Shaun O’Meara, Mirantis | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

This is texturung TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to our kubecon day two coverage here in Amsterdam. I'm joined today by Shawn O'Mara.

Cliff got it, Amara. Omara Sean is with morantis and we're gonna talk about a whole bunch of things. But before we get to that Sean O'Mara, how did you know give us a little bit of your story?

Sure. I'm the global field tto with morantes been to the company for now on seven years. Now being a number of different roles within the organization and seeing the company grow from where we started.

It's very much the open stack infrastructure Focus company. Yep. So where we are today where we still have that infrastructure side very focused on the kubernetes space.

Now, of course why we're here but we've grown up from that infrastructure company and we're starting to offer more more services and applications in the application space. And our goal is to make developers lives easier, ultimately absolutely and you know, it's funny. I mean we're talking about being here and it's a little quiet now, which is good.

I guess sessions must be young because it gets loud here. Yeah, if anything this year is Current is taught me that cloud made of has matured where it's not just the developers anymore developers are still a huge part of it, but we spend less of our time especially my time here talking to people and I have a good seat here talking to people like in past few cons. We'd be talking about multi-threaded application developments, right?

microservices You know and they can hold container thing that has now become woodwork if you will. Yeah Baseline, so and we talk about higher things. Right and it's I think that I think it's also it's a maturation and evolving.

kind of community But it really cements that cloud native is the is the stack. It is ultimately it's a stack. It's the plumbing that we run our applications on.

Yep, you know, none of us. Yes a lot of the audience at a kubecon and and at these events that we this community wraps itself around a lot of this audience are building the plumbing a building that tools I ultimately the business value for the customers that we're servicing is the code that they're running on top of our tools and how quickly they can get that code into a production environment how they deal with the governance around that how they handle the risk around that we're providing them tools to do that. But ultimately the value for business is that code that they write and that's really where we want to spend a lot more of our focus and times is making that a simple Journey for your developer.

Not your devops audience, but you're developer devops is an important portion of this but ultimately devops is a function within a larger development community and if we look at businesses where the majority of developers is reside, which is the big Enterprise Actual services companies even your isvs, you know, your software companies devops are still a small portion of the audience. The guys who actually interacting with our products at the lower level or your devops engineers. Yeah, but the guys are writing that function code that day-to-day development.

I would argue that they don't really care about kubernetes or microservices or the latest service mesh capability. It's important for Value, but do they really care? Right?

So for us we've we've transitioned the company we've gone we do infrastructure well. There are a few other people who do infrastructure. Well, we have our own unique take on it.

We like to do and provide a more bespoke. Experience for our customers we're able to Pivot fast. We're just that right size of engineering organization.

But now we're saying that developer that Enterprise developer who doesn't really want to care about infrastructure. It doesn't want to care about writing a thousand Yarns yaml to get his complex web app. Out there, he wants a different experience he or she wants a different experience.

So, how do we give them that experience? How do we make it simple? Simple and inverted commas here because there's never actually that simple but how do we make it simple for them to bring along their function code on a day-to-day basis?

provide proven standardized tested application architectures and let's use a great example your typical web app. It's going to be three tier. It's a typical web app.

It's going to have some kind of front-end some kind of middleware and some kind of database. We want to pull those together as simply as possible. They're the same across everywhere back out there, there's nuances, but they're the same.

So developers can come along they inject a code. That's stage one. Great.

I've got code in production. One argues that's just the first stage because you've tested that once but you have to be anyway, the beginning not the beginning of the end that first time you put it into production. You probably have some leeway.

It's day two. It's when I'm building that next functional feature when I'm building that next capability. Okay that need that really is going to make a difference to my business.

Now I can't just go and change production. So, how do I take that exact same pipeline that I built to put code in production? But I don't really care about.

Somebody else has got to worry about that. And make a exact copy of that but with just my changes. And so that's where we're starting to focus.

We're focusing on without with the amazing acquisition and Lagoon. We're really building that environment for developers where they can come in and drop just their code. They can easily test and validate.

It's all handled for them yet. If they want to get under the hood and tweak things. We still offer them that capability.

That's the stage one that we're focusing on today. I love it. I'm further to that we've gone.

Well, that's the new code problem right greenfields greenfields. It's always easy to deal with the Greenfield. If only the whole world were a green field.

Yeah. I mean, you know, we wouldn't need us that much would you right? There's a lot of work that's already in production developers have been building kubernetes apps for three years now.

Yes, we're only reaching the true productionization of kubernetes now at any real sort of scale. But there's a lot of Legacy kubernetes applications terrible you were to use I know but Legacy. So we're saying okay the next generation of that is how do I take all this Legacy analyze it but not change it.

Evolve it without changing the way the people who look after it today have to work, but I want to apply policy to that. And so that's been the next generational leap. We're taking with the next round of products.

So we bought shipper. Hmm shippers, come on board. We're busy doing a lot of work around shipper relaunching as part of our bigger ecosystem really helping companies with existing load apply policy, but also understand what's happening within that.

simple things am I having containers restarting tens of thousands of times? What caused that what was the change that happened that caused that restart to happen 10,000 times? Can I get the history of that?

In a way that's accessible to developers. So that's what shippers focusing on right and then within that development life cycle, of course going. All right, cool.

So I've done that. Now, how do I apply consistent policy over all the next generation of code that I so for us all of that is being wrapped into the lens into lanes are left Banner Lanes becoming that Gateway for developers Lanes is very devops focused today. Ideally.

It's very much about how do I interact with kubernetes in a Consistent way without having to spend my life learning cube-cattle commands or you know, trying to manage 10,000 command lines I come along and I have it all visualized for me. And again I come back to that core message, which I was referring to which is how do I make life simpler? I don't make it easier.

The ultimate goal here is business and the people who are creating code for my business. If they're spending their valuable time. dealing infrastructure Versus writing code where's the value point?

They're writing code that creates money for the business. They're adding value. Simple perspective that's why I might developers to write code not be plumbers.

precisely and that's a good that's that's a simply. No charge did use that as your marketing. Yeah, can we get the video that's often with the video but right out there, but but it is true, right?

It's And that was something quite frankly that I always thought was a little Bass ackwards about devops is that we are going to give developers more things to do other than writing code. Because they're the highest paid people on the on the team and we just need to give them more. Yep, right where if I'm gonna give them more I want them to write more code.

I want them to write secure code. I wanted to write quality code. I want them to write code that fulfills the mission those mission in the business meet.

Yeah, but I don't really need them to be platform Engineers or or sorrys or testers. Or you know any of the other marriages for a reason, you know, I grew up I grew up in South African and era where we had to be Jacksonville trades because we just didn't have the scope. And we always used to comment about the rest of the world seem to have special Specialists for everything and then I dealt with the rest of the world and I see that today we see now.

We're we're defocusing. By and large just as an industry. Where do you focusing?

We're trying to get people to do too much. Yeah, and what's happening is we're actually slowing ourselves down and we're reducing our quality if we can take a and this is almost a Manifesto in its own way. But if we can allow people to focus on doing one or two things exceptionally well, And that other people focus on what they do exceptionally well.

The combine the combination of those two is where we're going to end up with building value for our businesses and building this new digital age for all businesses. So I like that a lot. We're gonna wrap up in here in just a minute, but for the wrap up if it's okay shines, I'd like you to look into that camera.

Tell the folks. What's the best way to engage? Yeah with marantis.

Where did they go have? What's the on-ramp look like, right. How do we how do we where's the rubber meet the road for them?

Okay. So the best way to deal with morantis is reach out to us through our website, you know, one of our salespeople will get in contact with you. We will sit down and have a deep conversation to understand your problems.

We're not interested in coming to you and pressing a new set of products on top of you. We want to understand what your challenges are within your business today and have a deeper conversation. We'll we want to learn that's our goal.

We want to learn from you. com. He's a click button there.

There's a bit of AI there that'll pop up and you can have a conversation and we'll get a meeting set up with you as soon as possible. Everybody has AI today everybody has a that's a whole conversation right next interview. Also a big Focus for us.

I'm sure sure. Thank you. Sean omara here on textrung TV.

We're gonna take a break. We're gonna be wrapping up day two. I mean, maybe just another interview or two I think and I will be back again tomorrow stay tuned.

We're live in Amsterdam.