#031 – Kubernetes For Humans Podcast with Daniel Bryant (Syntasso)

Itiel Shwartz: Hello everyone and welcome to a special episode of the kubernetes for Humanitec I’m Itiel Shwartz, and today I have with me the show Daniel Daniel right it’s here sounds good yeah yeah so do you want to introduce yourself maybe

Daniel Bryant: Yeah sure thanks my name is Daniel Bryant I’ve come from a Java development background and then moved into a bunch of of architecture and operations and then to build in platforms and I’ve Lally done everything from coding all the way to CTO and platform roles I joke me say like job titles are like Pokémon I want to affect them all right but the real reason I love learning I love learning new stuff and that’s why we’re here right

Itiel Shwartz: Yeah yeah that’s that’s the reason so try to give us a bit more color like what companies where are you at now share us the journey

Daniel Bryant: Yeah so I’m at Syntasso we’re building KubeConratix which is the framework for building composable internal developer platforms so having myself been a platform user back in the day but mainly as a consultant I worked for with OpenCredo in London for a number of years we worked with big companies like banks with smaller companies and there was always some element of platform building right I enjoyed doing that I was always the Jenkins person always building out the CI/CD right movie like sandbox like everything BSL like I loved the I really enjoyed like infrastructure’s code I enjoyed that knitting together all the things like for building my applications and then yeah when I’ve known the founders of saso for about 10 years and then I’ve watched their Journey they’ve done a bunch of interesting things and when they started creating KubeConratix I was like Hey I’ve built similar things in the past I’ve seen like certain problems like practic shaped and then I ssort of I was working at Ambassador Labs and then I moved sort I finished that roll up there and then when KubeConratix like hey do you want to come BR us I was like why not awesome Team Awesome product and here we are

Itiel Shwartz: So what is like the current title

Daniel Bryant: That’s why I’m Head of Product Marketing yeah so I’ve done a bunch of DevRel work recently but in reality had a startup you do whatever is needed right and I found I was doing a lot more product marketing because I have been a developer because I’ve also been an operator a QA person I can you know speak the language I can understand I can empathize because I think a big thing with platforms that I’m passionate about building platforms as a product if you’re building them as a product you have to know your customer right you can’t just be like I’m going to build this for you and you’re G to use it so like my ssort of super power some folks have said is the ability to bridge the people and the technology which is I think increasingly important in what we do right

Itiel Shwartz: Okay okay so let me share a bit more about what is the product exactly because I think that I’m not sure if I completely understand

Daniel Bryant: So KubeConratix itself is a framework for building platforms and the two key things to understand is you can build APIs that are relevant to your business so it might be something like a database as a service API but you can also compound these things and maybe even do higher level services so for example we a lot of banking customers so like you ever know your customer service or fraud detection right and if you open that service it’s actually like a Java service a database you know I mean so we say Turtles all the way down that’s like kind the phrase we use good very good for your thing that the conference all way down but not only you have the API being able to be defined we help we manage the lifecycle so we basically have a series of pipelines and hooks that you can do you can build say database database with like Terraform Crossplane Bash whatever you like you can do security scanning you can notify someone by a Slack do some ordering do some checks right whatever is relevant to your business we allow you to encode in a series of workflow steps and you can run them at an arbitrary point in time so say you discover a vulnerability like in Postgres or something you can everything that’s managed in critics you can very quickly roll out the latest version we saw a lot of folks struggling with like Heartbleed and Log4Shell all that kind of stuff and feel like you know you’ve got to do the hard work of putting your software your platform in KubeConratix but once it’s in KubeConratix very easy understand what’s where and very easy to upgrade it

Itiel Shwartz: Okay so like who who is Dan like who are you fighting for who are the customers

Daniel Bryant: Yeah no not the customers the enemies like who who is your competition oh competition yeah oh interesting so in like ssort of the platform orchestration space so like we broadly ssort of adopted this ter that orchestration the main folks are there’s KubeConratix there’s KubeConubeVela which is a CNCF Sandbox project open source project and there Humanitec so Humanitec do a graph based platform orchestrator to and we also do see a little bit of the portals yeah exactly like backstage and so on and Cortex see they’re awesome people right and Port Port folks as well and we work like we’re we’re ssort of we’re a complimentary story as much as like you can actually like you can get very far with Port even your own on Backstage or you’re writing your own plugins we ssort of enable you to abstract a lot of the workflow stuff they do at a more platform API layer and if you’re ssort of looking at say portals being almost competitors or being in the space that things like Crossplane Terraform same space right so with Crossplane you can actually something called compositions you can put arbitrary code in that and kind of you like cycle management but the way I look at the world is there is three tiers there is this like application layer platform orchestration layer and an infrastructure layer you can mix them up a little bit but my software architecture they say that having clear domain boundaries clear APIs are the way forward that’s why I believe like KubeConratix is a good thing for that middle there

Itiel Shwartz: No so it’s interesting so big companies are going to you and you have them to manage the database and all of it yep databases queues high-level services how big are you in terms of people

Daniel Bryant: We’re about 15 people now and like it’s not like a bit scary for big companies to trust you guys or in any company I’m sure it is we’ve definitely got paying customers like we’ve know got good back ssort of good backing in terms of our experiences practically everyone at Syntasso has built a platform has built components and like I say we know we definitely care a lot about what we’re doing so we’re very much a product company so people are investing in the product and again a good that project is open source as well Apache 2.0 license and but yeah we’re we’re definitely working hard to convince customers that like hey we can support you on the journey and we’re all about teaching them to fish you know not we’re not giving a fish we’re teaching them to fish and so that’s a big mus long as they see the KubeConratix delivers and we can support them delivering as well everyone’s happy

Itiel Shwartz: No it sounds good so so what’s that plans like you are new right like

Daniel Bryant: Yeah we’ve been around what KubeConratix it’s been around about three years ah really yeah yeah the B is that we’re working on it ssort of stealth for like a year or so and then hire some other Engineers on after that and then then yes your open source project is about three years old

Itiel Shwartz: Okay okay and they they took you because now we are going to get bigger like the company H

Daniel Bryant: We certainly hope so you were here sponsoring Platform Engineering Day was is fantastic so yeah we did a whole day of that sponsorship there we decided not to sponsor KubeConubeCon but next year KubeConubeCon is going to be in London which is our home city right we’re based out of London so we may even sponsor more there but the plan is definitely you know bring on more customers grow grow your reasonable size for sure

Itiel Shwartz: And then what do we hear from the folks that are in in coupon like what’s the feedback on the product on the problem on the future

Daniel Bryant: Yeah I think it’s good I’m definitely hearing a bunch of folks like recognizing platform engineering is the Platform Engineering Day people like we’re doing this we might not call it exactly this but now I understand we are doing platform engineering I do do see a big lean into platform as a product I mentioned as well folks are recognizing developers are customers we have to build stuff that solves their problems which sounds really obvious but a lot of people like platform teams just build platform us right about goals and things so I am glad to actually see folks really embracing that notion and I think KubeCon is still a very infrastructure focused conference right I don’t see many product managers here I don’t see many sort of like leadership type folks you know I see a couple like we had like three or four in our booth I was quite surprised yeah oh like like technical product for like not like a yeah so we I see more yeah was with one of the PMS of BlackRock like the one responsible compute platform yeah and she came to the book and so on so yeah yeah that’s nice right you I know they exist I CH but not a lot not a lot like it’s not the common thing no

Itiel Shwartz: So you think like in the future more products will come as part of like the shift for platform

Daniel Bryant: I hope so I do I mean some of the other conferences I’ve been like the KubeCon conferences with INF both you we get a whole mix of folks there like you are clear bring a product you need that business understanding you need that product management project management you need use your experience right like you can’t deliver a product without all those things so I’m I’m really hoping that yes as like folks recognize you need to have this product management more and more folks will come along with their engineering teams as well

Itiel Shwartz: That makes sense so so what are the trends that you’re maybe seeing here in on the floor like in booths in coupon

Daniel Bryant: Yes is in this year I’m seeing less AI which I thought was interesting like I think last year I saw everyone was big stuff right there is definitely AI here but like less like I think of the hype we saw last year which is kind of good right so people are focusing very much on the on the problems like I’m seeing a lot of folks now offering end-to-end Solutions right be it security be observability these things so definitely strong Trends still in security and observability right strong Trends in CI/CD sh Akuity folks earlier on and that’s very much like becoming a thing now with like the Octopus Deploy folks taking in Codefresh and other folks yeah but like people are really focusing on the core components of their platform I think the overarching thing is you need a platform as a product but if you look around the floor everyone’s really focused on doing certain things well security observability CI/CD would definitely spring to mind and communication stuff I saw a whole bunch of API gateway vendors I work in that space too the service mesh folks still kicking around as well so I just see like maturity is is picking up and which is is there having been like coupon since day Zero it’s really nice now to see we’re focused on actual solving problems right

Itiel Shwartz: I feel that the infrastructure is itself where is like in a certain point that enable us to focus on other things right like yeah KubeCon in it early day wasn’t stable by itself right like

Daniel Bryant: Yeah yeah as any new and like full new product

Itiel Shwartz: Okay that’s cool so what do you see in the future like three years from now we meet again in coupon what do you think the BRS are going to be about yeah

Daniel Bryant: Say that so as much as I said we’re not seeing so much AI stuff I see ironic right fed I should say I do think we’re seeing like a lot of benefits with copilots for coding right a lot of developers are with they loving copilots and I do I do fantastic right so but I’m not seeing fact Engineers use it yet so clearly like if developers are getting some performance boosts you 30 percent pick a number black Engineers I believe will be embracing that too but I think it’s going to be less AI branded and see more part off products yeah you I mean it’s almost like it make like certain products will make recommendations or they’ll you know create pull requests that then just as Humanitecs we as Humanitecs review so I definitely think that is until day I will also review right like who knows right I mean there terms like agentic being banded around like you know in like almost like other members of the team will literally be agents will be AI H who knows on that one yes so I’m hoping that KubeConU continues to get pushed down the stack we’re seeing that already and higher level contracts emerge where developers can just focus on getting their work done so they’re not writing CRDs they’re not understanding about some of the storage allocation and kubernetes they maybe are using more natural-language like interactions to to get stuff done you know I need a way to deploy this application in development here’s a way in staging here’s a way in production I’m hoping it’s like more natural way of of building coding shipping running as we say

Itiel Shwartz: And what do you think about like platform compared to Dev compared to Dev like where is that going to be in a couple of years

Daniel Bryant: That is a great question so I’ve had a number of chats there around the conference floor and whereas like you know I come from from an era of Dev and Ops like you being very separate we then saw devops come together but I’m worried now a little bit I’m seeing platform and Dev like off yeah which I think is a real shame because I get like the whole devops thing doesn’t always scale yeah if you work for like we work with all banking companies regulated companies like like you build it, you run it doesn’t always work have 10 different ways of doing security right 10 different ways of doing observability just like the Auditors no I like that right so I definitely think like it’s notion there is a value in having a centralized platform but it’s still when it becomes like them and us it’s really hard to get worked up right and I am a bit concerned that we focus on technology quite a lot and not always on the people’s side of it a lot of having conversations right it’s like chatting and say hey I need this what what can you give me and like we negotiate on these kind of things I think and I get it because I’ve been a programmer like we want to avoid conversations sometimes no want like the platform to abstract everything away and that is not possible

Itiel Shwartz: Okay so less words us like do you want to say something to the public to our listeners

Daniel Bryant: I say if they’re building platforms build it as a product that’s the thing I’m going to say to folks like definitely check out KubeConratix other frameworks that do exist in this space too right but I’m a firm believer that if you’re building a platform unless going like everyone is working with a platform now but if you’re consciously interestly on consciously building a platform do check out the frameworks out there I see a lot of people Reinventing the wheel and like why do that when there’s open source projects out there you can build upon so check check out Kratix check out the other frameworks around it and hope you have a lot of fun and ask me questions if you get stuff as well

Itiel Shwartz: Okay sounds good pleasure having you thank you very much

[Music] Kubernetes for Humans.

This is an AI generated transcript of the conversation