Analyzing the Recent ‘Kubernetes and Cloud Native Operations’ Report – Techstrong TV

Alan and David discuss the findings of our recent ‘Kubernetes and Cloud Native Operations Report.’

Alan Shimel:               Hey, everyone. Welcome to another segment on Techstrong TV. I’m happy to welcome back for this segment David Booth. Hey, David, welcome to Techstrong TV.

 

David Booth:              Thanks for having me back.

 

Alan Shimel:               David, for people who maybe didn’t catch your first interview, why don’t we briefly give them your corporate background, your title, your role, a little bit about you, and kind of, if you wouldn’t mind, set the foundation for where we pick up today.

 

David Booth:              Happy to do it. My name is David Booth. I’m the VP of Cloud-Native Applications at Canonical. Previous to that, I’ve been in the software development industry with a variety of different companies, generally building tools for developers, first with JetBrains and then with another company in a space called ZeroTurnaround, where I was the CEO. We raised a decent amount of venture capital, grew the company, sold it, and then did it again with another company later before joining Canonical. But, I’ve always been interested in this developer space, and so I’ve spent most of my career here. In our last conversation, we were looking at the Kubernetes and Cloud-Native Operations Report that we ran at Canonical, which was really meant to be a vendor-neutral report. We invited a lot of other experts from the space to come and participate in that.

 

We started talking about a bunch of different things, one of which was just how early we still are in this space, so where Kubernetes is in terms of adoption. I think it was something like 16 percent of people are saying, “I’m using Kubernetes for everything,” and then everybody else is saying, “Frankly, mostly it’s VMs and bare-metal,” and there is VMs, bare-metal, and Kubernetes, and then, “We did a measure of intent to move towards Kubernetes,” which was interesting, and that showed that a lot of people were moving in that direction. In this conversation, as we were getting to the end of that, we started talking about what are some of the challenges that people are facing in the industry, given that it’s still early, what are some of the problems that people have? I would be happy to dig into that today.

 

Alan Shimel:               Absolutely. Look, I don’t want to be Chicken Little, Henny Penny, “The sky is falling,” but people are having real problems, right? Here’s the crux of it in my mind, David. If you have a greenfield, I’m starting a new company tomorrow, or I’m building a brand new app on a brand new infrastructure tomorrow and I decide I want to use Kubernetes because that’s the hot stuff and that’s what people are doing right now, that’s one set of facts and that’s great. I may still have challenges, but it’s a greenfield, right? I’m starting fresh. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way, for the most part.

 

David Booth:              There are a lot of big companies out there who have a lot of history.

 

Alan Shimel:               There are a lot of dirty fields. There are a lot of brown fields out there, and there are a lot of people who, over the last 20 years, invested a lot of money into their VM, into their hypervisor-based infrastructure, bare-metal or what have you, into public cloud versus private, and hybrid and multi and all of these things. When those people go to adopt this cloud-native Kubernetes infrastructure, they’re finding that that is a road not less traveled, it’s very much traveled, but it’s a road that is not necessarily smooth.

 

David Booth:              It’s not paved with gold yet, so ‒

 

Alan Shimel:               That’s for sure.

 

David Booth:              You’re right. You know Gartner has the Hype Cycles.

 

Alan Shimel:               Right.

 

David Booth:              You’ve got this path in the early noughts of virtualization, where everybody got really excited about it, expectations were really high, and then it became difficult and people were saying, “Oh, we don’t have the skills to do all this stuff.” Then, eventually, they kind of figured it out and found this plateau of productivity around the end. After that, you started seeing this with IaaS, PaaS in the exact same _____, and then now with containerization. Very similar paths, very similar problems, and, unsurprisingly, people are solving them in pretty similar ways. In this particular case, we asked people, “What are the biggest challenges when migrating to Kubernetes and containers?” and people were saying, “Number one, lack of skills.” This happens more and more frequently nowadays because the waves of technology are coming faster and faster, so we’re starting to think about how do we prepare for the future.

 

The future-proof thing is something we can touch on later. The second one is company IT culture, so are people able to change with the practices that best serve the business as technology changes? Incompatibility with legacy systems. These are the three kind of top areas where people are having issues, and then we thought, “Okay. Well, if the number one challenge is skills, a skills shortage,” we thought, “Okay, which of these cloud-native skills have you really mastered? As a developer or someone in ops, or the combination of the two, where do you consider yourself a real master?” CI/CD was the number one answer. Out of all the stuff that people could choose, continuous integration/continuous delivery, this is an area where people are comfortable.

 

The next two answers were, “None. I’m not a master of any,” or, “I’m trying to figure this out,” followed by just a long list of all of the different things that you could become an expert in in the cloud-native space. But, none of them were above 23 percent, from databases to networking to server lists, it went down to 4.5 percent of some respondents were saying that they’re considered masters. The companies are, again, looking to solve this in similar ways. Historically, if technology wasn’t the focus of your business, what did they do? They brought in some people internally, they outsourced, or they did a combination of the two, really. We’re seeing this happening again and again, so now people are looking to ‒ well, if you think about it, each of these layers, from virtualization to infrastructure as a service to containerization is an abstraction of the previous layers.

 

There is an option here where we use technology to continue to abstract these layers so that for those few ‒ we eventually get to software running software, software running applications. We get to a place where fewer masters of spaces are able to code software that then automates those spaces for the rest of us, and that, plus looking to managed services or to have other teams handle this for us, those are the answers that people are looking for today in similar ways as they have in the past.

 

Alan Shimel:               You know what, David? COVID, not COVID, a lot of things stay the same, and we see it here at MediaOps. Why do people come to DevOps.com or Security Boulevard or Container Journal, or any of our other properties? Because they want to hear from people who have similar fact patterns to them. They want to hear from people, or companies, or individuals who are familiar with the challenges they’re facing and the plans they’re making, and have either best practices, emerging practices, or good failure stories, because you learn more from failure sometimes than success, that they can learn from, that they can kind of maybe not have to pay an idiot tax on. I think that’s the biggest reason. That’s what this is all about, how do we collectively raise the bar on what’s the best way to do these things, because it’s sort of like a parallel evolution, where we’re all looking to get to that same nirvana, or we think it’s nirvana.

 

Anyway, whether it’s nirvana is probably another story, but we’re all looking to get to this Promised Land, and what’s the best way to get there. Here’s a question, and I bet our folks in the audience get this, too, would like to hear this, too. You guys at Canonical do this study, you get a ton of input from people, and beyond how many people said A, how many people said B, how many people said C, when it comes to the interpretation, so that we can then do the analysis and give people real advice, give us a little bit of insight, David, if you can, into kind of what goes into that; taking this raw data and saying, “All right, here are the nuggets we need to tell people.”

 

David Booth:              Yeah, so we thought that our voice, although maybe an interesting one, well, there are more voices out there that are probably a little more interesting than us, so we reached out to other people. On that previous topic, we were talking with guys like Kelsey Hightower, and James Strachan over at CloudBees. We were talking with Michael Hausenblas over at AWS, who is on their observability stack. I forget which of them said it specifically, but they were basically suggesting what you just said, where sometimes you get burned but the whole move here is there is a higher level of productivity by implementing newer technologies, and you often just have to get started.

 

As an individual, you get started so that you can level up your skills. As a company or as an enterprise, you get started so that you can attain those advantages that maybe your competitors haven’t gotten yet, which, at the end of the day, reduces your costs and increases your ability to serve your customers. Let’s see. I actually have some of their quotes over here, if you don’t mind. I can read ‒

 

Alan Shimel:               No, go ahead. If it’s okay with them and you, we’re happy to have them.

 

David Booth:              Sure.

 

Alan Shimel:               Those are all people we know.

 

David Booth:              Michael, for example, was saying that everyone is still struggling with regards to in-house skills and Kubernetes. It’s really a matter of buy versus build, though. There are companies keen to invest in building up their skill set and engineering power so that they can run the entire stack, and even hire evangelists that preach and lead with good practices. Other businesses say, “We’re not in the business of Kubernetes. We just want the benefits.” Coming out of Amazon, that makes a lot of sense. Coming out of managed services company, that also makes a lot of sense. James suggested that the lack-of-skills answer was particularly interesting for him, that he thought people underestimated how big of a technology change has happened over the last couple of years: Kubernetes, cloud, CI/CD, DevOps, GitOps, ChatOps. He said so much has changed, and it’s really hard for a lot of people to keep doing their job and also learning this new stuff.

 

While lack of skills and training, manpower is a huge issue right now, and the only way to really learn is by doing, so pick a path and try it. But, it’s right in line with exactly what you just said, often it’s just about getting started. We did ask a few humorous questions, as well, and one of those was around, “What can’t you do with Kubernetes today?” The number one answer was, “Make coffee.” We decided that at the next KubeCon, we are going to set up a coffee machine that runs off of any of the clouds of your choice, all using Juju or an underlying technology that helps to manage workloads across different clouds; you’ll be able to pick out that at your booth, if you happen to be there. At the Canonical booth, possibly at other booths, we’ll see if we’re able to actually pull that through. A couple people said that there is nothing that they can’t do with Kubernetes, to which ‒ do you know Alexis Richardson over at Weaveworks?

 

Alan Shimel:               I sure do.

 

David Booth:              He suggested that that’s called Kubris.

 

Alan Shimel:               Kubris. That’s a good one. I like that one.

 

David Booth:              I thought that was pretty good.

 

Alan Shimel:               Kubris. Okay. Look, a long, long time ago, I helped start what was called an ASP, application service provider. This was before cloud, before VMware. We were hosting Lotus Notes for people in PeopleSoft and Oracle apps and Lawson, OnyX and some other dinosaurs, but we did a lot of study of the market when it comes to outsourcing, buy versus build, grow versus buy. What we discovered is if something is core and critical to your company, you do not outsource that. You grow that. You may buy it originally, but then grow it. You bring that in-house. If it’s either core or critical but not both, it’s a candidate for just farming it out. If it’s not core and critical, you certainly don’t do it in-house. I think to your analogy about whether or not you have that internal Kubernetes skill set internally, I think that’s the litmus test, “Is it core and critical?” If it is, you do it.

 

I think the other thing, though, as James said, David, there has been so much, even just since COVID, we’ve seen so many things rise that we haven’t really ‒ it just feels like everything we’ve done in the last year and a half has been done kind of like our vaccines, on an emergency approval process and not that long-term, regular stamp of, “This is how we do it.” A lot of what we’ve done, you’ll talk to people and they say, “Yeah. Well, it’s working right now. We’ll have to normalize it or equalize it, or work with it when we’re back on a normal footing,” but we are on a normal footing now. This is the new normal, and Kubernetes is it right now. The best practices, or the emerging practices that we’re seeing are the best we’ve got right now, and I think that’s what people have to get used to.

 

David Booth:              We’re seeing a lot of people who have kind of gone through, I forget what the bottom of that curve is in the ‒

 

Alan Shimel:               The trowel of disillusionment.

 

David Booth:              Disillusionment. I was going to call it the trough of despair, but something along those lines, and people have kind of gone through that, and COVID was maybe a factor in that. Coming back from that, people are starting to look for that next level of productivity, and that old debate that surfaces again and again is coming back, “Do I buy or do I rent? Do we move everything to a public cloud, or is an on-prem solution something that actually makes more sense? How does the math look?” This is another thing that’s coming back, likely because people are starting to get more comfortable. They’re not super comfortable yet, but people are starting to think about the numbers, and they’ve got some of the skills coming into place and they’re anticipating that a year out from now, they’ll be ready to make that move, so they’re starting to talk about that now, as well.

 

Alan Shimel:               Absolutely. You know, I have an interview later today with Tim Hockin. Tim is one of the original Kube team members ‒

 

David Booth:              He took part in this interview, as well.

 

Alan Shimel:               Oh, did he? Okay. We’re actually going to talk about this sort of Kube next, if you will, and what some of these newer things mean to it. It’s an interesting, fascinating topic. David, to reinforce for people who want to get more information on the survey from Canonical, where can they go?

 

David Booth:              Sure. The website is juju.is, so juju dot I-S, and then it’s in the Resources section. You can see the Cloud-Native Operations Report right in there.

 

Alan Shimel:               Excellent. Hey, man, come back. Keep us posted on what’s going on with all of this at Canonical. It’s a pleasure having you on, as always, David. Thank you.

 

David Booth:              Thanks for inviting me again.

 

Alan Shimel:               All right. David Booth from Canonical here on TechStrong TV. Again, part two of a conversation we had about a great survey they did on Kubernetes and cloud-native, and adoption and where the pain is. Check it out on juju.is. That’s J-U-J-U dot I-S, right?

 

David Booth:              That’s right.

 

Alan Shimel:               All right. This is Alan Shimel. We’re going to take a break here on TechStrong TV. We’ll be right back with another guest.

 

[End of Audio]

 

Alan Shimel

As Editor-in-chief of DevOps.com and Container Journal, Alan Shimel is attuned to the world of technology. Alan has founded and helped several technology ventures, including StillSecure, where he guided the company in bringing innovative and effective networking and security solutions to the marketplace. Shimel is an often-cited personality in the security and technology community and is a sought-after speaker at industry and government conferences and events. In addition to his writing on DevOps.com and Network World, his commentary about the state of technology is followed closely by many industry insiders via his blog and podcast, "Ashimmy, After All These Years" (www.ashimmy.com). Alan has helped build several successful technology companies by combining a strong business background with a deep knowledge of technology. His legal background, long experience in the field, and New York street smarts combine to form a unique personality.

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