In the third episode of our DevOps Unbound streaming broadcast on TechStrong TV and devopsy.kinsta.cloud’s sister site Digital Anarchist, Alan Shimel is joined by Kevin Dunne of Tricentis, Tracy Miranda of CDF and Alon Girmonsky of UP9 to answer the question: Can we have DevOps without open source?
The video is immediately below, followed by the transcript of the conversation. Enjoy!
Transcript
Alan Shimel: Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of DevOps Unbound. DevOps Unbound is sponsored by Tricentis, so many thanks to them. But it’s our show here at MediaOps and we try to explore, you know, just some of the areas around DevOps and not just dev and ops but DevOps as a framework for the way things are being done, the way application and software is being made and deployed today, the way it’s being hosted, the way it’s being operated and maintained and observed, and so many other aspects of how we’re doing technology.
It airs every other week and this episode is episode number three of DevOps Unbound. Hope you’ve enjoyed the first two.
With that let me introduce to our panel today. First of all, well, it may not be right or left on your screen, because so it makes no sense to tell you how it is on my screen, but let me first start off with my friend, Tracy Miranda. Tracy is the executive director of the Continuous Delivery Foundation, which is a Linux Foundation and a sister organization to Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Got that all out of the way. Tracy, welcome.
Tracy Miranda: Hi everybody and thanks for having me Alan.
Shimel: My pleasure to have you on Tracy.
Joining Tracy and I today, I have Kevin Dunne, who has been on our TechStrong TV in the past. Kevin is with Tricentis and runs their open-source communities, as well as some of the open-source projects that are now under their management, some by acquisition over the years, some they’ve developed themselves. But Kevin, welcome to DevOps Unbound.
Kevin Dunne: Thank you, Alan. Happy to be on and glad you’re having us back with you again.
Shimel: That’s our pleasure.
Then last by not least is my friend, Alon Girmonsky. Alon is the CEO/founder of UP9, that’s U-P-9. He’s going to tell us about that when I ask everyone to introduce themselves here in a moment, but Alon was also the founder/CEO of BlazeMeter, a very well known open source or player in the open-source testing world acquired by CA, which of course became Broadcom.
So, today’s episode ladies and gentlemen is around DevOps, cloud native and open source more importantly, most importantly, and how important open source is to this whole DevOps movement and this whole — Someone today, I had someone from Deloitte Cloud on and I was doing an interview called it a “revolution” that we’re seeing, especially since COVID, right? IT has undergone a revolution of cloud transformation, digital transformation, acceleration and so much of it is made possible by open source. So that’s our subject today.
Before we hop into it I wanted to give each of you like 30 seconds, just in case our audience wanted more than the cursory kind of introductions I did. Why don’t we start with you Kevin? Give them who you are, your background and we’ll jump through all three of us from there.
Dunne: Yeah, that’s great. My name is Kevin Dunne. I’m with Tricentis as Alan mentioned. My main focus is on our open source and sort of community products. I’ve been with Tricentis for seven years. Prior to Tricentis I was at QASymphony, which merged with Tricentis about two years ago. So very passionate about open source, it’s been sort of a new area that Tricentis has been getting into.
There was a lot of work around Flood, which was built on top of JMeter and Gatling and now Tricentis has acquired TestProject which is built on top of Selenium and Appium and most recently SpecFlow which is an open source project based on cucumbers.
So I’m really excited to see how these tools are helping to kind of shape the Tricentis roadmap and sort of broaden the community in the open source supports, so very exciting projects going on so far.
Shimel: Alon, how about you?
Alon Girmonsky: Hey everyone and Alan thanks for inviting me. I’m a big fan both of Tricentis and obviously the CD Foundation. Alon Girmonsky as you mentioned my current company UP9, which I have the privilege of being cofounder in, deals with microservices and cloud native in respect to testing. Testing is something that is becoming harder and harder to do, especially when you know you talk about service testing and API testing. So UP9 provides a solution for somewhat autonomous, mostly automatic you know service testing.
As you mentioned prior to that my previous company, BlazeMeter, was all about load testing and stress based on the open-source tool JMeter. You know I had the pleasure over the past 10 years to be involved in the open-source community and understand or at least try to understand what’s the place of open source and why is it so important specifically for developers. I’m very happy to have the opportunity to discuss this in this forum.
Shimel: Last, but not least Tracy how about you?
Miranda: Tracy, I’m the executive director of the Continuous Delivery Foundation or CDF, which is an open-source foundation with the mission to improve the world’s capacity to deliver software with security and speed. The CDF is home to the open-source project Jenkins, JenkinsX, Tekton and Spinnaker.
Before that I was leading open-source community at CloudBees. In general I’m a 15-year veteran of open source, so I love all things open source, open innovation and building communities.
Shimel: Excellent. So folks, here’s my opening premise and we’ll let — it will be our jumping off point.
I also have a long involvement in the open source world. I first got involved in open-source security related projects 2002, 2001 and we were blessed in security to have some amazing open-source tools at our fingertips. Products like Snort, which was developed by Marty Roesch, who then started Sourcefire, acquired by Cisco, was the de facto standard for intrusion detection. The NMap and Nessus scanners, Renaud Deraison, who’s cofounder over at Tenable Network Security and Ron Gula, who started Tenable with Nessus. NMap has been out there. There were many others, ClamAV and so many commercial companies actually sprang up just by using that open-source software under the covers putting a UI on it and stuff.
So I’ve seen open source. I remember talking to CIOs and I remember speaking to you know a DOD agencies about their use of open source and they would tell me that they don’t have any open source, they don’t allow open source and then you would go look at what their developers were working on and it was all open source, you know it was Linux and everything else that they had, just didn’t bother telling them about. So I’ve seen open source become from a gorilla-type of operation in many environments, to the dominant form of software and software development today.
When I got into DevOps it became really apparent to me and this is my jumping-off point, we wouldn’t have DevOps without open source. I just don’t think — I think so much of what we can consider not only the tools of DevOps, so specific open-source projects, but the culture of DevOps, the collaboration, the sharing of knowledge of DevOps is based upon that open-source mindset, on the open-source culture that you couldn’t have DevOps without open source.
Tracy, you ran the open-source community of CloudBees first and only ED at CDF, part of Linux, what’s your feeling on that? Why don’t you kick us off?
Miranda: Yeah so definitely as a big fan of open source I’ve seen how it’s been really instrumental to DevOps. I think you know one of the things that open source does really well, like sometimes people focus just on the code, but it is really all about that collaboration, how people work together. I think at the heart of DevOps really what it’s trying to get at is building bridges, getting people to work together even if they are in slightly different spaces, whether you know it’s DevOps COPs who are trying to bring security practitioners closer to developers or ops people closer to developers. I think open source really captures that spirit of collaboration and that’s why it’s become almost synonymous with DevOps.
Shimel: Kevin, Alon, what do you think?
Dunne: Yeah, I mean I would definitely agree with that. I would say one other thing that you know of the many benefits of open source, right, is kind of just the transparency and visibility. I think you know a lot of companies were finding like DevOps in the CI/COVID process especially is kind of integral to business success, right? So a lot of companies are very hesitant to put a tool in place that is going to be that critical to their success unless they’re able to you know fully understand what it does, you know any limitations that it has, you know extended where needed and you know kind of have that ability to build on top of it as well.
I think way too many companies kind of got burnt a bit by you know solutions that were completely closed source, didn’t allow customization and things like that. Then you know they kind of get stuck when you know something breaks. So they reach the limits and the vendor is not able to you know update that for them. So I think that was one of the big things about you know the whole Jenkins’ community, right, as you just see how many plug-ins and other you know ways people come up with of extending the tool that you just would never see from a closed-source product, right. So I think that’s been something as well as just kind of like the ability to have the transparency into how something works and be able to extend that to fit your own needs is pretty critical to DevOps success I think.
Shimel: Yeah, I, I agree. Alon, you more than I think even Tracy and Kevin I mean you built a business with a successful exit on an open-source kind of business model if you will. You know what’s your view on… Is, can, is it a chicken and egg? Can you have DevOps without open source?
Girmonsky: I think if we go back even in more than a decade there was open source and there were commercial offerings, right? There was an inherent conflict between the two.
I think that if you fast forward for today it’s about product market fit. I think open source needs to be part of any product as long as it involves developers, maybe even more than developers, but developers as Kevin kind of mentioned we talked about transparency I think developers need to have control. They cannot rely on someone else to have a black box. So anything from transparency, having control, not having dependency. You know if you think about speed to market the more control you have your ability to change quickly you know the faster you can go.
So what we’ve learned over you know the past decade the developers they need to have the open source not because it’s free. I think that’s the last aspect of open source. It was in the past it was free and a poor man’s solution. Today you want to have open source because you want to maintain control, visibility, transparency and reduce the dependency on other vendors. That’s kind of my key learnings you know from my experience.
Shimel: Yeah. I mean that reminds me of something I’ve always been taught and heard about open source and that is look with open source it’s free as in freedom and free as in beer, right? It doesn’t cost, it’s free as in beer, right, free beer for everyone. But really though that was a big driver, you’re right Alon that was a huge driver and remains a huge driver that people can just pick up this software and run with it. And if at some point they want to buy an enterprise license or an enterprise version or go to a vender that has a supported version they can pay for it, but they can use it for free today. But more importantly than that is the freedom as in freedom, right? In that it gives them the transparency, it gives them the ability to see exactly what it is they’re getting themselves into as Kevin pointed out.
But to me that’s almost turned the original problem on its face. Tracy you’ve been in these, in this open-source world longer, as long enough, right? In that originally that was also one of the big shortcomings of open source, right, is that everybody, everybody sees the source code, hackers or whoever will more easily exploit that source code or can break in or can see what’s going on. And whom am I going to call, Ghostbusters, right, for support and to fix this thing, right?
And so how can I as an enterprise you know based my business on open source? Is it reliable enough, secure enough, supportable enough? But yet we seem to have overcome that. One of the reasons I think, Tracy, is because of the advent of foundations like the CDF, right? So talk about that if you will a little bit.
Miranda: Yes, yeah, no absolutely. Like I think well first of all I want to make it clear like you can still have DevOps with a proprietary CI/CD stack and there’s plenty of offerings out there. But I think the key thing where open source plays a big role is it’s really in driving the innovation across the industry, making it so people can leverage it in different ways, combine it and get that interoperability to you know produce things that solve their problem.
And the way foundations have really helped is dealing with some of the issues or you know sometimes there have been misconceptions with open source, but sometimes they are genuine problems, which you know fall in the gaps of well maybe the developers on the projects want to focus on the code and there are other things we can do across multiple projects to help you know whether it’s focusing on security or focusing on building communities that are diverse. So open-source foundations have just added that extra layer to give the industry confidence that these are trusted projects that are being well sustained and people can rely on them to either build products or use in their own CI/CD stacks and really just kind of push, push things further I a good, positive direction for the whole industry.
Shimel: I’m going to comment or not disagree, but I wanted to distinguish and clarify something you said there Tracy and that is yes there are closed source or commercial or whatever you want to call it CI/CD solutions out there. But even they and we report on them at devopsy.kinsta.cloud right, even they rely on open-source integrations, open-source components.
I mean you look at Alon with what you’re doing with UP9, with UP9, with what you did in BlazeMeter. Kevin when he talked about the three or four different open-source kind of based tools that Tricentis is doing, they’re all based on open source. When you go under the covers they’re closed source but they’re based on open source, things like Selenium and these kinds of things.
So you know even in the CI/CD space and I’m not here to name names, but we know the closed source you know CI/CD players. I don’t think they’re product works well if you didn’t have an open source kind of framework that they plug into. I think it’s especially true in the testing world. I think Alon you’re living proof of that, right? Could you have had a BlazeMeter without having some of those great open source? Kevin all of the projects you mentioned are based on open source, right? Can you have any of them without open source? It’s a real you know …
And guys don’t wait for me to ask your name, feel free to jump in here.
Dunne: I think it’s a good point. It’s becoming more of the model like Alon was you know mentioning is it’s kind of you stand on the back of giants a lot of times, right? So I think you know you see a lot of the at least in the testing space, right, BlazeMeter, Sauce Labs, BrowswerStack, you know a lot of these bigger companies they’re succeeding by basically doing what you were talking about with the security tools 10, 20 years ago, right?
Take an open source community and kind of you know build something on top of that, right, that provides value, but still is kind of using this known currency of this open-source project. I think people like that because you know by the time they get to buying that commercial solution they’ve got a lot of confidence in the open-source components that have reached a you know critical kind of juncture where they’re bought into those tools enough that they’re willing to invest in something you know commercial to help support it and you’re solving real problems, right.
You mentioned you know free and open source being free, but you know everyone knows one of the big challenges with open source is just the amount of time that you have to invest a lot of times to customizing it, deploying it, you know patching it, upgrading it, dealing with security concerns. And so you know a lot of these vendors come in and they solve a real problem, but I think it is a little bit of a you can put the cart before the horse, right?
The people need to adopt the open-source tool, see that it works, feel the pain of you know what it’s like to manage it on their own and then you know usually graduate to these commercial solutions. I think when people come and try to present the commercial solution upfront without that open-source community you know it kind of fails because you haven’t proven the value yet, right? And it’s a big jump for people to make and that’s you know been a good thing in the market having open source. It’s kind of put the power in the hands of the users that you know users get to call the shots first and the user expects you’re going to give me some value in this open-source tool before you start to charge me an arm and a leg, right?
Miranda: I like the analogy, free as in free puppy, so we can have it, but you still have to take care of it, feed it, and keep it from pooping on the carpet.
Dunne: Exactly yeah.
Girmonsky: Yeah.
Dunne: And that takes a lot.
Shimel: Alon?
Girmonsky: I think I’ve learned a good concept a couple of years ago, kind of the open core concept. It wasn’t there ten years ago, but then you understand okay this is what, what we’ve been doing all along. The ability to open your core, the core of your platform, the core of your offerings. So you know your user will have more flexibility. Maybe the use case is a bit different than what you had in mind initially, right, by having an open core or an open-source project that you’re basing on, right, you allow the users to build their own use cases and then bring value that again the product market fit is in my view better than anything that has close and this is what you can do with it and that’s it.
Shimel: Agreed. So Tracy you know the CDF is a great model for the kinds of stuff we’re all three of us are talking about, right? You have in essence this four main properties or projects that CDF manages. Each one of them is closely tied to one or more commercial entities that solutions are based upon, right? But yet the community revolves around the CDF. By the way it’s the same thing in the CNCF, right, where you have Kubernetes and you have you know a lot of Kubernetes service providers that manage Kubernetes, but the community lives around CDF.
What are you seeing here? Like where is that handoff? Where is the you know passing the baton from that open-source user to the commercial entity?
Miranda: Yeah, no I think that’s a great question. What we see, well certainly what I’ve seen over the last 15 years is it’s an ever-changing line if you like. So when we talk about innovation you know we have these open-source projects and we don’t want people to be reinventing the wheel over and over again. Like take something like pipeline orchestration. You know when it gets to a point where that’s pretty ubiquitous then that’s a good thing to have as an open source you know kind of standardized in one project.
Then we can move up the stack into new innovations and vendors can lead that charge of take open-source projects and try to build things on top of that that add new things to the industry. As those become more and more ubiquitous then you know it probably eventually will get an open-source solution and then people will sort of move onto the next thing.
So I think it’s always kind of this tide as such where the more kind of proprietary things will test out the beating edge and where they can get value for using some things that haven’t been done and then open-source projects become like the infrastructure, the roads, and the bridges and things like that.
Shimel: Fair, guys any comment on that?
Dunne: Yeah I think that’s true. It’s kind of tough though puts vendors in a tough position, right, where it’s like you know you have to – it really raises the bar, right on delivering innovation, right, because you know all of the… It’s kind of a commoditization, right, that you know things that have been in the market for 10, 20 years you know the market, the commercial market for those sort of erodes and you know it gets replaced by open-source tools. And so it’s always kind of playing that game of being the you know next hand-up on the baseball bat.
You know it’s just like your always – if you stop innovating there’s… I think that’s why you see you know the SAS model being really popular with a lot of these software companies is just they need to keep innovating, right, and you can’t just like you know expect to sell a tool, a licensed tool and you know have a customer use that for ten years and collect maintenance from them. Like these are – all the tools that are you know demanding good budget from companies are really you know evolving quite quickly. So it’s really put a lot of pressure on vendors to innovate, otherwise they’re going to become stale and replaced by open source pretty quickly, which is a good thing for the uses of these tools I think at the end of the day.
Shimel: I also think that’s to Alon’s point that’s why OpenCore is such a great model for this, right?
Dunne: Yep.
Shimel: Because you can’t – you can keep innovating at your core and then have your freemium, premium, whatever you want to call feature set kind of revolving around that core and keeping people, “Okay now that’s why I should pay money.”
Dunne: Right.
Shimel: So –
Miranda: And I think –
Shimel: Go Tracy.
Miranda: And I think we’ll increasingly see companies kind of use that to change the dynamic in the market and then they can use open source almost as a weapon to drive commoditization by saying, “Okay well this thing that was a premium feature for a number of vendors, we’re going to open source our vision” and you know suddenly change the dynamics. So it is real interesting because, yes, I think SAS services will make a big difference and everybody in the industry has to be on their toes constantly.
Girmonsky: Absolutely. By the way a way to compliment this is think of you know we used to live in an industry where the big vendors provide point tools, value, do something that you haven’t done before. Today, with developers it’s very hard to think of having an infrastructure that is not open source, right? So let’s assume the entire infrastructure is open source whether by vendors, by developers, or by big cloud like you know Netflix, Amazon and others. Then the next layer is efficiency and productivity. Then the commercial vendors they can provide impact by, you know, this is what I have done in BlazeMeter. It wasn’t — BlazeMeter wasn’t a load-testing tool. I think Flood was the same. It’s JMeter was the testing tool.
Dunne: Yep.
Girmonsky: BlazeMeter back then was all about making JMeter more efficient and the developers more productive. So suddenly LoadRunner wasn’t like, okay there is an alternative to what was de facto commercial tool, okay it’s the open-source tool, but as you said open source on its own it’s pretty tough. So you know here come the vendors that make our lives more productive and use of open source more efficiently.
Shimel: Agreed. Kevin, Alon I’m going to put guys on a hot seat here for a second. You know what CNCF has been wildly successful in so many of the projects that they’ve incubated and now graduated and have been tremendous successes. Tracy, CDF is only what about two years old now?
Miranda: Yeah, not even.
Shimel: Yep, they’ve got four pretty amazing CD tools that are kind of de factor standards, right, that people are gravitating around. With such a strong heritage of open source and testing and continuous testing, automation, why haven’t we seen sort of the equivalent of the CDF in the testing world? Right? Why hasn’t the Linux Foundation or some other, Eclipse or Cloud Foundry or something or a new one sprung up that says, “Hey, we’re going to take these individual projects you know out of hands of individual company and do a community thing”? It may be a case of what, don’t break what’s, don’t fix what’s not broken, right, because it seems to be working the way it is. But why don’t we see a foundation for open-source testing?
Dunne: That’s a good question. I mean I think you know if I had to guess the main reason probably is just that you know testers are sort of developers, but sort of testers, right, and like an automated tester kind of falls in between the gap of maybe both and some view themselves as developers, some view themselves as testers.
I feel like it’s starting to happen. If you look at some of these tools like Cypress for example. You know the newer tools that are emerging definitely they’re communities have much more of like a developer feel around them and there’s much more structures of the open source contributions and whatnot.
But you know historically it was definitely very fragmented and you know the load testers all kind of rallied around JMeter and Gatling and you know the web testers around Selenium and the mobile testers around Appium. There’s really no common thread. I guess it’s kind of more like more siloed, right, versus my guess would be you know these tools like Kubernetes and you know Spinnaker or Jenkins, I mean those are ubiquitous, right? I mean everyone whether they’re building you know a web app you know in Java or in you know C# or whatever can use these tools versus I think a lot of the testing tools because they’re kind of like a thought you know into the decision that’s made after you make some decisions oftentimes on your kind of app infrastructure. That’s why they’re sort of thought of as maybe – they were historically thought of as more of an afterthought and the communities got more fragmented as a result of that.
But I think that is starting to change. I mean we know and we talked about these results on the last time I was on with you, Alan, you know that testers are becoming more and more like developers and becoming more technical, right? So I think the tools you know are going to demand to change this community structure, but it will take time but I think we’ll start to see that over the next few years my guess.
Shimel: Alon?
Girmonsky: Yeah I think that if you look at the industry, the open-source industry for past second decade you know prior to CNCF there as Apache, right.
Shimel: Yeah.
Girmonsky: Yeah and it was kind of you know in many ways the collection of open-source tools that if you’re in Apache open-source tool you’re probably in good. And now we see it’s not about open sources, it’s about what you do. Right? CNCF started mostly as Kubernetes and you know other tool and now the CD Foundation I think the focus is kind of all you know on the development lifecycle, as opposed to point tools and use cases it’s about the entire flow.
Actually I feel very comfortable. You know if testing finds its right position under CD because in CD you build, you test, right, these are the operations you do day-in-day-out. I would hesitate from having too many because it will kind of defocus many people, “I may do this,” “I may do that,” “Is it different?” Having like you know a family to belong to which is the continuous delivery continues deployment maybe in the future. I think it’s actually you know not a bad direction to take.
Miranda: Yes, absolutely and I think you’ve hit spot-on like CD continues deliveries is a process and I think that process does include testing and although we started off with these tools, which are all pipeline orchestration I’d love to you know CDF to future more open-source testing tools and certainly a lot of the conversations we have around interoperability testing comes up a lot. You know people are like, “Why isn’t there a standardized way to show pipeline results, the test runs” and why don’t we strive for that? That’s you know a problem that lots of end users highlight. So yeah, I’m all for you know having CDF be a place where we can have more of the testing community come together, seed, expand beyond kind of the traditional developer or and just make folks feel included in that community. So yeah, we should definitely talk. I like the direction [crosstalk].
Shimel: So you heard, you heard it here first on DevOps Unbound. Alon, Kevin you have her contact info.
Dunne: Oh yeah.
Shimel: Let’s see some testing projects being part of CDF, right? Let’s bring it together.
Alon, the next line of questioning starts with you, but Kevin and Tracy feel free to jump in. So Alon you’ve been there, done that, you did BlazeMeter as you mentioned. You build it on JMeter and some other open-source stuff, but you didn’t want to duplicate what JMeter did, you were supplementing it and building on top of it.
Your present company, UP9 is new, not a lot of people are as obviously familiar with it as BlazeMeter. But I remember interviewing you when we first started talking about UP9 and you said, “Look this is for now, right, this isn’t what BlazeMeter…you know we took a lot of lessons that we learned and a lot of things that we saw, but this is for today.” What makes it for today, especially from an open-source perspective, right, that was different than when let’s say BlazeMeter you know first started with JMeter.
Girmonsky: Yeah. So BlazeMeter dealt with a problem that was irrelevant for 2010 or 2012, it was again it was kind of moving to the cloud, the Web-scale system, but mostly around service oriented architecture, right, and WebUp monolith of the time. At this time let’s say 2020 and going forward we’re talking about cloud native and containerized system. The industry took an approach to build the system that scales horizontally, right, with microservices. When you have than a few microservices you bring in Kubernetes or Docker Swarm or ECS sometimes, right, to orchestrate.
But this entire new tech stack it is far more complex than it was n the past and still you need to test. You have you know you call it not reliability, you have to have reliability case. You know you develop software you don’t want to develop faults that become failures, right? So and again it’s far more scalable in the past. If we used to do one service, now we have 200 services, dependencies, individual roadmaps, what do you do?
So UP9 takes care of it. UP9 provides a way to first test each and all microservices, like to provide the complete test coverage, but also do it you know use machine learning to offload a lot of the work from the developers.
Now to connect this with open source again I’m a strong believer that it’s not this or that, it has to be both. You have to start with open source because you first need to onboard your users, right? The only way to onboard them for them to have confidence is by giving them open-source tools and not because it’s free or because I want to make a name for myself in the open-source community, because that’s the only way to start you know the operation and then you make their lives, the developers’ lives more efficient.
So this is UP9, UP9 start with open core solution that enables testing microservices in a Kubernetes ECS Docker kind of environment, but making it no matter how many services you may have, how many endpoints, whether it’s thousands of endpoints and hundreds of services you know you get things going pretty quickly, because you know this is how you would do things these days.
Shimel: Understood. Kevin, Tricentis I mean Alon’s example applies directly to Tricentis, right? You have three or four projects that you’ve spoken about, acquisitions that you manage, you know you’re managing these open-source communities and project, but yet there’s, you know there’s commercial or closed-source Tricentis. Where is the integration, where’s the overlap, where’s the leverage from one to the other?
Dunne: Yeah it’s a good question. I mean I think we’re kind of starting to see two different I would say maybe like communities of practice you know coming out of large IT organizations, right? You have definitely what Alon was talking about which is like kind of people building these I would call “systems of engagement,” right, which are customer-facing apps, that you know have all of these challenges around how to deal with containerization. So that’s where we really target a lot of our open-source tools, right, and open-source friend tools so that those people who really developing these web apps, mobile apps, you know web services in-house. But we’re also seeing that you know there’s this other large community as well, which is kind of all the systems of record, which should be maybe your main-frame systems, your package apps, like SAP, Salesforce, you know Workday.
And some of those communities, like some companies are starting to really start to try to do CI/CD and things like that around Salesforce and some of these more cloud-friendly apps, but for the most part a lot of those communities that kind of work differently they have different expectations, they usually are less technical and a lot of times would actually prefer sometimes a closed-source tool to kind of match the closed-source ecosystem that they’re supporting.
So that’s where I think you know when you look at it you kind of wonder, “Well hey how, why does Tricentis have both closed-source and open-source tools?” But I think you’ve got to have the right tool for the job and the right tool for the user, right? And so we see that you know you can-to-go and bring a highly technical tool to you know a nontechnical user that’s trying to test you know a very legacy package application. And vice versa you can’t bring you know a commercial tool a lot of times to a developer that wants to be you know able to write code and you know implement it into their DevOps pipeline and things like that and force them to take that approach. So rather than trying to you know have one or the other group suffer we’re sort of trying to bring together a platform which provides you know different tools for the different approaches.
Shimel: Tracy how does that jive with what you see with some of the pipeline tools and projects and companies in the CI/CD world with CDF?
Miranda: Yep, no I think it’s really interesting and it was great to hear that distinction. So when look at cloud native and particularly Kubernetes and things sitting on top of that, I think the state is today that you still have to be highly technical to stitch a system together and to make it work and to keep up with all the updates. So it’s far, far away from being used very effectively by folks who are less technical or folks who want to be a bit more removed and just get a certain job done, but still take advantage of you know all the benefits of these containerized cloud-native systems.
So I think where the open source has to evolve there is to make that a lot easier. We talk a lot about kind of the developer experience and what that looks likes, because today like it’s really confusing if you had to come in new and figure out you know what tool to start with, how to put it together, take Kubernetes itself it’s got hundreds of distributions, which one do you even start? And then there’s a lot of confusing information as well for how you make decisions.
I think there’s a lot we can do in open source to drive some clarity on you know what are you trying to achieve, how do you get there, and how do you make the tools work together effectively and not leave it as an exercise to the user to figure out what goes with what.
Shimel: Agreed, agreed. Guys were coming … You know I could sit and talk about this with the three of you for the rest of the day, but we’re coming up on 45 minutes, which is kind of our cutoff here. Tracy you’ve heard what Alon and Kevin have said. So first of all guys I’m going to hold it to you. I’d like to see you reach out to Tracy and start and I’ll help, I’ll introduce some of my other friends in the open source and testing world and you have my commitment Tracy on that. I’ll do an e-mail intro. I’d love to see some testing projects become part of CDF. I’d like to see it expand beyond the pipelines to the real tools that folks are using in these things.
But you know Tracy CDF as you mentioned is less than two years old. We just last week we had KubeCon CNCF, Virtual Con, whatever I think it was called, what’s in store for CDF? What should our listeners be looking for?
Miranda: Yes, yeah, no, we are having our first big cdCon which will be virtual. It’s a first stand-alone event we have for bringing all the communities together. Because of COVID you know we’ve had to pivot quickly to going virtual. So you know it’s not going to be the same as in person, but it is going to be a really good way to bring people together and get that interaction.
So cdCon which October 7th and 8th and registrations are open now. That will be yeah just a really good way to come in and figure out what is the state of continuous delivery today and lots of different tracks on specialist topics and cloud native and of course lots and lots of open source.
Shimel: Don’t miss it. So that cdCon, October 7th and 8th, highly, highly recommend it. I’m sorry my Apple watch was ringing. There we had to shut that off quick.
Thanks Tracy. People can get information at that at CDF?
Miranda: Yes, as cd.foundation and find details there.
Shimel: Great. Kevin, news around Tricentis open-source projects and products.
Dunne: Yep, yeah. I think for us you know like Tracy mentioned we’ve got to go virtual this fall as well, but we’re having our annual Accelerate conference this time online. We had one that was focused in kind of May on more of the US area, but we’re having more of a global one to come in October. So we’re going to be showing off a lot of exciting new stuff about a lot of the tools that I mentioned like test projects, SpecFlow, Flood. A lot of new integrations kind of between those tools and the core platforms. So starting to develop that story that I mentioned about sort of one platform to fit various different approaches, whether that’s more of the technical users or the nontechnical users. So that’s definitely one to check out. I’m just checking the date. I think it’s the 21st and 22nd of October is when we’re planning that for it I believe.
Shimel: It’s going to be a crazy October of virtual events. Alon, how about you and UP9?
Girmonsky: Yeah, you know and the UP9 is a new startup. We started almost two years ago, but we are working diligently to complete our software. We already released our first version, but you know the work, still a lot of work ahead of us. So I hope to show you a lot of new cool things down the road. Now we are heads down you know building and building.
Shimel: Excellent. Guys I want to thank all three of you for being on DevOps Unbound with us today. I wish we had more time to dive into this. You know there’s so much. Even the idea of having a CDF versus let’s say five or 10 years ago if I told you we were going to have something called a “CDF” you wouldn’t believe me, right? You would think, “What do we need this for?” And you know so we’ve come so far in DevOps and continuous delivery and Kubernetes and — well Kubernetes itself is open source, but this whole revolution honestly around open source and community it’s what makes, it fuels so much of what we are seeing. You know where would we be in COVID without a lot of what we’ve, open source has enabled us to do you know using technology? So I do think it is, it is an integral, it’s a precursor to having the DevOps world that we live in today is open-source software.
So, thanks for joining us. We have to have you back on. I’m serious about testing tools in CDF though guys. I think that’s some, long, long overdue. Tracy, thank you and best of luck now that you’ve moved fulltime into the CDF. I know you’ll make great things happen there. Kevin, Alon, best of luck to both of your companies, UP9 and Tricentis. This is Alan Shimel for MediaOps, devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Thank you all. Thank you for watching. We’ll see you on the next DevOps Unbound, soon. Bye-bye everyone.
