Is Kubernetes Right for You?
Transcript
all right you're listening to and watching another great cto dose cto advisor crossover episode i have good friend with me from on the other side of the pond alex ellis we've had them on the program before but alex uh you shared some great great news with me what is that great news yeah there was an announcement from um vmworld from techtarget and there's uh basically every year a group of judges get together and they set up a whole bunch of awards and announcements highlights of the
show winners in different categories and it turned out that and you have to keep me honest here open faz limited got um the the best startup or featured startup and was a winner in that category now let's talk about the significance of this one open fast is a kubernetes related project you guys work more than just kubernetes uh which is really interesting is is swarm still supported in open fast this is something that i've actually been talking about recently quite a bit in my insider's emails
in openfastslack on twitter and really um i think that i think that swarm slowly died two years ago and we all really need to be thinking about other options in particular openvas users i would just expect you to be using kubernetes and if we hear this common argument is too complicated it's too hard actually we've made it really easy using k3s and using tooling like arcade so that getting openvas and kubernetes are probably even easier than it was on swarm and once you have that um
if you had a swarm cluster in the olden days yes you could sort of join it and create it and what have you manage it relatively easily but today we actually have managed kubernetes services so those old opinions that were formed by people back then when you still had to set up your own kubernetes cluster set up all the certificates rotate them yourself and manage all of the notes today with something like amazon eks that has all gone away and you can get a very easy
experience so we'll get into kind of the integration of if you want to consume uh a functions as a service project like open faz uh in a managed kubernetes service etc but let's go back to this best of vmworld thing because we we we've heard of vmware tanzu and vmware's entry into kubernetes et cetera help me understand i am a judge for best of vmworld so you know i kind of like ah yeah i kind of was surprised no i'm not surprised i was one of
the people that voted for open fast to win the at large uh startup or open fast ltd or support company to win the at large uh prize for best of uh best for best startup but help us understand what is the relationship between open faz and vmware because that it kind of i think i have to do mental gymnastics to kind of make the connection yeah i mean it's yeah it's a classic breakup story um vmware fell in love with openfast they were building a product
on it they uh they reached out and sort of wooed me and tried and offered to hire me to continue working on it at the company with a team i went ahead and did that and after 13 months they they were like well we we think times are changing we want to go in a different direction and they sort of parted ways with me there and then i've been out effectively on my own keeping the project running thinking of creative ways to build a business that
can pay into this project because it's a full-time job to maintain it and i used to have a team of four people working with me now i'm back on my own with the community and github stars don't pay the bills end users very rarely contribute code or or any money of any kind um but what i thought was quite quite sweet was that when i was at vmware i created an add-on for openvas the vcenter connector what that meant was when an event happened in vcenter
in your software-defined data center it could fire off a function and we could remediate we could audit we could log we could do whatever you wanted in powershell um in python it doesn't matter the language so an example would be and the company worked at before vmware adp we had this classic problem people creating vms on self-service nobody knew if they're being used or who they belong to nightmare you run out of your capacity and the answer is um you send an email out to everyone
please can you delete your vms a couple of people do but the problem's no better you don't have to buy another server and put it into your data center and it gets worse and worse so with the connector and open files you can solve that problem very quickly by just tagging the vm when it comes up and you know exactly who created it so an event is created and open fast triggers off of that open fast function triggers off that event yeah so that was pretty
popular with pre-sales you know and with this office of the cto whilst i was there and then after moving on they kept up their interest they kept developing their ideas around it and re-branded the work that i've put together is something called viva or vmware event broker appliance and as some of us that are more hands-on will know an appliance is effectively a pre-packaged vm with some software installed on it right and the software is open fast the vcenter connector and i think recently they've also
bundled in a reverse proxy as well so the upstream project plopped on a appliance pushed in the registry somewhere you can then download that and install it on your vsphere and start writing your own functions and they've provided the catalog and you know in the beginning they were quite active on slack lots of requests um lots of lots of asks can you add this feature can you do this code can you review this can you do the other um and that kind of dropped off and
really heard from them for about a year but they've continued what they were doing and it looks like it's it's creating some value for them so hopefully they'll come back and offer some support for the open fast community but i wanted to shift the conversation to a blog post you wrote a month or so ago uh about this decision matrix on whether or not kubernetes is right for you i'm just coming off of last night writing a blog post on do i still hate kubernetes and
much of my frustration around kubernetes i think the industry has um the community has addre addressed some of that but first overview you're in the kubernetes community i mean you have a kubecon you have a raspberry pi presentation coming up uh you're running a open source a couple of open source projects that are tightly aligned to kubernetes shouldn't the answer to that question just be yes i think uh you know i think that the temptation is for it always to be yes and one of the
things that i find um in the open slack community and wherever i go really is often users will look at technology particularly if it's open source because the documentation is out there the buying process has completely changed that there's there's nothing to pay for um you're only paying your own time um to set something up they come in they've had a look around and then they think okay well can i shoehorn in this problem and get it fixed with this project and they say right yeah
i think i can accept x and they come and ask you a deeply specific extremely narrow technical question with no context and no insights into what they're trying to do and techy people will just answer them and i've seen it and it will be 90 replies in the thread and i come in in the morning and i'm like what problem are you trying to solve they'll say and so were you looking at the wrong solution whilst you see three four of your sort of uh dedicated
friendly community members have been thrashing around this idea trying to solve it for them they've not known what the problem was and i see the same with adoption of kubernetes people are adopting kubernetes but we don't know what the question is and what this blog post does is it says start by defining not only what is the problem but what constraints do you have an example we have here is yes a problem that could be solved by kubernetes but the constraints in place were um it's
actually a personal friend of mine an ex-colleague he didn't have any devops capability in the company at all and he wasn't interested in paying for that he was vce backed and he needed to be paying people to develop features he wanted to defer as much as he could this idea of devops and paying someone for that right maximize the returns now i thought that was a little bit sort of um short-sighted to begin with and i then i saw there was a couple of quick wins
so he had one vm he could have lost a lot of money he could have lost the respect of his vcs if that one vmware died and the 200 000 customers couldn't get service right it could be disastrous for the company right just mirror it job done i mean not auto scaling not not a bunch you know not not creating a a resilient backplane etc just mirrored the vm huh and what about snapshots you know he was using digital ocean have it built in their platform
you can set it up on a cron so it runs every hour every night there's a snapshot of the database and maybe the deployment platform very cheap very easy um and whilst hiring a kubernetes consultant could have cost him tens of thousands of dollars or they can pay a company like psi up or weave works i think they have plans like a thousand dollars a month per cluster you could have also just used a platform he had mirrored the vm put a load balancer in front
of it taking snapshots of the database and that's what devops is about it's not about shoehorning in a sexy technology or even if you really want to use it or you've got someone inside the company that's desperate to try out it's not giving into that too early sometimes it's appropriate maybe most of the time but there's always other options even managed containers right let's say lambda wouldn't fit what he needed well you know you can use something like google cloud run and you can run an
ad hoc container there um it scales for you there's no billing idle there's lots of different options and it's not always self-managed kubernetes so i love that example of where kubernetes isn't necessarily the right fit or even the solution to the problem but you know i kind of feign this you know kubernetes is too big it's too complicated etc but you've personally done a lot of work to make open fast consumable on top of kubernetes for people who just need they just want functions and uh
kubernetes i mean open fast by itself isn't providing a run time so there needs to be a run time there needs to be a underlay for open fast to call yeah and you've kind of helped to package this thing in a way that is consumable can you an example of where uh you make you've helped make open fast production ready for a smaller team so there's a lot of requests that come through openvis slack and github and you can always tell when it's being used commercially
because they're very secretive about it and they come in and they say we are doing x here's our super narrow technical request no context no introduction can you fix it right and then you have this long arduous process of winding it back and trying to figure out who is we you know are you working at vmware are you working at netapp are you working at a large bank what problem are you trying to solve are you already using open fast and this is very very difficult
unless you have a consulting relationship or they're paying for something like an open fast premium subscription where you've got a relationship with them a you have no obligation to give them enterprise grade support and b you've nobody in the community is under any obligation to look at their request or even speak to them the code is free professional services are not and they're not included whilst we do everything we can to help people and generally welcome commercial users i do think that having that relationship means
that we can then help the company get success the worst thing and the most frustrating thing is we're doing a proof of concept of open voucher or within lats we're not going to pay for any consulting or any advice or any support but we're going to raise all these feature requests we're going to bug you all the time on slack and eventually when we're running in production we might come back and and chuck you some sort of beer money no you will not have a successful
poc that way it's good probably going to cost you a lot of time and energy and you might come to the wrong conclusion for a small amount of money you can actually partner with the people that created the project who have an ability to influence the road map and to respond to whatever questions you have in an expert way right and get you further along now there was one company that saw the value of this and partnered with us over the course of last year and
we hardened the open first control plane for them introduced the ability to run with g-visor which is google's isolation technology for containers they were wanting to run multi-tenant code they didn't want people to escape from the container but they didn't have a way in open fast to set that value so that's one of the things that we're able to do is prioritize that on the roadmap and also work through some other things with them where they had come up with a really convoluted system i was
people say have you thought about x and at the end of the day they said yeah we've saved a lot of money saves a lot of time by actually um putting some money and funding up front for this so i'm hearing two things one you should really know the problem that you're solving uh you should always both me and you are more than happy to offer advice in our overall disciplines especially uh engaging customers and helping them along their journeys a poc is not free uh
i wrote a blog post uh just last week talking about what the amount it costed us internally the cto advisor something around sixty five thousand dollars in labor and another twenty five thousand dollars in services and expenses to run a comparison of the various vmware cloud solutions uh this stuff costs money uh and then the other thing that i'm hearing is that the direct input into the project itself what were some of the learnings that you took back from that engagement and you've applied to the
project i mean in my mind as a i.t infrastructure person i get stuck in my head snapshots of the state of a project and i remember kubernetes from last year when i wrote the blog post why i hate kubernetes so much that it was just cumbersome etc but if i wanted to layer something like open i really want open fast but i look at the kubernetes project and just think man kubernetes is just way too heavy for me to get that functionality how is that how
is that thinking a little bit um outdated well you know it isn't necessarily adrian carrycroft is a vp of probably going to get this wrong i think it's something like open source yeah engineering or architecture at aws and he was on the software circus with mark coleman at pacquiao and they were talking about this and he said i really worry what you get when you come in and you layer down kubernetes istio k native and then your application code you have so many layers of indirection
and control plane and if you just want to run a couple of functions the cost per invocation is out of this world in comparison something like lambda it is ridiculously expensive and not only that what you've provisioned how many requests per second can it actually process and ask these very important questions and i thought you know it's quite refreshing yes it's incentivized to say that and to push you towards lambda but at the same time he's actually right there's a lot of control plane in there
and recently i've spent time over the last year creating the fasd project initially as an experiment could we just take contain d and container networking the two lowest level components in kubernetes get rid of everything else and just run open files on that and the answer is yes you can and you can then package it as an appliance just like vmware did but whilst vmware's has kubernetes their own operating system container networking and then contour and all these other things plus a connector when it comes
to fast d you just have linux system d service and one binary that's it and it's very efficient uh we've seen like a real sort of interest from hobbyists through to commercial users and there's a company called sprucy in china using in production and so kubecon serverless summit had a chance to give a 10-minute lightning talk on it um and just go over those questions that adrian had and how fast d can sort of answer that that's really cool i've seen that in the uh insider's
update and that's really really cool speaking of the insider's update let's wrap up the conversation with what if people want to support openfast i know last year the cto advisor we supported open fast by sponsoring the website that was a pretty heavy commit from our part but what are the ranges how do people get involved you talked about the this is your full-time gig how do people support you is it like a patreon like how do we support open open source yeah i mean i've i
originally thought that that was what would happen uh when i launched a company sort of 18 24 months ago and i realized that that that isn't the direction i want to go in i rather offer a product that people can buy not interested in donations if a company sponsors openfast homepage they're getting impressions that is a product if a company wants to use openfast in production and have somebody to speak to when things go wrong or be able to have a road map um review every
three to six months they can buy an open fast premium subscription these are products that you can pay for through the company with an invoice and then if you're an individual that um let's say really respects what i'm doing or or values open files users at home or any of the other tools we make in the community you can get this insider subscription which gives you again a product it's not donation you get a weekly newsletter um on cloud native all of these blog posts some
exclusive content as well and that's just a great way to keep connected and nowhere is anybody donating money there's always an exchange of value and it's always a net positive and so if it's not of interest to you don't do it but i think you should try it particularly if you have any interest in infrastructure and cloud and what's the home page for lt for open files ltd openfast.com yeah that's right all right well alex i appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule to
come and talk to us about uh first congratulating you on the vmware best vmware award giving us some really great insight into how that uh fling was created inside of vmware and how it's matured and just how you know if the kubernetes road or journey is right for you how to determine that it's very very helpful inside that's it for this episode of the cto visor cto dose crossover if you want to see more of this stuff head over to the homepage the ctoadvisor.com in the
next couple of weeks so we'll be launching a new home page we're pretty excited about that until then you can talk to me online at ctoadvisor on the twitter or on linkedin talk to you next cto advisor podcast
