Qarik Group is a digital transformation specialist that helps organizations modernize their IT infrastructure to grow their businesses. The company is keen to build in the concept of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to help organizations move to the cloud. In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sat down with Steven Kim, Chief Technology Officer at Qarik Group to discuss the challenges organizations face with implementing CI and CD and how a cultural shift towards continuous innovation can be key. Kim says, “We need to figure out a way to decentralize operationally, that’s number one. You can’t have a central group trying to go out and manage and be a central point of bottleneck for things like release management policies.”

Key takeaways from this video interview are:

• Although there are commonalities between CI and CD, they are often categorized differently as they are trying to solve two separate problems. Technologies like automation can go and provide value in both areas.
• Understanding the differences of CI and CD and what their goals are are key. CI is primarily focused on giving engineers and development teams early feedback. CD is more aligned with business objectives like reliability, service quality, and agility.
• As CD is often geared towards reliability, having a site reliability engineering (SRE) mindset can help achieve the business objectives and SLAs.
• Development teams should own the processes end-to-end as having centralized teams can cause bottlenecks in processes and may not have the necessary understanding for specific aspects of an application.
• SRE is where engineers are dedicated to one job, whether it is making the product, service, or an application reliable. This might be how much memory an application uses, or its network requirements, or detecting upstream and downstream dependencies at a peak cycle.
• Organizations do not necessarily need to hire SRE engineers but rather to adopt an SRE mindset. It may be that a subset of the software engineers in an organization are focused on reliability. This tends to be more senior team members who have a broad understanding of the top-level business objectives.
• CD is a strategic enabler of cloud migration as it accelerates modernization and transformation, as well as putting in place best practices.

Guest: Steven Kim (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: Qarik Group (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk
Keyword: CI/CD Pipeline Implementation

About Steven Kim: Steven serves as CTO at Qarik Group LLC, responsible for the technical strategy and development of the firm’s core competencies and delivery capabilities. Steven also provides thought leadership and support across the firm’s client engagements and business development pipeline, while directing an engineering culture and mindset that sets Qarik’s identity and market position. Steven has 25 years of deep technical experience with world class organizations like Google, DreamWorks and Oracle. Steven is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles.

About Qarik Group: Qarik Group, headquartered in New York, was founded in 2019 to bridge the gap between business leaders and tech solutions. The team is anchored by a number of senior Google Cloud leaders, solution architects, and developers. Qarik has built a world-class development, engineering, and data science team with over 100 professionals worldwide. The consulting and services firm focuses on solving complex business challenges with Cloud technology and tools for some of the world’s largest companies using experience and expertise.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.