Tech Lounge
00:14:27 · Chris Chinchilla, Will Stewart
[00:14:27] S0: I appreciate this is probably some of the kind of the magic source that a company like Northflank adds. But how hard is it to make all these different services and different opinions of the implementers of these services from AWS to GCP to open source products to etc, etc, to actually communicate and work together in a seemingly seamless way for your customers? Is it really like that all the time? [00:14:54] S1: Obviously a long time and a lot of hard work. Kubernetes has gone a long way to help us here. Lot of the cloud providers have to move to a sort of standard, and that's helped us with networking, storage, and compute. But as you mentioned, these open source tools, certainly hasn't been solved yet. So it's a lot of engineering work and then speaking with customers, understanding use cases, then trying to consistently expose that to them through and again, we make it more complex. We have to do it consistently through UI, API, CLI, GitOps, and templates. And I'm not sure if you've taken a look at our template builder and our preview environments, but that's sort of a step change in developer experience for CICD. It's not just templates for... We would call it infrastructure as data. So people are focused on Terraform and defining static environments, like create this cluster, create this auto scaling group. What we're saying is, let's start defining your workloads, defining the CICD workflows for those repositories, for those databases, and then the infrastructure is then provisioned from that.
00:15:55 · Chris Chinchilla, Will Stewart
[00:15:55] S0: Yeah. I'm not sure if this ties into what you're talking about, but there's a couple of companies emerging, some using AI, some not, that are twisting that on its head. You you actually make the infrastructure from code instead. Polygamy is one of the earlier ones, but there's another one I've spoken to whose name escapes me right now. But you know, instead of having it kind of this separate thing, you can either, you know, explicitly mention it in code, which is similar, or if it's the AI based ones, it kind of infers from the application. Is that anything that doing? [00:16:28] S1: I'd say that I understand the principle that just write your code and we're gonna magically create all the gap projections. I'm not proven [00:16:36] S0: it is. It sounded amazing, but yeah. [00:16:38] S1: I think it's... I'm not sure the... Is it worth the squeeze? The effort to do that? I'm not sure if it's worthwhile. If you can just build high level objections to infrastructure problems, and a Northflank config looks as simple as it does and is as sort of easy to onboard as it is. Obviously I'd be biased saying that, but if it is that simple, maybe we don't need to have that even more insane sort of high level abstraction, which means you lose all control. And I would say that engineers always love more control. And abstraction. [00:17:14] S0: It's just interesting you mentioned that deploying to glucose monitors. So, that what we would consider an edge device? It sounds like something even less than that.
00:17:14 · Chris Chinchilla, Will Stewart
[00:17:14] S0: It's just interesting you mentioned that deploying to glucose monitors. So, that what we would consider an edge device? It sounds like something even less than that. [00:17:24] S1: So, there's an open source tool, the name is KSP, but there's a guide, for example. Deploy this, for example, is not a hosted offering. So, if the people have their glucose monitor, it uploads the data, it has a database, it has a front end, and Northflank is one of the recommended sort of go to. We have a free tier, so if kids are needing to monitor their glucose, it uploads the database, and they can view it in a dashboard. And to a Northflank sort of abstraction, it's one database, one microservice in a template, and then they can click a button and deploy it onto the platform. Okay. [00:18:01] S0: Do you let people bring I can see a list here but do you let people bring their own [00:18:05] S1: cloud as well? Exactly. So by default, said Northflank is sort of allowing you to deploy on our multi tenant. But most organisations at some serious scale says, It needs to be on my AWS, it needs to be on my GCP, it needs to be on my Civo, it needs to be on [00:18:20] S0: my Azure. Even more abstract than that? Like, on OpenShift? Yeah, so [00:18:25] S1: we have customers requiring us to run on their data centers, on OpenShift, on Rancher, on bare metal. Exactly. If it has a Kubernetes endpoint we can access, Northflank as a platform can install on And
00:18:25 · Will Stewart, Chris Chinchilla
[00:18:25] S1: we have customers requiring us to run on their data centers, on OpenShift, on Rancher, on bare metal. Exactly. If it has a Kubernetes endpoint we can access, Northflank as a platform can install on And [00:18:39] S0: sort of final question. Last time I spoke with Civo, then I think they're still kind of using the same line around that there's especially in Europe a shift from public clouds to private clouds. Is this something you kind of work across all of them? So is it something you've noticed among certain clients or regions? [00:18:58] S1: I'd say that it has a weird shift. People on private cloud are trying to move to public cloud. People on public cloud are trying to move to private cloud. They're looking for answers. [00:19:08] S0: And then in some cases, you've got one [00:19:10] S1: company trying to do both, and they're trying to do hybrid cloud. So generally, I don't like the term multi cloud because multi cloud could be active active. I've got a workload running on two clouds concurrently, or I have one cloud being my active cluster and then a disaster recovery in another cloud, or I have two teams within a single organization doing both. I think that also extends to hybrid cloud, which is some trying to have a consistent way to deploy to AWS, GCP, Azure, Civo, or their OpenShift. There's a enterprises lot invested billions of dollars in their data centers. They're not going to throw that away, especially when it's so efficient.
00:19:10 · Will Stewart, Chris Chinchilla
[00:19:10] S1: company trying to do both, and they're trying to do hybrid cloud. So generally, I don't like the term multi cloud because multi cloud could be active active. I've got a workload running on two clouds concurrently, or I have one cloud being my active cluster and then a disaster recovery in another cloud, or I have two teams within a single organization doing both. I think that also extends to hybrid cloud, which is some trying to have a consistent way to deploy to AWS, GCP, Azure, Civo, or their OpenShift. There's a enterprises lot invested billions of dollars in their data centers. They're not going to throw that away, especially when it's so efficient. [00:19:47] S0: They are throwing billions. Think that's one of the things. It's become more expensive than I think they expected. I think that seems to be the general pattern. [00:19:54] S1: And the goal with Northflank is generally if there's a compute cluster, install Kubernetes on top, install Northflank on top, and then now you've got a consistent way to deploy workloads. You've got this golden path self-service experience to production for any engineer on OpenShift, on public cloud, on bare metal. And that consistent workflow means that your Node. Js developer, your Rust developer, your Postgres admin can one click deploy to any deployment target. And that to me sounds a very exciting future. [00:20:29] S0: Okay. So my audience is a lot of developers. You did mention already you do have a sandbox option. That seems to give a reasonable amount? Limited? It's quite
00:20:29 · Chris Chinchilla, Will Stewart
[00:20:29] S0: Okay. So my audience is a lot of developers. You did mention already you do have a sandbox option. That seems to give a reasonable amount? Limited? It's quite [00:20:47] S1: a lot. We are quite generous. Used to call it a free tier, but then calling it Developer Sandbox piques people's interest more. [00:20:53] S0: I think it sounds good. [00:20:53] S1: So you can deploy a couple of services for free. You can deploy a couple of databases for free and a couple of jobs as well. And that's on our cloud, so completely free. If you want to run it on your own cloud, maybe you've a free EKS cluster or a receiver cluster lying around, you can leverage Northflank to then deploy workloads on that. I think we give a cluster for free then. [00:21:17] S0: Yeah. And even then it gets pay as you go, which is kind of interesting. You're not doing monthly billing, which is what some of the kind of alternative to public cloud providers do because people want almost something that's more reliable. But you're sort of following a similar...