Guest: Arul Jegadish (LinkedIn)
Company: OpsVerse (Twitter)

Organizations embarking on adopting DevOps realize that they will need multiple tools to handle their software delivery pipeline. Managing these tools—often from different vendors, some commercial, others are open source—can become unwieldy.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk recorded at the KubeCon in Detroit, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Arul Jegadish, Co-Founder of OpsVerse, to discuss the challenges organizations face when adopting DevOps and how OpsVerse is helping them manage their DevOps toolchain better.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Jegadish comes from a DevOps and development tools background. He has built entire DevOps toolchains from scratch for companies. When he noticed that he often built the same set of tools over and over again at multiple sites, he saw the industry’s need and co-founded OpsVerse.
• Jegadish describes what occurs in the software delivery pipeline and how DevOps changed things up for the developer. It is essentially the ability to see and control what is happening in production. He also explains the concept of platform engineering, what this entails, and how it helps developers.
• Aside from managing DevOps tools, Jegadish explains the importance of bringing in a standard interface for the different people within an organization.
• With an abundance of available tools such as those in the CNCF landscape, it is important for an organization to pick the right one for its needs. Jegadish feels that open source often can offer the right set of features and integrations.
• OpsVerse provides a platform with common DevOps tools, operationalizes them, and offers them as a service. Customers can manage these tools using one interface and they can bring in other tools via plugins.
• One of the risks of trying to abstract the underlying tools is that it is difficult to scale beyond a point because the abstraction layer becomes a bottleneck. Jegadish points out that it is important to pick a vendor that offers flexibility to go down the abstraction layer and make changes once the requirements go beyond a certain scale.
• DevOps tools need to work with your source code and interact with production systems. However, Jegadish believes it is not optimal, from a security perspective, to open up one’s production system to third-party vendors. OpsVerse is trying to address this challenge with private SaaS and by pioneering a new way of deploying DevOps tools.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.