Episode Details

The conversation covers: 

• Why Kevin helped launch Single Music, where he currently provides SRE and architect duties.
• Single Music’s technical evolution from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes, and the key reasons that drove Kevin and his team to make the leap.
• What’s changed at Single Music since migrating to Kubernetes, and how Kubernetes is opening new doors for the company — increasing stability, and making life easier for developers.
• How Kubernetes allows Single Music to grow and pivot when needed, and introduce new features and products without spending a large amount of time on backend configurations. 
• How the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted music sales.
• Single Music’s new plugin system, which empowers their users to create their own middleware.
• Kevin’s current project, which is a series of how-to manuals and guides for users of Kubernetes.
• Some common misconceptions about Kubernetes.

Links

• Single Music
• Traefik Labs
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/notsureifkevin?lang=en
• Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/notsureifkevin

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 Emily Omier, your host, and today I am chatting with Kevin Crawley. And Kevin actually has two jobs that we're going to talk about. Kevin, can you sort of introduce yourself and what your two roles are?

Kevin: First, thank you for inviting me on to the show Emily. I appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit about both my roles because I certainly enjoy doing both jobs. I don't necessarily enjoy the amount of work it gives me, but it also allows me to explore the technical aspects of cloud-native, as well as the business and marketing aspects of it. So, as you mentioned, my name is Kevin Crawley. I work at a company called Containous. They are the company who created Traefik, the cloud-native load balancer. 

We've also created a couple other projects, and I'll talk a little bit about those later. For Containous, I'm a developer advocate. I work both with the marketing team and the engineering team. But also I moonlight as a co-founder and a co-owner of Single Music. And there, I fulfill mostly SRE type duties and also architect duties where a lot of times people will ask me feedback, and I'll happily share my opinion. And Single Music is actually based out of Nashville, Tennessee, where I live, and I started that with a couple friends here.

Emily: Tell me actually a little bit more about why you started Single Music. And what do you do exactly?

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. So, the company started out of really an idea that labels and artists—and these are musicians if you didn't pick up on the name Single Music—we saw an opportunity for those labels and artists to sell their merchandise through a platform called Shopify to have advanced tools around selling music alongside that merchandise. And at the time, which was in 2016, there weren't any tools rea