May 17, 2023 • 31 mins
Join Eveline Oehrlich and Kumar Chivukula, co-founder and CTO of Opsera, to discuss the CTO role, the first no-code DevOps orchestration platform and no-code versus low-code.
Kumar is an experienced IT and Operations leader, with experience accelerating digital transformation and business growth with a customer-first mindset at companies like Adobe and Symantec.
Today, he is the co-founder and CTO of Opsera, driving the mission to help companies deliver software fast, safe, and secure via disruptive DevOps solutions.
Enjoy the Humans of DevOps Podcast? We’re incredibly grateful to be voted one of the Best 25 DevOps Podcasts by Feedspot.
Want access to more DevOps-focused content and learning? Join SKILup IT Learning to gain access to a toolbox of hyper-relevant skills in a convenient, online learning platform focused entirely on DevOps and IT with courses tailored to sharpen your IT and essential human skills.
Kumar is an experienced IT and Operations leader, with experience accelerating digital transformation and business growth with a customer-first mindset at companies like Adobe and Symantec.
Today, he is the co-founder and CTO of Opsera, driving the mission to help companies deliver software fast, safe, and secure via disruptive DevOps solutions.
Enjoy the Humans of DevOps Podcast? We’re incredibly grateful to be voted one of the Best 25 DevOps Podcasts by Feedspot.
Want access to more DevOps-focused content and learning? Join SKILup IT Learning to gain access to a toolbox of hyper-relevant skills in a convenient, online learning platform focused entirely on DevOps and IT with courses tailored to sharpen your IT and essential human skills.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Narrator (00:02):
You're listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a
podcast focused on advancing thehumans of DevOps through skills,
knowledge, ideas, and learning,or the skil framework.
Kumar Chivukula (00:17):
expectations from the prospects and customers
are huge, because they expecteverything to them yesterday.
It's very hard and even thoughyou want to do it, but sometimes
you need to understand balancebetween what is possible versus
what is not possible. Andsometimes you have to say no.
Eveline Oehrlich (00:34):
Welcome to our humans of DevOps podcast titled
with no code into the future.Today, we have with us a very
esteemed thought leader in thetopic, continuous orchestration.
Our special guest is KumarChiku. Tula. I hope I said your
name correctly Kumar Hello.
Kumar Chivukula (00:53):
Yes, how are you?
Eveline Oehrlich (00:54):
I'm fine. How are you?
Kumar Chivukula (00:57):
I'm good. Thanks for having having me. I
really appreciate your time andopportunity to talk to you.
Eveline Oehrlich (01:02):
Yes, excited for you to be with us today. Let
me give our listeners a littlebit of a background. And then of
course, I'll open it up to youbecause you might want to add
something. So Kumar is anexperienced it and operations
leader with experienceaccelerating digital
transformation and businessgrowth. With a customer first
(01:22):
mindset at companies like Adobeand Symantec. I think that's
where you were before. Today, heor you is the co founder and CTO
of UB Sarah, driving the missionto help companies deliver
software fast, safe and secureby a disruptive DevOps
solutions. All of that soundsfantastic. So thank you again,
(01:45):
Kumar, welcome and glad thatyou're here. Thanks for taking
time out of your I'm sure busyday. The first question of
course, before we get started,if our listeners who are of
course roles like DevOpsengineers, app dev, folks,
security people, individuals,contributors, leaders, give them
(02:08):
about the 10,000 foot level ofwhat does appsero really do?
Kumar Chivukula (02:16):
Absolutely, thank you. So if you look at the
current market, right, DevOps isnothing new. It's been there for
quite some time, the recentexplosion of the digital
transformation of all the kindsof press companies and multi
cloud adoption, and thetechnological changes that is
happening in the cloud, the waythe rapid pace and the rapid
pace. Like way the cloud evolvedfrom easy to instances, to the
(02:39):
containers to the micro servicesto the server less plus all the
languages, it's very hard forenterprises to keep up with
existing the software deliverymanagement, it's very complex.
It's resource intensive, andit's challenging for them to
keep up with agility, velocity,and then also visibility. If you
talk about like CTOs and CIOsand CTOs like care for agility
(02:59):
velocity based on our survey,and then CISOs, and CIOs cares
for care for the visibility,governance doesn't mean that
they don't care what otherthings they do. But at the
highest level, that's what it isto solve the problem of how can
we continue to help agilityvelocity for the CTOs and CEOs
visibility and governance, andbased on the practical
challenges that we've seen andthe challenges that we see in
(03:20):
the current market and the gapswe started Apsara is that
continuous orchestrationplatform, what we do is we like,
as you rightfully said, in theearly part of the introduction,
our mission and goal is toenable and empower enterprise
companies to make their softwaredelivery faster, better and
secure. It's a very broad, boldstatement loaded statement, I'll
just quickly unpack that. Ourgoal is to continue to protect
(03:43):
existing investment of thecurrent enterprise companies.
And when we mean by the currentinvestment, because people
already invested in the DevOpsin the last three, four years,
we want to make sure that weinvest we continue to protect
investment, and using ourplatform, accelerate the DevOps
and Dev SEC of journey in will,whether it be any cloud or
whether it be AWS, Azure GCP, orrunning in on prem, or working
(04:05):
across any technology stack ortool. So it just some summarize
it together. Our goal is to wecontinue to work with their
existing customers and have themkeep the existing tool stack and
build the new code pipelines,which is one of the one of the
value proposition where theydon't have to worry about
building the pipelines manuallycurate them and manage them at
(04:27):
scale as well and providing theend to end visibility with
respect to governance and wherevisibility with respect to doing
more with less. And that's thethat's that's what we do. And
think about for the lack ofbetter way to say that the way
the sales force solve theproblem for the salespeople. We
want our opposite of platform wego and vision vision is to make
make it easy for the developersusing offshore platform as well.
Eveline Oehrlich (04:51):
So what I heard you say is that you are
protecting existing investmentswhich is great because we do
know we are in a challengingsituation right across the world
budgets aren't growing as much,I think between all the
different analysts is aboutmaybe 5% or so in software and
in services. So that's greatorchestration means to some
(05:14):
extent you are making andbringing things together, which
allows folks to actually improvetheir speed, reduce toil, and
improve the reliability andsecurity of the services. So I
think that's probably anexcellent, high level summary.
Now, you are yourself a CTO, CTOin a software company. Many of
(05:36):
our listeners probably havetheir own CTOs within their
companies, but they're not insoftware. But as a CTO in a
software company, what does thatmean? What do you do on a day to
day basis?
Kumar Chivukula (05:49):
Yeah, it's the title wise is the the next
startup company, we wearmultiple hats, and from the from
the taking a step back and talkabout what we do. Probably I'll
give my two cents. And I may notbe the true for everybody, but
in the startup and working on aday to day basis, building the
product and setting the guidanceand vision. And those are the
(06:12):
high level responsibilities ofCTO making sure that but I'll
explain that in general, what Isee. So as a CTO, your job is to
look at the future, look at thecurrent pain points of the
customers and make sure thatthat the current technology
stack, also that the platform isaligning to that and making sure
that it is solving the problem,the biggest thing is on top of
the product, managing theproduct and technology roadmap,
(06:36):
we the CTO job is to make surethat alignment between sales,
marketing and productengineering is very important,
because it's very, otherwise,the CTO cannot just go and build
a team build the product andtechnology. And next thing you
know is after building theproduct into the platform,
there's no one to sell it and noone to understand what it is.
And alignment is absolutelycritical. And that is one of the
(06:58):
biggest responsibility Besidesbuilding and managing the
technology stack and looking atDivision, looking at the
innovation and whatnot. Butthat's the second set. The
second thing. Third thing ismaking sure that right people,
right people are in place tomanage this thing because CTO
themselves as a city, we can'tsolve everything, you can only
solve so much. But you need tohave a right set of people who
(07:20):
are managing the product, etc.People who are managing the
engineering, and then yourreliability engineering SAS
platform, and you need to have aproper team that manages
architecture and design. Sootherwise, it's very difficult
to bring it together and scalethe platform as well. Their
highest level in the people inthe product, people process
technology, and CTO plays a rolein all of them in the initial
(07:42):
stages of the company, it'smostly around product and
people. And then when you startto grow into this one, and it
becomes a more process, and thenthe technology comes into play
along the way as well. So
Eveline Oehrlich (07:53):
So you actually, and your role are an
orchestrator yourself, not justthat your company does work in
the orchestration, you actuallyhave the role of an orchestrator
as well amongst the differentfunctions within your within
your organization. Now, youmentioned people and processes,
(08:14):
of course, people is the mostimportant one and where I want
to go a little bit further, whenyou think about your day to day
job as CTO, I'm curious, whatchallenges do you face relative
to some of the people in theculture either within your
organization? Or what do you seewithin your installed base or to
clients? Because you said you doa lot of I'm assuming you're
(08:34):
doing a lot of conversationswith prospects and clients? What
challenges do you have and see,relative to the human side and
the culture?
Kumar Chivukula (08:45):
Yeah, the expectations from the prospects
and customers are huge, right?Because they expect everything
we done yesterday, it's veryhard and even though you want to
do it, but sometimes you need tounderstand balance between what
is possible versus what is notpossible. And sometimes you have
to say no and hard to say no inthe middle of the conversation.
But we need to find a way toestablish the relationship and
(09:06):
explain to the prospect andcustomer in terms of like how
they can need to align and howthey need to think through this
one. Not everything needs to bedone yesterday, not everything
is important. Theprioritization, alignment with
respect to customer and alsoemployees is one of the biggest
challenge that happens for manyof the companies. Once you have
that alignment initial stages,it becomes easier but as and
(09:26):
when we add more customers,things are going to improve. But
once you build MVP once you havea product market fit once you
establish the go to market fitit the journey becomes easier,
which isn't we have aninflection stage of product
market fit to go to market fitand the initial stages were
building the product andheadstone, building the product
and we're focusing on code tocoding and testing and
validating and making sure theproduct is ready. And then
(09:48):
continue to add bells andwhistles on top of it and add
security and add thereliability, the scalability, a
bunch of other features. That'swhere the journey comes in. But
the core product of corephilosophy is not going to
change. The challenges areassociated with it in terms of
like aligning the, the customervision opposite, the opposite of
vision aligning customers. Andalso making sure that our team
(10:09):
is aligned to that is one of thecritical component of the CTO
job. Because without that, itwill be very hard, very hard for
either of the people tounderstand why we're not seeing
why we say no, or why we sayingyes, people are not going to be
happy when you say yes to thecustomer come back with an
update, hey, we have to developthis new feature new capability
new, our new offering, and theywant to understand why and why
(10:31):
not and what's ROI, what's therate of return on investment,
these are the things we have toinvest, and we have to manage
them. Because you don't want tobuild it for one customer,
right, and you don't want toaccumulate technical debt, you
want to be very careful,managing the technical debt in
the company, and especially SAScompany is very, very
challenging and very difficultas well. But if you have to have
build the culture in a way, youcontinue to draw the line, what
(10:53):
is the what what is the part ofthe product? What is not? What
is the core versus context? Onceyou do that becomes easier
conversation for, for having thechallenges with challenge the
conversation with the customer,also with the employees as well.
Eveline Oehrlich (11:06):
Great, I love what you said core versus
context, sometimes, in my roleas an industry analysts, which
is my second job. When I go intobriefings with some of my vendor
clients, they forget to sharecore, they only share context.
And that makes it sometimes verydifficult. And then one other
thing you said, MVP, or minimumviable product, I heard
(11:29):
something just recently, which Ireally have adopted. I'm going
to call it a minimal lovableproduct instead of a minimal
viable product. Some of theenterprise clients loved when he
suggested that. Excellent,great.
Kumar Chivukula (11:44):
Now a good minimum lovable product.
Eveline Oehrlich (11:46):
Yeah, that's a new a new vocab. I mean, I'm
sure you heard about
Kumar Chivukula (11:51):
it before. Yeah,
Eveline Oehrlich (11:52):
I think I leveraged the aka stolen from
somebody else. But I don't Icannot remember. So I cannot
give that person credit. Allright. So um, Sarah was founded,
I believe, in 2020. And with avision, as you mentioned,
software developers and DevOpsteams to achieve faster software
delivery through anorchestration platform and did
(12:12):
some research, of course on opsera. And I'm not a stranger to
you, because I covered or lookedat, at your solution. When I was
doing research as an industryanalysts. Looking at it, you're
the first no code, DevOpsorchestration platform. So give
us a little bit more context interms of, again, that
(12:33):
orchestration platform, andparticularly in terms of no
code, right, because I thinkthat's really what's intriguing
with regards to our listeners,because sometimes folks are a
little bit afraid to say nocode, what do you mean, you're
replacing me? And others aresaying, yes, that's great,
because I can actually doadditional work which I can get
(12:54):
to when I have an orchestrationplatform. So that's kind of the
backdrop of my question.
Kumar Chivukula (13:00):
Yeah, thank you for the question is a really
good question, actually. Sothere's always misconception
about the no code and low codeand this whole concept, right?
So when we talk about no code,it's more not about replacing
people, it's about enhancing theability of the existing DevOps
team and making sure that theyaccelerate the journey, because
otherwise, you end up doingthat, in our survey, about
(13:22):
30 40% of the time they'remanaging the tools and managing
the pipelines. It's nothingwrong with it, but is it really
impeding them for them to helpdevelopers innovate and shipping
things faster, which is not agood thing as well as evaluate.
another data point is based onIBM and Gartner survey that was
done in 2019 2020. This wasagain, two, three years back 15
(13:45):
to 18% of the code that waswritten by the most of the
companies doesn't see light atthe end of the tunnel, because
it is all done for internaldevelopment, nothing that has
been for customer. Imagine that15 to 20% of the time that has
been gone, invested by thepeople, and the company is not
generating the value that is aproduct to the loss for the
company and revenue loss andopportunity loss. How can we
(14:06):
have them focus on things thatthey can help the company bottom
line, and also help acceleratethe journey and make sure that
they continue to stay currentwith the technology, right? So
if you look at that, do thosethings then apcera will come as
a like for It's like anothersmart chatbot or smart Mini and
for them like where they cancontinue to accelerate the
(14:26):
journey by leveraging oppositeorchestration platform. How do
we do that we as a coreprinciple of apcera, we want to
build reusable micro services inthe platform when what we mean
reusable micro services so thatwhen we build a micro service,
or a petrol function, we want tomake sure that it scales across
many and many enterprisecustomers. So as a in our in
(14:48):
order orchestration platform, wehave three modules. One is tools
and automation. Second one is nocode pipelines. Third one is
unified insights. We weexplained previously, tool chain
automation will help theenterprise customer to protect
their eggs Testing investment bybringing the tools together,
once they bring the toolstogether using local pipelines
within the local pipelines, whatwe have is we built a bunch of
(15:08):
integrations in a microservicesformat. All the enterprise
customers have to do it insteadof them worrying about the right
and the glue code integrationcode, or like Jenkins file, or
maybe writing the glue, groovyscripts that were maybe custom
in scripts what they have, theycan leverage the existing
microservices that we have, andbe able to build them as a part
of Lego set, we are given theLego set, the DevOps team still
(15:30):
have to conceptually, the their,their own car, and to drive it
the Release car, right, we'renot stopping them, we're not
going to drive the car for them,they have to drive it, that's
still the responsibility of ops,what we're doing is instead of
them building the car, then allby themselves, we're enabling
them to build the car glue tothe reusable microservices, so
that they can make the journeyfaster, better and secure. And
(15:50):
then last, but not least indoing so they get to see the
visibility aspect of it. So forthe for them to achieve all of
them in a scale. It's verycumbersome and difficult. You
need to have a ton of people tomanaging it like in my previous
life, and both Symantec andAdobe, and we used to spend a
boat to the world's largestsoftware publishers, as you guys
(16:10):
know, we spend about 60% of themoney that you spend on people
and 40 personal tools. It's theYep, it's not easy for every
company to scale, invest thatmuch money. And then there's
that many resources, we'retalking about scale in the lines
of poleetical. If a milliondollars per year just on
software delivery management,I'm not talking about software
development, software deliverymanagement. So to bring it
(16:33):
together, the no code pipelines,what we talk about is like we
give you the templates, withinthe templates, you have
reasonable micro services, welet enable the enterprise
enterprise customers to take thetemplates build the templates
for their own use cases, whetherit be sblc, which is a software
development lifecycle thatincludes across multiple
languages, multiple technologystacks, means stack, Java stack,
(16:55):
dotnet, stack, and so on. Soforth, are SAS DevOps, which is
Salesforce, snowflake,Informatica, Adobe Experience
Manager, APG and so on, soforth, which is it DevOps. And
the third one is about intraintra as a code, all three
things can be possible by layerin the quality security gates,
we have a deeper integration tosecurity stack and quality stack
as well, which is included thatincludes from the code time the
(17:17):
code commit is done, we want tomake sure that we scan for
secret keys passwords, andensure that no vulnerabilities
are there. No knownvulnerabilities are there in the
builds and deployments, and thedynamic code analysis and making
sure the containers that arerunning, fully secured known
vulnerabilities are not there,or any any VMs are being
deployed that vulnerabilitymanagement, we can also scan
(17:38):
them. So having these things asa security hygiene as part of
the CI CD pipelines along withquality hygiene, we'll help them
make the software deliveryfaster, but also make it secure,
and also improve the qualitysecurity posture significantly
for them. So imagine that wedon't have any of these things,
they have to do it with hundreds10s of people plus a person
leaves, and the second personwants to come in, we do it all
(18:01):
over again, because they don'twant to talk to the code, again
understood a lot, but just bringit back, we have the new code
pipelines. What we mean by thatis not to replace people. It's
about enhancing the existingjourney that they have, by
taking the templates and thereusable micro services help
them build the pipelines atscale across SDLC SAS DevOps in
Frazer code.
Narrator (18:21):
Skill updates and skill up hours are the perfect
way to stay on top of the latestDevOps trends and improve your
skills from the comfort of yourown home or office, or virtual
micro conferences and webinarsfocus on DevOps and the tech
industry and feature expertsbecause from both the DevOps
world and top it companies, atour skillup days, you will get
everything you'd expect attraditional conference,
(18:44):
including virtual sponsorbooths, competitions, and
networking opportunities withother attendees and speakers,
don't miss out, check out ourlineup of upcoming events on
DevOps institute.com. Andregister now.
Eveline Oehrlich (18:57):
Sounds like this actually will make if I am
in the software delivery role,my job a lot more fun, because I
do remember conversations withsoftware developers who say, I
really like my job most of thetime. But there are a few
aspects of it, which are reallynot fun. And I don't look
(19:18):
forward to those. And I thinkyou as you just described some
of those tasks, if they are likea cookbook or a playbook or a
template, allow me to actuallystep out of the mundane tasks
and allow myself to actuallybring things together. That's
one of the biggest challenge wesee. And we found when we did
(19:39):
our upskilling that folks arereally starting to disengage
with in connecting, notconnecting with what they're
doing because some of the workthey're doing is just not as
challenging and creative. So Isee lots of opportunities there
now. Low code, and or no codeAll right, what's the
(20:01):
difference? I think the
Kumar Chivukula (20:04):
there is a slight difference. And basically
how we want to use it. It'ssometimes it's marketing term
and buzzwords in the industry.But low code or no code
development is like, forexample, locode is called Give
an example of low code, like inthe case of where some tasks
that needs to be done repeatedway. And, for example, you want
(20:26):
to collect a applicationparticularly, like, I'll just
give an example of the DevOps,you want to be in a position to
repeatedly use your static codeanalysis step across all CI CD
pipelines, you can do the lowcode, or no code way, low code
way is nothing but you justwrite a minimal code that can
work work across various tasksand leave it as part of the your
stepper microservice and createa template and use it across
(20:49):
multiple multiple pipelines. Andthat way, you know what to
expect, what are the conditions,what are the thresholds, what
are the gates and so on soforth, it's with a bit of a
little bit more customization ormaking it more meaningful to the
existing your own environment aswell existing environment.
Whereas a look no code, thatmeans that you just really like
doing the plug and play,basically, it's a plug and play
(21:10):
and think about is like, yourLego example, right? You are
given a set of Legos and theblueprint and the template. And
for you to construct the thingwithout you making the Legos and
deliver the with the model,where people like in the
different personas, like whenyou look talk to it DevOps, and
especially with SAS DevOps, it'sbasically the focus is more on
(21:32):
the configuration and makingchanges at the application
level. They don't want to be thecoders, traditional coders, like
Java developers, or the goodGolang developers, and so on so
forth. They care about havingsomething in a plug and play in
a resort based approach, whichis what low code development is
like, basically, they want tojust take something that is out
there, create by clicking coupleof visits, and be able to create
(21:54):
the pipeline for them. Whereasno code, low code is like where
we want to give them a littlebit of opportunity for them to
tweak it with existinginvestment, and also be able to
help them bring the existingtools. As a result, we have to
give them a little bit ofopportunity for them to tweak
the Legos that they have. Sothat I'm trying to give you that
like example of the DevOpscontext. So the they're in the
industry standard standard,they've kind of interchange in
(22:17):
some areas, and they peopleconveniently use it. But low
core to me is there isn't 100%locode is very hard to do it at
this point in this is not fullynot there, but there are a
couple for a particular use caseyou can achieve the low code for
for a particular use case, youcan you can achieve no code as
well depends on the use case.Depends on the persona.
Eveline Oehrlich (22:37):
Great. Excellent. Okay, I want to shift
a little bit Toria installedbase because I know you know
them well, because you do haveconversations and you are the
owner to take thoseconversations and turn them into
products, which is a great, agreat noble cause. What
challenges do you think? Let'smaybe take the number one
(23:00):
challenge if you kind of go backand think about your last week's
conversations or last quarter,while the quarter is I don't
know what yours. It's just
Kumar Chivukula (23:10):
the end of this month.
Eveline Oehrlich (23:12):
Okay, so if you go back to the to the last
quarter, what would you say? isthe number one challenge your
installed base? Or prospectstoday? Half? And how are they
solving them? Besides, ofcourse, you are offering your
orchestration platform? That'sof course one, right. But what
(23:32):
are some other challenges? I'mcurious.
Kumar Chivukula (23:35):
There are a few, but I think I'll highlight
a couple of them. Especiallylike in the, in the enterprise
sector, digital digitaltransformation is really key.
And people will expect it totransform because customer and
their end user expectations aredifferent. Like nowadays, if you
asked me six years back, you cango back, go to the website and
(23:55):
just or maybe mobile app, justbook a car and the car would
show up to the door, which isTesla in this case, it's very
hard, I would have said no, andthere's no way and it's
happening and especially withthe pandemic, it's even changed.
We don't have to go to the cardealership and get the car and
then the car has to show up thecar can show up to your door.
And it's very hard to evenimagine that and that the this
(24:18):
type of innovation is happeningand customer expectations have
changed and they like Amazonprime prime example right? You
just ship something, it shows upthe doorstep without you going
and worrying about all of them.So the behavior and the customer
expectations have changed as aresult enterprises are dealing
with digital transformation,they have to otherwise they will
be taken out of the business forthem and how do they do it
(24:38):
without having the people thenwithout having the platform
without having the way to managethe overall software delivery
management because they have totransform themselves from a
retail company to more of asoftware company or to maybe
manufacturing company to asoftware company, as Microsoft
CEO said famously into thosedata to those in depth tell
every company has to become asoftware guy Coming in, as a
(25:01):
result, that people arestruggling with it in terms of
like trying to keep up with thepace of the digital
transformation and innovationthat is happening in the market.
The second biggest challenge ishow do we do it in a more in a
secure manner. Because that'sanother thing that is coming
into the play, it's not just theshipping the code, especially
with the cloud, we would developsomething and just put it out
there in the cloud expect thecloud is secure, that's a wrong
(25:22):
assumption, you have to makesure that your data, your your
bills, your deployments, youhave to protect it, there is no
other way around AWS and Azureand GCP, they will only give the
offer the utility computing andthey'll give you the compute for
a cost. And they have to run,the enterprises have to run
their application, they have tomanage the deployments as a
result coupled with softwaredelivery management in the
(25:44):
digital transformation, alongwith because it's continuous
innovation, right? It's not likeyou just do the release once a
year, or once in six months,it's a continuous innovation
every week, every day. Andsometimes every two weeks,
sometimes once a month dependson the company trajectory and
their adoption and their Agiletransformation roadmap. So it
varies from there, it's hard tokeep keep up with the pace of
(26:06):
innovation also managing withpeople with that. So it's we
continue to see that that is adigital transformation coupled
with the software deliverymanagement along with DevOps.
devsecops is one of the one ofthe big no longer the nice to
have any more for four years.But it's nice to have now it's a
line item, everybody's talkingabout it, executives are talking
about it.
Eveline Oehrlich (26:28):
Which brings me to my almost last question,
it's around skills, we at DevOpsInstitute are very passionate
about upskilling, and helpingthe different roles right, and
in the last five years have beenconducting the research around
skills. And we're just at thepoint where we are releasing our
upskilling 2023. report inApril. So I'm doing a lot of
(26:51):
research there. So if you haveto give advice to our listeners,
and remember, those are theirsoftware developers, software
engineers, there are DevOpsengineers there's SRE is, but if
there are a few things, youwould say, hey, really focus on
this? What would that be?
Kumar Chivukula (27:10):
It's the continue to when you when you're
in the technology field, it'snot a the what environment is
changing around us. Right? Soand continue to keep up with the
basic core elements of the rightone is the one is the cloud
stack, because cloud is going tobe there for next 10 years, I
continue to be there, it's theonly wall which can change. But
keep up with the certificationsand keep up with Cloud level
(27:34):
certification, there are a lotof free courses that offer both
AWS and Azure GCP. And also youcan sign up for the course
Coursera Udemy. And then a lotof the videos are available in
in the internet, where you canjust take advantage of them, and
then be able to upskill andcontinue to upskill. And like
attending the some of the tradeshows, and wherever possible,
(27:56):
most of them are virtual now,thanks to pandemic and most of
the sessions used to be inperson now the virtual so that
we have a lot more opportunityfor people to learn from the
community. And effectively, anew kind of like you have to
transform into into more of SREDevOps team no longer just doing
the configuration management didthey have to have a language,
(28:18):
they have to at least understandthe data structures languages,
and will be able to understandthe algorithms is very, very
important. No, they don't havedeveloped all of them. But they
will be dealing with thedevelopers who speak the
language, having the idea aboutall of them and be able to
understand proficient in onelanguage will be always helpful.
Because once you understand thelanguage, it's easy to replicate
(28:38):
the knowledge across the rest ofthe languages that are going to
be there in the market. And it'slike, to me, it's we continue to
keep up with the cloud vendorswhat they're doing, and then
basically, take one or at leastone of one or two withdrawal
possible, which is one minimum,to certainly have a
certification in that so thatway you will know and then you
will people recognize thatpeople understand the value and
(29:01):
value that and then havingkeeping up with trade shows and
also continue to leverageadvantage of the communities
communities are things that wehave. Plus, obviously we have
now we are going to be taught toa Coursera Udemy and a bunch of
other things LinkedIn learning,they're all the things that
resources are available at amuch cheaper rate than we used
(29:21):
to be before and is accessibleindividual so you can sign up
for a monthly plan. You can signup for a yearly plan and put a
plan a plan together, what winsinstructor led or like you can
do the self paced learning aswell. So
Eveline Oehrlich (29:33):
Fabulous. Fabulous Kumar, thank you so
much. I have one more question,but this is more of a fun
question. Yeah. So what is yourfavorite weekend activity? I'm
assuming you have sometimes aweekend.
Kumar Chivukula (29:47):
Yeah, I do. Like obviously if a weekend
comes in, I want to spend timewith the family as much as
possible and also like to me, Imy fun time is mostly around,
catching up on Reading andespecially I'm not really
reading books and books but Ithink I listen to a lot of
podcasts and listen to somevideos and follow the some of
(30:09):
the blog posts and so on soforth and try to keep keep up
myself. And I try to take myselfout and then go for do some
exercise and walk and long walksand when they have a free day,
the last one is about likecatching up on sports and that's
just I like sports and publicacceptance on the sports.
Eveline Oehrlich (30:30):
Great, super. We have been with Kumar Chiba
Kula CTO for apcera, a DevOpsorchestration platform Kumar,
thank you so much for joining metoday on humans of DevOps
podcast. Humans of DevOpspodcast is produced by DevOps
Institute. Our audio productionteam includes Julia Papp and
(30:50):
Brendan Leigh. I'm humans ofDevOps podcast executive
producer Evelyn Yoli. If youwould like to join us on a
podcast, please contact us atpodcasts at DevOps
institute.com. I'm Emilygnomish. Stay safe and hope that
you tune in next time.
Narrator (31:09):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the humans of
DevOps podcast. Don't forget tojoin our global community to get
access to even more greatresources like this. Until next
time, remember, you are part ofsomething bigger than yourself.
You belong
You're listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a
podcast focused on advancing thehumans of DevOps through skills,
knowledge, ideas, and learning,or the skil framework.
Kumar Chivukula (00:17):
expectations from the prospects and customers
are huge, because they expecteverything to them yesterday.
It's very hard and even thoughyou want to do it, but sometimes
you need to understand balancebetween what is possible versus
what is not possible. Andsometimes you have to say no.
Eveline Oehrlich (00:34):
Welcome to our humans of DevOps podcast titled
with no code into the future.Today, we have with us a very
esteemed thought leader in thetopic, continuous orchestration.
Our special guest is KumarChiku. Tula. I hope I said your
name correctly Kumar Hello.
Kumar Chivukula (00:53):
Yes, how are you?
Eveline Oehrlich (00:54):
I'm fine. How are you?
Kumar Chivukula (00:57):
I'm good. Thanks for having having me. I
really appreciate your time andopportunity to talk to you.
Eveline Oehrlich (01:02):
Yes, excited for you to be with us today. Let
me give our listeners a littlebit of a background. And then of
course, I'll open it up to youbecause you might want to add
something. So Kumar is anexperienced it and operations
leader with experienceaccelerating digital
transformation and businessgrowth. With a customer first
(01:22):
mindset at companies like Adobeand Symantec. I think that's
where you were before. Today, heor you is the co founder and CTO
of UB Sarah, driving the missionto help companies deliver
software fast, safe and secureby a disruptive DevOps
solutions. All of that soundsfantastic. So thank you again,
(01:45):
Kumar, welcome and glad thatyou're here. Thanks for taking
time out of your I'm sure busyday. The first question of
course, before we get started,if our listeners who are of
course roles like DevOpsengineers, app dev, folks,
security people, individuals,contributors, leaders, give them
(02:08):
about the 10,000 foot level ofwhat does appsero really do?
Kumar Chivukula (02:16):
Absolutely, thank you. So if you look at the
current market, right, DevOps isnothing new. It's been there for
quite some time, the recentexplosion of the digital
transformation of all the kindsof press companies and multi
cloud adoption, and thetechnological changes that is
happening in the cloud, the waythe rapid pace and the rapid
pace. Like way the cloud evolvedfrom easy to instances, to the
(02:39):
containers to the micro servicesto the server less plus all the
languages, it's very hard forenterprises to keep up with
existing the software deliverymanagement, it's very complex.
It's resource intensive, andit's challenging for them to
keep up with agility, velocity,and then also visibility. If you
talk about like CTOs and CIOsand CTOs like care for agility
(02:59):
velocity based on our survey,and then CISOs, and CIOs cares
for care for the visibility,governance doesn't mean that
they don't care what otherthings they do. But at the
highest level, that's what it isto solve the problem of how can
we continue to help agilityvelocity for the CTOs and CEOs
visibility and governance, andbased on the practical
challenges that we've seen andthe challenges that we see in
(03:20):
the current market and the gapswe started Apsara is that
continuous orchestrationplatform, what we do is we like,
as you rightfully said, in theearly part of the introduction,
our mission and goal is toenable and empower enterprise
companies to make their softwaredelivery faster, better and
secure. It's a very broad, boldstatement loaded statement, I'll
just quickly unpack that. Ourgoal is to continue to protect
(03:43):
existing investment of thecurrent enterprise companies.
And when we mean by the currentinvestment, because people
already invested in the DevOpsin the last three, four years,
we want to make sure that weinvest we continue to protect
investment, and using ourplatform, accelerate the DevOps
and Dev SEC of journey in will,whether it be any cloud or
whether it be AWS, Azure GCP, orrunning in on prem, or working
(04:05):
across any technology stack ortool. So it just some summarize
it together. Our goal is to wecontinue to work with their
existing customers and have themkeep the existing tool stack and
build the new code pipelines,which is one of the one of the
value proposition where theydon't have to worry about
building the pipelines manuallycurate them and manage them at
(04:27):
scale as well and providing theend to end visibility with
respect to governance and wherevisibility with respect to doing
more with less. And that's thethat's that's what we do. And
think about for the lack ofbetter way to say that the way
the sales force solve theproblem for the salespeople. We
want our opposite of platform wego and vision vision is to make
make it easy for the developersusing offshore platform as well.
Eveline Oehrlich (04:51):
So what I heard you say is that you are
protecting existing investmentswhich is great because we do
know we are in a challengingsituation right across the world
budgets aren't growing as much,I think between all the
different analysts is aboutmaybe 5% or so in software and
in services. So that's greatorchestration means to some
(05:14):
extent you are making andbringing things together, which
allows folks to actually improvetheir speed, reduce toil, and
improve the reliability andsecurity of the services. So I
think that's probably anexcellent, high level summary.
Now, you are yourself a CTO, CTOin a software company. Many of
(05:36):
our listeners probably havetheir own CTOs within their
companies, but they're not insoftware. But as a CTO in a
software company, what does thatmean? What do you do on a day to
day basis?
Kumar Chivukula (05:49):
Yeah, it's the title wise is the the next
startup company, we wearmultiple hats, and from the from
the taking a step back and talkabout what we do. Probably I'll
give my two cents. And I may notbe the true for everybody, but
in the startup and working on aday to day basis, building the
product and setting the guidanceand vision. And those are the
(06:12):
high level responsibilities ofCTO making sure that but I'll
explain that in general, what Isee. So as a CTO, your job is to
look at the future, look at thecurrent pain points of the
customers and make sure thatthat the current technology
stack, also that the platform isaligning to that and making sure
that it is solving the problem,the biggest thing is on top of
the product, managing theproduct and technology roadmap,
(06:36):
we the CTO job is to make surethat alignment between sales,
marketing and productengineering is very important,
because it's very, otherwise,the CTO cannot just go and build
a team build the product andtechnology. And next thing you
know is after building theproduct into the platform,
there's no one to sell it and noone to understand what it is.
And alignment is absolutelycritical. And that is one of the
(06:58):
biggest responsibility Besidesbuilding and managing the
technology stack and looking atDivision, looking at the
innovation and whatnot. Butthat's the second set. The
second thing. Third thing ismaking sure that right people,
right people are in place tomanage this thing because CTO
themselves as a city, we can'tsolve everything, you can only
solve so much. But you need tohave a right set of people who
(07:20):
are managing the product, etc.People who are managing the
engineering, and then yourreliability engineering SAS
platform, and you need to have aproper team that manages
architecture and design. Sootherwise, it's very difficult
to bring it together and scalethe platform as well. Their
highest level in the people inthe product, people process
technology, and CTO plays a rolein all of them in the initial
(07:42):
stages of the company, it'smostly around product and
people. And then when you startto grow into this one, and it
becomes a more process, and thenthe technology comes into play
along the way as well. So
Eveline Oehrlich (07:53):
So you actually, and your role are an
orchestrator yourself, not justthat your company does work in
the orchestration, you actuallyhave the role of an orchestrator
as well amongst the differentfunctions within your within
your organization. Now, youmentioned people and processes,
(08:14):
of course, people is the mostimportant one and where I want
to go a little bit further, whenyou think about your day to day
job as CTO, I'm curious, whatchallenges do you face relative
to some of the people in theculture either within your
organization? Or what do you seewithin your installed base or to
clients? Because you said you doa lot of I'm assuming you're
(08:34):
doing a lot of conversationswith prospects and clients? What
challenges do you have and see,relative to the human side and
the culture?
Kumar Chivukula (08:45):
Yeah, the expectations from the prospects
and customers are huge, right?Because they expect everything
we done yesterday, it's veryhard and even though you want to
do it, but sometimes you need tounderstand balance between what
is possible versus what is notpossible. And sometimes you have
to say no and hard to say no inthe middle of the conversation.
But we need to find a way toestablish the relationship and
(09:06):
explain to the prospect andcustomer in terms of like how
they can need to align and howthey need to think through this
one. Not everything needs to bedone yesterday, not everything
is important. Theprioritization, alignment with
respect to customer and alsoemployees is one of the biggest
challenge that happens for manyof the companies. Once you have
that alignment initial stages,it becomes easier but as and
(09:26):
when we add more customers,things are going to improve. But
once you build MVP once you havea product market fit once you
establish the go to market fitit the journey becomes easier,
which isn't we have aninflection stage of product
market fit to go to market fitand the initial stages were
building the product andheadstone, building the product
and we're focusing on code tocoding and testing and
validating and making sure theproduct is ready. And then
(09:48):
continue to add bells andwhistles on top of it and add
security and add thereliability, the scalability, a
bunch of other features. That'swhere the journey comes in. But
the core product of corephilosophy is not going to
change. The challenges areassociated with it in terms of
like aligning the, the customervision opposite, the opposite of
vision aligning customers. Andalso making sure that our team
(10:09):
is aligned to that is one of thecritical component of the CTO
job. Because without that, itwill be very hard, very hard for
either of the people tounderstand why we're not seeing
why we say no, or why we sayingyes, people are not going to be
happy when you say yes to thecustomer come back with an
update, hey, we have to developthis new feature new capability
new, our new offering, and theywant to understand why and why
(10:31):
not and what's ROI, what's therate of return on investment,
these are the things we have toinvest, and we have to manage
them. Because you don't want tobuild it for one customer,
right, and you don't want toaccumulate technical debt, you
want to be very careful,managing the technical debt in
the company, and especially SAScompany is very, very
challenging and very difficultas well. But if you have to have
build the culture in a way, youcontinue to draw the line, what
(10:53):
is the what what is the part ofthe product? What is not? What
is the core versus context? Onceyou do that becomes easier
conversation for, for having thechallenges with challenge the
conversation with the customer,also with the employees as well.
Eveline Oehrlich (11:06):
Great, I love what you said core versus
context, sometimes, in my roleas an industry analysts, which
is my second job. When I go intobriefings with some of my vendor
clients, they forget to sharecore, they only share context.
And that makes it sometimes verydifficult. And then one other
thing you said, MVP, or minimumviable product, I heard
(11:29):
something just recently, which Ireally have adopted. I'm going
to call it a minimal lovableproduct instead of a minimal
viable product. Some of theenterprise clients loved when he
suggested that. Excellent,great.
Kumar Chivukula (11:44):
Now a good minimum lovable product.
Eveline Oehrlich (11:46):
Yeah, that's a new a new vocab. I mean, I'm
sure you heard about
Kumar Chivukula (11:51):
it before. Yeah,
Eveline Oehrlich (11:52):
I think I leveraged the aka stolen from
somebody else. But I don't Icannot remember. So I cannot
give that person credit. Allright. So um, Sarah was founded,
I believe, in 2020. And with avision, as you mentioned,
software developers and DevOpsteams to achieve faster software
delivery through anorchestration platform and did
(12:12):
some research, of course on opsera. And I'm not a stranger to
you, because I covered or lookedat, at your solution. When I was
doing research as an industryanalysts. Looking at it, you're
the first no code, DevOpsorchestration platform. So give
us a little bit more context interms of, again, that
(12:33):
orchestration platform, andparticularly in terms of no
code, right, because I thinkthat's really what's intriguing
with regards to our listeners,because sometimes folks are a
little bit afraid to say nocode, what do you mean, you're
replacing me? And others aresaying, yes, that's great,
because I can actually doadditional work which I can get
(12:54):
to when I have an orchestrationplatform. So that's kind of the
backdrop of my question.
Kumar Chivukula (13:00):
Yeah, thank you for the question is a really
good question, actually. Sothere's always misconception
about the no code and low codeand this whole concept, right?
So when we talk about no code,it's more not about replacing
people, it's about enhancing theability of the existing DevOps
team and making sure that theyaccelerate the journey, because
otherwise, you end up doingthat, in our survey, about
(13:22):
30 40% of the time they'remanaging the tools and managing
the pipelines. It's nothingwrong with it, but is it really
impeding them for them to helpdevelopers innovate and shipping
things faster, which is not agood thing as well as evaluate.
another data point is based onIBM and Gartner survey that was
done in 2019 2020. This wasagain, two, three years back 15
(13:45):
to 18% of the code that waswritten by the most of the
companies doesn't see light atthe end of the tunnel, because
it is all done for internaldevelopment, nothing that has
been for customer. Imagine that15 to 20% of the time that has
been gone, invested by thepeople, and the company is not
generating the value that is aproduct to the loss for the
company and revenue loss andopportunity loss. How can we
(14:06):
have them focus on things thatthey can help the company bottom
line, and also help acceleratethe journey and make sure that
they continue to stay currentwith the technology, right? So
if you look at that, do thosethings then apcera will come as
a like for It's like anothersmart chatbot or smart Mini and
for them like where they cancontinue to accelerate the
(14:26):
journey by leveraging oppositeorchestration platform. How do
we do that we as a coreprinciple of apcera, we want to
build reusable micro services inthe platform when what we mean
reusable micro services so thatwhen we build a micro service,
or a petrol function, we want tomake sure that it scales across
many and many enterprisecustomers. So as a in our in
(14:48):
order orchestration platform, wehave three modules. One is tools
and automation. Second one is nocode pipelines. Third one is
unified insights. We weexplained previously, tool chain
automation will help theenterprise customer to protect
their eggs Testing investment bybringing the tools together,
once they bring the toolstogether using local pipelines
within the local pipelines, whatwe have is we built a bunch of
(15:08):
integrations in a microservicesformat. All the enterprise
customers have to do it insteadof them worrying about the right
and the glue code integrationcode, or like Jenkins file, or
maybe writing the glue, groovyscripts that were maybe custom
in scripts what they have, theycan leverage the existing
microservices that we have, andbe able to build them as a part
of Lego set, we are given theLego set, the DevOps team still
(15:30):
have to conceptually, the their,their own car, and to drive it
the Release car, right, we'renot stopping them, we're not
going to drive the car for them,they have to drive it, that's
still the responsibility of ops,what we're doing is instead of
them building the car, then allby themselves, we're enabling
them to build the car glue tothe reusable microservices, so
that they can make the journeyfaster, better and secure. And
(15:50):
then last, but not least indoing so they get to see the
visibility aspect of it. So forthe for them to achieve all of
them in a scale. It's verycumbersome and difficult. You
need to have a ton of people tomanaging it like in my previous
life, and both Symantec andAdobe, and we used to spend a
boat to the world's largestsoftware publishers, as you guys
(16:10):
know, we spend about 60% of themoney that you spend on people
and 40 personal tools. It's theYep, it's not easy for every
company to scale, invest thatmuch money. And then there's
that many resources, we'retalking about scale in the lines
of poleetical. If a milliondollars per year just on
software delivery management,I'm not talking about software
development, software deliverymanagement. So to bring it
(16:33):
together, the no code pipelines,what we talk about is like we
give you the templates, withinthe templates, you have
reasonable micro services, welet enable the enterprise
enterprise customers to take thetemplates build the templates
for their own use cases, whetherit be sblc, which is a software
development lifecycle thatincludes across multiple
languages, multiple technologystacks, means stack, Java stack,
(16:55):
dotnet, stack, and so on. Soforth, are SAS DevOps, which is
Salesforce, snowflake,Informatica, Adobe Experience
Manager, APG and so on, soforth, which is it DevOps. And
the third one is about intraintra as a code, all three
things can be possible by layerin the quality security gates,
we have a deeper integration tosecurity stack and quality stack
as well, which is included thatincludes from the code time the
(17:17):
code commit is done, we want tomake sure that we scan for
secret keys passwords, andensure that no vulnerabilities
are there. No knownvulnerabilities are there in the
builds and deployments, and thedynamic code analysis and making
sure the containers that arerunning, fully secured known
vulnerabilities are not there,or any any VMs are being
deployed that vulnerabilitymanagement, we can also scan
(17:38):
them. So having these things asa security hygiene as part of
the CI CD pipelines along withquality hygiene, we'll help them
make the software deliveryfaster, but also make it secure,
and also improve the qualitysecurity posture significantly
for them. So imagine that wedon't have any of these things,
they have to do it with hundreds10s of people plus a person
leaves, and the second personwants to come in, we do it all
(18:01):
over again, because they don'twant to talk to the code, again
understood a lot, but just bringit back, we have the new code
pipelines. What we mean by thatis not to replace people. It's
about enhancing the existingjourney that they have, by
taking the templates and thereusable micro services help
them build the pipelines atscale across SDLC SAS DevOps in
Frazer code.
Narrator (18:21):
Skill updates and skill up hours are the perfect
way to stay on top of the latestDevOps trends and improve your
skills from the comfort of yourown home or office, or virtual
micro conferences and webinarsfocus on DevOps and the tech
industry and feature expertsbecause from both the DevOps
world and top it companies, atour skillup days, you will get
everything you'd expect attraditional conference,
(18:44):
including virtual sponsorbooths, competitions, and
networking opportunities withother attendees and speakers,
don't miss out, check out ourlineup of upcoming events on
DevOps institute.com. Andregister now.
Eveline Oehrlich (18:57):
Sounds like this actually will make if I am
in the software delivery role,my job a lot more fun, because I
do remember conversations withsoftware developers who say, I
really like my job most of thetime. But there are a few
aspects of it, which are reallynot fun. And I don't look
(19:18):
forward to those. And I thinkyou as you just described some
of those tasks, if they are likea cookbook or a playbook or a
template, allow me to actuallystep out of the mundane tasks
and allow myself to actuallybring things together. That's
one of the biggest challenge wesee. And we found when we did
(19:39):
our upskilling that folks arereally starting to disengage
with in connecting, notconnecting with what they're
doing because some of the workthey're doing is just not as
challenging and creative. So Isee lots of opportunities there
now. Low code, and or no codeAll right, what's the
(20:01):
difference? I think the
Kumar Chivukula (20:04):
there is a slight difference. And basically
how we want to use it. It'ssometimes it's marketing term
and buzzwords in the industry.But low code or no code
development is like, forexample, locode is called Give
an example of low code, like inthe case of where some tasks
that needs to be done repeatedway. And, for example, you want
(20:26):
to collect a applicationparticularly, like, I'll just
give an example of the DevOps,you want to be in a position to
repeatedly use your static codeanalysis step across all CI CD
pipelines, you can do the lowcode, or no code way, low code
way is nothing but you justwrite a minimal code that can
work work across various tasksand leave it as part of the your
stepper microservice and createa template and use it across
(20:49):
multiple multiple pipelines. Andthat way, you know what to
expect, what are the conditions,what are the thresholds, what
are the gates and so on soforth, it's with a bit of a
little bit more customization ormaking it more meaningful to the
existing your own environment aswell existing environment.
Whereas a look no code, thatmeans that you just really like
doing the plug and play,basically, it's a plug and play
(21:10):
and think about is like, yourLego example, right? You are
given a set of Legos and theblueprint and the template. And
for you to construct the thingwithout you making the Legos and
deliver the with the model,where people like in the
different personas, like whenyou look talk to it DevOps, and
especially with SAS DevOps, it'sbasically the focus is more on
(21:32):
the configuration and makingchanges at the application
level. They don't want to be thecoders, traditional coders, like
Java developers, or the goodGolang developers, and so on so
forth. They care about havingsomething in a plug and play in
a resort based approach, whichis what low code development is
like, basically, they want tojust take something that is out
there, create by clicking coupleof visits, and be able to create
(21:54):
the pipeline for them. Whereasno code, low code is like where
we want to give them a littlebit of opportunity for them to
tweak it with existinginvestment, and also be able to
help them bring the existingtools. As a result, we have to
give them a little bit ofopportunity for them to tweak
the Legos that they have. Sothat I'm trying to give you that
like example of the DevOpscontext. So the they're in the
industry standard standard,they've kind of interchange in
(22:17):
some areas, and they peopleconveniently use it. But low
core to me is there isn't 100%locode is very hard to do it at
this point in this is not fullynot there, but there are a
couple for a particular use caseyou can achieve the low code for
for a particular use case, youcan you can achieve no code as
well depends on the use case.Depends on the persona.
Eveline Oehrlich (22:37):
Great. Excellent. Okay, I want to shift
a little bit Toria installedbase because I know you know
them well, because you do haveconversations and you are the
owner to take thoseconversations and turn them into
products, which is a great, agreat noble cause. What
challenges do you think? Let'smaybe take the number one
(23:00):
challenge if you kind of go backand think about your last week's
conversations or last quarter,while the quarter is I don't
know what yours. It's just
Kumar Chivukula (23:10):
the end of this month.
Eveline Oehrlich (23:12):
Okay, so if you go back to the to the last
quarter, what would you say? isthe number one challenge your
installed base? Or prospectstoday? Half? And how are they
solving them? Besides, ofcourse, you are offering your
orchestration platform? That'sof course one, right. But what
(23:32):
are some other challenges? I'mcurious.
Kumar Chivukula (23:35):
There are a few, but I think I'll highlight
a couple of them. Especiallylike in the, in the enterprise
sector, digital digitaltransformation is really key.
And people will expect it totransform because customer and
their end user expectations aredifferent. Like nowadays, if you
asked me six years back, you cango back, go to the website and
(23:55):
just or maybe mobile app, justbook a car and the car would
show up to the door, which isTesla in this case, it's very
hard, I would have said no, andthere's no way and it's
happening and especially withthe pandemic, it's even changed.
We don't have to go to the cardealership and get the car and
then the car has to show up thecar can show up to your door.
And it's very hard to evenimagine that and that the this
(24:18):
type of innovation is happeningand customer expectations have
changed and they like Amazonprime prime example right? You
just ship something, it shows upthe doorstep without you going
and worrying about all of them.So the behavior and the customer
expectations have changed as aresult enterprises are dealing
with digital transformation,they have to otherwise they will
be taken out of the business forthem and how do they do it
(24:38):
without having the people thenwithout having the platform
without having the way to managethe overall software delivery
management because they have totransform themselves from a
retail company to more of asoftware company or to maybe
manufacturing company to asoftware company, as Microsoft
CEO said famously into thosedata to those in depth tell
every company has to become asoftware guy Coming in, as a
(25:01):
result, that people arestruggling with it in terms of
like trying to keep up with thepace of the digital
transformation and innovationthat is happening in the market.
The second biggest challenge ishow do we do it in a more in a
secure manner. Because that'sanother thing that is coming
into the play, it's not just theshipping the code, especially
with the cloud, we would developsomething and just put it out
there in the cloud expect thecloud is secure, that's a wrong
(25:22):
assumption, you have to makesure that your data, your your
bills, your deployments, youhave to protect it, there is no
other way around AWS and Azureand GCP, they will only give the
offer the utility computing andthey'll give you the compute for
a cost. And they have to run,the enterprises have to run
their application, they have tomanage the deployments as a
result coupled with softwaredelivery management in the
(25:44):
digital transformation, alongwith because it's continuous
innovation, right? It's not likeyou just do the release once a
year, or once in six months,it's a continuous innovation
every week, every day. Andsometimes every two weeks,
sometimes once a month dependson the company trajectory and
their adoption and their Agiletransformation roadmap. So it
varies from there, it's hard tokeep keep up with the pace of
(26:06):
innovation also managing withpeople with that. So it's we
continue to see that that is adigital transformation coupled
with the software deliverymanagement along with DevOps.
devsecops is one of the one ofthe big no longer the nice to
have any more for four years.But it's nice to have now it's a
line item, everybody's talkingabout it, executives are talking
about it.
Eveline Oehrlich (26:28):
Which brings me to my almost last question,
it's around skills, we at DevOpsInstitute are very passionate
about upskilling, and helpingthe different roles right, and
in the last five years have beenconducting the research around
skills. And we're just at thepoint where we are releasing our
upskilling 2023. report inApril. So I'm doing a lot of
(26:51):
research there. So if you haveto give advice to our listeners,
and remember, those are theirsoftware developers, software
engineers, there are DevOpsengineers there's SRE is, but if
there are a few things, youwould say, hey, really focus on
this? What would that be?
Kumar Chivukula (27:10):
It's the continue to when you when you're
in the technology field, it'snot a the what environment is
changing around us. Right? Soand continue to keep up with the
basic core elements of the rightone is the one is the cloud
stack, because cloud is going tobe there for next 10 years, I
continue to be there, it's theonly wall which can change. But
keep up with the certificationsand keep up with Cloud level
(27:34):
certification, there are a lotof free courses that offer both
AWS and Azure GCP. And also youcan sign up for the course
Coursera Udemy. And then a lotof the videos are available in
in the internet, where you canjust take advantage of them, and
then be able to upskill andcontinue to upskill. And like
attending the some of the tradeshows, and wherever possible,
(27:56):
most of them are virtual now,thanks to pandemic and most of
the sessions used to be inperson now the virtual so that
we have a lot more opportunityfor people to learn from the
community. And effectively, anew kind of like you have to
transform into into more of SREDevOps team no longer just doing
the configuration management didthey have to have a language,
(28:18):
they have to at least understandthe data structures languages,
and will be able to understandthe algorithms is very, very
important. No, they don't havedeveloped all of them. But they
will be dealing with thedevelopers who speak the
language, having the idea aboutall of them and be able to
understand proficient in onelanguage will be always helpful.
Because once you understand thelanguage, it's easy to replicate
(28:38):
the knowledge across the rest ofthe languages that are going to
be there in the market. And it'slike, to me, it's we continue to
keep up with the cloud vendorswhat they're doing, and then
basically, take one or at leastone of one or two withdrawal
possible, which is one minimum,to certainly have a
certification in that so thatway you will know and then you
will people recognize thatpeople understand the value and
(29:01):
value that and then havingkeeping up with trade shows and
also continue to leverageadvantage of the communities
communities are things that wehave. Plus, obviously we have
now we are going to be taught toa Coursera Udemy and a bunch of
other things LinkedIn learning,they're all the things that
resources are available at amuch cheaper rate than we used
(29:21):
to be before and is accessibleindividual so you can sign up
for a monthly plan. You can signup for a yearly plan and put a
plan a plan together, what winsinstructor led or like you can
do the self paced learning aswell. So
Eveline Oehrlich (29:33):
Fabulous. Fabulous Kumar, thank you so
much. I have one more question,but this is more of a fun
question. Yeah. So what is yourfavorite weekend activity? I'm
assuming you have sometimes aweekend.
Kumar Chivukula (29:47):
Yeah, I do. Like obviously if a weekend
comes in, I want to spend timewith the family as much as
possible and also like to me, Imy fun time is mostly around,
catching up on Reading andespecially I'm not really
reading books and books but Ithink I listen to a lot of
podcasts and listen to somevideos and follow the some of
(30:09):
the blog posts and so on soforth and try to keep keep up
myself. And I try to take myselfout and then go for do some
exercise and walk and long walksand when they have a free day,
the last one is about likecatching up on sports and that's
just I like sports and publicacceptance on the sports.
Eveline Oehrlich (30:30):
Great, super. We have been with Kumar Chiba
Kula CTO for apcera, a DevOpsorchestration platform Kumar,
thank you so much for joining metoday on humans of DevOps
podcast. Humans of DevOpspodcast is produced by DevOps
Institute. Our audio productionteam includes Julia Papp and
(30:50):
Brendan Leigh. I'm humans ofDevOps podcast executive
producer Evelyn Yoli. If youwould like to join us on a
podcast, please contact us atpodcasts at DevOps
institute.com. I'm Emilygnomish. Stay safe and hope that
you tune in next time.
Narrator (31:09):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the humans of
DevOps podcast. Don't forget tojoin our global community to get
access to even more greatresources like this. Until next
time, remember, you are part ofsomething bigger than yourself.
You belong
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.