Episode Details

The conversation covers:

• Some of the pain points and driving factors that led Jón and his partners to launch Garden. Jon also talks about his early engineering experiences prior to Garden.
• How the developer experience can impact the overall productivity of a company, and   why companies should try and optimize it.
• Kubernetes shortcomings, and the challenges that developers often face when working with it. Jón also talks about the Kubernetes skills gap, and how Garden helps to close that gap. 
• Business stakeholder perception regarding Kuberentes challenges. 
• The challenge of deploying a single service on Kubernetes in a secure manner — and why Jón was surprised by this process. 
• How the Kubernetes ecosystem has grown, and the benefits of working with a large community of people who are committed to improving it. 
• Jón’s multi-faceted role as CEO of Garden, and what his day typically entails as a developer, producer, and liaison. 
• Garden’s main mission, which involves streamlining end-to-end application testing. 

Links:

• Company site: https://garden.io/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonedvald
• Kubernetes Slack: https://slack.k8s.io/

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'm chatting with Jón Eðvald. And, Jón, thank you so much for joining me.

Jón: Thank you so much for having me. You got the name pretty spot on. Kudos.

Emily: Woohoo, I try. So, if you could actually just start by introducing yourself and where you work in Garden, that would be great.

Jón: Sure. So, yeah, my name is Jón, one of the founders, and I’m the CEO of Garden. I've been doing software engineering for more years than I'd like to count, but Garden is my second startup. Previous company was some years ago; dropped out of Uni to start what became a natural language processing company. So, different sort of thing than what I'm doing now. 

But it's actually interesting just to scan through the history of how we used to do things compared to today. We ran servers out of basically a cupboard with a fan in it, back in the day, and now, things are done somewhat differently. So, yeah, I moved to Berlin, it's about four years ago now, met my current co-founders. We all shared a passion and, I guess to some degree, frustrations about the general developer experience around, I guess, distributed systems in general. And now it's become a lot about Kubernetes these days in the cloud-native world, but we are interested in addressing common developer headaches regarding all things microservices. 

Testing, in particular, has become a big part of our focus. Garden itself is an open-source product that aims to ease the developer experience around Kubernetes, again, with an emphasis on testing. When we started it, there wasn't a lot of these types of tools around, or they were pretty early on. Now there's a whole bunch of them, so we're trying to fit into this broad ecosystem. Happy to expand on that journey. But yeah, that's roughly—