#021 – Kubernetes for Humans Podcast with Ramiro Berrelleza (Okteto)

Itiel Shwartz: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of kubernetes for humans podcast

Ramiro Berrelleza: Hey D how are you thank you for having the show very very excited to to be here and talk about you know kubernetes I love the kubernetes for humans name of your podcast and looking forward to chatting more about what that means and how we all con true to it

Itiel Shwartz: Yeah let’s do it but first like share a bit about yourself where did you come from what do you do when did you first like started going to computers and then when at Corti so so share a bit about yourself

Ramiro Berrelleza: Yeah I’m happy to so my name is Ramiro Berrelleza I am the founder and CEO of Okteto Okteto is a platform for managing your remote Dev environments on kubernetes I currently live in the San Francisco Bay Area in Oakland for those of you familiar with the area but I’m not from here I was born in Mexico I grew up there all the way to school I I first got into computers in Mexico when I was little because my dad worked at a bank and in Mexico Banks were one of the first kind of like Industries to have computers so my dad would bring me and my brother to the office every now and then and for us it was like the most exciting thing thing to go there and you know see this computer and you know type things on the keyboard and see them come up on the screen would like print out things and play with them and and I’ve been hooked ever since that was the first thing that didn’t High School I started to you know play video games put together my own computers back then so then by the time I got to like college for me it became a very obvious choice hey I want to learn more about this with technology and and that’s when I said to study computer science and I’ve been on this track since then computer science I got my degree in Mexico Tec de Monterrey is my school in there and then from there got lucky they got recruited by Microsoft moved to the US started working in my first job out of school at the team that eventually became Azure and that’s what got me in the track of of cloud cloud services eventually containers and then all the way to to kubernetes

Itiel Shwartz: No that’s like quite a journey so maybe like maybe maybe share a bit about the beginning maybe like Microsoft what did you do and also what are you currently doing right let Let’s I think like you have quite an interesting story so you know a point for two and

Ramiro Berrelleza: Yeah it’s it’s been it’s been a fun it’s been a fun journey and it’s interesting how when you look back you know you can see all these pieces that kind of took me into this trajectory when I joined Microsoft my first team for like the first few weeks was remember was.NET Framework within the Net Framework there was this team called WCF, Windows Communication Foundation back then we were building all the SDKs for these brand-new things back then I’m talking like 14 years ago 15 years ago called JSON and REST all these things were new so Microsoft built this team to kind of build the libraries for The.NET Framework I was a QA engineer back then those days Microsoft had two two different roles for engineering one was like the test automation which is was my role and then you had like the kind of more like the feature building what’s really cool though is that very soon Max realized hey this Cloud thing is growing we don’t have something there let’s make it happen back then Steve Ballmer you know the famous developers developers developers guy was a CEO and they funded this team and then they took a bunch of teams including mine and said hey you guys seem to know about like you know like apis networks Cloud you start building the first version of of Azure and I landed in this team called service bus still around service bus was one of the first was their first public Serv of Azure that was built entirely for the cloud now it was kind of similar to like RabbitMQ or you know like like a queue for events very similar to like Azure Service Bus but it was fascinating for me because I was able to kind of like do this shift from building things on you know for application I will code SDKs that get shipped as binaries and then shift it to shipping services and to building globally available infrastructure to think about availability SLAs and and and for me was really cool because as a as a test engineer it was a massive Paradigm Shift it’s like how do you test a service that millions of people are going using at the same time how do you test for availability how do you test for backwards compatibility between like you know different versions of this cloud service so that was really cool I had a lot of fun and that put me on track for kind of what I’ve been doing ever since which is DevOps Cloud infra services and and you know the one thing that really maps to what I’m doing now is that back then one of our biggest challenges was hey we’re building things not local machines we’re building SD Cas we’re building for those on Windows desktops and then suddenly you move to this platform that is scale up that has multiple noes that runs on the cloud so we had that challenge of hey how do we move from writing code that only runs on my machine or like in a single machine to write in code that runs in the cloud how do you replicate that locally so fast forward 15 years after Azure I worked for this startup called ElasticBox one of the first kind of DevOps startups that some of my friends started then I work for Atlassian the makers of Jira and and HipChat and a few other things and then now I’m going of back at that problem again because the reason why we started Okteto is because we saw kind of the same problems As you move to Containers As you move to kubernetes you’re moving away from applications that are going to be running on a single machine to these highly distributed applications and the tooling we have for that today is not great like a lot of developers have to like mimic by running things like Minikube or like you know you need to make your laptop look like a cluster and then what we’re building is hey why did we flip that and we give you the tools to make a cluster work for you as a developer and that’s what got us motivated and excited to start Okteto is the core of what we do is remote development environments on kubernetes but with all the tooling and all the ease of use of the local machine experience and we’re re building of t for now almost 5 years great list of customers a big community and I’m very excited because it’s clearly a problem that developers have you know developers want it to be easy frictionless but they want to be able to Leverage The Power of cus and and you know that’s where we are today

Itiel Shwartz: Oh that that’s like a a super interesting story maybe I’ll TR like I’ll ask like two questions and then we’ll jump more into like the details but you know you are very like you are you were and you are a very technical person and then jumping right to a CEO position which in a lot of companies even your company is super techy it’s not like you know it’s not the first thing that comes to mind right Co and Technical so how how was the transition and you know maybe share a bit about like why not being a a CTO you know for stter I’m CTO right yeah why or how you know I I did not know what I was getting into that’s for sure no it was it was an interesting transition I like it a lot now I learn a lot I like the you know like CEO as you said of a very technical company it’s a really cool role for me because I still get to be very involved in technology like I talk to like all of our customers are developers so I talk to a lot to like CTO I talk a lot to like Tech very technically sophisticated companies so it’s really cool that I still have that Tech site on me but it’s been really interesting and fascinating to also kind of start building the skills that you need as a CEO around go-to-market strategies sales kind of getting a a business understanding of the market and not just as a technologist that was really cool in the early days I have I have two co-founders Pablo and Ramon the three of us are Engineers so when we start the company we just GNA figure hey who’s going to be who or which role and you know the beginning doesn’t matter as much you know we have three three founders we’re doing everything but then when when he started to matter when he started to say hey we’re getting into business we’re going to get like VC funding I chose to be the CEO and and you know my my found my co-founder supported me because it felt like because I’m in San Francisco because I’m kind of like where where the money is I mean in the early stage it just makes sense and then you know I build that skill it and then Pablo kind of became the CTO he built more like the highly technical Visionary and then Ramon is leading product so he can of got more into like user experience development like the needs of our customers so and that be one of my favorite things about building a company is how we have three Engineers who’ve been Engineers all their careers and then slowly Through The Years cuz you know you don’t you don’t start on like day one with like 100 people in your company or 50 the three of us have grown our skills in different paths while still keeping the technical side on us which is super helpful so that’s that’s great and it’s something that you know when somebody starts a company at least I didn’t thought about these things but now that I know more I think it’s something people should think about like what does it mean to be a CEO or a startup but you know learning new things is great and you know if you’re at Komodor, I’m sure you’re going through the same where like you know you’re getting stretched you’re picking up skills and to me that is part of the fun of of being in an early stage startup is you get to learn a lot I’m not going to lie it gets hard sometime but but it’s fun and I found that I like it and you know every day I’m learning something new and every day I’m liking it more

Itiel Shwartz: That that that’s great that’s great and like again like a very very interesting like you know very interesting story and like maybe like as a second question you know and you said that you help like developers right to to work basically and more efficient I would say right like or like so so a lot of the time and we see it in Komodor customers as well it’s not really clear who cares about it do you think from your customers is it something the developers cares about is it something something that comes from the platform team like kubernetes is hard right okay great now I want to simulate Kubernetes somehow and then people find that that’s all right so so so that makes sense but who is the one that is bringing it into the companies is the developer the Ops person share maybe a bit about that

Ramiro Berrelleza: Yeah that’s that’s a very interesting Evolution for us because when we started the company we thought hey developers care about this they’re going to bring us into their organizations and we’re to be successful and developers care a lot about being productive I think developers care because they’re like hey I want to do my job I’m excited to work you know when when somebody joins your company they’re excited to join company they love the mission they want to be productive they want to deliver value so they care the challenge we saw is that at every organization not every developer is equal know the more senior kind of architect-level developers they get like a more broad Vision the new the new developers care more about their features so we what we’ve seen is that this kind of tools and and we love to hear your thoughts on this gets more adopted by the platform teams what we’re what we’re seeing in the market is the three persons you mentioned CTO platform engineering team and developers they all care about productivity for different reasons right CTO cares because you know the CEO is giving is giving CTO some like measurements of like hey we need to shift this many features we have to like close this customer and we need this so CTO cares about high level KPIs productivity how many people going to hire I want to get small team that delivers a lot you know all those things then platform engineering teams are in our experience chartered with like this responsibility make our teams more effective so they care from that perspective they want to enable they want to make sure that people can do more with less resourcesces they have to keep costs down but they want to be like especially this new breed of platform Engineers they don’t want to be like the naysayers they want to be a neighor they want to be like okay you want to do X let me build a golden path for you that sort of thing so what we look for we’re trying to figure out like who’s the right fit for a good company to partner to use Okteto is we’re looking for companies where we see this happening where the CTO understands the value of investing on a platform efforts to make their teams more productive where we see platform Engineers who are like who understand that they need to care about developer experience that they need to care about enabling developers and also where you need to have developers that are willing to take the risk of learning new tools learning a new way of doing things so when you find those three things in a company that’s like hey a SLAm dunk this is great and a lot of our customers most of them fit this profile and that creates like wonderful Partnerships because you see this very clear alignment where like everybody understands software is going to make our business do better if we build better software if we build it faster it’s G to be even better and then when you find those companies that’s when you like kind of strike gold and really build this like long-term meaningful Partnerships and and we’ve done that with many many companies and it’s really cool like as I talk to more companies as we as we find more customers as we talk with the community the understanding of why it’s very meaningful to invest in platforms why it’s very important to care about developer experience or development experience you know for everybody Developers for PMs for QA for all mobs for stakeholders it matters and more more people get it and it’s very exciting I think that Cooper Dennis has been a great accelerator it is hard I agree but I think because it’s hard but it’s powerful people see the value and they want tools like what K’s building like what OCT is building to make the lives of all of these people easier so they can you know they don’t care about Kubernetes they care about their business they care about shipping value and the more tools can help them with that are platforms the happier everybody is in this kind of like chain of of people

Itiel Shwartz: No I think everything you say makes sense so let me ask you something harder maybe like why would someone want want want want to use you guys basically what is preventing like everyone you know because everyone wants to to move the business fast right like I think like you said no one cares about kubernetes everyone wants to like get more money and bring more values or like higher quality Val like value to their customers faster so what do you think is like preventing companies from adopting these or yeah

Ramiro Berrelleza: I love that question it’s it’s a it’s a it’s a question that some of our investors asked me from time to time no and I like it I think something very important for all of us Building Products to have a clear answer because you can’t build a product for everyone like I think that’s kind of like a fool’s errand this this kind of Fool’s errand phrase but it’s like you’re going to put so many resources like it’s very important for platforms to be opinionated to have a thesis say this is what we do so our thesis is developers need realistic environments that look like production and they should be running on the same class of infrastructure with the same configuration or as close as possible as production so we believe in that so anybody who doesn’t agree with that for many reasons because maybe the applications are not complex or they’re using platforms where there’s no difference between your local machine and and the cloud that’s okay OCT is not for them we’re looking for we partner with companies where they have complex environments several microservices large teams like you know an example of someone who’s doing a good fit for Okteto is a company with three people like we were at the beginning when you’re three people we have five Engineers you don’t need to invest as much on like Automation and golden bats and and and you know all these things but when you have a 100 Engineers like we have customers with like thousands of Engineers that’s a whole different game that’s where like governance shared configurations you know having everybody do the same thing and not reinvent the wheel so those are the ones that benefit from Okteto if you’re not building things on kubernetes if you’re using Nomad if you’re using VM or or something like Heroku then Okteto is not a good it’s not necessarily a good fit for you and and you know we’re building this very specifically for those who value kubernetes as you know as as a container orchestrator and want to give their developers a best of class development experience on top of that that is our our where we like like super hot or if you care he I have a lot of microservices and I care about easy replicable environments then then we should talk

Itiel Shwartz: Oh that that’s a great I think like of who who be your Target and what do people really care about so let’s talk a bit about like you know that like you’re in the industry in the industry for quite quite some times what do you see is like the most interesting Trend when it comes to like developer involvement inside forc you like you know what do you see what compared to when you started in company to this day did something change

Ramiro Berrelleza: Oh yeah a lot like you know I we’re we’re the kubernetes ecosystem so I of course go to like every KubeCon I’m actually wearing my my Reject American t-shirt a few things have changed that I like a lot the first is more and more people care about development experience when when you know when 10 years ago when Kubernetes was launched the concerns were different the concerns was like how do I run a cluster how do I keep it running then you know as the years went by the concern evolve to like how do I do observability how do I do storage how do I do security now we care about the experience people are questioning how do I make it easier how do I you know the platform engineering movement how do I create golden paths that’s fascinating to me because more and more people care which is showing us that there’s a certain maturity in our ecosystem that we’re now thinking more of the end ulisteners and not trying to figure out technology that for me is is fascinating AI of course is is very exciting we’re seeing a lot of like Investments on AI for for DevOps what what Darren Shepherd is working with K8sGPT I think it’s chat GPT forgot the name was like this GPT for developments and a mix of like infas cod there as well what Pulumi is doing I think all those things are very interesting I like the trends of make tools and platforms that are easier to use care about the experience care about self-service and find ways to like 10x and Elevate everybody those for me are are like super exciting Trends is what keeps me motivated every day I love being part of that of that community and you know I feel a developer on my life for the longest time theyve experienced was kind of like a second concern like yeah yeah you figure it out you go and you know write your make files or or you kind of create your rmes do whatever like you needed right but now it’s becoming more and more a concern like I’ve seen companies now that they’re creating the Head of DevEx role DevEx missions and that’s fascinating to me it’s like it’s like yes finally all these things I’ve been doing kind of more as skunkworks in my in my previous jobs you know like at night or like creating scripts and kind of like sharing them with like your close friends the fact that now you see this companies built with that idea like ours and companies building teams and budgets for this that to me is the most exciting trend for me personally it’s more exciting than I because I I love the DevEx it’s something I do every day I think all day about this I’ve been doing it for a long time it’s really cool to see that hey more people care about this it’s not like this few of us kind of like shouting on the Hills now a movement and that’s very exciting

Itiel Shwartz: No I completely agree like I think that DevEx is not something that existed like a couple of years ago and now people are like proud to tell to p Ser like that and you know like it’s also like maybe like a nice segue just you know for you to mention that you guys are all all in like the de day so maybe like maybe maybe say a word about that

Ramiro Berrelleza: Yeah and of course thank you for that it wasn’t planned that way but I think it just came out so yes I mean OCT is all about DevEx and you know like like we’re building a platform we have a product but I also want to build a community of people who care about the V of all of us were pushing the frontier the boundaries of what DevEx is so we have this website DevExallday.com but we’re kind of starting it’s just new like it just came out this week so if you go to DevExallday.com you can sign up for a newsletter that’s our first thing we’re going to be publishing interviews articles all about developer experience this is not like about Okteto this is not like a hidden vendor pitch this is like about developer experience if you sign up we’re gonna we actually made some really cool stickers so first 100 signups for the newsletter you’re going to get a really cool sticker pack of like DevEx all day if you said if you if you find me at KubeCon and you said hey I heard you and it we’re talking we might have some swag for you but you check it out sign up and it’s it’s really about building this community and helping you know learn from each other I love how the cloud native Community is all about building community learning from each other so we want to do our part especially on the DevEx angle of things you know we’re very inspired by the way by the work that you and and knew they’re doing on platform engineering but now we’re doing it from the DevEx side of things so please check it out

Itiel Shwartz: No that that sounds super awesome and like if someone you know like is in cubec con feel free to to to meet me and and say also I’ll look you up with stickers if you’ll give me I’ll get some exra for you let let me ask like maybe like a like a small question because we almost ran out of time but you are talking about DevEx versus platform engineering like platform is it the same is it the same person is it the same role is it like you know what is it

Ramiro Berrelleza: Yeah that’s that’s a great question is it something I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about I don’t think it’s a same role no I think in some cases because it’s early is the same person but my the way I see this platform engineering and DevEx are two different efforts that they have a lot in common because I think the DevEx movement and the platforming movement are all about making it easier for developers to do their job I mean removing friction but it’s a different angle I believe that platform engineering is more around self-service automating infrastructure things like that DevEx for me is is a about building this kind of like ease of understanding around like the actions to be made you know when you’re trying to accomplish a task make sure that you have all the information in front of you make sure that you know like things we do for example is heyy with Okteto you don’t have to give every developer the credentials to like a private registry for their containers it’s fully automated for me it’s an example of DevEx because that means I as a developer don’t have to think about oh yeah the Reg oh the cloud account hey where do I get access to a cluster so for me DevEx is more about that reducing cognitive load reducing toil making sure people feel empowered to do the lever while platform engineering is more around like self-service automation I think it’s early and and a lot of there’s a huge overlap between both of them which I which I love but I think as as time goes by we’re going to start to see a more clear differentiation of what is platform what is the V and why you need both because yeah if you build a platform with a terrible developer developer experience no one’s going to use it if you build a platform with great developer experience with the right level of abstractions with like clear you know actions to be taken what is this good for what is this not good for that drives adoption and that’s something that we see a lot with our customers where like if the tools are not good you know like CTO like you can force developers to use tools you can tell hey I want to use this tool well if the tool is not good if there’s not a good of experience developers will find their way around it and and that’s why I feel like both aspects are very important they’re emerging many places the same people care about both things yeah but we’re going to see specialization as time goes by

Itiel Shwartz: Okay I think I hope so I hope so because I would love to see more DevEx Engineers Head of DevEx out there obviously and any last words I think like we did ran out of time so

Ramiro Berrelleza: Yeah yeah I mean any of you like let’s keep this conversation going if any of this topics resonates with you please you know reach out on I’m very active on Twitter or X I guess Mastodon LinkedIn I’m always looking forward to talk to more people chat about the space chat about the challenges we all have as we build this community and if you’re having around your Dev experience and we can help you know I’m I’m we’re more than happy to chat again you can reach out for us on Twitter or we do have a special offer if you email us at [email protected] we have some special deals for you all listeners and and fun things like that

Itiel Shwartz: A that that sounds awesome so thanks a lot I really like enjoyed this episode like a quite a unique story unique company and I love how you see the industry and like the changes in the industry around the empowering developers so super cool

Ramiro Berrelleza: Thank you tell a lot of fun love the questions and looking forward to seeing you hopefully at KubeCon

Itiel Shwartz: Yeah KubeCon Paris check it out

[Music] Kubernetes for Humans.

This is an AI generated transcript of the conversation