Reality check - Containers in the Enterprise - CTO Advisor 081

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Hey, welcome to episode 81 of the CTO Advisor podcast. com. We've replayed a couple of those, at least counting today, a couple of those videos as podcast. Today's video is with Normada, who is a client on the custom content side of the CTO Advisor. We're doing an ebook that's sponsored by Normada on cloud native containers, Kubernetes, orchestration. I think there's a lot of marketing fluff and a lot of kind of static that's really hard to get through on what's reality versus what's marketing in the container space.

And I wanted to have a conversation, a real world conversation with both Jim and Ratish to talk through what have they seen in their customers? What are they seeing at Valley startup type events? So what's kind of fluff versus reality? I hope you enjoyed the conversation. You can see more of these conversations over on the CTO Dose, which we've also launched a podcast. So three to six minute videos slash audio versions of podcasts can be found over on the CTO Dose.

Hopefully you enjoyed the conversation. Hey, how's it going? com. Doing our first CTO Daily Dose on-premises at Normada. And you know, pretty exciting conversation. I have Ratish Patel and Jim Bavadia, co-founders of Normada. And we're going to have a great conversation. Hopefully we can get it within the timeline because it's a pretty powerful topic, containers in an enterprise. So guys, I had a conversation or I looked at a conversation yesterday with Kelsey Hightower from Google, one of the experts in the Kubernetes kind of space.

And he was saying, you know what? We need to have containers that we can run inside of cloud serverless constructs. And I'm thinking, oh my goodness, I can't even keep up with the term serverless. What's the reality? Are customers actually asking for the ability to do all these advanced things? You guys have been selling your product for a while. As you're talking to customers, what's the conversation like really on the ground? Right. Yes, it depends on where the enterprise is within their journey, right?

So we do see, of course, a lot of customers are still trying to take traditional three-tier applications and start with the initial containerization of that itself. So that's the first step. And once they get familiar with containers as they go towards embracing this new world, then they're also interested eventually in getting to serverless functions as a service and other cloud-native constructs. So in a lot of cases, even microservices is more aspirational. You're right. It's a goal that they want to get towards, but they want to start with what they have today.

So with that, what do they have today? Are we talking about, Ritesh, right before we started recording, we talked about Netflix at a meetup called these applications that were built kind of circa 2013, 2014 distributed monoliths. Like what's the real mix? Is it a bunch of distributed monoliths that's in the market? Is it these legacy three-tier apps? Or are there more cloud-native apps that people are looking to deploy containers in an enterprise? I think we see mostly a lot of them are the traditional three-tier applications, right?

And these are probably applications that were built maybe eight, 10 years ago. Since then, maybe in the last few years, some of the newer applications are a little bit more cloud-native, but then they still don't adopt all the best practices of microservices and applications. That's what we call, we've heard the term distributed monolith. A lot of that term is distributed monolith. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and the true microservices, I mean, that's still, for traditional enterprises, it's still further out. You're right.

Trying to kind of take these existing applications, figure out how to run them at scale in containers, and then think about transforming them, if required, into microservices. So this is a move and then migrate afterwards. Jim, what's the business value of this? I'm struggling. I'm a traditional VMware guy. Right. These three-tier applications run well in VMware, vSphere, even Hyper-V, whatever. Why am I bothering to even containerize these legacy applications to begin with? Right. Yeah, so as part of the term, if you kind of deconstruct cloud-native itself, the simple way to think about it is, is my application optimized to run on a cloud infrastructure?

So containers provide a standard way of packaging applications, of course, but also, more importantly, give you a common operations and management interface. So from the operations perspective, there's a lot of efficiencies to be gained by containerizing any application, right, traditional or distributed or microservices stuff. Now, the value of moving towards microservices is more to do with the organizational aspects and even some of the cultural aspects as teams grow, as things need to scale. You know, developers want to focus on individual components of the application.

So having that kind of mental model of a huge monolith application is daunting. So microservices help sort of break that down into smaller composable pieces where different teams can apply their, you know, best practices, their knowledge to those individual services. So I get a distributed layer, and I'm still, I guess I'm still pushing back a little bit. I could do that in theory in a virtual machine. I could package the application. If I'm in a vSphere environment, I could package application into a VM.

I can give a developer, a development team, their own virtual machine, and they could, you know, kind of have at it. They can clone it, flip it, package it the other way. I guess where it breaks down a little bit is when I bring in cloud into the situation. Right, and the key point, you know, the key challenge there is what you just said about giving the developer a VM. Right. Because once you do that, there's no turning back. Yeah, I'm not getting it back.

Yeah, I'm not getting that resource back. You know, I can try and put a time limit on a VM, but once I get a developer a VM, I'm never getting that resource back. Yeah, so containers becomes that interface to decouple applications cleanly from your infrastructure. Okay. So now if you do want to take that VM, or maybe, you know, deploy that container somewhere else, it's possible. You're no longer having to give sort of VM or infrastructure access, but developers manage applications, IT manages the infrastructure.

So one of the big challenges that I've seen talked about in the industry when it comes to VMs versus containers is that I've built a whole ecosystem of tooling around virtual machines. I can back them up. I can, I have monitoring software. I have all these tools that I've built around my day two operations. How do I do that in a containerized environment? Kind of where's the maturity of orchestration, management, data protection, et cetera? Where's the reality of that, of the whole management day two operations of containers?

So the exciting trend over there is around CNCF and Kubernetes, right? CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the ecosystem they're building around Kubernetes and related technologies. So what, and I think we've all realized from, you know, how sort of the virtualized world grew, that this has to be bigger than a single vendor or a single company, right? So that's where, you know, we're super excited to see that, you know, CNCF pick up that charter and build the ecosystem around Kubernetes. So in terms of the maturity, it's still evolving, you know, honestly.

And that's where, though, we see every day there's new innovation in this space. But there are, you know, the tools are at this point about on par with what you could do with VMs and will soon be better. So there's been a lot of noise around Kubernetes. Let's talk about that, the value that it's bringing to orchestration and management of containers in an enterprise. When I look at the material for learning Kubernetes, I look at Kelsey Hightower's Kubernetes to Hardware. And that doesn't really appeal to me.

Like when I read that from an architect, Kubernetes to Hardware, I already thought it was hard enough. You mean Kubernetes to Hardware. But then I look at something like a Docker swarm that promises to make Kubernetes easy. I look at Red Hat OpenShift. There's a lot of solutions out. Where does Normata play in that? And then in the CNCF, you know, I'm used to closed source software. So when I think of VMware vSphere, I think of Hyper-V. Or even when I think about Amazon Web Services, there's kind of a centralized, this is an opinionated view of how I manage VMs.

This is an opinionated view of how I manage cloud services or offer up cloud services. Help me out in the ecosystem of things. CNCF has the core mission and they have the project. Where does players like Normata, Red Hat, where do you guys fit into all of this? So I'll start. I'll take that one. So Kubernetes provides, or it's actually making the orchestration layer kind of boring, if you will. Standardizing the orchestration. Right. Because again, containers need to be scheduled, deployed on servers.

Kubernetes gives you a standard way of doing this at scale, right? Because coming from Google, has a lot of, brings in some of those best practices. Now, what's happening with CNCF and with, and as Kubernetes is becoming kind of more and more popular, is an ecosystem is emerging around it, right? Now, because Kubernetes has standardized APIs, if you will, for workload management, right? For networking, for storing. So each of these components are kind of now being provided by different vendors.

So where Normata comes in is around the operations and management of the Kubernetes cluster. And what we see is more and more teams, more and more enterprises are setting up multiple Kubernetes clusters, whether it's for their DevOps pipeline, or whether they want to have clusters on different clouds. So we simplify that. We don't have our own Kubernetes distribution. We take the upstream distribution, but we provide policies and governance, as well as the deployment of the cluster itself. So that's one aspect.

And then the other aspect is simplifying the application management on top of Kubernetes. So Kubernetes has built-in constructs, and rich manifests kind of for describing your application. For describing your application, we help translate that. We help users model those applications and define pipeline to kind of deploy these in seamlessly in different models. So guys, if people are more interested in Normata, how do they find out more? Yes, so certainly our website is the first stop for information, and we're also very accessible.

So we do meetups locally quite a lot. On the internet, of course, or just if they want to contact us through email. I'm Jim at Normata, and you're Sritesh at Normata, so we're always here for you. Super secret email. Super secret email. Yeah, and one thing about Normata, so our product is actually delivered as a service. So it's really, if somebody wants to just try out Normata, they don't even have to talk to us. io, sign up, no credit card required, try out the service, test drive it, and even if they run into issues, they can reach out to us from within the app, and we can help them.

All right. So I'm actually writing a ebook about this whole Kubernetes space, and it's sponsored by Normata, so I appreciate you guys for sponsoring the CTO Advisor ebook. So look out for that ebook. We'll be tackling a lot of these questions and expanding about. At the end of the day, infrastructure teams just want to build infrastructures that are consumed by the developers' application teams. Whether that's VMware-based, Kubernetes-based, Docker-based, the whole point is to build something that developers will consume. How is that done, and how can we best support day-two operations?

We'll find out more in the ebook. So watch out for that ebook. com, subscribe to the blog, subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the CTO Dose, subscribe. We'll talk to you next CTO Dose on-site.