TriggerMesh, a cloud native integration platform, announced the availability and certification of TriggerMesh Cloud Native Integration Platform and AWS Event Sources for OpenShift. We sat down with the Co-Founder and CEO of TriggerMesh, Mark Hinkle, to talk about the announcement and how it brings Amazon EventBridge functionality to OpenShift.

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Here is a lightly edited transcript of the interview for your easy consumption.

Swapnil Bhartiya: TriggerMesh has announced Cloud-Native Integration Platform Certification for Red Hat OpenShift. Can you tell a bit about the need for this certification and what is it all about?
Mark Hinkle: The first part of the certification is the certification of the TriggerMesh operator and the operator is terminology for the way that you install applications within a Kubernetes cluster and specifically this is an OpenShift Kubernetes cluster. The first part is we verified and done the testing and passed their certification so that the TriggerMesh platform can be installed on OpenShift. The second part of our announcement is the certification of a project called SAWS and solves is an acronym for sources from Amazon Web Services or AWS. What that means is that you can use these sources to trigger functions from Amazon services to serverless functions running within OpenShift serverless.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What new capabilities do you bring to OpenShift and build a bridge between AWS and OpenShift?
Mark Hinkle: What we really bring is the ability to integrate Cloud Native infrastructure across multiple clouds. For example, you could have a file stored on S3 and when that file is uploaded to Amazon S3 you could trigger a function that manipulates that file on OpenShift. So, it could do some kind of ETL (extract, transform and load) data transformation. It could do a variety of things from a file that would be on one cloud ecosystem to another. We think that as you look at the Cloud Native landscape, Cloud Native applications are made up of distinct microservices and as this design pattern evolves, we think that microservices are not just going to run on one cloud but multiple clouds and on your end data center.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Right, can you also elaborate a bit on bringing Amazon EventBridge like functionality to an OpenShift ecosystem?
Mark Hinkle: Amazon’s EventBridge is very popular within their own ecosystem. And so, it stands to reason that other cloud infrastructure, especially serverless architectures, will want to have that same kind of capability. So, we’ve built is an event bridge for every cloud. It’s a single platform that allows you to have that kind of functionality, whether you’re on OpenShift, IBM Cloud, Google, Microsoft or Amazon. It’s not limited to a single cloud or you can use it from your data center as well. It gives you one consistent way to trigger your functions no matter where they reside.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you talk about your relationship or your engagement with Red Hat and Amazon on this announcement?
Mark Hinkle: So we are a part of Red Hat and Amazon partner programs, but we are largely certifying right now and working with our customers so that they know that our solutions are certified in those ecosystems. As we get more customers, we’ll probably look at Amazon and Red Hat as a strategic partner and see how we can further our relationships.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What is the significance of this announcement now?
Mark Hinkle: I think the significance now, especially in this age of a big shift from working from home, there’s a lot of folks and organizations that are working on accelerating their digital transformation plans. Because they have a large workforce that is now working remotely and a lot of their systems to adequately enable those remote workers have to be updated. So, we feel like we’re a catalyst for that digital transformation by allowing them to quickly build systems that are remotely accessible.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Because of this crisis, we are starting to rethink how we build our systems. So, from your perspective, what do you think will be in the aftermath of this crisis as people will start looking at their infrastructure in a totally different light?
Mark Hinkle: The fortunate side effect of an unfortunate situation is that these companies will see the benefits of having remotely accessible and remote work systems. They’ll also have a sort of trial by fire and see where their inadequacies are. It’ll help them prioritize what they update.

The sample that I probably see more than anything else is you have systems that are readily available on your corporate LAN and now you have to access them from home, without having the same kind of heavy overweight systems on a high bandwidth, low latency LAN, now need these to be available over a mobile connection, variable connections that have different qualities of service.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What does it mean for TriggerMesh?
Mark Hinkle: It doesn’t mean all that much as far as difference in where our vision and mission to enable digital transformation was, I think it just affects our timeline. I think it moves it up for a lot of those things. We feel like we have a good hypothesis that people are moving to a digital world that is more varied in the way that you access your data.

One of the things you just mentioned is corporate laptops. I’ve been shocked by the number of folks that I’ve seen say that they don’t even have home computers anymore. They have tablet computers and their phone and their desktops.

When they went to migrate, there wasn’t desktop software that they can install on their mobile device. That was something that I hadn’t even considered until I started seeing friends and family speak on Facebook. And my friends in IT, moving groups of white-collar workers to their homes and saying, “There isn’t a desktop client. These folks have iPads at home or they live off of their mobile device and they don’t have a computer.” So those factors probably just move up our timelines.

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