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The other challenge that we had was, of course, the state of the machine learning models; when you train a model, that basically generates an output, and then you need to ship that model to the VM where the model is running. There was a lot of funny things that we did with containers and AI, but that's probably for a d... |
**Break:** \[46:45\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What about the last platform? I think this is the one that you have many things to say about... |
**Marcos Nils:** Oh, yeah. The last one - I would think this last platform, because it was one year ago, is going to probably resemble to the newcomers, and to the most young audience, that is basically navigating the whole current platform engineering trends, and CNCF, and all that. So hopefully, that's going to be a ... |
But anyways, the last platform that I worked on was Wildlife Studios is the company; it's a resilient gaming company. If you play mobile games, and you've seen like Tennis Clash, or Zooba, and Sniper 3D, this is the company behind it. And it's an interesting -- |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Sorry, I have to interrupt you. We need a cleanser. You are the South America champion of something related to gaming. |
**Marcos Nils:** Oh, yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Tell us about that... Because I want to have it in the recording for us to know what that is, and I could reference it back. |
**Marcos Nils:** Cool. Yeah, so back in my young days I was very fond of FPS games, and I happened to land in the Quake series, for whatever reason. And I basically started very early days on the internet multiplayer gaming thing. So I started with Quake 2, using dial-up... And then I moved of course to Quake 3 using c... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm going to make an assumption now... It's unlikely to be true, but hopefully it will be funny. Is all your involvement with platform engineering, and all the problems and all the frustrations that were building up during the day, that you would take to FPS, and use all of that frustration, and you c... |
**Marcos Nils:** Well, maybe it was the other way around, right? I took all the angriness and all those sentiments from the game and then I put it into platform engineering. Because platforms happened after Quake. But yeah, you could say that. It's funny, because there's -- I don't know if you saw it, but there's a gam... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Wow, I haven't seen it. We have to link it in the show notes. Okay, so this was hopefully a pleasant segue for listeners, and now we're going back to the third platform, the one that you started talking about, which was for a gaming company. |
**Marcos Nils:** Yeah. So I guess the most important thing and also takeaway from this is context, right? Context matters a lot when you're building this type of solutions. And when I arrived at the company, they had a quite large, you could call it DevOps... To be honest, I don't like the term DevOps, because to me, e... |
But anyways, when I arrived there, the SRE/DevOps teams were 5 to 10 people, but the most critical thing, which is similar, was that developers were already exposed to some underlying concepts of "the platform", because they already had a platform they were running, whether you like it or not. They were using Kubernete... |
\[52:18\] So it was important to take note that developers already had a workflow. So they were already exposed to Kubernetes manifests, they were already exposed to kubectl... And to be honest, a lot of them were happy about it, because it was another tool in their tool belt; they could also find a lot of Kubernetes c... |
So what happened - and please be careful if you see this happening in your organization - was that some new VP was hired... That usually happens in large organizations. We're talking about - this wasn't as big as the first company that I mentioned, but this company is big enough. We were around like 200 to 400 engineer... |
And of course, I was actually there when that thing happened, and then we started researching, "Okay, what should we do?" Because embarking into a project with that magnitude, where you need to basically try to see how you're going to leverage the current workflows that you have and try to make them more API served dri... |
It's a very interesting project, I would say. It's very complex as well. It has a complex architecture. But the most important thing is that Backstage brings its own set of opinions, right? It is designed in a way that it's meant to be very extendable, and very pluggable, and I would argue that it was designed for a ve... |
\[56:14\] So what happened, to make the story short, is that we adopted Backstage, we started doing some changes to the core of Backstage, because it wasn't designed for our organizational model and what we needed to build, and then that led to a multi-month, massive project where it wasn't clear what everyone was doin... |
So in any case, we started building the thing, and then at some point we realized -- we said, "Hey, it would have been way easier to iterate on the workflows, and on the basically pipelines, and the golden paths that we currently had by slightly changing the experience with little improvements, than to basically throw ... |
So my suggestion for companies, either small or big, trying to tackle these challenges, is start small, and think mostly around the golden paths and the opinions that your company currently has, that your developers are actually asking about. Because if you bring an already-existing platform, you might be lucky and it ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[59:52\] I think most of us suspect that big bang rewrites are a bad idea. And what typically happens is that you're trading problems that you know, and are familiar with, some intimately, with problems that you don't even know exist. And you may not like what you're getting. And it's impossible to k... |
**Marcos Nils:** Exactly. I totally agree. And it usually helps a lot if you drive those conversations backed by data. One thing that I also believe didn't do in our last platform implementation was to basically present developers - and not only developers, but also upper management - with the current raw data of our c... |
And I would argue that in most of the cases, you can do little increments on your current processes or software cycles, that could help accomplish that without trying to adopt or find like a magical platform solution that fixes that. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. And the other thing, which would be worth mentioning is that when people identify, they go "We're going to try this new thing, but we will only take a subset of the applications. We'll start with one, or a few", what typically happens is that a year or two later you end up having two platforms; ... |
**Marcos Nils:** I think I have a very concrete answer for that. So if I would build something that can be called the platform, the most important thing to me to build is a centralized visualization place that people know to go to basically do something. Of course, you need to build the workflows that I mentioned befor... |
\[01:04:04.19\] But in my opinion, the most valuable short-term outcome you can give your developers, no matter how big the company is, is have a place that people don't need to think about, that they can naturally go and get an answer to the question that they have. For example, how do I create a new application? Go h... |
"How do I now see the metrics of my application?" "Go to the centralized place, and then I'm going to take you to whatever monitoring system that we have implemented, and then you can go from there." |
So having like a central cockpit to see the state of your app, understand how to do things, see the metrics, and then get feedback, maybe ask a question to your teams through the messaging systems that you have, and potentially start building on top of that - in my opinion, it's the best thing that you can do for any s... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right. Is there something that exists today that you'd be tempted to try out as a first step? Something that you wouldn't be building from scratch, something as a starting point that you would use. Or maybe a couple of things that you would use. |
**Marcos Nils:** Hm... That's an interesting question. To be honest, I don't think there's something I would use. What I would do until I can build that is - since it's all about communication, as I said before, I would build a platform probably based on whatever communication system we have in the company; either Disc... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[01:08:24.20\] Yeah. Can I assume that you would pick containers over VMs? |
**Marcos Nils:** Yeah, you can assume that. That's the right assumption. And I think the tough question is "Are we going to pick serverless over containers?" Or what's gonna happen there, right? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Hm... Interesting. Which way would you go, serverless or containers? |
**Marcos Nils:** To me, the serverless story is very appealing. Today, I don't see a strong use case to move everything to serverless, because I currently see that there are some things which are not yet solved. The compute thing is still a problem. The statefulness of serverless still has some quirks on it. For exampl... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Interesting. Would Kubernetes make your cut? |
**Marcos Nils:** The way it is designed today? No. I think that's one of the -- I mean, that's one of the biggest challenges in platforms, is that when the foundational basis changes, it's very difficult to adapt. OpenStack, even though it was designed to be on-premise, was designed to be VM-based. Kubernetes has been ... |
I don't know, to me the whole system is designed to be very container-aware, that it's going to require quite some effort to basically try to abstract it and make it serverless-native; I don't think it's going to cut it, but I might be wrong. I guess we'll see what happens. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[01:11:56.03\] So it's very hard for me to not start recording the second episode with you right now... Because this is something really interesting, and I'm sure we could dig into it. Unfortunately, we do have to stop on this occasion. And the last thing which I'd like us to cover is what are you mo... |
**Marcos Nils:** As personal, general, technology platforms...? Is there any context that you would like me to scope the question to? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think it would be technology. I think that's what the listeners will most resonate with. But if you want to share a personal, I'm most looking forward to. Go for it. |
**Marcos Nils:** So I envision a 2023 where you can safely run CI/CD pipelines locally and in the cloud. That's what I'm currently working on to help developers about. That's one thing that I would like to see happening, I would like to see more WASM and serverless adoption, and use cases of companies using it for prod... |
Of course, I guess we can't deny the AI effect, right? So there's gonna probably be a lot of tooling around that. For the platforming space I'm not sure where the biggest advantages are going to be. I don't know if it's going to be cloud costs, or some sort of like Copilot-based thing... You can probably say to ChatGPT... |
And I don't know, the last thing that I would like to see is -- one thing that I miss a lot, that I would actually like it to come back, is some sort of meetup thing, right? I believe that, given the past two years, a lot of human contact has been lost in communities, in people sharing knowledge. We all became a little... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. Those are all great things to look forward to. |
**Marcos Nils:** Yeah, we'll see what happens. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Speaking about people, and speaking about coming together, today is exactly one year since I joined Dagger. So I'm very glad that the 4th of January 2023, when we are recording this, I get to share it with you. Thank you, Marcos. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. |
**Marcos Nils:** Happy new year, Gerhard, and it's a pleasure to work with you every day. We are building some really cool stuff together, and the most important part is that we are learning and we are sharing. It's all about that, right? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. Likewise. Same here. I can hardly wait for the next time that we get together in-person. It has only happened once, and that was cut short. And yes, it was COVID, unfortunately... But this year, it's gonna happen again. Not the COVID part, just the getting together part. I would much rather not ... |
**Marcos Nils:** I promise that you're going to be able to cycle the Golden Gate Bridge. It is going to happen. |
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