The CTO Advisor

This is a double dose of the CTO Dose on the CTO Advisor podcast. Say that 3-times fast. Keith sits down in two separate interviews with leaders in the Kubernetes community. The first interview is with Kubernetes co-founder and VMware …

This is a double dose of the CTO Dose on the CTO Advisor podcast. Say that 3-times fast. Keith sits down in two separate interviews with leaders in the Kubernetes community. The first interview is with Kubernetes co-founder and VMware Principal Engineer Joe Beda. Keith and Joe discuss how VMware is approaching Kubernetes for an enterprise audience. The two touch on VMware’s Project Pacific and Tanzu.

In the 2nd interview, Keith interviews Brian Lyles who was the Conference co-Chair for Kubecon 2019 San Diego. The conversation shifts focus to community and culture around Kubernetes in the opensource community and Kubernetes in the enterprise community.

Overall, the episode is one of the longer ones we published but two very related conversations.

Joey D'Antoni (@jdanton), Principle Cloud Architect joins the program to talk all things Microsoft Multi-cloud including Azure Arc (not to be confused with Microsoft Arch, the mouse). Keith and Joey tough on other leaders in hybrid including VMware with vSphere everywhere/Tanzu as well as NetApp from a data capability.

I know, I know. I hate Kubernetes. Why am I talking about it so much? Because it’s a great technology to expose the challenges that most organizations face. Kubernetes was designed to host stateless processes. If Netflix needs a surge in video encoders or streamers, Kubernetes orchestrates the provisioning of thousands of container instances almost instantly. When demand has subsided, those instances disappear.

Traditional enterprise applications aren’t designed to operate in that fashion. For example, application servers in legacy design keep some type of configuration state in the application server. If you’ve ever had to load balance across a set of application servers that wanted to “own” the application session, you’ll understand why you can’t simply containerize application server of a 3-tier monolithic app.

So, what if you do have a bunch of stateless application components you’d like to containerize and adopt cloud-native operations to those systems? I sat down with Damani Corbin to talk about where I believe the gaps are in Kubernetes maturity and what Damani has seen in his travels as a Kubernetes expert helping companies deploy Kubernetes at scale.

I hope you enjoy this fun and insightful conversation.

I know, I know. I hate Kubernetes. Why am I talking about it so much? Because it’s a great technology to expose the challenges that most organizations face. Kubernetes was designed to host stateless processes. If Netflix needs a surge …

Thanks to Redis Labs for sponsoring the CTO Dose during AWS re:Invent. Keith Townsend caught up with Redis Labs Chief Product Officer Alvin Richards. The duo talked about how Redis Labs adds value beyond being the primary sponsor for open …

Thanks to Redis Labs for sponsoring the CTO Dose during AWS re:Invent. Keith Townsend caught up with Redis Labs Chief Product Officer Alvin Richards. The duo talked about how Redis Labs adds value beyond being the primary sponsor for open source project behind the popular database. Richards shares some basics and history behind Redis and helps introduce watchers to the concept of a key-value store such as Redis and a column DB such as Cassandra.

Richards makes an argument for why customers should consider engaging Redis Labs for their Redis support and functionality extensions.

Kubecon had over 200-sponsors. All were scanning badges for sales leads, giving away t-shirts, and had booth raffles. Kubecon felt like a traditional enterprise conference walking the show floor. However, if Kubecon 2019 San Diego was your first opensource software …

Kubecon had over 200-sponsors. All were scanning badges for sales leads, giving away t-shirts, and had booth raffles. Kubecon felt like a traditional enterprise conference walking the show floor. However, if Kubecon 2019 San Diego was your first opensource software (OSS) or Kubernetes conference, I’ll forgive you if you walked away thinking you live in the stone ages.

Keith and Alex discuss the comings and goings of Serverless and this conference.

Director of OpenShift Strategy & CloudCast host Brian Gracely joins the podcast to talk Kubernetes in the enterprise. As a previously active member of the OpenStack community, Brian brings a unique view as he now leads strategy for Kubernetes at Red Hat.

Keith and Brian talk discuss the effort to make OpenStack-based OpenShift a PaaS and the lessons learned to the Kubernetes distribution. A critical part of the conversation is how Red Hat brings their enterprise experience to making Kubernetes consumable for the typical enterprise IT shop.

At 22:00, Keith asks the competitive question. It’s not the obvious OpenShift vs. VMware PKS but Openshift vs. public cloud services.