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And on that summit, we attended Jérôme Petazzoni's Docker training, where he basically taught people advanced use cases of Docker, and then he showcased the latest features, and so on and so forth. And I recall that at the time Docker Swarm was becoming a thing... And then he had a lab where around 30 to 50 people were... |
So then we were sitting there with Jonathan and then we said, "Hey, this is very confusing, it's very difficult to follow." And it wasn't only us. People were saying, "Okay, how do I use this? What happens if I lose my paper? What happens if my connection drops?" It was also quite challenging for him to spin up all thi... |
So yeah, anyways, we realized that there was a process that could be optimized there, and then we said to ourselves, "Hey, it would be amazing if you could do all this in a browser." You have your cluster there, your terminals there, you can share it with someone else, you can even invite people to collaborate with you... |
The other day, we -- there's a picture actually somewhere in one of the DockerCon keynotes where we presented the official project, there's a picture with... There's Jonathan, myself, Solomon Hykes, and then Julius Volz from Prometheus... And the four of us were drinking at a bar, and then we are actually showing Solom... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wow... |
**Marcos Nils:** ...and it's there, out in the wild. Yeah. And then after that, we added a bunch of things. It became like a big thing. But yeah, that was the spark that basically started everything. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[10:02\] It's interesting how many great ideas start like that. "Let's try and see what happens", literally. "Let's take a few hours a day, get it out there, and see if this thing floats or sinks. And if it sinks, that's okay. And if it floats, how well does it float? And how much weight can we put i... |
**Marcos Nils:** Yeah, exactly. It's about solving a user's problem, right? Like, if you follow Paul Graham's school, basically, it's all about that. It's all about the users. And in this particular case, we were presenting an alternative to a very annoying problem, and that actually seemed to work for people. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. Now, I know that you haven't finished with the Play With series, and I don't think you'll ever finish; that thing is like one of your things. What is the latest creation in the Play With series, that I know most people will not have heard of this yet? |
**Marcos Nils:** So the latest one, which is completely different from the others, because it's not reusing any of the Play With backend open source stuff - which you, of course, already know - is Play With Dagger, I would say, or the Dagger Playground. In case people don't know, I'm currently working at Dagger, with y... |
So around two months ago, we released play.dagger.io, which is the playground that you can get into, and then you're going to see -- currently, you're going to see a GraphQL interface, but we are improving that... Where you can describe your pipelines in GraphQL queries, and then you can run them out there, and you can... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** One thing that has changed since is the URL. So if you're trying to go to play.dagger.io and it gets a DNS error, that's okay. It's normal. It's meant to be play.dagger.cloud. |
**Marcos Nils:** Oh, you're right. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So that has changed. There were many things that happened in the background. What matters is that there is a Play With, that you can try Dagger, it's putting up the GraphQL API... It has built-in documentation, that's really neat, and that all comes from the API. And a bunch of other things, but I'll ... |
Now, the idea of this episode started with the following hook: hard truths about platform engineering. So over the last eight years I know that you have helped build three separate engineering platforms for three different companies. Before we dig into what they were, and what worked well, and what could have been bett... |
**Marcos Nils:** Hm... That's a really good question. So if someone comes to me today and tells me "What is platform engineering?", first of all, I would feel a bit confused about the term... Because a platform to me is not necessarily like something concrete, that you need to ship to accomplish a goal. I guess platfor... |
\[14:08\] And the ultimate goal doesn't need to be to build or ship a platform. You basically need to -- you could solve that, the developer experience objectives, or developer experience tasks and goals by delivering a set of opinionated workflows, and basically present blueprints, or present golden paths to your engi... |
So I guess that at some point in time people started converging all these ideas, of like how to build this experience into one single term, and then they started building products around it, and that's what I believe the whole ecosystem calls platform engineering. But to me, I don't see any specific, relatable delivera... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. So in the same context, when platform engineering gets mentioned, sometimes as clickbait, the following thing tends to appear, which is "DevOps is dead." Now, obviously, DevOps is not dead, just to make it clear... But it tends to attract clicks, it tends to attract eyeballs. What is the relatio... |
**Marcos Nils:** So I guess the natural relationship that people do is they usually try to encompass the platform engineering term in shipping a product a whole, fully-fledged platform that your company is going to use to do everything in it... And that kind of confuses who does what, because on one side you have the D... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[17:53\] Okay. So if DevOps is mostly concerned with getting the code wherever it needs to be, whether it's an artifact, whether it's production, whether it's staging, all the tooling that takes the code from your laptop and it gets it out in production; there is a lot of it. It's usually CI/CD, but ... |
**Marcos Nils:** Yeah, that's a good question. That's why I'm saying that one of the hard truths or the hard parts about platform engineering is not that a single product is going to help with everything, is going to make everything magic. You are still going to need DevOps, you're still going to need SREs. The only th... |
So that team is going to have a specific metric that they're going to be aiming for, and then usually, the team that does that is the DevOps teams, right? Because developers have a different set of metrics; product developers have a different set of metrics, that are usually more related to the company business. Like "... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. So we started high-level on purpose, just to paint a picture of how complicated this is. And everyone has a slightly different opinion, and also a slightly different experience. And you yourself had three separate experiences building platforms, or contributing to teams that build platforms, and... |
**Marcos Nils:** \[22:06\] Yeah, that's a very nice story. So I guess what I wanted to bring to this episode, as you mentioned, Gerhard, is that first of all, platforms have been here for a very long time, even before eight years ago. And the context that I had when that happened was that I was working for a very, very... |
But in any case, Docker wasn't a thing. it was around 2013, 2014 and Docker was still on its very early days; it wasn't production-ready. It was like a toy project. And then we basically needed to give developers - what I said before more autonomy, provide them a golden path to the things... Containers weren't a thing,... |
And then we came up with something that is called Meli Cloud. Meli is the name of the company, the public ticker, which was basically a set of services built by what we call the architecture team. We had like the whole infrastructure department, we had different teams. One was managing the OpenStack deployment, the oth... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So what worked well, with that platform, the things that you are most proud of in practice, the things that were good in practice? |
**Marcos Nils:** \[25:50\] So the things that I liked the most, and the things that I saw people actually enjoying was the fact that they give them a lot of autonomy when they had to manage their resources. So the typical flow back in the days was that you got into the company, you downloaded a CLI, and then you config... |
It's funny, because it's very similar to -- if you see more advanced "platforms" today, it's pretty much the same flow. You get a template, and then, of course, you get a Git repo out of it, and then when you push to that repo, there's a series of hooks that get triggered... As I said before, we didn't have containers,... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It's interesting that it is these principles that stay the same. Even when buildpacks came along, you had like the different things that would run, and even when you were to implement your own buildpack, you would basically fill the template with whatever you needed for your build pack. And I remember... |
So in that world, I'm going to ask you, what could be better? And I'm going to also answer it. VMs, right? We all know. So let's skip over that answer, because VMs have their own downside. What could have been better in that world, apart from VMs? |
**Marcos Nils:** So we made a lot of mistakes by building the platform. I guess a lot of the mistakes that we made were also contextual to the infrastructure that we had, the decisions that we made... But one of the things that I really recall - I don't know if regretting, or like learning a lot of things the hard way,... |
\[30:20\] So what we did is that we tried to -- from the architecture team, we tried to come up with services similar to whatever you can find in any cloud today RDS, Elasticache, whatever... But we tried to come up with those services ourselves. And we tried to do it in a fast-paced kind of way, where we could show de... |
So I recall that the first thing that we did was called BQ, which was an analogous thing to SQS, I would say; it was like a queue service where you could push a message and then consume it from somewhere else, and it was our initial approach to deliver an eventful system, event-driven storage system between application... |
And the thing that I remember the most was, first of all, it is very difficult to build a high scalable, high throughput distributed systems yourself, right? There's PhDs out there that are actually doing this S3, SQS, whatever, and we were just a bunch of senior software engineers, but trying to tackle very challengin... |
So yeah, we made some of those mistakes multiple times. So we tried to come up with this service, with \[unintelligible 00:32:19.04\], which - it worked pretty well for some time, but then it wasn't scaling anymore. It was built also on top of Node.js, which was around that time 0.4, very early days, we were adopting v... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** How hard can it be, right? |
**Marcos Nils:** It's extremely hard, yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. |
**Marcos Nils:** So if you're building a platform today -- I will try to bring that example to today. If you're trying to build a platform today, whatever that platform is, and then you need to build those services yourself, or you're either -- sometimes you're not building the service, but you're adding a lot of like ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[33:48\] Yeah. I think it was 2014-2015, around that time, when I was involved with Pivotal Data Services. And I was on that team, so we were building a bunch of stateful services, we were managing a bunch of stateful services in the context of a platform. This was the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform ... |
**Marcos Nils:** I still recall like one last fun story around that - we also built like a distributed caching system. It was similar to Elasticache from Amazon, but the difference was that we needed it to be Redis, I believe, and Elasticache was Memcache, I believe, initially... So we basically built an API that accep... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So that was the first platform. We still have two more to cover. Let's move on to the second one. What happened with the second platform that you were involved with? |
**Marcos Nils:** So it's also very interesting, because the second platform - and you're gonna see that in these three different stories the platform itself is a completely different outcome and product. And that's what I think is the takeaway of this episode - "What is the platform, and how do I do it, or what do I do... |
\[37:54\] On the second case, after I left this \[unintelligible 00:37:55.17\] company, I went to like bootstrap a startup with five friends, right? So we were only six people working there, and it was a machine learning startup. The people that were working there had few knowledge on cloud, and distributed systems; th... |
So yeah, we basically were only two engineers working on "the platform", and we needed to basically come up with a workflow that allows people to ship reliable code. It's all about that, right? So during that time, we learned a lot about AI, and GPUs, and all that. And Docker was already an important thing in the indus... |
\[41:55\] And that was pretty much it. We were very happy about the outcome, because even though we were a very small company only six people, again a very, very tiny startup, we managed to bring some hard opinions on how to accomplish very specific tasks, which these AI engineers were ultimately very happy about, beca... |
Remember that this was, again six years ago, probably... So still, what we knew about platforms were very, very early stages, and they were very difficult to operate. This whole platform engineering, or PaaS term is not something new; you could basically argue that it was mostly coined by Heroku maybe, or something aro... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I have one question regarding the startup, and the second platform that you were involved with. How did you solve the stateful data problem? Because that's the really hard part. Whatever platform you have, there will be state, and usually lots of it. The more state you have, the faster it's changin... |
**Marcos Nils:** So the good thing is that since we were more connected to the cloud, we were just basically using Amazon, we relied on the services that Amazon provides to manage state; basically, all the things that needed to be transactional were basically in the RDS database... And you could create a pretty reasona... |
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