AI Integration in Software Development with Harry Wang at AWS re:Invent 2024

This is Techstrong tv. Hello everyone. It's Alan Shimmel with Techstrong and we are live, that's right, live in Las Vegas.

We're at our wind studio with our AWS Reinvent coverage. You know, we, uh, the day one, well it was actually last night was the opening keynote, but day one today, keynotes are still going on. It's been a lot of, lot of announcements.

We're gonna be covering a bunch of them here. We also have some of our FU room analysts in here weighing in through the day. We have a full day of, of coverage.

I wanted to kick off our coverage today though with my friend Harry Wong. Harry is with sonar makers of the popular Sonar source. You may know them, if not, not to worry.

We'll get you up to speed. Harry, welcome to Techstrong tv. It's great having you here, Alan.

Thank you for having me. So when did you get in to Vegas for reinvent? It was just last night.

Alright. Alright. So at least you had a night to sleep.

It was good. Straight from the airport. I felt.

I can feel the energy right after like this. Yeah. Yep.

So Harry, you are VP of of Growth and New Ventures. That's right At at Sonar. I'd an interesting title.

How did you come to become the, uh, VP of of Growth, invent and New Ventures here? Give us a little of your background. Sounds good.

I was a software engineering by training for many of the audience at this venue. Now these days, uhhuh and, uh, before joining Sonar, I was with a Google for over a decade. Oh really?

And I always enjoy the intersection between engineering, technology and business. So within Sonar, uh, I joined Sonar earlier this year. Uh, this role is, uh, for lack of better description of fancy, of fancy title for many different things in one package.

So I manage our investments. I manage our corporate dev and partnership technology partnership in particular as well as our product marketing. So it's a very exciting to be, be able to see Business audience portfolio.

Yeah, that's a great portfolio. So, you know what I mentioned Sonar, and of course I said Sonar and Source Britain. Not everyone out here is gonna be familiar.

If you give me a give our audience, you know, a little background so they, in case they're not familiar. Yeah, absolutely. Sonar is the best known for our products on the cube in the developer communities.

We've been 15 years around and we ultimately help the developers and the organization build better software by improving the code quality. So we do so throughout the different stages of a software development process, from the moment the developers are writing code in the IDs to the places to the workflow, they actually navigate from the code to build, to deploy, and all the way through the testing stage. Right?

We do so by really surfacing the issues, whether it's quality issues or security vulnerability issues in the code. And we make a recommendation to the developers on how they should be able to fixing it. So by catching the issues early on in the development process, we can really help unleash the developer productivity and the lower cost of maintaining a software.

You know, when we think about Shift left and shift left security and shift left code quality, really that, that is the sonar kinda right in your sweet spot. Right, exactly. And that's what you guys have been doing.

Um, well before we go any further for people want to get more information on Sonar, what's their website? com is the best way easy to remember. Mm-Hmm.

And, uh, we are officially known as a sonar source as the company name. Uh, sonar is a much, uh, is I think people called Sonar. Exactly.

I'm old enough to remember when they still called it Sonar Source, but yeah. Most people refer to it as sonar today. Exactly.

And that's S-O-N-A-R. That's that, that's exactly right. Yeah.

So part of your portfolio is strategic relationships. You're here at Reinvent. I'm assuming AWS is a strategic relationship for Sonar.

Absolutely. We recently became the, so-called I-S-V-A-I, uh, that's a stands for ISV Salary Partners. It's a different tier for IV and is recognized for the contribution and the business we've done together as a business.

And also I'm very honored to be, um, sonar representing Sonar to be named as the Rising Stock Partners at a Ws re invent. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you.

Appreciate it. Excellent. Um, they made a slew of announcements today around code, uh, testing, code security, the whole queue developer thing.

But you know, this again is something I said Sonars been doing a long time. You really sonar and, and sonar. Cuba is very popular in the open source community.

It's a real power for the company. Mm-Hmm. You wouldn't mind talk a little about the, the intersection of open source and sonar?

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, we are developer first. Uh, we always came, we founded by developers.

Uh, we came from that heritage and our main products from the cube is open source based. Uh, and, um, you know, as a developer, individual developer or small team, they can always come to Sona Cube Cloud, which is a free tier product, but also they are able to get access to the source code and spin up their own releases for experimentation or development on their own. Um, when it comes down to business, we appreciate the organizations who actually care a lot about the support, the premium of, uh, uh, support available as well as the enterprise level feature.

So we build on the open source community and we offer additional feature and capabilities, but also automated the services to the enterprise customer. Excellent. Look, you can't walk more than five minute, five steps here on around that AWS floor without tripping over ai.

Ah. So I've gotta assume sonar, like many companies has put a lot of effort, a lot of resources into not only how do you use AR to AI to allow sonar to better inspect code, to better test code, to better secure code. Yeah.

But also, you know, there's 27 million developers they say in the world today. Yeah. But growing Every Day.

Well, once we start using ai, everyone's a developer, there'll be 500 million developers, right? Yeah. They may not be the developer professional developers we think of.

Yeah. But everyone will be generating code and just tell the AI I want IT app that you May not just recognize it's all sitting in the background. Exactly.

But someone's gotta test that code. Someone's gotta look at that code for security. That's sonars job.

Right? Absolutely. Yeah.

How is the influx influx of AI generated code kind of changing the mission for Sonar? Yeah. We, we see our mission remains the same.

We obviously, uh, want to adapt as the process of software development adapts. And this happens every couple decades. And I'm very, very personally as a technologist our very itself.

I'm very excited to be in this era. And the, in terms of you think, I like the draw analogy. If you're thinking back of what we're going through right now to maybe 30, 40 years ago, how people really move on, developers moving on from assembly language to the more, you know, descriptive pro higher level program language like CEC plus plus or later on Python, ava, it's really about how do you express humans' desire and requirements and then make that machine readable and turn that into a reliable high quality application.

We have just actually moving up and up into the extraction layer. Now what we do is really actually the developer community as in general, is moving up a layer from more of a prescriptive, high level rigid program. Language to the next layer may be more natural language description of what you wanna achieve.

So in this process, the tooling will change, the processes will change, the quality and security control will change, uh, the, how you actually implement that. One thing doesn't change really as an organization, as the beneficiaries of application, you still want have safe, reliable, trustworthy applications. And that's in line with our mission is how do we really interpret the intent in helping the developers, the 1 billion developers as soon be there, really ensure the code underlying the hood, which they may, may not see, is remaining in up to the standard set by the organization, set by the owner of the applications.

Well said. Luckily, I'm here interviewing you. So I, I remember 30 plus years ago when we moved from assembly to CC plus and c Shar over the years, and it is very much a, a, a sea change.

Yep. Right? That, that's where we're undergoing here now.

So rubber has to meet the road though. Yep. Right.

So is is there, is there a whole new products within the Sonar Source family that are dealing with this AI Yeah. Tsunami of code that's coming? Or are we just kind of strengthening the existing sonar cube?

It's a combination of both. There's only, I can only speak to what's available, what we announced recently. Sure.

So, and I can share what, uh, you know, uh, our review for the future of, uh, you know, our product roadmap in terms of, uh, the ai, there are two angles that we want the position center to help our user and customer base. One is really in terms of recommendation moving or further expanding from issue detections to help developer how to actually fix the issues. Right.

The backlog of issues today with these, uh, you know, all the cybersecurity going, uh, is only growing and how do we return from just actually the issue we surface to something or the recommendation with a hit a click of the button, the developer can actually resolve the issue. That's what we really recently announced about the AI cofi. And that's available in a certain UBA product effect.

It's within Cube right now. Yes, exactly. And then the second, um, uh, capability we recently announced a couple weeks ago is really geared towards organizations as a, uh, enterprise, as a organization.

The, whether it's the CIOs or it's the CISOs or any other VP of engineering, executive stakeholder, they really want to make sure the quality of the application, the quality of the code, stay the same up to the bar that is set as an organization regardless whether the code was written by the human developers or it's coming from the AI or you know, the combination. Right. So our role from so and SonarQube perspective is really ensure this collaboration is remains the same.

They are able to set a standard as an organization, they're able to enforce that standards as an organization. We recently announced the capability called so called, uh, AI Code Assurance, which is exactly trying to facilitate these different stakeholder within organization to accomplish that. Got it.

So AI code, it should, let me ask a silly question. Are you using AI to test the AI code? Um, the, we internally Absolutely.

We do. Right. So that, that's actually, uh, reminds a, a movie the enemy of state.

Right? That's exactly, he's watching the watchers, right? Yeah.

So I can, um, maybe just, uh, step out of my sonar role for a second. Sure. Um, and just in general, as a participant to the industry, I, I am very excited about the, all the different technology coming to solutions in ai, adapting and serving different parts of a software development stage.

Um, we do see a role for Sonar to be really playing in terms of verifying the AI generat code, not only just from the lines of code perspective, but also fundamentally how we ensure the AI model behind the scene is also doing the right thing. And to your point, anyone playing in that space, there's also the question, if you using the same ai AI model model, uh, verifying the same AI model, generating code, there's this notion about model collapse, right? So, um, it's a great question about how we as an industry ensure the source the data is coming.

There's some golden dataset that's actually not being polluted, not being intended in that AI model training process. Again, this is, uh, I think a, a common problem that's still existing in the industry. And, um, I'm very excited to be in as a participant of the industry to solve that problem.

You know, our, our TV here went off, but it, I was, was watching the, uh, keynotes on here this morning and one of the things that I think it was Andy Jassy that really hit home with is, Hey, we're early in the Gen AI Absolutely. Journey here. Yeah.

So, as you say these things, I don't wanna say they're first generation, but they're early and we're going to see a lot Yeah. A lot of evolution. We're gonna see a lot of complexity Yeah.

And sophistication built into these things. So look, I'm excited as I think you are because, you know, it's what's coming through loud and clear is you're, you're an engineer, you're a technologist, it's a great time to be alive, right? Yeah.

There's, there's good stuff going on. Um, what else do you have going on here at Reinvent? Uh, we have, uh, you know, happy hours and our booth and, uh, we have a huge team here meeting our customers, greeting our developer and users.

So that's, uh, keeping us, uh, busy. Um, at the same time, we obviously might, in my own capacity, engaging our partners in the ecosystem, whether it's, uh, from people in the observability space or in the DevOps platform space. And of course AWS as our strategic partner, uh, we have a lot of conversation going on, so stay tuned for any announcement that we'll have in the coming years or coming months.

Absolutely. Harry, thank you so much for coming up here and talking to us. Thank you, Adam.

Enjoy the rest of reinvent. We'll, we, we cover sonar pretty regularly, so we'll maybe we, we appreciate back on, on regular text on TV and we'll go from there. Thank you.

Thank You too, so much, Adam. Alright. Yeah.

Harry Wong vp, uh, revenue and Growth and Ventures. Growth and Ventures. Excuse me.

I was thinking Revenue officer for some reason. I mean, you Come up with a better Title Ventures. Thank you.

You know, you're the first VP of Growth and Ventures I've ever met, so congratulations on that. All right. We're gonna take a break.

We're live. We have more coverage coming in. We have some other, uh, great content for you here at our AWS Reinvent Station.

This is Alan Shimel. We'll be back in a bit.