Episode Details

The conversation covers: 

• An overview of Ravi’s role as an evangelist — an often misunderstood, but important technology enabler. 
• Balancing organizational versus individual needs when making decisions.
• Some of the core motivations that are driving cloud native migrations today. 
• Why Ravi believes it in empowering engineers to make business decisions. 
• Some of the top misconceptions about cloud native. Ravi also provides his own definition of cloud native.
• How cloud native architectures are forcing developers to “shift left.”

Links

• https://harness.io/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ravilach
• Harness community: https://community.harness.io/
• Harness Slack: https://harnesscommunity.slack.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.

Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, I am your host Emily Omier. And today I'm chatting with Ravi Lachhman. Ravi, I want to always start out with, first of all, saying thank you—

Ravi: Sure, excited to be here.

Emily: —and second of all, I like to have you introduce yourself, in your own words. What do you do? Where do you work?

Ravi: Yes, sure. I'm an evangelist for Harness. So, what an evangelist does, I focus on the ecosystem, and I always like the joke, I marry people with software because when people think of evangelists, they think of a televangelist. Or at least that’s what I told my mother and she believes me still. I focus on the ecosystem Harness plays in. And so, Harness is a continuous delivery as a service company. So, what that means, all of the confidence-building steps that you need to get software into production, such as approvals, test orchestration, Harness, how to do that with lots of convention, and as a service.

Emily: So, when you start your day, walk me through what you're actually doing on a typical day?

Ravi: a typical day—dude, I wish there was a typical day because we wear so many hats as a start-up here, but kind of a typical day for me and a typical day for my team, I ended up reading a lot. I probably read about two hours a day, at least during the business day. Now, for some people that might not be a lot, but for me, that's a lot. So, I'll usually catch up with a lot of technology news and news in general. They kind of see how certain things are playing out. 

So, a big fan of The New Stack big fan of InfoQ. I also like reading Hacker News for more emotional reading. The big orange angry site, I call Hacker News. And then really just interacting with the community and teams at large. So, I'm the person I used to make fun of, you know, quote-unquote, “thought leader.” I used to not understand what they do, then I became one that was like, “Oh, boy.” [laughs]. 

And so just providing guidance for some of our field teams, some of the marketing teams around the cloud-native ecosystem, what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, my opinion on it. And that's pretty much i