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Category: Video Interviews

  • Strengthening Software Trust in Modern DevOps Workflows

    Strengthening Software Trust in Modern DevOps Workflows

    At swampUP 2025 in Napa Valley, Alan Shimel sat down with Tariq Shaukat, CEO of Sonar, and Gal Marder, EVP of Strategy at JFrog, for a discussion on how partnerships across the DevOps and AI ecosystems are reshaping the way software is built, secured and delivered.

    Shaukat emphasized that Sonar’s relationship with JFrog is rooted in shared values around trust, transparency, and code quality. As AI continues to accelerate software creation, both companies see a growing need for solutions that help developers not only move faster but also maintain the highest levels of security and reliability. “It’s never been about how fast developers type,” Shaukat noted. “It’s about ensuring that what’s being built is safe, verifiable, and ready for production.”

    The discussion also touched on the rising influence of AI in DevOps workflows and the responsibility that comes with it. Shaukat and Marder agreed that as teams adopt AI tools to generate, test, and deploy code, governance must evolve to keep pace. That’s where the partnership between Sonar and JFrog becomes especially relevant—bridging code integrity with artifact management, vulnerability detection, and software supply chain security.

    Marder added that this collaboration exemplifies JFrog’s broader strategy to build a unified, secure DevOps ecosystem powered by trusted partnerships. Together, Sonar and JFrog are working to redefine how software quality and trust are measured in an era where AI agents, automation, and human developers all share the same pipeline.

  • Secure Governance and Scalable Management for AI Models

    Secure Governance and Scalable Management for AI Models

    At swampUP 2025, Yuval Fernbach, vice president and CTO of MLOps at JFrog, and Adel El Hallak, senior director of product for NVIDIA AI Enterprise, discuss how JFrog is integrating machine learning operations (MLOps) into its platform strategy. Fernbach, who joined JFrog through its acquisition of Qwak, outlined how JFrog is extending its mission beyond artifact management to embrace AI-driven software supply chain automation. The goal, he noted, is to enable developers to build, deploy, and govern AI models with the same level of trust and traceability that JFrog has long brought to binary and container management.

    They discussed the rapid convergence of MLOps and DevOps, a shift that is redefining how teams manage the entire software and model delivery lifecycle. As organizations accelerate their adoption of generative AI and large language models (LLMs), the challenge is no longer just building or training models—it’s governing and managing them at scale. AI introduces new forms of technical debt, compliance requirements, and operational risk that traditional software management frameworks were never designed to handle. Every model carries dependencies, training data, and inference patterns that must be tracked, versioned, and secured across environments. Without unified governance, enterprises risk exposing sensitive data, violating regulations, or deploying unverified models that behave unpredictably in production.

    The energy at swampUP reflects an industry in transition—where every team, from developers to platform engineers, is rethinking their toolchains for the AI era. As Fernbach and others shared, JFrog’s latest innovations are designed to bridge that gap, ensuring that software—and now models—move from experimentation to production with speed, security, and confidence.

  • How Graph Intelligence Is Transforming Software Supply Chain Visibility

    How Graph Intelligence Is Transforming Software Supply Chain Visibility

    At swampUP 2025 in Napa Valley, longtime JFrog collaborator and Java community veteran Stephen Chin talks about the evolution of software delivery, the fusion of graph intelligence with DevOps, and the growing need for integrated security across the software supply chain.

    Chin, who has worn many hats across his career — from developer advocate to founder and now technologist working at the intersection of graph data and DevOps — has seen firsthand how the field has shifted since the first swampUP event a decade ago. What began as a small, casual gathering of early DevOps adopters has evolved into a global conversation about automation, AI and security at scale.

    In his latest work, Chin is exploring how graph intelligence can be used to map and understand complex DevOps environments — from dependencies and artifacts to vulnerabilities and trust relationships. He described how visualizing these relationships in graph form gives teams a clearer view of their entire software supply chain, helping them detect risk patterns and respond to incidents faster.

    The conversation turned toward what Chin jokingly dubbed “DevGraphIntelOps” — a synthesis of graph data, intelligence, and DevOps principles aimed at securing modern, AI-driven workflows. As organizations embrace agentic automation and complex multi-repository systems, understanding the connections between components has become mission-critical.

    Reflecting on the past ten years of swampUP, Chin noted that while tools and trends have evolved, the core DevOps ethos remains the same: collaboration, transparency, and continuous improvement. The next frontier, he said, will be about context and visibility — knowing not just what’s running in production, but how every component connects across the entire ecosystem.

  • Building Faster, Safer Pipelines Through Practical Automation

    Building Faster, Safer Pipelines Through Practical Automation

    At swampUP 2025, Alan Shimel spoke with Hariharan Ragothaman, a technologist and repeat attendee who has taken his passion for DevOps automation to the next level. While not a JFrog employee, Ragothaman has been a frequent participant in the JFrog community, first attending swampUP 2023 and returning this year to present a framework he developed to optimize infrastructure deployments.

    Ragothaman’s project focuses on improving accessibility, security and speed in the deployment process—three areas that often compete for attention in enterprise DevOps environments. Using JFrog’s platform as a foundation, he built a framework designed to dramatically reduce the time it takes to bring new services into production without compromising on compliance or control. The result, he explained, is a more efficient, secure, and transparent pipeline that helps teams move from code to deployment faster and with greater confidence.

    What makes Ragothaman’s approach particularly compelling is its emphasis on practical, repeatable automation. By embedding quality checks and security policies directly into the framework, teams can accelerate delivery while maintaining strong governance. His work aligns closely with JFrog’s broader vision for end-to-end trust and automation across the software supply chain—a theme echoed throughout this year’s conference.

    Beyond his technical presentation, Ragothaman reflected on the collaborative spirit of swampUP, describing it as a unique space where practitioners can share real-world solutions and learn from one another. For him, the event isn’t just about product announcements—it’s about community, experimentation, and the drive to keep improving how software gets delivered.

    His takeaway: innovation in DevOps doesn’t just come from platforms; it also comes from practitioners who use those platforms to reimagine what’s possible.

  • MLOps at Scale: How Community Is Driving AI Into Production

    MLOps at Scale: How Community Is Driving AI Into Production

    At swampUP 2025, Alan caught up with Demetrios Brinkmann, founder of the MLOps Community, to discuss the growing gap between AI research and real-world production deployments. Brinkmann leads a global network of more than 100,000 developers dedicated to bridging that divide, helping teams move beyond flashy demos and academic models to systems that deliver tangible business value.

    The MLOps Community provides multiple ways for practitioners to engage: a Slack workspace, curated one-on-one matches, in-person meetups, workshops, conferences, virtual events, a newsletter, and a popular podcast. The goal, Brinkmann explained, is to raise the overall level of education and awareness across the field while connecting practitioners who are tackling similar challenges in bringing AI and ML into production.

    One of the recurring themes is the operational complexity of scaling AI workloads. Many organizations can train models, but deploying them reliably, monitoring performance, and ensuring governance at scale requires different skill sets and tools. The community’s role is to share hard-won lessons from practitioners and highlight emerging best practices in areas like observability, CI/CD for ML models, and managing technical debt created by fast-moving experimentation.

    Brinkmann noted that with the rise of generative and agentic AI, the stakes are even higher. Teams are under pressure to move fast, but deploying AI without proper guardrails risks security lapses, compliance failures, and business disruptions. The MLOps Community’s mission is to give practitioners a space to navigate these issues openly and collaboratively, rather than reinventing the wheel in isolation.

    As Brinkmann put it, AI won’t transform industries unless it can be reliably operationalized — and that’s where communities like his make the difference.

  • Securing the Software Supply Chain with Full Visibility and Compliance

    Securing the Software Supply Chain with Full Visibility and Compliance

    At swampUP 2025 in Napa Valley, JFrog’s Yossi Shaul, senior vice president of DevOps, joined Alan to reflect on both his personal journey and JFrog’s evolving role in shaping modern software delivery. Shaul has been with JFrog since its early days, starting with the creation of Artifactory nearly 16 years ago — before “DevOps” was even a recognized term. He recalled leading the Artifactory team, driving its adoption, and later stepping into architectural leadership before returning to oversee JFrog’s entire DevOps organization across product and engineering.

    Shaul highlighted how much has changed since those early years. What began as a simple repository manager has grown into a platform that now touches nearly every aspect of software supply chain management. With the rise of AI, security concerns, and increasingly complex pipelines, the pressure on DevOps teams has only intensified. JFrog’s answer has been to expand beyond artifact management into governance, automation, and AI-driven workflows — all areas Shaul now helps drive.

    One theme that stood out in the discussion was continuity. Shaul’s long tenure gives him a unique perspective on how JFrog has evolved with the industry — from open source beginnings to enterprise adoption, from managing binaries to securing supply chains, and now from human-driven workflows to AI-assisted delivery.

    Shaul also emphasized the importance of listening to customer feedback. swampUP, he noted, is not just about unveiling what’s next but about validating that the technologies JFrog delivers address real-world challenges DevOps teams face daily.

    JFrog’s DNA remains rooted in DevOps, even as it pushes into the AI era. For Shaul, the mission is clear: build platforms that help teams deliver software faster, more securely, and with confidence at scale.

  • Empowering Secure, Agentic Software Delivery

    Empowering Secure, Agentic Software Delivery

    At swampUP 2025 in Napa Valley, JFrog co-founder and CTO Yoav Landman joined Alan to reflect on the company’s latest announcements and the broader direction of software delivery in the AI era. Landman noted that this year’s event may have been JFrog’s most ambitious yet, with a wave of product releases designed to tie together themes of trust, automation, and AI-driven DevOps.

    One highlight is the company’s push to unify governance through AppTrust, which provides end-to-end traceability and compliance across the software supply chain. The aim is to ensure that every artifact — whether human- or AI-generated — can be validated and trusted before moving through the pipeline.

    Another centerpiece is JFrog Fly, billed as an “agentic repository” that enables AI agents to securely interact with APIs and development workflows via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). As AI coding tools become commonplace, Fly is intended to help DevOps teams manage the complexity of agent-driven development while maintaining control and visibility.

    Landman emphasized that these aren’t abstract roadmaps — they’re production-ready features shaped directly by customer feedback. The feedback loop from swampUP, he noted, often influences products within months rather than years, especially as AI accelerates iteration cycles.

    For Landman, the common thread across these initiatives is addressing the realities of modern DevOps: accelerating release velocity while ensuring governance and security don’t lag behind. With software supply chains under constant pressure and AI poised to reshape workflows, he argued that platforms like JFrog must become the system of record for DevOps in order to keep pace.

    The conversation underscored the urgency: in a world where AI is changing how code is created and deployed, trust and automation aren’t optional — they’re foundational.

  • Building End-to-End Trust in the Software Supply Chain

    Building End-to-End Trust in the Software Supply Chain

    At swampUP 2025, JFrog’s Guy Levi, head of the architects team, highlights some of the technologies shaping the company’s next chapter. Levi’s role centers on exploring advanced technologies “beyond the horizon,” but he emphasized that swampUP isn’t about future promises — it’s about showing what’s available today.

    One of the highlights Levi pointed to was AppTrust, JFrog’s initiative to establish end-to-end trust across the software supply chain. By unifying governance, risk, and compliance capabilities into a single framework, AppTrust is designed to give enterprises more confidence that applications are secure and reliable from development through deployment. The goal is to tie disparate security and verification processes into one cohesive approach that simplifies how organizations enforce trust at scale.

    Another major focus was JFrog Fly, which Levi described as a breakthrough in supporting AI-era DevOps. Fly provides an “agentic repository” that integrates with Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) to enable AI agents to securely interact with APIs and development pipelines. With AI-generated code and autonomous agents becoming part of daily workflows, Fly aims to ensure those components can be governed, tracked, and optimized just like traditional software artifacts.

    Together, these initiatives underscore JFrog’s push to position itself as the system of record for modern DevOps and AI-driven development. AppTrust tackles the governance side, while Fly addresses how AI agents and automation will reshape pipelines.

    For Levi, the key message was that the industry can’t afford to wait for “next year” to solve these challenges. AI and security pressures are already here, and JFrog is working to deliver the tools teams need now to navigate them.

  • Sketch Coding and the Rise of MCP in DevOps

    Sketch Coding and the Rise of MCP in DevOps

    At swampUP 2025, JFrog’s Yonatan Arbel reflects on his journey inside the company and how developer DNA continues to shape JFrog’s culture. Arbel, who has spent nearly a decade with JFrog, began as a software engineer before moving into leadership and eventually into a developer relations role. But as he emphasized, “once a developer, always a developer.” He still codes daily, keeping a hands-on perspective that influences how JFrog builds and communicates its platforms.

    That commitment to staying close to the keyboard led Arbel to create JFrog’s first experimental MCP (Model Context Protocol) server as an open source project. Uploaded to GitHub almost as a side experiment, the project quickly gained traction — even attracting pull requests from NVIDIA and references from Cisco. For Arbel, it was validation that MCP represents a real turning point in how enterprises will connect APIs, AI models, and DevOps workflows.

    He described his process as “sketch coding,” akin to vibe coding, where ideas start as rough AI-assisted prompts before maturing into production-ready tools. That approach mirrors how many developers are now blending AI into their workflows: iterating quickly, validating ideas, and only then investing in hardening code for scale.

    Arbel also highlighted the excitement — and occasional sense of magic — that comes from integrating AI into day-to-day development. Whether it’s pulling runtime insights from an IDE or rapidly prototyping new capabilities, the goal remains the same: help developers work smarter while ensuring JFrog’s platforms support security, governance, and scalability across the software supply chain.

    The conversation underscored how JFrog continues to bridge its engineering roots with the demands of modern DevOps, proving that innovation often starts with developers who never stop building.

  • Bringing Trust and Governance to AI-Driven DevOps

    Bringing Trust and Governance to AI-Driven DevOps

    At swampUP 2025 in Napa Valley, Alan Shimel sat down with three industry leaders whose companies sit at the heart of today’s AI-driven DevOps transformation: Rahul Tripathi, general vice president and GM of ITSM at ServiceNow; Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise AI at NVIDIA; and Shlomi Ben Haim, co-founder and CEO of JFrog.

    Tripathi, only months into his role at ServiceNow, stressed the importance of grounding product strategy in lived practitioner experience. Having led DevOps teams himself, he emphasized that ITSM remains the “bread and butter” of ServiceNow, but AI integration is reshaping expectations for productivity and security across IT operations.

    Boitano reflected on NVIDIA’s long journey from pushing CUDA adoption in 2008—when many thought GPU computing was a stretch—to today, where GPUs and AI frameworks have become central to enterprise computing. He noted that partnerships with companies like ServiceNow and JFrog are critical to building out the ecosystem, particularly as organizations look to infuse AI into every layer of their development lifecycle.

    Ben Haim underscored the urgency behind what he called “AI FOMO.” With board-level pressure driving 40% of CIOs to expand AI budgets, enterprises are rapidly embedding AI into software supply chains. For JFrog, that means positioning itself as the “system of record” for DevOps, launching new platforms like JFrog Fly to simplify AI agent adoption while strengthening governance, traceability and security.

    Together, the panel painted a picture of an industry balancing excitement with pragmatism. AI agents may not replace developers anytime soon, but they are already changing workflows, tooling expectations, and the economics of software delivery. As the panelists made clear, success will depend less on hype and more on how well organizations align AI adoption with trust, verification, and long-term resilience.