Guest: Ohad Maislish (LinkedIn)
Company: env0 (Twitter)

env0 focuses on the move for the cloud to code and provides solutions for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) supporting TerraForm, Pulumi, and AWS CloudFormation. The company aims to empower DevOps engineers, maximizing productivity and collaboration.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Ohad Maislish, Co-founder and CEO of env0, to introduce us to the company and how it is helping DevOps engineers manage infrastructure. He talks about the evolution of infrastructure and how this is challenging for people to manage in today’s distributed environment. He goes into depth about some of the ways env0 solutions are tackling these challenges.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Maislish introduces us to env0 and the key areas it focuses on.
• Now that cloud applications are more distributed into small microservices, it has become difficult for DevOps engineers to manage. Maislish discusses the challenges for DevOps engineers whose code sits on GitHub or other platforms, whereas their cloud resources sit on different systems, and how this motivates env0 to help tackle these challenges.
• For many years the role of a developer was focused on code and nothing else, but nowadays infrastructure also falls within their remit. The reality is that even a tiny code change can impact the entire infrastructure. Maislish explains that while engineers have more power to influence their applications by changing the infrastructure using code, it’s more responsibility.
• Maislish discusses the evolution of infrastructure as code and how nowadays engineers can influence the infrastructure in order to better manage the cloud. Maislish tells us how we have shifted away from manual operations and “clicking a button” to change configurations instead of changing code.
• Lots of companies are embracing the cloud, but while TerraForm provides an open-source framework it is predominantly a technical solution, not a management solution. Maislish explains why they focus on multi-framework and how they help customers manage TerraForm, CloudFormation, and Pulumi, at scale.
• Maislish discusses how env0 helps to prevent drift whereby someone within an organization changes cloud resources manually without changing the code. He takes us through how env0 enables you to manage code and cloud resources together, showing so you can understand the implications before making changes.
• Cloud costs remain a key consideration, particularly with lots of organizations looking to cut costs and sometimes an engineer will look to make a change to the code which looks good but has serious implications for cloud costs. He shares his recommendations for these scenarios.
• Maislish details how env0’s services originally started by enabling you to execute the code or initiate “a plan” assigning developers what they can do with that code, and how code execution is being approved. Nowadays, their offerings enable DevOps engineers to run fast, and develop fast with minimum risk while having governance visibility, and predictability for your cloud deployments.
• Some of the pain points DevOps engineers are experiencing are the responsibility with dangerous code and understanding the implications of that code execution. Maislish feels that lots of DevOps engineers lack the confidence to make those changes, which can create a bottleneck. He discusses how env0 can help them solve these problems.
• env0 has had a successful Series A funding round, which has now reached $35 million, with customers including PayPal, MongoDB, Virgin Media, and Western Union. Maislish talks about some of their key investors, their expertise in the IaC area, and their involvement in steering the company.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.