Episode Details

Some of the highlights of the show include

• The diplomacy that’s required between software engineers and management, and why influence is needed to move projects forward to completion.
• Driving factors behind Ygrene’s Kubernetes migration, which included an infrastructure bottleneck, a need to streamline deployment, and a desire to leverage their internal team of cloud experts.
• Management’s request to ship code faster, and why it was important to the organization. 
• How the company’s engineers responded to the request to ship code faster, and overcame disconnects with management.
• How the team obtained executive buy-in for a Kubernetes migration.
• Key cultural changes that were required to make the migration to Kubernetes successful.
• How unexpected challenges forced the team to learn the “depths of Kubernetes,” and how it helped with root cause analysis.
• Why the transition to Kubernetes was a success, enabling the team to ship code faster, deliver more value, secure more customers, and drive more revenue. 

Links:

• HerdX: https://www.herdx.com/
• Ygrene: https://ygrene.com/
• Austin Twitter: https://twitter.com/_austbot
• Austin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austbot/
• Arnold’s book on publisher site: https://www.packtpub.com/cloud-networking/the-kubernetes-workshop 
• Arnold’s book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Kubernetes-Workshop-Interactive-Approach-Learning/dp/1838820752/

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. My name is Emily Omier, and I am here with Austin Adams and Zack Arnold, and we are here to talk about why companies go cloud-native.

Austin: So, I'm currently the CTO of a small Agrotech startup called HerdX. And that means I spend my days designing software, designing architecture for how distributed systems talk, and also leading teams of engineers to build proof-of-concepts and then production systems as they take over the projects that I've designed. 

Emily: And then, what did you do at Ygrene? 

Austin: I did the exact same thing, except for without the CTO title. And I also had other higher-level engineers working with me at Ygrene. So, we made a lot of technical decisions together. We all migrated to Kubernetes together, and Zack was a chief proponent of that, especially with the culture change. So, I focused on the designing software that teams of implementation engineers could take over and actually build out for the long run. And I think Zack really focused on—oh, I'll let Zack say what he focused on. [laughs].

Emily: Go for it, Zach.

Zach: Hello. I'm Zack. I also no longer work for Ygrene, although I have a lot of admiration and respect for the people who do. It was a fantastic company. So, Austin called me up a while back and asked me to think about participating in a DevOps engineering role at Ygrene. And he sort of said at the outset, we don't really know what it looks like, and we're pretty sure that we just created a position out of a culture, but would you be willing to embody it? 

And up until this point, I'd had cloud experience, and I had had