Tech Lounge
00:00:03 · Chris Chinchilla, Will Stewart
[00:00:03] S0: Oh, hey. How are you? Great to hear. Yeah. Come in. Make yourself comfortable. Like a drink? Sure. There you go. Welcome to the Tech Lounge. Shall we begin? Welcome to the Tech Lounge. I am your host as always, Chinchilla, bringing you an interview from late last year, slowly getting through the twenty twenty four interviews with Will from Northflank, another one of the self-service developer platform tools providers, that helps you automate deployments and workloads in a kind of Kubernetes style. Since the interview, it looks like they have actually raised 22,000,000, So good for them. And this was recorded in a press room as a Berlin venue. And if there's one thing that always likes to happen in Berlin venues is people slamming doors. Done my best to clear that up. Just bear that in mind. All of that aside, enjoy the interview with Will from Northflank. Git is an essential tool and workflow for almost any developer in the world these days, and Git can be easy for some but hard for others. And I've always been a fan of Git graphical tools, Git GUIs that help me and could help you understand some of those more esoteric commands or just speed up what you do on a regular basis. Tower is perhaps one of the oldest and preeminent and best known Mac and Windows Git GUIs. And if you want to get 25% off their full price tool, then head on over to go.christianchilla.com/tower. [00:02:03] S1: I've also brought you a flyer. We've got this for the event, but just in case.
00:02:03 · Will Stewart, Chris Chinchilla
[00:02:03] S1: I've also brought you a flyer. We've got this for the event, but just in case. [00:02:08] S0: Northflank. I'm gonna go off a little bit of your top level description because there's a lot of companies in this space but actually you're doing some things that are more interesting than many of them. But let's start with the top level. So self-service developer platform for kind of not everything but apps and databases and jobs. We might come into what you exactly mean by jobs in a minute but that's a fairly busy space. So, what do you think Northflank offers to differentiate in that space?
00:02:39 · Will Stewart
[00:02:39] S1: Generally speaking, Northflank, we speak in workloads rather than infrastructure to create this EC2 group and create this load balancer and create this Kubernetes cluster. We think about the developer experience. What does the developer want to do? They want to get a Postgres database. They want to get Mongo. They want to get Redis. They want a preview environment for their Node. Js app or their Golang application. And that's what Northflank is trying to do, a post commit platform for engineers to self-service apps, databases, jobs to cloud infrastructure. We happen to leverage Kubernetes as an operating system, but ultimately the end user doesn't really know Kubernetes is in the background. It could be any container orchestrator. So today, users can deploy on Northflank on our managed infrastructure. They don't have to worry about no cloud at all. Or they can connect their own AWS account, their own GCP account, their own Azure account, and then leverage Northflank to then power their cloud account. So they get the beauty of data residency, the security of their own cloud account, but then they have the automation of their DevOps, their infrastructure, really to empower engineers to do their best work or reinforce overburdened DevOps and platform engineering teams who have to do more with less. They're always on call, they're always responding to outages. But Northflank is this concept of unifying the post commit experience. So whether that's you push your code to GitHub, Northflank will then build it, deploy it, help you release it from preview, staging, production. Then when it reaches production, help you with all the data operations like logs, metrics, auto scaling, disaster recovery. When something goes wrong, the platform is there to help you. Do you also have your own cloud or is
00:04:15 · Chris Chinchilla, Will Stewart
[00:04:15] S0: it just deploying to other clouds? [00:04:17] S1: So Northflank multi tenancy runs on cloud infrastructure, but the underlying hardware is actually Google Cloud or Azure. We're just basically taking larger clusters and then putting our secure runtime on top, powered by Cardi containers and Gvisor, Cilium service and Istio service mesh. We sort of can securely divide up those resources and then resell them to customers. [00:04:38] S0: We're actually speaking at Navigate. Civo is a European based private cloud. So do you also support I'm assuming you Absolutely. Also [00:04:49] S1: today or tomorrow we'll be announcing that we've recently hit general availability of our Civo integration. So with Northflank, you can start with Civo, you connect your Civo credentials, and then we can do the full cluster lifecycle management of your Civo cluster. Boots up in about ninety seconds, then Northflank is installed on top. And in under ten minutes, you have a production ready workload platform where you can deploy databases, highly available services, and you can just get back to doing what you do best, is building your application.
00:04:49 · Will Stewart, Chris Chinchilla
[00:04:49] S1: today or tomorrow we'll be announcing that we've recently hit general availability of our Civo integration. So with Northflank, you can start with Civo, you connect your Civo credentials, and then we can do the full cluster lifecycle management of your Civo cluster. Boots up in about ninety seconds, then Northflank is installed on top. And in under ten minutes, you have a production ready workload platform where you can deploy databases, highly available services, and you can just get back to doing what you do best, is building your application. [00:05:16] S0: Know any company founder hates this kind of question, but even in the vendor hall here, there are some companies doing similar things, some of whom I actually know way better. So again, this sort of platform as a service, platform team replaced your DevOps engineers, etc. There's still a few companies doing this and you've given some details, but in comparison to those who also say we focus on the developer experience, etc. They all say that. So really, I actually can see some things on your more technical details that I think are more interesting. But where would you really say your points of differentiation?
00:05:59 · Will Stewart, Chris Chinchilla
[00:05:59] S1: I think the proof's in the pudding. We've got hundreds of API endpoints. Every single feature we've added to the Northflank platform is available in a real time beautiful UI, an API, CLI, and GitOps. So if you're a platform engineer or you're a platform leader and you want to build something special, you want to build a platform for your team, you just leverage Northflank's APIs. Or you can have those engineers then self-service to a real time API. So we've sort of got like a platform API that some of our largest customers and enterprise customers are using today, and they looked at the market and saw that Northflank was the only team offering that level of abstraction, this higher level of abstraction of workloads, but also giving them the capability of some of these sort of platform I'd say if we look to the past, people like Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and Heroku, very successful platforms. Cloud Foundry, sort of defeated by Kubernetes, and then Heroku sort of sold too early to... [00:06:55] S0: To defeat themselves.