Wanted to talk a little, as I mentioned, you guys both presented together yesterday.

What did you present on and tell us about it. Yeah, so we presented at Platform Engineering Day and uh, it was our first time presenting together and my first time presenting at Platform Engineering Day. Was it your first time?

It absolutely was. Yeah. So it was exciting.

Very Exciting. Yeah, it was awesome. Now this was Platform Engineering Day from CNCF.

Yeah, that's right. org. That's Right.

This was that Culminated event. This was a co-located. Yes.

Yeah. Well I couldn't think of a more timely, uh, interview to have today. I know, right?

com, our newest tech strong site. And you know, I like to say at at Techstrong we're about breaking down silos. Mm-Hmm.

com we're, we're breaking down some silos 'cause in, in our view of the world, and I'm interested in how you guys view this. Look, we built software, whether we like to admit it or not, in sort of a factory. It may not be a factory with big machines or robots.

Well maybe they're digital robots, but, you know, it's not a car factory per se. But nevertheless, there's a, an assembly line and a supply chain. And, and part of that are these frameworks and, and, you know, disciplines that we use along the way.

And I think it's time platform engineering is recognized as one of those key building blocks of the factory the same way DevOps is and agile is and cloud native stack is, and DevSecOps and SRE and you know, all the way through observability. Very right. Dear to you.

Yep. So fantastic. What, let's hear, what did you present on platform engineering?

What'd you present about? So we talked about, um, uh, oh my God, I'm brain farting. Yeah.

We actually talked a lot about our, okay, We got mar, Sorry. So we had our best practices that we wanted to lay on and define what policy as code is. Because when you think about platform engineering, one of the biggest challenges is breaking down the silos like you just suggested.

But policy also enters the chat because there are so many different types of policies. Yes. And when you have different teams wanting to move into production, they can't be doing their own thing.

You need an external team that kind of has this foresight, has this ability to view all all these different activities, all these different application requirements and bring them all together as one, but as code somehow as code that can be repeatable, reusable, that could be modified down the line and iterated upon to be better so that it could be optimized. And that's essentially what our talk was about. But there's a security element here.

It's a big security element because there are different kinds of policies. Sometimes we overlook those policies and we might shortcut them because we want to get into production because we have some metric or goal that we have to hit. But guess what happens if you don't hit those policies or wrap them around your, your workloads.

Something breaks, something goes down and then it becomes a bit of a, uh, operational nightmare down the line. Yes. And I, I think the other thing that I wanna add, like this talk was born out of like our personal frustrations 'cause we've exactly been through this stuff.

Like even like simple example, like you're onboarding onto a new company and you're having to request all of this access to systems, like manually. Like what about having those policies in place codified so that it's not having to be such a arduous process? Yes.

com about why we launched this site. So I've gone through my own evolution. You know, when they first started with the whole platform engineering thing, it was DevOps is dead platform.

That was all nonsense. I think we recognized that. However, I think, you know, platform engineering is certainly real.

Platform engineering is needed. I also think a lot about platform engineering isn't necessarily new. Yep.

So True. These are things that we have been doing or we should have been doing all this time. We're just kind of grouping them together with maybe a new name.

Yeah. But we we're doing these things and a lot of it is born out of frustration, born out of, we're tired of banging our head on the wall. The the head's getting soft.

Right. And, and so there's gotta be a better way. And I, I think that's kind of the promise of platform engineering.

It, it's not necessarily, it isn't about breaking down silos. It is about trying new things. It's not, it's not like AI where man, we're just going to disrupt the whole, you know, potentially disrupt the whole field.

It, this is more about let's, let's kind of codify what we're doing here and put some policies and process in place that makes sense. That makes us go, that allows developers and everyone else to go faster. Yeah.

So what was the reaction, what kind of crowd did they have at Platform engineering yesterday? I feel like we had a good crowd. A large, large crowd.

Yeah. It was like huge. I heard it was a large crowd too.

Huge drew. And like it was pretty packed I would say. Right.

Yeah. And you get multiple viewpoints and personalities that come in. We didn't have any time for questions though.

No, unfortunately. Because we just went right to the end. Uh, but I to cover, Yeah.

I mean folks are always welcome to come up to us and chat with us after the fact. And I'm sure like once we get back we're gonna get a lot of questions about how we can help 'em and, you know, help them navigate this whole policy as code when it comes to platform as platform engineering. Well Look, I'd love to give you a platform to continue that conversation.

Oh yeah, right. com We could either do it as a video, not, not here right now. Yeah.

I got enough on my plate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But back from the studio we could set something up.

Yeah, That'd be awesome. Or wanna write something. I, you know, I'm sure they don't, they're not getting CNCF owns that video if they, I don't even know if they do videos at all of the Zero day.

I they do zero Day think her Observability Day. Yes. Say But I don't need, they do it for everyone to tell you the truth because it's a lot recorded.

R They Did Sure. They were recording. Yeah.

It's like 24 different, um, events. They always record all the uh Yeah. Events.

Yeah. Yeah. So maybe if that's your elbow, we could, you know, kick off with that.

But I'd love to, you know, talk about it. Um, open telemetry while we're here. Sure.

What's going on here? I I, they had their thing too and Yeah. Yeah.

I was, I presented at that yesterday too. So you're, you're again, you're just Lolly wagon not doing anything Adriana coasting. I know.

Like coasting, Just coasting. And then Marino gave a, you gave a workshop yesterday morning too, right? That's right.

Yeah. Where'd you give a workshop? So Kong ran their own little workshop event.

Yes, I Saw it. And uh, they focused on two key things. The, their AI gateway as well as their developer tool called Insomnia.

So there's a lot of, a lot of noise around AI and every single AI is just an API and when you think like that, now you have the right tooling that's already possibly in place if you're already using Kong to be able to get you to that level of, hey, how do we shift from one LLM to another LLM Do like the high availability magic, do the cost control. That's effectively what that workshop was about. Excellent.

Well guys, I don't know if you have anything else you want to add. You know, I will add one thing. 'cause you mentioned silos.

Yes. And the main thing, like I'd say one of the biggest takeaways from our talk yesterday would be like that when it comes to crafting policies, we often see this case where the people crafting the policies don't consult the ones who are, Who actually living with them. The Policies, right?

Yeah. And nothing's more frustrating than like, know, all of a sudden you come into work Democracy in action. Right, Right.

And like, I, I think the most frustrating thing is coming into work and having, um, finding out that all of a sudden as a developer, I can't install software on my work machine to do my job because some policy has been rolled out without me being consulted. And so having like really bridging those silos, like let's all be friends y'all, because otherwise, like we can't craft effective policies. Yeah, I, I agree with you.

I mean, because I mean, but that's classic stuff, right? The people here make rules for the people here and then they don't understand why the people here think those rules aren't really such great rules. And, you know, and that, that frankly is one of the great things about the whole Linux Foundation model is, you know, on your TLCs and on your governing boards, yes you have the, the big companies, the big guys, but you have individuals and there's always a certain amount of board seats set aside, right?

For an unaffiliated individual and stuff like that. And it's important. I I think that's part of the reason for the success.

You got 180 something projects right here in CNCF. It's part of the reason for that. Alright.

Hey Marino, man, this is your first time on here, there. Thank you so much for having me there. Don't do the stranger detect strong tv.

All right. Absolutely Adriana, always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Good luck on the new gig. I'm sure you're gonna rock it and I'll see you on some text Drunk TV thing sooner or later for sure. All.

Hey, we are gonna wrap up day one of Q Con. We hope you've enjoyed it. Uh, we'll be back tomorrow with another f We actually have a crazy slate of stuff tomorrow, so don't miss it.

Uh, we'll start in the morning and go all day. com. Cloud native now Techstrong TV, digital CXO Security Boulevard Tech, AI Techstrong ITSM.

Have a great day everyone.