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**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, it was meant to be like a riff... So that was all very accurate, Colin, and very well put, so thank you. |
**Break:** \[45:18\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** One thing which you mentioned, Colin, that I really get, and I start seeing how things are starting to come together was the versioning that's built into the Kubernetes API. So I can see how you can have multiple versions of the same promise, at the same time, easily, because the platform - I'm doing ... |
**Colin Humphreys:** Yeah, we've really seen a lot of value in that API. And as much as I publicly say Kubernetes is a waste of time - and it is a waste of time if you are on those applications teams really trying to get to the end goal; but if you're a platform team and you're trying to build a platform, it's absolute... |
\[48:14\] And that's why we, with a small company, have been able to build what I believe to be a really, really impactful, meaningful framework, Kratix, so quickly - it's because we're just leveraging the best of Kubernetes, platform as a product, and bringing it to most Kubernetes clusters. We've taken the best of Ku... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I have seen this link in the past, when we were rocking on Cloud Foundry. And there was Bosch as well. Awesome piece of tech. I think the combination didn't quite work, and I'll get to that in a minute... because we had Cloud Foundry, which had a scheduler, Bosch, which was kind of doing a lot of the ... |
**Chris Hedley:** I think we were looking at the problem of how do we get pieces of software deployed on K8s clusters that could be distributed across many different logically-discrete K8 clusters. And the GitOps toolkit has done a tremendous job of that. It has very powerful tools that allow it to listen to a message ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Do you mean like the Concourse resources that have triggers? Do you mean in that way? |
**Chris Hedley:** That feels like a trick question, Gerhard. I'm not an expert on Concourse or Concourse's triggers, so can you explain back to me how you mean that, and maybe we can find a pattern there? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So you know how we had those resources, like for example GitHub repositories, and then a new version would trigger that resource? Then that trigger could be the input to a job, and you could have multiple inputs. So to me, when you describe this component of the flux - I don't know what exactly it's c... |
**Chris Hedley:** I don't know what the component is called, but to go back and maybe answer your original question of why Flux or the GitOps toolkit versus a non-K8s-native technology, since it's Kubernetes... I think it is the K8s native way that the GitOps toolkit is being engineered from the ground-up. I think you ... |
\[51:51\] I think K8s is genius, and I think Colin touched on this earlier - that the thing that really sold Kubernetes to me was the custom resource definition kind of pattern that they've come up with, and then sitting the controllers and operators behind that as an API, to then control the thing that you're trying t... |
So if you learn that kind of CI/CID operator pattern, those learnings are transferable. Whereas Concourse may well have the patterns already, it may be as powerful, but it's yet another learning curve, it's yet another technology that you have to orchestrate on top of the K8s. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. How do you test Kratix? I'm really interested in that. How do you test a platform builder? Do you just build many platforms? Do you use property-based testing? How does that even look like? I wouldn't know where to start... What do you do today? Let's do that - what do you do today? How do you t... |
**Chris Hedley:** How do we test Kratix... So I can give you the very blunt, honest, business-focused answer to that, Gerhard... We're currently three people. We've spent the last nine months getting a business off the ground. So we've been coming up with a business narrative, looking at the problem space... Kratix was... |
**Colin Humphreys:** This is confusing the last two questions, what Chris is saying. So firstly, we test Kratix by using mesh space fit forward and we have a set of sample promises. We have a Redis promise and a Postgres promise which we inject testing it's all working testing we're doing all the right things with thos... |
I did want to touch on that as well - Argo CD... Like, why use Flux rather than Argo? Argo I think is more specific for applications in Kubernetes; it's a CD server. Whereas Flux is almost like an agent you put out in all of your remote clusters, specifically to pull from repos and stay up to date with those repos. Flu... |
But I think when you said "Your GitOps toolkit" - I wanna be very clear here, it's not ours. I need to thank lots of people for their contributions. We're standing on the shoulders of giants here. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Of course. |
**Colin Humphreys:** Thank you so much to the many people that contributed to the GitOps toolkit. We haven't put anything back in yet. We're a tiny company. I wanna say a huge, huge thanks to those people - for the GitOps toolkit, for Kubernetes itself. Everyone out there that's part of the ecosystem - a huge thank you... |
So as mentioned, we have a Ginkgo-based test suite for Kratix, which you can just try out; it's all there, github.com/syntasso/kratix. You can run the test suite. It does require some Kubernetes testing infrastructure around KinD, but it's all there for you to run, should you choose to run it. |
We did actually start Kratix entirely test-driven from the outset as a set of behaviors defined in style syntax. So we very much started test-first, and that way of thinking about things. But I think as we -- it's actually fairly straightforward to test, I would say, because promises are not actually that clever, if th... |
\[56:07\] I think as we move towards being able to assert complex suites of upgrades, in terms of like "If this promise changes, then that promise changes", what happens in any interactions between them across multiple clusters... So our cost of testing is gonna go through the roof. So I get that. But right now we're n... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So first of all, I think I need to give a bit of background. We have worked for so many years together, that when Chris answers something, I understand what he's not saying... And I don't think the listeners are getting that same experience... And for that I have to apologize, that I can't convey that... |
Yes, I looked at the code, I was thinking of Ginkgo as well; Colin, thank you very much for that. What I was thinking and what I was trying to hint to is the complexity of these types of tests. Because they're integration tests, right? Like, how does this CRD, when it's set up, actually behave in practice? Does it do w... |
**Colin Humphreys:** Thank you. That's good to hear. It's a little slower than we'd like, so I think as we move on to -- as it gets more complex, we're gonna have to find ways of doing things. But thank you again to the Kubernetes community. There's some awesome tooling out there around just running like API server in ... |
So I think the hard work of everyone else in the community is what's enabled us to go fast and keep ourselves sane, and do all the things we need to do. And again, testing - I think it's gonna get more complex. We've looked on this for years, Gerhard; as the testing suite gets slow and grows, then you put effort into t... |
As Chris was saying earlier, right now we're so far biased towards going fast with a small team we don't even have a CI system, because we run all the tests locally, as one pair, and then commit. So that is CI. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That makes sense. I remember doing that, and people looking at me saying "Are you crazy? Is there Jenkins running on a Mac?" Yes, I have a spare one. Why not. It's just me and two other people in the same office. We don't have a big team. So it just makes sense. Especially when you're taking things of... |
**Chris Hedley:** Why am I not C-suite... I think the honest answer to that question, Gerhard, is if you form a company, you do it because you want to do the thing that you want to do in life. As you've probably gathered from this podcast, I'm not a great public-facing person. I'm not the person to stand on the rooftop... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I do. |
**Chris Hedley:** I enjoy working with individuals, I love running teams, I love getting heads-down into the code. And as the company grows and changes, that's the role I want to do. So you start a company to do the thing that you want to do... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, actually. |
**Chris Hedley:** \[59:53\] ...not get pushed into a role that you're uncomfortable with and I don't want to do. It's more to it than just the label, right? So that's the honest answer. That, and Colin won't let me. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[laughs\] He's keeping CTO for someone else... Is that what it is? No, it's not that. |
**Chris Hedley:** Keeping it for himself. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** For himself. \[laughs\] CEO and CTO. I don't think that has happened before. |
**Chris Hedley:** He knows he will be ousted as CEO eventually, and he's keeping CTO around. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** His left bicep is CEO, and his right bicep is CTO. And they're massive. \[laughs\] Okay. So what's coming next for Kratix and for Syntasso in the next six months, for example? Do you have anything on the horizon? Growing the team, developing Kratix... What do the next six months look like for you? |
**Paula Kennedy:** That's a great question. What does it look like...? So since we been going, we are a small company, as I think Chris and Colin mentioned. Some might say that we have over-engineered some of our processes, because we have come from a background of Pivotal, big product company, VMware, huge product com... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I see where you're going with this, yes. |
**Paula Kennedy:** You can see where I'm going? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I see, yes. |
**Paula Kennedy:** We pour a lot of our learnings from the last seven years into our tiny three-person company... So we are regularly having objective and key result meetings to review, and we have regular board meetings to plan what's the next three months, what's the next three years. The interesting thing is that, y... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. You need to have it, but it will change, so don't worry about it. Yeah, I know what you mean. |
**Paula Kennedy:** Yeah. It's quite open right now. |
**Chris Hedley:** You hint at a lot of things that -- like, we would be lying if we weren't thinking about some of the things you've hinted at there, Gerhard. So we are three people, I think we've run that message home. As we start to work with more and more customers - and believe it or not, they're awesome - that's s... |
So we're constantly reflecting on what our constraint is within the business, and we're constantly looking to address that. And I certainly speak for myself... I'm sure Paula and Colin wanna object to this too much, we're probably start to dile it down to a three, as we start to work with customers and continue the pro... |
**Colin Humphreys:** What's been awesome, but also really scary, has been that our customers we've been talking to have said to us, effectively - we've had this directly from a few of them... What we've built here with Kratix - it's a system, it's not a tool. It's very easy to talk about a small shop tool and build the... |
So they're saying to us "This is awesome. You have this system that will help my company become a better system." But that also then scared us, because we're like "That sounds great... And you're from this company with 10,000 people, and we're from this company with three." And therefore, we will be taking investment, ... |
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