Narrator: You're listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a

podcast focused on advancing the humans of DevOps through skills,

knowledge, ideas, and learning, or the skil framework.

Kumar Chivukula: expectations from the prospects and customers

are huge, because they expect everything to them yesterday.

It's very hard and even though you want to do it, but sometimes

you need to understand balance between what is possible versus

what is not possible. And sometimes you have to say no.

Eveline Oehrlich: 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 the topic, continuous orchestration.

Our special guest is Kumar Chiku. Tula. I hope I said your

name correctly Kumar Hello.

Kumar Chivukula: Yes, how are you?

Eveline Oehrlich: I'm fine. How are you?

Kumar Chivukula: I'm good. Thanks for having having me. I

really appreciate your time and opportunity to talk to you.

Eveline Oehrlich: Yes, excited for you to be with us today. Let

me give our listeners a little bit of a background. And then of

course, I'll open it up to you because you might want to add

something. So 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. I think that's

where you were before. Today, he or you is the co founder and CTO

of UB Sarah, driving the mission to help companies deliver

software fast, safe and secure by a disruptive DevOps

solutions. All of that sounds fantastic. So thank you again,

Kumar, welcome and glad that you're here. Thanks for taking

time out of your I'm sure busy day. The first question of

course, before we get started, if our listeners who are of

course roles like DevOps engineers, app dev, folks,

security people, individuals, contributors, leaders, give them

about the 10,000 foot level of what does appsero really do?

Kumar Chivukula: Absolutely, thank you. So if you look at the

current market, right, DevOps is nothing new. It's been there for

quite some time, the recent explosion of the digital

transformation of all the kinds of press companies and multi

cloud adoption, and the technological changes that is

happening in the cloud, the way the rapid pace and the rapid

pace. Like way the cloud evolved from easy to instances, to the

containers to the micro services to the server less plus all the

languages, it's very hard for enterprises to keep up with

existing the software delivery management, it's very complex.

It's resource intensive, and it's challenging for them to

keep up with agility, velocity, and then also visibility. If you

talk about like CTOs and CIOs and CTOs like care for agility

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 other things they do. But at the

highest level, that's what it is to solve the problem of how can

we continue to help agility velocity for the CTOs and CEOs

visibility and governance, and based on the practical

challenges that we've seen and the challenges that we see in

the current market and the gaps we started Apsara is that

continuous orchestration platform, what we do is we like,

as you rightfully said, in the early part of the introduction,

our mission and goal is to enable and empower enterprise

companies to make their software delivery faster, better and

secure. It's a very broad, bold statement loaded statement, I'll

just quickly unpack that. Our goal is to continue to protect

existing investment of the current enterprise companies.

And when we mean by the current investment, because people

already invested in the DevOps in the last three, four years,

we want to make sure that we invest we continue to protect

investment, and using our platform, accelerate the DevOps

and Dev SEC of journey in will, whether it be any cloud or

whether it be AWS, Azure GCP, or running in on prem, or working

across any technology stack or tool. So it just some summarize

it together. Our goal is to we continue to work with their

existing customers and have them keep the existing tool stack and

build the new code pipelines, which is one of the one of the

value proposition where they don't have to worry about

building the pipelines manually curate them and manage them at

scale as well and providing the end to end visibility with

respect to governance and where visibility with respect to doing

more with less. And that's the that's that's what we do. And

think about for the lack of better way to say that the way

the sales force solve the problem for the salespeople. We

want our opposite of platform we go and vision vision is to make

make it easy for the developers using offshore platform as well.

Eveline Oehrlich: So what I heard you say is that you are

protecting existing investments which is great because we do

know we are in a challenging situation right across the world

budgets aren't growing as much, I think between all the

different analysts is about maybe 5% or so in software and

in services. So that's great orchestration means to some

extent you are making and bringing things together, which

allows folks to actually improve their speed, reduce toil, and

improve the reliability and security of the services. So I

think that's probably an excellent, high level summary.

Now, you are yourself a CTO, CTO in a software company. Many of

our listeners probably have their own CTOs within their

companies, but they're not in software. But as a CTO in a

software company, what does that mean? What do you do on a day to

day basis?

Kumar Chivukula: Yeah, it's the title wise is the the next

startup company, we wear multiple hats, and from the from

the taking a step back and talk about what we do. Probably I'll

give my two cents. And I may not be the true for everybody, but

in the startup and working on a day to day basis, building the

product and setting the guidance and vision. And those are the

high level responsibilities of CTO making sure that but I'll

explain that in general, what I see. So as a CTO, your job is to

look at the future, look at the current pain points of the

customers and make sure that that the current technology

stack, also that the platform is aligning to that and making sure

that it is solving the problem, the biggest thing is on top of

the product, managing the product and technology roadmap,

we the CTO job is to make sure that alignment between sales,

marketing and product engineering is very important,

because it's very, otherwise, the CTO cannot just go and build

a team build the product and technology. And next thing you

know is after building the product into the platform,

there's no one to sell it and no one to understand what it is.

And alignment is absolutely critical. And that is one of the

biggest responsibility Besides building and managing the

technology stack and looking at Division, looking at the

innovation and whatnot. But that's the second set. The

second thing. Third thing is making sure that right people,

right people are in place to manage this thing because CTO

themselves as a city, we can't solve everything, you can only

solve so much. But you need to have a right set of people who

are managing the product, etc. People who are managing the

engineering, and then your reliability engineering SAS

platform, and you need to have a proper team that manages

architecture and design. So otherwise, it's very difficult

to bring it together and scale the platform as well. Their

highest level in the people in the product, people process

technology, and CTO plays a role in all of them in the initial

stages of the company, it's mostly around product and

people. And then when you start to grow into this one, and it

becomes a more process, and then the technology comes into play

along the way as well. So

Eveline Oehrlich: So you actually, and your role are an

orchestrator yourself, not just that your company does work in

the orchestration, you actually have the role of an orchestrator

as well amongst the different functions within your within

your organization. Now, you mentioned people and processes,

of course, people is the most important one and where I want

to go a little bit further, when you think about your day to day

job as CTO, I'm curious, what challenges do you face relative

to some of the people in the culture either within your

organization? Or what do you see within your installed base or to

clients? Because you said you do a lot of I'm assuming you're

doing a lot of conversations with prospects and clients? What

challenges do you have and see, relative to the human side and

the culture?

Kumar Chivukula: Yeah, the expectations from the prospects

and customers are huge, right? Because they expect everything

we done yesterday, it's very hard and even though you want to

do it, but sometimes you need to understand balance between what

is possible versus what is not possible. And sometimes you have

to say no and hard to say no in the middle of the conversation.

But we need to find a way to establish the relationship and

explain to the prospect and customer in terms of like how

they can need to align and how they need to think through this

one. Not everything needs to be done yesterday, not everything

is important. The prioritization, alignment with

respect to customer and also employees is one of the biggest

challenge that happens for many of the companies. Once you have

that alignment initial stages, it becomes easier but as and

when we add more customers, things are going to improve. But

once you build MVP once you have a product market fit once you

establish the go to market fit it the journey becomes easier,

which isn't we have an inflection stage of product

market fit to go to market fit and the initial stages were

building the product and headstone, building the product

and we're focusing on code to coding and testing and

validating and making sure the product is ready. And then

continue to add bells and whistles on top of it and add

security and add the reliability, the scalability, a

bunch of other features. That's where the journey comes in. But

the core product of core philosophy is not going to

change. The challenges are associated with it in terms of

like aligning the, the customer vision opposite, the opposite of

vision aligning customers. And also making sure that our team

is aligned to that is one of the critical component of the CTO

job. Because without that, it will be very hard, very hard for

either of the people to understand why we're not seeing

why we say no, or why we saying yes, people are not going to be

happy when you say yes to the customer come back with an

update, hey, we have to develop this new feature new capability

new, our new offering, and they want to understand why and why

not and what's ROI, what's the rate of return on investment,

these are the things we have to invest, and we have to manage

them. Because you don't want to build it for one customer,

right, and you don't want to accumulate technical debt, you

want to be very careful, managing the technical debt in

the company, and especially SAS company is very, very

challenging and very difficult as well. But if you have to have

build the culture in a way, you continue to draw the line, what

is the what what is the part of the product? What is not? What

is the core versus context? Once you do that becomes easier

conversation for, for having the challenges with challenge the

conversation with the customer, also with the employees as well.

Eveline Oehrlich: Great, I love what you said core versus

context, sometimes, in my role as an industry analysts, which

is my second job. When I go into briefings with some of my vendor

clients, they forget to share core, they only share context.

And that makes it sometimes very difficult. And then one other

thing you said, MVP, or minimum viable product, I heard

something just recently, which I really have adopted. I'm going

to call it a minimal lovable product instead of a minimal

viable product. Some of the enterprise clients loved when he

suggested that. Excellent, great.

Kumar Chivukula: Now a good minimum lovable product.

Eveline Oehrlich: Yeah, that's a new a new vocab. I mean, I'm

sure you heard about

Kumar Chivukula: it before. Yeah,

Eveline Oehrlich: I think I leveraged the aka stolen from

somebody else. But I don't I cannot remember. So I cannot

give that person credit. All right. So um, Sarah was founded,

I believe, in 2020. And with a vision, as you mentioned,

software developers and DevOps teams to achieve faster software

delivery through an orchestration platform and did

some research, of course on ops era. And I'm not a stranger to

you, because I covered or looked at, at your solution. When I was

doing research as an industry analysts. Looking at it, you're

the first no code, DevOps orchestration platform. So give

us a little bit more context in terms of, again, that

orchestration platform, and particularly in terms of no

code, right, because I think that's really what's intriguing

with regards to our listeners, because sometimes folks are a

little bit afraid to say no code, what do you mean, you're

replacing me? And others are saying, yes, that's great,

because I can actually do additional work which I can get

to when I have an orchestration platform. So that's kind of the

backdrop of my question.

Kumar Chivukula: Yeah, thank you for the question is a really

good question, actually. So there's always misconception

about the no code and low code and this whole concept, right?

So when we talk about no code, it's more not about replacing

people, it's about enhancing the ability of the existing DevOps

team and making sure that they accelerate the journey, because

otherwise, you end up doing that, in our survey, about

30 40% of the time they're managing the tools and managing

the pipelines. It's nothing wrong with it, but is it really

impeding them for them to help developers innovate and shipping

things faster, which is not a good thing as well as evaluate.

another data point is based on IBM and Gartner survey that was

done in 2019 2020. This was again, two, three years back 15

to 18% of the code that was written by the most of the

companies doesn't see light at the end of the tunnel, because

it is all done for internal development, nothing that has

been for customer. Imagine that 15 to 20% of the time that has

been gone, invested by the people, and the company is not

generating the value that is a product to the loss for the

company and revenue loss and opportunity loss. How can we

have them focus on things that they can help the company bottom

line, and also help accelerate the journey and make sure that

they continue to stay current with the technology, right? So

if you look at that, do those things then apcera will come as

a like for It's like another smart chatbot or smart Mini and

for them like where they can continue to accelerate the

journey by leveraging opposite orchestration platform. How do

we do that we as a core principle of apcera, we want to

build reusable micro services in the platform when what we mean

reusable micro services so that when we build a micro service,

or a petrol function, we want to make sure that it scales across

many and many enterprise customers. So as a in our in

order orchestration platform, we have three modules. One is tools

and automation. Second one is no code pipelines. Third one is

unified insights. We we explained previously, tool chain

automation will help the enterprise customer to protect

their eggs Testing investment by bringing the tools together,

once they bring the tools together using local pipelines

within the local pipelines, what we have is we built a bunch of

integrations in a microservices format. All the enterprise

customers have to do it instead of them worrying about the right

and the glue code integration code, or like Jenkins file, or

maybe writing the glue, groovy scripts that were maybe custom

in scripts what they have, they can leverage the existing

microservices that we have, and be able to build them as a part

of Lego set, we are given the Lego set, the DevOps team still

have to conceptually, the their, their own car, and to drive it

the Release car, right, we're not 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 all by themselves, we're enabling

them to build the car glue to the reusable microservices, so

that they can make the journey faster, better and secure. And

then last, but not least in doing so they get to see the

visibility aspect of it. So for the for them to achieve all of

them in a scale. It's very cumbersome and difficult. You

need to have a ton of people to managing it like in my previous

life, and both Symantec and Adobe, and we used to spend a

boat to the world's largest software publishers, as you guys

know, we spend about 60% of the money that you spend on people

and 40 personal tools. It's the Yep, it's not easy for every

company to scale, invest that much money. And then there's

that many resources, we're talking about scale in the lines

of poleetical. If a million dollars per year just on

software delivery management, I'm not talking about software

development, software delivery management. So to bring it

together, the no code pipelines, what we talk about is like we

give you the templates, within the templates, you have

reasonable micro services, we let enable the enterprise

enterprise customers to take the templates build the templates

for their own use cases, whether it be sblc, which is a software

development lifecycle that includes across multiple

languages, multiple technology stacks, means stack, Java stack,

dotnet, stack, and so on. So forth, are SAS DevOps, which is

Salesforce, snowflake, Informatica, Adobe Experience

Manager, APG and so on, so forth, which is it DevOps. And

the third one is about intra intra as a code, all three

things can be possible by layer in the quality security gates,

we have a deeper integration to security stack and quality stack

as well, which is included that includes from the code time the

code commit is done, we want to make sure that we scan for

secret keys passwords, and ensure that no vulnerabilities

are there. No known vulnerabilities are there in the

builds and deployments, and the dynamic code analysis and making

sure the containers that are running, fully secured known

vulnerabilities are not there, or any any VMs are being

deployed that vulnerability management, we can also scan

them. So having these things as a security hygiene as part of

the CI CD pipelines along with quality hygiene, we'll help them

make the software delivery faster, but also make it secure,

and also improve the quality security posture significantly

for them. So imagine that we don't have any of these things,

they have to do it with hundreds 10s of people plus a person

leaves, and the second person wants to come in, we do it all

over again, because they don't want to talk to the code, again

understood a lot, but just bring it back, we have the new code

pipelines. What we mean by that is not to replace people. It's

about enhancing the existing journey that they have, by

taking the templates and the reusable micro services help

them build the pipelines at scale across SDLC SAS DevOps in

Frazer code.

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Eveline Oehrlich: 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 with software developers who say, I

really like my job most of the time. But there are a few

aspects of it, which are really not fun. And I don't look

forward to those. And I think you as you just described some

of those tasks, if they are like a cookbook or a playbook or a

template, allow me to actually step out of the mundane tasks

and allow myself to actually bring things together. That's

one of the biggest challenge we see. And we found when we did

our upskilling that folks are really starting to disengage

with in connecting, not connecting with what they're

doing because some of the work they're doing is just not as

challenging and creative. So I see lots of opportunities there

now. Low code, and or no code All right, what's the

difference? I think the

Kumar Chivukula: there is a slight difference. And basically

how we want to use it. It's sometimes it's marketing term

and buzzwords in the industry. But low code or no code

development is like, for example, locode is called Give

an example of low code, like in the case of where some tasks

that needs to be done repeated way. And, for example, you want

to collect a application particularly, like, I'll just

give an example of the DevOps, you want to be in a position to

repeatedly use your static code analysis step across all CI CD

pipelines, you can do the low code, or no code way, low code

way is nothing but you just write a minimal code that can

work work across various tasks and leave it as part of the your

stepper microservice and create a template and use it across

multiple multiple pipelines. And that way, you know what to

expect, what are the conditions, what are the thresholds, what

are the gates and so on so forth, it's with a bit of a

little bit more customization or making it more meaningful to the

existing your own environment as well existing environment.

Whereas a look no code, that means that you just really like

doing the plug and play, basically, it's a plug and play

and think about is like, your Lego example, right? You are

given a set of Legos and the blueprint and the template. And

for you to construct the thing without you making the Legos and

deliver the with the model, where people like in the

different personas, like when you look talk to it DevOps, and

especially with SAS DevOps, it's basically the focus is more on

the configuration and making changes at the application

level. They don't want to be the coders, traditional coders, like

Java developers, or the good Golang developers, and so on so

forth. They care about having something in a plug and play in

a resort based approach, which is what low code development is

like, basically, they want to just take something that is out

there, create by clicking couple of visits, and be able to create

the pipeline for them. Whereas no code, low code is like where

we want to give them a little bit of opportunity for them to

tweak it with existing investment, and also be able to

help them bring the existing tools. As a result, we have to

give them a little bit of opportunity for them to tweak

the Legos that they have. So that I'm trying to give you that

like example of the DevOps context. So the they're in the

industry standard standard, they've kind of interchange in

some areas, and they people conveniently 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 fully not there, but there are a

couple for a particular use case you can achieve the low code for

for a particular use case, you can you can achieve no code as

well depends on the use case. Depends on the persona.

Eveline Oehrlich: Great. Excellent. Okay, I want to shift

a little bit Toria installed base because I know you know

them well, because you do have conversations and you are the

owner to take those conversations and turn them into

products, which is a great, a great noble cause. What

challenges do you think? Let's maybe take the number one

challenge if you kind of go back and 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: the end of this month.

Eveline Oehrlich: Okay, so if you go back to the to the last

quarter, what would you say? is the number one challenge your

installed base? Or prospects today? Half? And how are they

solving them? Besides, of course, you are offering your

orchestration platform? That's of course one, right. But what

are some other challenges? I'm curious.

Kumar Chivukula: There are a few, but I think I'll highlight

a couple of them. Especially like in the, in the enterprise

sector, digital digital transformation is really key.

And people will expect it to transform because customer and

their end user expectations are different. Like nowadays, if you

asked me six years back, you can go back, go to the website and

just or maybe mobile app, just book a car and the car would

show up to the door, which is Tesla in this case, it's very

hard, I would have said no, and there's no way and it's

happening and especially with the pandemic, it's even changed.

We don't have to go to the car dealership and get the car and

then the car has to show up the car can show up to your door.

And it's very hard to even imagine that and that the this

type of innovation is happening and customer expectations have

changed and they like Amazon prime prime example right? You

just ship something, it shows up the doorstep without you going

and worrying about all of them. So the behavior and the customer

expectations have changed as a result enterprises are dealing

with digital transformation, they have to otherwise they will

be taken out of the business for them and how do they do it

without having the people then without having the platform

without having the way to manage the overall software delivery

management because they have to transform themselves from a

retail company to more of a software company or to maybe

manufacturing company to a software company, as Microsoft

CEO said famously into those data to those in depth tell

every company has to become a software guy Coming in, as a

result, that people are struggling with it in terms of

like trying to keep up with the pace of the digital

transformation and innovation that is happening in the market.

The second biggest challenge is how do we do it in a more in a

secure manner. Because that's another thing that is coming

into the play, it's not just the shipping the code, especially

with the cloud, we would develop something and just put it out

there in the cloud expect the cloud is secure, that's a wrong

assumption, you have to make sure that your data, your your

bills, your deployments, you have to protect it, there is no

other way around AWS and Azure and GCP, they will only give the

offer the utility computing and they'll give you the compute for

a cost. And they have to run, the enterprises have to run

their application, they have to manage the deployments as a

result coupled with software delivery management in the

digital transformation, along with because it's continuous

innovation, right? It's not like you just do the release once a

year, or once in six months, it's a continuous innovation

every week, every day. And sometimes every two weeks,

sometimes once a month depends on the company trajectory and

their adoption and their Agile transformation roadmap. So it

varies from there, it's hard to keep keep up with the pace of

innovation also managing with people with that. So it's we

continue to see that that is a digital transformation coupled

with the software delivery management along with DevOps.

devsecops is one of the one of the 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 talking about it, executives are talking

about it.

Eveline Oehrlich: Which brings me to my almost last question,

it's around skills, we at DevOps Institute are very passionate

about upskilling, and helping the different roles right, and

in the last five years have been conducting the research around

skills. And we're just at the point where we are releasing our

upskilling 2023. report in April. So I'm doing a lot of

research there. So if you have to give advice to our listeners,

and remember, those are their software developers, software

engineers, there are DevOps engineers there's SRE is, but if

there are a few things, you would say, hey, really focus on

this? What would that be?

Kumar Chivukula: It's the continue to when you when you're

in the technology field, it's not a the what environment is

changing around us. Right? So and continue to keep up with the

basic core elements of the right one is the one is the cloud

stack, because cloud is going to be there for next 10 years, I

continue to be there, it's the only wall which can change. But

keep up with the certifications and keep up with Cloud level

certification, there are a lot of free courses that offer both

AWS and Azure GCP. And also you can sign up for the course

Coursera Udemy. And then a lot of the videos are available in

in the internet, where you can just take advantage of them, and

then be able to upskill and continue to upskill. And like

attending the some of the trade shows, and wherever possible,

most of them are virtual now, thanks to pandemic and most of

the sessions used to be in person now the virtual so that

we have a lot more opportunity for people to learn from the

community. And effectively, a new kind of like you have to

transform into into more of SRE DevOps team no longer just doing

the configuration management did they have to have a language,

they have to at least understand the data structures languages,

and will be able to understand the algorithms is very, very

important. No, they don't have developed all of them. But they

will be dealing with the developers who speak the

language, having the idea about all of them and be able to

understand proficient in one language will be always helpful.

Because once you understand the language, it's easy to replicate

the knowledge across the rest of the languages that are going to

be there in the market. And it's like, to me, it's we continue to

keep up with the cloud vendors what they're doing, and then

basically, take one or at least one of one or two withdrawal

possible, which is one minimum, to certainly have a

certification in that so that way you will know and then you

will people recognize that people understand the value and

value that and then having keeping up with trade shows and

also continue to leverage advantage of the communities

communities are things that we have. Plus, obviously we have

now we are going to be taught to a Coursera Udemy and a bunch of

other things LinkedIn learning, they're all the things that

resources are available at a much cheaper rate than we used

to be before and is accessible individual so you can sign up

for a monthly plan. You can sign up for a yearly plan and put a

plan a plan together, what wins instructor led or like you can

do the self paced learning as well. So

Eveline Oehrlich: Fabulous. Fabulous Kumar, thank you so

much. I have one more question, but this is more of a fun

question. Yeah. So what is your favorite weekend activity? I'm

assuming you have sometimes a weekend.

Kumar Chivukula: Yeah, I do. Like obviously if a weekend

comes in, I want to spend time with the family as much as

possible and also like to me, I my fun time is mostly around,

catching up on Reading and especially I'm not really

reading books and books but I think I listen to a lot of

podcasts and listen to some videos and follow the some of

the blog posts and so on so forth and try to keep keep up

myself. And I try to take myself out and then go for do some

exercise and walk and long walks and when they have a free day,

the last one is about like catching up on sports and that's

just I like sports and public acceptance on the sports.

Eveline Oehrlich: Great, super. We have been with Kumar Chiba

Kula CTO for apcera, a DevOps orchestration platform Kumar,

thank you so much for joining me today on humans of DevOps

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