Episode Details

The conversation covers: 

• Gou’s role as CTO of Portworx, and how he works with customers on a day to day basis.
• Common pain points that Gou talks about with customers. Gou explains how he helps customers create agile and cost-effective application development and deployment environments.
• The types of people that Gou talks to when approaching customers about cloud native discussions.
• Why customers often struggle with infrastructure related problems during their cloud native journeys, and how Gou and his team help.
• Common misconceptions that exist among customers when exploring cloud native solutions. For example, Gou mentions moving to Kubernetes for the sake of moving to Kubernetes. 
• Gou’s thoughts on state — including why there is no such thing as an end-to-end stateless architecture.
• Some cloud native vertical trends that Gou is noticing taking place in the market. 
• The issue of vendor lock-in, and how data and state fit into lock-in discussions. 
• Gou’s opinion on where he sees the cloud native ecosystem heading.

Links

• Portworx: https://portworx.com/ 
• Portworx Blog: https://portworx.com/blog/
• Gou Rao Email: mailto:gou@portworx.com 

Transcript

Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, I'm your host Emily Omier, and today I am chatting with Gou Rao. Gou, I want to go ahead and have you introduce yourself. Where do you work? What do you do?

Gou: Sure. Hi, Emily, and hi to everybody that's listening in. Thanks for having me on this podcast. My name is Gou Rao. I'm the CTO at Portworx. Portworx is a leader in the cloud-native storage space. We help companies run mission-critical stateful applications in production in hybrid, multi-cloud, and cloud-native environments.

Emily: So, when you say you’re CTO, obviously that's a job title everyone, sort of, understands. But what does that mean you spend your day doing?

Gou: Yeah, it is an overloaded term. As a CTO, I think CTOs in different companies wear multiple hats doing different things. Here at Portworx, technically I'm in charge of this company strategy and technical direction. What does that mean in terms of my day to day activities? And it's spending a lot of time with customers understanding the problems that they're trying to solve, and then trying to build a pattern around what different people in different industries and companies are doing, and then identifying common problems and trying to bring solutions to market, by working with our engineering teams, that sort of address, holistically, the underlying areas that I see people try and craft solutions around, whether it's enabling an agile development environment for their internal developers, or cost optimization, there's usually some underlying theme, and my job is to identify what that is, and come up with a meaningful solution that addresses a wide segment of the market.

Emily: What are the most common pain points that you end up talking to customers about?

Gou: Over the past, I think, eight-p