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I think people want the simplicity of a Cloud Foundry experience, but they want the composability of Kubernetes. They want to be able to wire together the thing they want. But wiring together the thing they want is really hard, so people are looking for abstractions. Maybe they're looking for the vendors, or the cloud ... |
We talked about cognitive load for the app teams - we're trying to reduce that by shifting things to the platform team. But where Syntasso is now trying to help is "How do we help the platform team?" Because the more stuff we pile on them, and the more pressure we put on them to say "You need to build the right platfor... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's actually a really good point. I really like how you're thinking about that, and I would love to hear how Chris is thinking about the how part. So that sounds amazing... How do you actually achieve that platform builder? |
**Chris Hedley:** Yeah, it's fascinating. So just to extend on what Paula has just said - I think there's often an assumption that goes unsaid, that platform teams have one set of customers, i.e. the application developer teams... I think in our experiences we've realized they quite often don't. They have internal audi... |
\[24:29\] So CF was brilliant to just serving the Twelve-Factor App use case; not so great if billing came along and said "Tell me how much that particular application is consuming in compute resource, so we know how much to charge the team." Not so great if security come along and request certain runtime security scan... |
We're also trying to figure out abstractions that are meaningful to the platform team, so they can also service their other customers, so they can inject what they need at runtime into the software to make sure the billing box is ticked, the older boxes are ticked, the continuous secure software supply chains events ar... |
And then once that happens, how do you even distribute that software across the kind of infrastructure as state, so that users can start using it. I think once you've rolled all of those things up, that's quite a gnarly problem to have to grapple with. |
**Break:** \[26:25\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** We mentioned Kratix and Syntasso a couple of times, and as you know me, Chris, I like my whats. "What is JSON?" That was a very interesting question that I used to put during interviews, when we used to interview at CloudCredo. So -- |
**Chris Hedley:** Has anybody managed to answer the question yet, Gerhard? \[laughter\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes, they did, actually. People -- you know, they just don't get flustered in the moment; they just take it at what it is... They're just "What is JSON?" The acronym, what does it stand for. So what is Kratix, Chris? |
**Chris Hedley:** First of all, I think the meaning of Kratix we should probably call out to the top there, just on the back of that JSON conversation. So all credit goes to Paula here... |
**Paula Kennedy:** Or blame. One or the other... |
**Chris Hedley:** We're all about git praise... Unless it's colon, and then it's git blame. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. \[laughs\] |
**Paula Kennedy:** So the name Kratix came from a Greek word... So there's a bit of a tie-in to Kubernetes being a Greek word, so that's how Syntasso -- I'm going through the whole naming. That's how Syntasso got its name. So Syntasso came from a Greek word, which means to compile things in an orderly fashion. When we ... |
And then Kratix kind of -- we kept on the theme. Kratix comes from a Greek word which means to keep -- like, in Greek, I'm not gonna say it, because I can't speak Greek... But in the phrase "to keep a promise", the Greek word for "keep" is something that looks a bit like Kratix, and that's where we were like "Oh, let's... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. |
**Chris Hedley:** I think that to keep the promise is kind of -- that leads us quite nicely into a little bit more to what Kratix actually is... I think we looked -- because we were doing a lot of our investigation into the state of the K8s ecosystem; we were looking at operators as a technology to build and distribute... |
**Colin Humphreys:** The first problem I think Kratix is really trying to solve, in terms of "How do we do this?" - you have to imagine that most people we speak to live in a landscape where the infrastructure is many, many Kubernetes clusters. It's the first thing I wanna say; this is all about multiple Kubernetes clu... |
So the landscape is infrastructure nowadays - let's just be straight and direct about this. Infrastructure nowadays is multiple Kubernetes clusters. That's your infra, what you're gonna do next. So you're trying to get from that, to building a meaningful platform API for your organization, and that's what you have to d... |
So effectively, when you deploy Kratix for free, you get a complete GitOps topology. Everything is kind of auditable, traceable etc. via your Git repository of choice, be that GitHub, or if you wanna actually use S3 as a repo... Whatever you wanna use, we use the GitOps toolkit for pushing these things out. |
\[32:16\] So now when you've got the assets up, you have your platform cluster, you have your worker clusters, either static or dynamically created. So what you've got now is no platform API; you're just ready to build one. From there, we then have this concept which Paula was talking about, about promises, which is wh... |
The first thing you wanna do in your platform team is make Java application servers available, as a service, from your platform API. So you would build a promise for that; you would talk to them about the API they want... When they are building this application, what do they care about? Is it heap size, is it Java tuna... |
Then you take that and you add into that all of the needs that your business has, so the platform-level concerns, such as billing, metrics, monitoring etc. Those things are all encoded into the promise as a pipeline. You take that promise and you add it to Kratix, and then Kratix now is able to offer Java application s... |
And then you go to the muse "Okay, is that working well for you? Can we develop it? Are there other promises you need?" And then you iteratively and incrementally build out a platform as a product, as a series of promises in Kratix. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So just for me to understand this... If I was going to link the concept of a promise to something that I'm familiar with, I think I would choose a template. So we have templates of how things should look like, and you gave the example of Java applications. So what are the things that Java application ... |
**Chris Hedley:** I think it's exactly that, yes. The promise is providing that abstraction for the platform teams to bring in the complexity into the promise that they do not want to or need to expose to the end user. So an application developer team just giving a small Java stack, whatever that means for them, and th... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[36:12\] So Paula, if we were to link these concepts that we've talked about - the promises, the different teams, the application developers... If we were to link these -- actually, no. I'm thinking more about the Kubernetes primitives. So the promise is something that Kratix brings; but there's also... |
**Paula Kennedy:** That's an excellent question. So for the concept of a promise - you're right in saying that it's essentially an abstraction above operators. We're not trying to get into the space of building our own operators, or writing good operators. Operators exist; that's already a space that people are in. Wha... |
They also talk about interaction modes. And the key ones that I talked about in my conference talk were collaboration, and then x-as-a-service, which Colin described briefly. So really, where we think about platform as a product, tying the whole thing together. When we think about platform as a product, your platform n... |
The first interaction mode - collaboration. In our world, when we think about Kratix, that looks like this kind of promise framework; you're gonna go talk to the app team, you're gonna figure out with them a custom resource definition, what things do you care about, what things do you wish to define? You agree on that ... |
So you go talk to them, you define what they need, you define the custom resource definition, and then the platform team creates that in this promise abstraction, and then presents back to the application team "Hey, here's the five things that you care about every time you want to ask for a Java stack. So fill in these... |
That's the abstraction, and that's how we are thinking of tying all of these concepts together. Platform as a product, being able to talk to customers, collaboration, and then taking all of that collaboration, codifying it into something as a service. And then you deliver it as a service, and that's the product. |
Another thing that Team Topologies mentions is this ongoing lightweight collaboration. Because as Colin mentioned, the difference between project and product. Another difference is projects get started, and then they get finished. Products are long-lived, ongoing, so for your platform you need to not just -- it's not b... |
\[40:00\] Are the promises still the right ones? Are they still meeting the team's needs? Are there new promises that they need? Do they need to end-of-life some promises? That whole product lifecycle that you have with a normal product applies to the platform. That was a long answer, sorry... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** No, that was actually very good, because it helped me visualize all the interactions, all the teams, how they map to the promises, those technical components, whether that's at a technical layer... So that was very helpful for me, thank you. |
And you mentioned something really important, because I know step one is always the easy one. Like, let's just get this up. So you get your platform cluster, you get some worker clusters, and you define some basic promises... And then what? Well, that's when actually the hard work starts, the collaboration that you men... |
**Colin Humphreys:** Sure, I'll take that. I'm feeling -- |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Confident. \[laughs\] |
**Colin Humphreys:** No, confident isn't the right word. Some type of trepidation. This isn't the question I was waiting seven years for... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** No. But it's coming. \[laughs\] |
**Colin Humphreys:** I also wanna take a brief step back to something you asked there, Gerhard, that was super, super-interesting to me... You asked about templating. That's really interesting. But again, if this is a simple templating system, why are we not just using Helm? Why are we just not using any of the innumer... |
Now, there's no off-the-shelf platform out there, either SaaS, or vendor software, that can get you that. You have to build that yourself. Your platform team do have to make that come to life. But when it comes to life, it unlocks the power of your application teams, because they're not getting everything that's there. |
You then raised a great question as well, about "Well, that's great, because that sounds like a really useful experience for those organizations." But what happens day 2, day 3, day 100, day 1,000? How does that journey look? |
Firstly, Paula said this specifically, and we said this to everybody that we have talked to about this... Effectively, we're taking high-level user requests, we're breaking it down into a series of documents via the pipeline and everything else, we're pushing out those documents via the GitOps pipelines to multiple ser... |
As Paula mentioned, we are a level above operators in terms of the abstractions here. You need to create or choose off-the-shelf great operators put out to the workers so that when somebody asks for a Java wrap server, they get a Java app server. And also, when they try to upgrade a Java app server from one version of ... |
\[43:54\] Now, our promise would enable you to push down version documents to the workers, to say "You should now be in this state, you should now be in this state." And this is arguably the beauty of Kubernetes; this is a fantastic API server, and it's declarative and convergent. But the controllers you put in there a... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So Colin, you don't know what you're talking about, and I'm leaving this talk. That's what you asked me to do seven years ago. When you were giving the OpenCredo talk, you asked me to just say "Colin, you don't know what you're talking about", and just leave the talk, towards the end. Obviously,... |
**Colin Humphreys:** That's not the kind of thing I would say, by the way... |
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