KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Salt Lake City was abuzz with innovation, visionary insights, and the vibrant energy of the cloud-native ecosystem. Billy Thompson, Global DevOps and Platform Engineering – Office of the CTO at Akamai, joined me to delve into Akamai’s ongoing efforts in the cloud-native space, particularly focusing on their Akamai App Platform, trends in platform engineering, and Akamai’s evolving culture around open source.

One of the key highlights of the discussion was the unveiling of the Akamai App Platform, described by Thompson as “an IDP (internal development platform) in a box.” He explained how the platform aims to reduce toil, standardize workflows, and provide out-of-the-box functionality. It combines tools like Harbor, Tekton, and ArgoCD, among others, while addressing pain points like non-standardization and steep learning curves. “You’re not starting from scratch. You’re not spending years working on it… This is our gift to platform engineers,” Thompson said.

Billy Thompson emphasized the importance of giving back to the open-source community.He sees Akamai as being in the early stages of a long-term journey to become a more active member of the ecosystem.
youtu.be/sNMniAGnPqA
@cncf.io #kubernetes #opensource #kubeCon

— TFiR Media (@tfirmedia.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 11:25 AM

While some major tech giants face new challenges and scale back their involvement with open source, it’s refreshing to see newcomers like Akamai stepping up to play a more instrumental role in the open source and cloud-native ecosystem.

Thompson reflected on Akamai’s roots, crediting Linode for teaching the importance of a developer-centric culture. He also emphasized Akamai’s commitment to fostering an open-source-first culture through initiatives like an open source office program to encourage contributions.

Thompson highlighted the importance of giving back to the open-source community, both personally and organizationally. He sees Akamai as being in the early stages of a long-term journey to become a more active member of the ecosystem.

Thompson also points out that the way open source works makes it often difficult to track contributors accurately, as many participate using handles or emails not necessarily associated with their corporate identities/employees.

This flexibility is beneficial as it encourages broader participation in open source. However, like many companies, Akamai seems to have started discussions about establishing an Open Source Program Office (OSPO) to ‘codify’ its engagement with open source communities.

Guest: Billy Thompson (LinkedIn)
Company: Akamai
Show: Let’s Talk

Questions discussed

• What kind of traffic and conversations are you seeing at the booth?
• What is the Akamai App Platform all about?
• What pain points and challenges will the Akamai App Platform address for platform engineers and DevOps?
• What role does Akamai see itself playing in the cloud-native ecosystem?
• What kind of culture is Akamai building internally to encourage open source involvement?

This summary was written by Monika Chauhan.

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Unedited Transcript (Note: the text is AI generated, it has not been edited or reviewed. It may contain errors, including incorrect names. It’s provided here under  Creative Commons license (CC by 4.0) to be used by bloggers, journalists and analysts for creating their own content.)

Swapnil Bhartiya : Hi. This is your host, Swapnil Bhartiya, and we are here at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Salt Lake City, Utah. And today we have with us, once again, Billy Thompson, Global DevOps and platform engineering office of the CTO at Akamai. Billy, it’s great to have you back on the show.

Billy Thompson : Yeah, I’m having an awesome time, but it’s even better now that I’m back on your show. So thanks for having me.

Swapnil Bhartiya : No, it’s my pleasure to talk to you, and this is your place, right? This is where you belong in a way or other. First of all, what kind of traffic you’re seeing at the booth, what kind of conversation you’re having with folks, and what kind of concern you hear from them, where you see that, hey, this is where Akamai plays a great role.

Billy Thompson: I’ll start with the trends. So one that I guess I’m a little bit more into this time around, is Wasm. Now that one didn’t really sit home with me some of the past shows, and that’s kind of a fault of mine, because when I was learning rust, I just have a pairing in my brain with Wasm, is the next step for web applications and compiling to Wasm, but then I also kind of have a lower tolerance for hype, so I just sort of looked over it. But this time around, I can’t really articulate why, but it’s just kind of having a different feeling in the conversations and they’re happening in the booth. I saw a really cool talk, a lightning talk, not yesterday, but the day before, on the Wasm edge, and I don’t even remember the second half of it, because I pulled out my phone and started looking at the GitHub repo. Mike, all right, this is pretty cool. So that those conversations have been trailing over at the booth as well. And then platform engineering, you know, now that the hype around that has settled down, there’s a lot more serious conversation about that. So yeah, this, that’s what I’ve been picking up on so far. And yeah, yeah, I’m liking it.

Swapnil Bhartiya: One of the biggest stories, at least from the Akamai lens, is the announcement of Akamai App platform. I would also like to talk about the whole Akamai and the cloud native ecosystem, but let’s just quickly get the elephant out of the room, which is what is Akamai platform all about

Billy Thompson: it’s an IDP and for the purposes of accessibility, for our listeners, that’s internal development platform. It’s an IDP in a box. It just works. So the years, sometimes that platform teams will spend stitching together all the pieces to fit in a Kubernetes cluster, to finally have something working, and then say you have everything working, and then you add a network policy, and then it’s broken again. So all this time and energy that they put into and then it’s different in every single organization. So we just have an opinionated stack that we did the heavy lifting of making sure it just works. All the knobs, buttons and switches have at it, it works.

Swapnil Bhartiya : And since now, your role has changed. Now you are, you know, part of, you know, Office of CTO and focusing on DevOps and platforming. So talk a bit about what kind of pain points challenges platform engineers DevOps were facing that this Akamai App platform will address.

Billy Thompson : So the pain points are going to be the complexity, the non standardization, and basically, not that I’d say the learning curve, but the using curve, right? Because I think that Kubernetes, at least, in my opinion, I feel like is not that bad to learn. And I know some people get really hot when I say that. Like, what are you talking about? Have you never used it? I understand the headaches that it causes. I’ve been there, but it’s what you deploy on it when you go to set up your Observability stack, and when you’re doing backups, when you’re migrating and when it comes to building an internal developer platform, and you want one opinionated set of tooling. Back to my previous point, some teams can spend the better part of a decade just trying to get that right. You look at the CNCF landscape, there’s a lot of tooling. I haven’t used all of it. I don’t know anyone that has. But all of these projects, some are better than others. I would say all of them are good if they’re in the CNCF, but all of them have their pitfalls, every one of them. And then there’s a matter of opinion about which ones are better than others. And I. You’re kind of reinventing the wheel every time, and if the idea of platform engineering is to overall, one, save on cost, and two, deliver a better product, because let’s take a step backwards, like think about this sort of messy dependency chain. Or it’s not always messy, but it can be, where developers build the product to make the end users happy. They give feedback when they’re not happy, so the developer teams need to iterate on that quickly and make them happy, but then they have their own toil internally. That whole thing called silos and culture problems and all that. So then the platform teams have to be like, Okay, we have to fix this. So they have to develop a product that the internal teams can use to make the developers happy and the product managers and SREs happy so that then they can develop the product that makes the end users happy. So this is a long dependency chain here and then now, if they’re having the toil and they’re suffering to get that part of it right, where’s the benefit? So I mentioned in the past that I think that cloud providers should just take on this task and be like, Okay, we’re going to bang our heads against the ball and we’re going to get this right. We’re going to give you a stack that we can validate it just works. We’re going to test all the Helm charts. We’re going to test everything. You can customize it from there and do whatever you do, but what we provided just works. And the whole concept of, Is it usable? Can you use it? Is it actually reusable? Is it portable? If every company is doing their own thing, and that’s not to say that people still don’t want to do their own thing, and I don’t necessarily discourage that. But from my perspective, what I think that Kubernetes did, although there is complexity with it, it took what we were doing with DevOps, with containers, with the 12 factor app principles and the orchestration aspect to it. It made that easier. And yes, Kubernetes has complexity, but when I’m talking about easier, I’m looking at it from the perspective of, I feed it some yaml, I told it what I wanted it to do, and it does, for the most part, the heavy lifting, and spits out the results that I want. Now let’s look at products like backstage. Kind of follow the similar model here, right? You have, you have one unified platform for it, and people can add to it. It can extend. You add plugins and other things. They just made that easier. And look at how much that’s taking off, right? So from a cloud provider’s perspective, if we are a good cloud for DevOps engineers and platform engineers, which I believe we are, because we’re just easier to use, we stick to the core cloud infrastructure primitives, big proponents of open source, and that’s the type of solutioning and the type of workloads that do very well with this. And it just makes sense that our next step is to make that easier for them. So if we can package it and just hand it off, and it just works.

Swapnil Bhartiya : basically, in addition to all the other things, but it also makes Kubernetes kind of easier, right? I mean, complexity is there, so it lowers the barrier of entry, mitigate the whole learning curve as well, so most folks can get on board as quickly as possible.

Billy Thompson: Yeah. So in this case, since it’s deploying the Kubernetes cluster and installing a bunch of these with Helm charts, and you go to add your network and security policies, and it doesn’t break anything. From a learning curve perspective, you can just look at how we did it. All of this is open source so and I’m one of those people, one of the rare breeds that I just love to do things the hard way. That’s just how I like to learn. That’s how I like to R and D. Do I do that in production? No, no. Do I encourage my clients do that in production? No, but from my own learning, yeah, I’ll bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster, self hosting. I’ll go through all the pain. Just that’s my adventure. But that’s a learning curve that I embrace, and a lot of people are not in a position where they can embrace that. Maybe they don’t work for a cloud provider and they don’t have the resources to just test that out. Of course, there is mini cube and other things locally, but we’re talking about production and where time is money. So if you. Need to be an administrator of Kubernetes, or if you need to be a platform team developing an IDP. Here’s just an example that you can look at of how it works. It’s like reading through documentation or a giant tutorial, step by step guide you from point A to point B. So in that regard, I would say it lowers the barrier to entry and lowers the learning curve.

Swapnil Bhartiya: I mean, Linode was the one that kind of democratized the whole cloud. I mean, before AWS, you know, we were really, I mean, I was a Linode user from the very early on. So you folks have been around for a bit. Folks know, but Akamai is related with new Kumar in the in the this cloud native ecosystem, though Akamai has been a pioneer in this whole CDN and the security space. So can you also talk about what role do you see Akamai is already with the air platform, playing and going to play in this ecosystem.

Billy Thompson: Akamai is learning from Linode, which I think is really good, because what Linode did was spent years not just sponsoring shows and putting their logo in places. Linode didn’t just sponsor Pearl con. Linode was a part of pearl con. You’re a developer, I’m a developer. Let’s build stuff together, right? You know, the people at the show were not dollar signs walking around. They were our friends. They were our comrades, you know. And so building that up for so many years, and that’s why Linode, impressively, was able to grow to 150 million in revenue a year business just word of mouth or people finding the sign up button. It wasn’t until a couple years before the acquisition that we, you know, really started to roll out sales and marketing teams. So there was just so much there, just with the story of Linode and its contribution to open source and our CEO made commits to the colonel, right, and wrote his own modules, wrote it himself. That is just such a beautiful story to tell, and it’s just something that you really don’t see a lot anymore. Now, Akamai comes from an era 25 years ago where the internet was just atrocious. AOL dial up, and they solved the problem of how slow everything is, or what they call the worldwide weight, and they developed a CDM, but only big enterprises could do something with it back then. And, you know, just the developer space back then, just the historic, very corporate, very sales led growth. It was just a different environment right now to the developer scene that we have today. Everything’s about product everything is product led growth, and everything’s about, what can I get my hands on today? How can I interact with it? Where can I get help from my peers and other people that use this? So what I’m seeing is something as big as Akamai growing in that direction, and I think that is super, super critical right now. I know a lot of the talks and stuff have been happening around here, the hot takes around what’s happening to open source, and all the fear and uncertainty around license changes, and you know, the business source license, and a lot of what’s happening there with a lot of big companies similar to Akamai that just take and take and take and take and take and take everyone’s using open source. The fact is, is it can’t just disappear, because everything will crumble down like everyone’s using it. So there really needs to be more companies like Akamai giving back to it, and even me on an individual level, I haven’t always given back as much have I taken. In fact, my entire 2025 plan is around how much can I give back? Because I haven’t even personally done that when I write tooling for my team, it’s very easy for me to go and just write something custom that just fits our use case for what we’re doing. And nobody ever sees that. It never sees the light of day. So even me, personally now I catch myself doing that and go, Wait a minute. I. How can I generalize this and actually make this so someone else with a similar use case can use this exact same tool that I’m writing? So it’s now just like this part of anything that I write, how can I open source it like it’s an obligation, it’s a duty. It’s I’ve taken and taken and taken for a long time. So I need to give and give and give and give and so I just see Akamai in its earlier stages of doing that at a much greater scale.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you talk about what kind of culture Akamai is building internally so that more developers within Akamai are not only exposed to open source, but they also start getting involved, engaged with open source.

Billy Thompson: The short answer is that we’re having discussions about an open source Office program, and what that means exactly, because what happens a lot, and I wouldn’t be able to say how much this is happening in Akamai just by lack of visibility. But one thing that is common is that there are a lot of companies that have employees who are making contributions to open source projects, and they don’t know about it. And some of that may be because it’s just not whatever they’re using at work. And some of it’s because some of these companies have do have strict policies that say, if you did this on our hardware, then we have ownership over it. And there may be other reasons as well. So a lot of times, there could be several people within occupy that have made several contributions that I don’t even know about, but that’s something I would like to know about, because that’s something we need to come together on, and we’re having those kind of discussions as we speak.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Once again, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about, of course, the Akamai ad platform, but much bigger picture, how Akamai is, you know, emerging as a very no critical player in this ecosystem. So thanks for those insight insights. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you.

Billy Thompson: Thank you for having me, and thank you for having a discussion about open source with me.

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