Guest: Murli Thirumale (LinkedIn)
Company: Portworx (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

The rapidly changing nature of data is a key challenge for containerized applications. Portworx’s platform orchestrates the data of containerized applications just as Kubernetes orchestrates the application, ensuring that applications and their data are deployed with high resilience reliably. The company provides persistent storage, backup, disaster recovery, and data services to help tackle these challenges.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Murli Thirumale, GM of Portworx, talks about the company’s key focuses and the trends within the Kubernetes ecosystem. He goes on to discuss the changes he sees as Kubernetes begins to mature and how this is helping to tackle issues of complexity.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Thirumale has been involved with Kubernetes since the beginning as a Co-Founder of Portworx. He feels that at this year’s KubeCon there is a sense of innovation and maturity saying he is seeing large companies, even traditional ones, deploying at scale and customers putting mission-critical applications on Kubernetes on a large scale.
• Portworx ensures applications and their data are deployed with high resilience reliably, by providing persistent storage, backup, disaster recovery, and data services that are managed underneath Kubernetes. Thirumale discusses how Portworx is used to orchestrate the data of a containerized application, as Kubernetes orchestrates the app.
• Thirumale talks about the three key trends in Kubernetes that he is seeing: platform engineering is a maturation of DevOps where everything is being consolidated and deployed centrally. AI/ML and the Kubernetes stack are converging, and people need a copy of the changing AI/ML data that everyone can see through a virtualized model.
• While some of these trends are driven by innovation Thirumale says that while innovation is sometimes driven by software companies and startups, they also need innovative customers. He discusses how Portworx uses a co-creation model with its customers to create these new technologies.
• Thirumale talks about the changes we are seeing culturally. He feels that nowadays you do not need to be such an expert to deploy these new Kubernetes stacks since many products have matured to the point where you can deploy them reliably and many of these technologies are being offered as a service. Also, Kubernetes is becoming more invisible to the point where people are using Kubernetes without even knowing they are.
• Complexity continues to be an issue for Kubernetes and Thirumale discusses how vendors are making it easier by making it more invisible with click, drag, and drop-type solutions to help people operate it. He explains that now people are seeing Kubernetes as a fundamental technology to build an ecosystem around.
• Thirumale talks about the role he sees generative AI playing in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Portworx is beginning to use it to improve their documentation, and to create examples and demos for their product. Additionally, they are using it in their products such as with Co-Pilot. It is also helping to enable other applications in the industry.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.