Harnessing Innovation: AI, DevOps and Security Enhancements with Martin Reynolds – KubeCon Europe 2025

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel. We're back here at uh, Q Con.

Really happy to have Martin Reynolds of harness, uh, with us. You know, if you follow Textron tv, you know that Nick Durkin is a frequent guest. Nick, of course, field CTO at harness.

Well, he's a field CTO at harness too. We've got two of them. Figure that out.

Are there just two or are there four of you? No. So actually now there is four, Four Field CTOs.

There is four field CTOs. So you're emea? Yeah, I'm emea.

There is, uh, Nick who's covering the us. Then, uh, we have one that came in with the Traceable acquisition, so more of a security focused, uh, field, CTO. Uh, and then we have, uh, a new one here in London too, to, to oh, really everything that's going on in Europe, just because the growth has been insane over here.

That's fantastic. So Martin, give us a little bit of your background before you, you know, joined Harness. Sure.

So honestly, uh, engineer at Heart, you know, 30 years roughly, I hate to admit that, but it is what it is. Yeah. Uh, 30 years, you know, building software.

Uh, most recently the, the last company I was at, uh, I put that first product into the cloud, which kind of moved me over into that DevOps thing because I had to then operate it, make it work better. Uh, built out that DevOps team, which became a platform engineering team, about 40 products into the cloud, uh, which was great fun. Um, as part of that journey, I was the fourth customer for Harness for cd, and, uh, yeah, like six and a half years a customer for cd and then, you know, feature flag ci, cloud cross management, uh, the whole, I know a whole raft of them.

Yeah. So, uh, I've kind of traveled the journey on the other side and, uh, when I decided it was time to move on, the opportunity to come to Harness was here, believe in the products. So here I am.

Good for you. That's a great story. Great story.

So Martin, um, what's Harness doing here at Q ut? Well, quite a bit. I guess we, we have quite a bit going on at the moment.

Uh, we've been talking a lot about what we've been doing with the AI agents, which has been kind of fun. Um, and especially how that relates to, you know, and you well know, we started off kind of deploying into Kubernetes, trying to make that, those deployments easy and just the evolution of that and what you can do with the AI agents to make that even easier. You know, so now we have a DevOps agent, you know, which will help you build out those pipelines automatically help you solve the problems when it goes wrong.

Uh, so, you know, and, and just honestly make good recommendations, Hey, you can parallelize this process that will make your process quicker. You're missing a security test here that you should really do. Uh, and then, you know, going beyond that, we've, uh, built up a SRE agent, uh, which I should mention the, the core code logic that the SRE agent was built from.

We launched a new open source project called Respond Now, which is kind of a incident management tool. Uh, then beyond that, we've kind of built this, uh, SRE agent that kind of looks at when your system fails, analyzes the logs, builds out, that kind of post-mortem type stuff. You get a nice summary of all the things that are involved in the issue, keeps all the communications concise for you.

So again, makes incident management easier, less stressful. Maybe you don't need to call all those 20 people into a war room. Hopefully not.

Well, sometimes you do that, sometimes You do, right. But, you know, and maybe avoid some of that. I Get it.

You know, and, and that, and that right there is kind of the promise of ai, right? That we maybe have to do that a lot less. Yeah.

Um, I think the other thing though, Martin, is, you know, maybe this isn't obvious to people who don't come to CubeCon. You know, we serve a large IT audience. Not everyone.

DevOps, no cyber security AI platform engineer. Well, platform engineers are here too. Digital transformation.

Yeah. IT infrastructure. Uh, in some ways you can't have cloud native without DevOps.

No. And you can't have DevOps today almost. Well, maybe you could without a working in a cloud native environment.

But the fact is they're so closely intertwined. Yeah, I I think that's absolutely right. And I honestly, uh, so as you well know, we have a ridiculous number of modules at this point, which is awesome because it covers that whole, you know, software delivery lifecycle.

But actually it's difficult to talk about that. And what you're alluding to is actually, you know, what you need to talk about is, well, what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to achieve a digital transformation?

How can DevOps help you do that? How can modernizing your DevOps help you do that? Hey, do you know what you're trying to improve your platform engineering and your developer experience?

Okay, well, what are the things that can help you do that? And, you know, and when I translate that, you know, that might be, Hey, do you know what? You should really improve your cd, maybe your security testing.

Uh, maybe you need some chaos engineering in there. You know? Yeah.

Maybe those things are the things, or maybe you need its own developer portal. You know, it, it depends the angle that you're coming from. But I think you the conversation, the right way to have those conversations and is to really talk about what are the things that you are trying to achieve and worry about what products make that up after Agreed.

Focus on the goal and then work out the details underneath to make that happen. But if you know what the outcomes are that you want them, you know, then you can work out how to make good DevOps happen. Make good security happen.

Agreed. I, um, I think it's also, you know, there's something about technology. We're always looking for the next thing, even before we've digested the last thing.

Yeah. And transformation, you know, was a very cool word, but everyone wants to now do modernization, right? Yes.

And modernization has within it. Let's, let's go to a microservices architecture. Maybe we want to get off of a, a hypervisor 'cause the licensing is changing or something like that.

And, and so there's always, it's always the next thing there is always the next, the next thing. And, uh, AI and agentic. Ai.

Yeah. Two next things. I come to conferences like this because it, it grounds you into what the larger audience considers the next thing.

If I'm thinking about what's the next thing here? Observability is the thing. Right now.

AI is a thing, but the next thing as well, and primarily agen ai. Yeah. Um, you know, the, these are all coming together, but they're all, you know, these old technologies don't die.

They get into the work. So all of these things we're talking about are built on this cloud native infrastructure are built in a DevOps framework about how we do things. Yeah.

The, the CI/CD cycle. Yeah. Software pipelines, supply chain, they're all, everything's getting stacked on each other.

I I was about to say, it's like a maturity thing, right? Yeah. Because what happens is, and honestly, I've spoken to so many people here who want to do the thing that's over here.

You know, we want do the great observ ability up, but you, you get This, You need that. Absolutely. That's foundational.

It's the foundation stuff that they, and a lot of companies are still at the founda they want to get to here. They're still at the foundation. Well, that, That's something again, people like you and I, we live in events like this.

We talk to people. Yeah. We live in a bubble where we take it for granted.

But what we don't realize is, you know what, there's still a very sizable, Absolutely. Chunk of the market where DevOps is new to them. Clouds native, you know, they're not, they're, they're, they're grappling with whether they wanna stay on VMware or not.

Absolutely. And I I, yeah, I've had those conversations and you know, sometimes it's, it's really interesting 'cause people will come to you and go, Hey, we want some great developer experience. And then you dig a little deeper and you go, do you know what?

You really need to fix your build and deployment before You, Because you all get a better developer experience by fixing out First just doing fixed Stuff. Do the basics and, uh, build the stuff on top. Don't, don't start with a veneer and still have all the problems underneath.

I agree with you. I, and, and I think that really is the, the crux of it. The crux of it.

Anyway, Martin, we're about outta time. Wow. This goes really quick.

It really does. io, Harness. Do io Absolutely.

Take a look. We're there, We're all, you're here at Q Con, but where else are you gonna be? Uh, so we're gonna be at Google next, uh, next week in, uh, Vegas.

I had to think about where that was there. Yeah. Yes.

Are You going? I'm going. Yeah, I'll be, I'm not.

I want Mitchell who you met with is going. I'm not, I need to, I'm actually staying in Europe next week. Okay.

I needed some time. You know what we didn't talk about though, now that I'm thinking about it, is the traceable merger, Right? We didn't, we didn't talk about Traceable merger, you know, for those who don't know.

So Harness is founded by a friend of mine, Jody Zel. Jody uh, was the founder of AppDynamics Harness and the third company Traceable ai, which had an amazing story around security tracing and then AI and security. And I guess now it's about two or three months, right?

Yeah. It was merged into Harness and it's given harness some real security chops, real security DNA. How's that kind of manifesting?

It's, it's going really well. And it, it's really interesting 'cause it's kind of taken a, you know, we had security tooling, we had a story around, you know, embedding security into your pipelines. This really takes up that maturity level.

This makes Your security company Yeah, it does. And it makes AppSec a core message, you know, And that's important in DevOps. Absolutely.

And it takes us beyond the, hey, we are building, we're deploying, we are building, we're deploying, and we understand the context of it. Right. I I've heard that like cloud context in the code, you know, I understand everything that's running and how it's running and how it's talking to each other and how secure it is.

And I can relate that all the way back to the code and all the bits in between. And that's just a much stronger message to have. I love it.

Alright, my friend. Thank you Martin. Thank You very much indeed.

Martin Reynolds Field, CTO EMEA at Harness. He'll be a Google next, next week. I won't, but check him out.

If you're out there, we're gonna take a break here at, uh, cube Con. We'll be back in a moment.