Guest: Tommy McClung (LinkedIn)
Company: Release (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Environments can be a key cause of bottlenecks for developers. Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) company, Release, is helping reduce these bottlenecks by enabling developers to easily create and tear down, scale, manage, and reproduce their environments. EaaS helps to reduce cloud costs, foster better collaboration, and ultimately help developers get their work released faster.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Tommy McClung, CEO at Release, introduces us to the company and talks about how their Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) offering is helping to solve bottlenecks that make developers less productive. He discusses the benefits of Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) and what is in the pipeline for the company.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• McClung talks about his background as a CTO for a public company with around 300 developers and how during a push for modernization, one of the key challenges they experienced was that the environments were a big bottleneck that made developers less productive. He explains how this led to the creation of Release.
• The end developer needs an environment that ensures what they are building is doing what it needs to. McClung discusses how Release is helping streamline developers’ ability to produce and get their work released as quickly as they can.
• While there has been a lot of discussion around DevOps and SREs, lately we have seen a shift of focus back on developer experience. McClung feels that developers should stay within their flow and that their tools should work within the workflows they are currently using.
• Release offers Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) and McClung explains that if you think of the environment as everything you need to have your application run abstracted into an application template or blueprint. He takes us through some of the scenarios where developers can make use of an application template.
• McClung talks about some of the core benefits of Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) or Environment-as-Code: velocity, ensuring quality of code and consistency, developer experience, and better collaboration.
• Tribal knowledge can be a challenge but Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) can help ensure the knowledge remains when a developer leaves and the next developer can pick up where he left off. Since it also helps with sharing environments, developers can share what they need to so it is not just locked into one person’s hands.
• Release is a fully remote company and being able to share the environment has helped foster collaboration possibilities early in the development cycle with customers.
• McClung explains how customers can use Release to create environments on demand. Developers will get an environment with every pull request, which is a full replica environment of what you have in production. He discusses how developers are using these environments and how they are as close to production replicas as possible.
• Release’s customers range across all industries, from small startups to large companies. The common thread between the different companies that are building in-house software, where bottlenecks are slowing them down and facilitating easier collaboration is key.
• Two of the biggest challenges of Kubernetes are complexity and cloud cost and McClung explains that the core of Release is built on Kubernetes and how they have helped many companies get started with Kubernetes. He talks about how using an ephemeral environment helps address cloud costs.
• McClung discusses the trade-off between time, money, and effort, and how some of their clients who initially only had one staging environment and now have a hundred may incur greater costs since they are moving quicker. However, he tells us oftentimes the ephemeral nature of these environments actually saves money.
• Release has a couple of generative AI initiatives, looking at how generative AI can remove bottlenecks in operations by launching a chat interface that allows you to talk to your infrastructure. The company is also looking at the infrastructure side of AI as part of its core business.
• McClung talks about the challenges of letting AI act on your behalf and he believes that when you want to do very specific things that need to be accurate, you still have to have humans involved.
• Release’s key focuses are on evolving their core product and increasing the surface area of the kind of environments that can be created and managed.
• Release’s biggest competitor is in-house teams and McClung feels that the important thing for companies to consider is culturally having a mindset of what matters and building that as an intellectual property that adds value and is unique and this may not be the case for building their own in-house Environment-as-a-Service.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.