Shifting Left, Velocity, AI/ML, and More - 15 Minutes With Nick Durkin
Nick Durkin, Field CTO at Harness, had the opportunity to sit down for a quick 15 minute chat with John Furrier and David Nicholson for KubeCon + CloudNative Con NA 2021 in Los Angeles, CA. Just like everything else Nick touches, it turned into gold - and there are quite a few shiny, sparkly (paraphrased) nuggets in there:
1:10: On Shifting Left When it Comes to Cloud Costs: The notion of shifting left is great in theory, but in practice, we have to empower our engineers/developers with the data they need. It goes beyond getting the bill at the end of the month and figuring out what happened then - we have to provide access to cost data in real time. Proactive, not reactive. And... of course it doesn't hurt when you have Cloud AutoStopping!
3:44: On Velocity: When you think about Software Delivery, everybody wants to go fast. But with governance and compliance, we get roadblocked. We can still go fast, but it needs to be done in the right, compliant way. It's a challenge, and it can cause tension. But if you have tooling that ensures governance, and where your devs literally can't do anything wrong, that's the key. That's how you eliminate the bottleneck.
6:20: On the Benefits of Harness: We gave engineers their nights and weekends back. Harness uses machine learning to understand what 'normal' looks like so our engineers don't have to - and when things break, it's the same concept.
7:15: On AI and Automation: Throughout our entire platform, we've designed our AI to take care of the worst parts of anyone's job. Ask any DevOps person if they love babysitting deployments. That's a no. Ask any engineer if they love sitting there waiting for tests to run. Still a no. Our AI/ML is designed to remove all the things that people hate. It's there to make their jobs better. And the best news? It starts helping on the second build/deployment - and it only gets better from there.
11:00: On Complexity: It's too complicated for a full stack developer to also know infrastructure, edge computing, etc. - it's impossible. This is where tooling helps. Let devs shine where they're good at, and let tooling do the rest. That's our goal. Again: Allow people to do what they love.
11:57: On 'Peak' Kubernetes: I'm excited about the networking space and what we're doing there. When Istio was originally released, I thought that was one of the most amazing things. I think in the next few years, we're gonna see Kubernetes turn into that - 100% utilized across the board. This is gonna be where everyone's workloads continue to exist, like VMs were in the past.
Alright - not gonna give up all the goods. If you want to see what else Nick has to say, you're gonna have to watch the full interview below. A huge, heartfelt thank you to our partners at AWS for linking us with this speaking opportunity - we are very grateful! And to learn more about Harness, you can book your demo today.
I'll leave you with this, because it needs to be repeated: We demand a Continuous Durkin podcast!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkmb5D9bZHc