Developers are facing many challenges when developing apps and managing complex infrastructure. In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Nati Shalom, Founder and CTO of Cloudify, to discuss the key challenges developers face today.

Shalom goes into detail about the complexity DevOps and engineers are grappling with and the concept of Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to help obstruct the complexity of Kubernetes. Shalom shares details of their latest release, Cloudify 6.4 and what they are working towards in the future.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Shalom discusses that legacy-type enterprise organizations and those at the precipice of DevOps and cloud are facing challenges when developing apps and managing massive infrastructure. He explains that many DevOps or engineering teams are struggling to keep up with the speed in which things are moving in the cloud and tooling is being created causing bottlenecks within the organization itself.
• Organizations are spending more resources on managing the infrastructure around an application than on the application itself. Shalom explains the concept of IDP and how it is helping to create a self-service portal to obstruct a lot of the complexity of Kubernetes. He feels the awareness around this is growing and more platform engineering teams build teams around this concept.
• Shalom discusses how in the initial phases of adoption of Kubernetes or Terraform if the platforms themselves are not yet mature, developers will choose flexibility over simplicity. However, once the space matures to a point where it becomes repeatable it will enter a phase of simplicity and efficiency where it will not make sense to expose the complexity to the rest of the organization. Shalom feels that this is the phase we are in currently.
• Shalom takes us through the key capabilities of Cloudify’s latest release 6.4, saying they have added best practices in from large, advanced companies like Spotify, and packaged it into an open source product to offer to the rest of the organizations who want to build something similar or have a higher starting point to build something similar.
• Previous to the option of self-service, Shalom explains they were using CLI tools like Ansible Terraform directory from their desktops. However, there are two problematic areas with this – managing state files and governance. He discusses how this led to the concept of remote executive and how this moved to the next phase of a self-service experience and the benefits this brings.
• It can be difficult to strike a balance between flexibility and simplicity. Shalom feels we do not want a platform like the old generation of platform-as-a-service where someone made that decision for you. He explains that nowadays they realize each organization is going to strike the balance in a different place and how IDP allows each organization to customize the platform and tailor it to their own needs.
• The goal Cloudify is trying to achieve with simplicity is that a customer can get his environment to become self-service within an hour and that it does not involve code, at least not initially. Shalom tells us that this includes the day-to-day operation which is usually complex. He explains the three-step approach they are bringing together to make this possible.

Connect with Nati Shalom (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Learn more about Cloudify (Twitter)

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.