Guest: Shaun O’Meara (LinkedIn)
Company: Mirantis (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Mirantis recently launched Lens-powered DevOpsCare, which is a fully-managed CI/CD solution for any Kubernetes environment. It’s targeted at those customers who want to be agnostic to the platforms they use, but run into the age-old challenges of complexity of Kubernetes and managing applications.

Shaun O’Meara, Field CTO of Mirantis, expands on this by saying, “Customers are dealing with an enormous amount of complexity when it comes to Kubernetes. We’re here to help our customers make better decisions through the power of Lens and with the power, we’re adding on the Lens extensions to make it easier for customers to consume those resources.”

As to how DevOpsCare plays into the Lens ecosystem, O’Meara mentions that the latest release of Lens includes a new clustering capability, which makes it possible for every developer to access a real production level cluster to run and test their workloads on automatically. O’Meara expands on this with, “One of the big powers of Lens is its ability to extend in a very sustainable way. So we can start to add extensions to Lens and add extra capabilities to links. That’s how we’re going to offer DevOpsCare.”

How does DevOpsCare improve the lives of developers? The clear benefit, according to O’Meara, is ultimately the elimination of complexity and running Kubernetes with confidence. But why did Mirantis create DevOpsCare now? On that, O’Meara says, “One of the questions that every customer gets asked is what are the barriers to adoption? Every customer turns around and says complexity, and you can see it’s high up there. We’ve done our own surveys across our customer base and its complexity every single time.”

O’Meara says there are other people trying to do this same thing, but through software or SAS models. The differentiator with Mirantis is that they are completely agnostic to the underlying Kubernetes platform. They are also focused on outcomes. So, instead of saying, “Here’s our piece of software, go run with it,” Mirantis is saying, “Here’s our software and we’ll operate it for you and we’ll support you right throughout that journey including helping you analyze your product.”

The summary of the show is written by Jack Wallen

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Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya and welcome to TFR Let’s Talk, and today we have with us once again Shaun O’Meara, Field CTO of Mirantis. Shaun, it’s good to have you back on the show.

Shaun O’Meara: It’s great to be back. Thanks for having us again.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Yeah, today we are going to talk about Lens DevOps Care. Tell us, what is it?

Shaun O’Meara: So DevOps Care is aimed at our customers who want to be agnostic to the communities platform they’re running on, but are running into the age-old challenges of the complexity of Kubernetes and adding and managing applications on top of Kubernetes platforms. So this is a new foray from Rantis, we’re moving up the stack traditionally we are very focused on the infrastructure side of containers and virtualization.

We’re going into supporting our customers in building out and maintaining and operating their applications. The challenges we see is, customers are dealing with an enormous amount of complexity when it comes to Kubernetes. There’s an enormous amount of choice out there. Everything on that T and CF landscape that I know you and I have spoken about in the past, we’re here to help our customers make better decisions through the power of Lens and with the power of we’re adding on the Lens extensions to make it easier for customers consume that and those resources.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Thanks for explaining that. Now, this is something I just quickly want to talk to you about because we are talking about Lens. It has been a while since Lens was released. If I can ask you quickly, in the Lens ecosystem, what role is DevOps Care going to be? How is it going to help users, not only just with Lens and ID, but in general?

Shaun O’Meara: DevOps Care is going to leverage the power of Lens. Lens five foot of three just released this week, actually in the last week, we’ve got a number of fantastic new features as part of Lens. As you know, in the past, we added the extensions capabilities within Lens. We’re about to talk and release the Lens clusters capability. Every developer will be able to get access to a real production level cluster to run their test workloads on, automatically through Lens.

One of the big powers of Lens is the ability to extend Lens in a very sustainable way. So we can start to add extensions to Lens and add extra capabilities to links. That’s how we’re going to offer DevOps Care. Lens is the gateway, it’s the entry point, it provides for the services as a service-based offering added on the Mirantis Skill, Mirantis Experience in helping customers operate these environments.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If you can also share, because of DevOps Care, how’s changing the life of developers or users? What are the clear benefits that without that, they had to do all this and suddenly it’s making their life so easier?

Shaun O’Meara: So the clear benefit for the users is ultimately elimination of the complexity. What we’re hoping to achieve is to make the whole exercise of building and running applications on top of a Kubernetes cluster, anywhere regardless of what Kubernetes cluster that is a lot easier for users. We’re doing that by focusing on tool sets and capabilities like visibility, improving the speed and the delivery of containers and container software through COCD tool sets. Allowing them to run Kubernetes with confidence. So without having to become Kubernetes experts, they can focus on building value into their applications, will take on the responsibility of looking after all the infrastructure that’s necessary to actually run Kubernetes applications in production. Everything as I’ve said from the COCD, all the way through to managing and securing the environment.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Why are you [inaudible 00:03:48] now, is there any need that you saw some pinpoints within the ecosystem and you’re saying “we have to do it now.” What is the need for Ops Care?

Shaun O’Meara: I don’t think it’s necessarily a new need but I think it’s a need that’s coming to a head within the community. The own and on every year, since Kubernetes has been around CNCF, as an example, have done their survey. One of the questions that every customer gets asked is what are the barriers to adoption? Every customer turns around and says complexity, and you can see it’s high up there. We’ve done our own surveys across our customer base and its complexity every single time. The complexity is moving up the stack, up till now a lot of companies have been focusing on that infrastructure complexity and getting Kubernetes to run. We’ve solved that problem. We can run Kubernetes. We can get Kubernetes out of the public cloud. What we’re is, the problem is higher up the stack and that’s the drive for us to do this today, to help accelerate getting Kubernetes workloads into production as rapidly as possible.

Swapnil Bhartiya: As you’re talking about the challenges and complexity higher up in the stack, who are you going to target with this?

Shaun O’Meara: So initially, we’re targeting customers who have small development teams who need to get started fast, maybe making the transition from either traditional VM-based or non-Kubernetes container-based environments. Customers who are willing and happy to work with a SAS-based product. So everything we’re offering on a SAS and customers who are Lens users or would like to be Lens users. That’s the target market for this. So small dynamic development teams, we want to focus on building their value. As I’ve mentioned, who don’t necessarily have strong DevOps engineers to do that work.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Earlier, the previous question you’re talking about, this is not something new that was needed now. Are there people also trying to solve the same problem? How different is this from what they’re trying to do there?

Shaun O’Meara: There are other people trying to do this purely through software models or SAS models where they’re doing bits of the service. Our differentiator, and our core differentiators, we’re completely agnostic to the underlying Kubernetes platform. So, that’s the first. We’re focused on outcomes. So, instead of saying, “here’s our piece of software, go run with it.” We’re saying, “Here’s our software and we’ll operate it for you and we’ll support you right throughout that journey including analyzing, helping you analyze your product.” So, it’s based on software with a very strong operational calm to it. We’re giving you access to those experts and those experienced engineers who’ve done real-world deployments of Kubernetes applications at scale, to advise you on that journey, along with the software solutions to help you achieve your end goals.

So one of the other core tenants of our overall offering is that for everything we are doing, we’re offering it to customers with quantifiable metrics, which means customers can purchase the service on a weekly or monthly basis. We’re able to then deliver those metrics to them, on a regular basis. Then work with them to constantly get better along with us and to measure the service and the service quality at each stage so that they can make data-driven decisions about their applications and their use of infrastructure.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Shaun, thank you so much for taking time out today and of course talk about not only the space of the challenges but how Mirantis is trying to solve some of those challenges, complexity higher up in the stack. Whenever I talk to CNCF folks, they say, “Hey, it’s going to get even more complicated, don’t think that we are going to simplify things for you.” The logos are going to grow. So, thanks for talking about DevOps Gear. I look forward to talk to you again soon. Thank you.

Shaun O’Meara: Thank you very much for having me and to hearing what we’re doing in the future.

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