Mitch Ashley: Hey everybody. Welcome back to KubeCon here in Chi-Town, Chicago, 2023. I am joined by Venkat Ramakrishnan. Welcome. With Pure Storage, right?
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Yes.
Mitch Ashley: Great. And you are in charge of product and engineering?
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Yes. Yeah.
Mitch Ashley: Cool. So you want to talk about something I want to talk about, and that’s platform engineering.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Yeah.
Mitch Ashley: We’ve done some work in this area. And in my mind I think the timing for platform engineering is perfect because the focus on developer productivity and reorienting… 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 company.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Yeah, absolutely. If you look at most of the modern enterprises, one of the most precious resources they have as a developer, they want to make sure the developer community is thriving, is able to move their products and the experiences forward, and are able to get the most out of the infrastructure without being slowed down by the infrastructure.
And I always joke around, if data is the new oil, then developers or the new engines of the economy. So you really want… every enterprise out there is a modern software enterprise, a digital enterprise. And without the developers moving the business forward, they’re going to get left behind. So you have to look at it from that perspective as to why platform engineering is so critical in even the post-pandemic age. It has really accelerated it. 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 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 discipline. The platform engineering discipline has really taken a strong hold and we see a lot of customers run platform engineering orgs that centralizes all of the DevOps capabilities they had distributed before but also brings a lot of control over cost, security, governance, regulatory stuff, and all of that.
So it gives them a one stop shop for everything that the developers need to build and run their applications. And that’s where Kubernetes really shines. If you really go back and look, the vision for Kubernetes and containers is that you enable developers to 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 growth there from the perspective of folks running their applications and building these internal developer platforms and everything. Yeah.
Mitch Ashley: We abstract things, and containers simplify things to make parts of the pipelines more efficient and easier. That complexity goes somewhere else. Maybe it gets replaced by technology, but we still have to engineer the test, development, production environments we’re going to be in. We want those to be the same or as similar as possible. That’s one domain of platform engineering. There’s also developer portals and that kind of thing too.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Yeah, yeah.
Mitch Ashley: Are you focused more on the platform in platform engineering, or do you expand into other parts?
Venkat Ramakrishnan: No, that’s great. Our mission is to make the platform engineers’ life easy, but definitely our consumers are developers. See, the platform engineering team exists to serve their application teams and to help them build, ship, and run faster. But there are essentially two major personas that we build our products for. One, the top persona for us is a platform engineer, and they’re our superheroes, I call them. I just came off a customer meeting and they just told me they have about 6,500 to 8,000 developers on a platform which is building out about 100,000 builds a day, and their team size is only eight people.
Mitch Ashley: Wow. That’s impressive.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: That’s how lopsided the developer-to-platform engineer ratio is. 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 or manage the platform through policies, through rules and rule-based automation and all of that. So our job is to provide that to the platform engineering orgs, the platform engineers so they can have a quality of life.
But at the same time our customer’s customer is also very important to us, and most of the time or almost all the time it’s the developers who are the customers of the platform. They’re application users or the clients of the platform. So we build it so that these application teams have visibility into what happens to the infrastructure. They know how to manage the infrastructure without having to file tickets so they can even make the underlying infrastructure behave the way they want, for example, with respect to performance or how the data is placed, how it is all backed up, how you can do a DR across, or how you even migrate between versions.
So there are a lot of these things we let our 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. We have also let our developers, our platform teams protect the platform 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 your applications running in a Kubernetes namespace, you can back it up. Or as a platform admin you can back up the entire Kubernetes cluster and you can also restore just the namespace if you want.
So we give different fine grain controls for both the users. And not just that. We didn’t stop there. One of the toughest workloads to run, any environment, is a database. And there was a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about, can a database really run in Kubernetes? If you go back to the early days of Kubernetes. Portworx is one of the companies that emphatically said, “You can absolutely run databases on Kubernetes.” And they are actually best suited, especially the modern cloud-native databases, they’re best suited for running in Kubernetes because they need scale, they need agility, they need elasticity. And what better than a Kubernetes infrastructure to give you that?
Mitch Ashley: Distribution. All kinds of things.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Exactly. So we have been shipping Portworx data services, which makes it so easy to automate about to 14 important databases, and we’re continuing to add more and to run these databases anywhere from day zero to day two ops. Install, upgrade patching, all the way to doing DR for databases. You can literally deploy a clustered Postgres in a matter of minutes and you can set a DR policy so if your entire AWS region goes down, you can spin up in another region again in a matter of minutes. In a few minutes RPO.
Mitch Ashley: Let me ask you, and it may not be a fine line, but where does a platform engineer’s job start and end and a developer’s begin? What is that middle point where they intersect with each other? Because platform engineering isn’t just taking a bunch of stuff from developers and doing it for them. Developers still have to have their own way of… I might want to spin up an environment. “Create this for me. I don’t want to open a ticket.” Like the old days. So what does that middle part look like?
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Yeah. I think this goes with the principle that if you build it, you own it. That means a platform engineer is not going to do the developer’s job for them, and neither is the developer is going to do the platform engineer’s job for them. 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 are making sure their environment is up and stable, it’s able to serve up apps, people are able to deploy applications and get them running within the SLA they promised, and they are looking at it, the environment as a whole.
But a developer’s view is they have a namespace or a few namespaces 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 their application. They’re focusing on how they can do code patch updates and security updates to their application. They are making sure their application runs in compliance with the platform’s requirements. It is secure, it has all the latest CVEs patched, it’s able to get the performance it needs. It’s backed up at their level and all of that.
So developer’s scope is very narrow to their set of applications, but a platform engineer… a developer doesn’t go tell the platform engineer, “You know what? You need to add more nodes in your Kubernetes platform.”
Mitch Ashley: They don’t want to have to.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: That’s the platform engineer’s job. Yeah. They don’t want to have to. They shouldn’t be because it’s invisible to them. So what Kubernetes essentially delivers is an invisible infrastructure to the developers. And for the platform engineer, the platform engineer is not going to go to developer to say, “You know what? You should rewrite your code because this is how this platform works-”
Mitch Ashley: Won’t go over well if they do.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Exactly. And we all know the biggest inertia in enterprise, especially in software enterprises, that no developer wants to rewrite their application because it has to work for a different infrastructure. That’s what a lot of infrastructure companies think. Oh, I have a new API. All the application-writers are going to rewrite this applications to use by new API.
Mitch Ashley: Good luck.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: That’s why Posit still survives. We were having a raging debate yesterday in one of our community dinners we had. People were asking, “Why is Posit still around? Why is Block still around?” Because you have billions of apps out there that use these interfaces, and they work. And I guess object is a new interface, and we support it, but hey, I have seen-
Mitch Ashley: And nobody’s going to pay to move it. Why? What’s the value?
Venkat Ramakrishnan: So you’re going to see that the platform engineer cannot dictate the application developer to say, “Go change your app.” That’s whole reason I talk about databases. You could offer a bunch of data services, but a developer is going to come in, especially you’re building a new age app, you’re trying to bring in a new digital experience. They’re going to say, “Look, I’m going to use this high-speed database that can really do this many transactions or a few hundred nodes, or a few hundred or billions of users.” And the data service you offer may not be scalable to deliver that.
That’s why we’ve built these Portworx 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 wrangle with platform and the team and all of that on which data services they need to run for them. Because again, platform engineers are not database experts. And DBAs are not platform experts. So we wanted to marry that together and offer this to database teams, application teams, how you can run these modern databases and how you can simplify it. Again, that is the clear separation of responsibility. I hope that answered your question.
Mitch Ashley: Yeah. No, very good. Tell us a little bit about, what does your product do? What’s your approach to market? How do you help platform engineers do their part of this ecosystem?
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Yeah. Our product, as I mentioned, we have a complete data platform. It has storage, backup, and data services. We continue to add and expand it so we can engage with our customers in pretty much any stage of the journey. For example, if your customer is starting out early, you have an enterprise customer, you’re running a bunch of workloads, but hey, you’re not ready to run data services. You’re not ready to run mission-critical applications, but you are running a ton of apps in your… so we can start you with data protection, or your Kubernetes data protection, like where you can back up and restore your Kubernetes clusters. You’re always compliant with your security policies. You’re 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, get back-up in DR with our Portworx enterprise data management software.”
And the third thing is you can add to the platform and run any database of your choice from our catalog, that you can immediately spin it up and get your application teams to use it. Our primary mission is to serve the platform teams, 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 Portworx installs, they’re all mostly platform teams. But almost always the developers are consuming that platform, the application. So 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.
It’s kind of like if you’re in a company, the IT offers you a service and we as the employees of the company use that IT. For example, it could be email, it could be something like Slack. Same thing. A platform team offers a whole bunch of services to a community of developers who are building apps, and that’s what’s driving the business. Yeah. So we sell to the platform teams, but consumed primarily by the application developers.
Mitch Ashley: Great. And Portworx, is that a SaaS cloud offering, or you on-prem as well?
Venkat Ramakrishnan: We have on-prem as well as SaaS. Honestly we have seen explosive growth in both the deployments.
Mitch Ashley: And you really have to be in both to serve the center parts, right?
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Exactly.
Mitch Ashley: Very good. Can folks kick the tires like with the cloud service? Or how do folks learn about what you can do with Portworx?
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Yeah, they can go… for example, we have an Essentials version of Portworx. They can go to central.Portworx.com and 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. Point it to your Kubernetes cluster, your namespace. You can back it up as much as… we have some upper limits, but it’s pretty liberal. Then we have a trial version.
If they want to play with the enterprise, the entire suite of the platform, then they can download a trial. It’s unlimited from a features standpoint but limited by a certain number of days for you to play with and run. And then feel free to ping us, and we’re happy to always chat. We want to be partnering with our customers’ journey. Our mission is to make the platform engineer’s life easy. To give them the time back. To let them manage complexity at scale, and to be able to deliver these services and keep their SLAs but serve a large developer community. So again, we are on their side. They are our superheroes and we’re there to serve them.
Mitch Ashley: I’m sure they appreciate the help. Tell us the URL again to go check this out. The web address. Where do they go?
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Yeah. It’s ww.Portworx.com, ww.Portworx.com. They can go to central.Portworx.com as well to check us out. There’s a ton of help on docs.Portworx.com as well. So there’s a ton of resources. And we have our YouTube channel, which is Portworx. You can subscribe to it. There’s a ton of learning videos. If you go to Portworx.com, there’s also sandbox labs that they can play with as well so they can deploy immediately and run. So there’s a ton of resources to get up to speed. And you can always fight us on slack.Portworx.com as well, and come and ask questions also.
Mitch Ashley: That’s always great, to get in there, try it, and see what it does. How it works. There’s nothing like hands-on. Well, thank you, Venkat. It’s a very pleasure talking with you. Hope you have a good rest of the show.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Yeah.
Mitch Ashley: And if you’re talking Kubernetes, you’re at the right place.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Absolutely. I’m always happy and excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mitch Ashley: You bet.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: It’s always a pleasure to talk to Techstrong.
Mitch Ashley: Have you come back again. Always.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Absolutely.
Mitch Ashley: Yeah. It’s an evolving area, right?
Venkat Ramakrishnan: It is. It is.
Mitch Ashley: And fast moving, too. So it’s always good to keep up with what’s happening.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: And this show has gotten so much bigger and so much busier, right? It’s an amazing show.
Mitch Ashley: It’s pretty amazing. It really is. Well, thanks again.
Venkat Ramakrishnan: Thank you.
Mitch Ashley: We’ll be back with other great interviews, just like with Venkat, 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.
