With so many moving pieces in the Kubernetes world, it becomes really hard for DevOps and Security teams to have a complete view of the stack. It leads to delays in deploying new apps as both DevOps and DevSecOps teams don’t have the visibility they need.  “Calico suite of products merges the problems of security and observability and enables both DevOps and DevSecOps to become part of the solution. They can deploy every single application, every single container that they’re deploying, using security and observability as code. They can deploy those elements of security and observability directly as part of their CI/CD pipeline,” said Utpal Bhatt, CMO of Tigera.

Tigera is the creator and maintainer of the open-source Kubernetes security and observability project, Calico. The company will be attending KubeCon as Silver Sponsor. In this special series of Let’s Talk interviews for KubeCon 2021, we invited Utpal Bhatt, CMO of Tigera.

We started off our discussion with the core topic: As Kubernetes is becoming mainstream, what does it mean for observability and security? Is there enough awareness among the user community?

There is some obvious overlap between observability and security. There are many projects in CNCF that offer observability and security. What kind of merger and consolidation is happening within the ecosystem?

Security is  an age-old problem There are established (or in other words legacy) security vendors who are entering the cloud-native world. Are they bringing the legacy solutions through patchwork to the cloud-native world? Is that creating some kind of friction?

Kubernetes observability is a busy and crowded space. How does Tigera differentiate themselves from the rest?

Once again we are seeing a cultural evolution of practices, roles and responsibilities – from developers to DevOps, DevSecOps, SREs and so on. One person is doing so much more. Cloud native is already complicated. How does Tigera ensure that observability remains easy without adding more complexity to the workflow and an engineer’s pipeline?

Tigera also announced Calico Enterprise 3.5 ahead of KubeCon to start some discussion around it. We talked about it in detail too.

[su_note note_color=”#000″ text_color=”#fff”]Utpal Bhatt is responsible for overall marketing strategy and execution at Tigera. Utpal brings 20+ years of Marketing and Product Management leadership experience at high-growth start-ups and large companies. Utpal has a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Physics from Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani (India) and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.[/su_note]

[su_box title=”More about Tigera” style=”soft” box_color=”#f4f4f4″ title_color=”#e50d70″]Tigera, the inventor and maintainer of open-source Calico, delivers Calico Cloud, the next-generation cloud service for Kubernetes security and observability. Tigera’s Kubernetes-native service extends the declarative nature of Kubernetes to specify “security and observability as code,” which ensures consistent enforcement of security policies and compliance and provides observability and troubleshooting across multi-cluster, multi-cloud and hybrid deployments. Tigera’s solution is used by some of the world’s leading companies, including HanseMerkur, Merck, Finicity, Mindbody, RealPage, L3Harris, Discover, AT&T, and ServiceNow.[/su_box]