This is a conversation with the co-founders of Opsera, Kumar Chivukula and Chandra Ranganathan. The conversation spanned across a wide range of topics including but not limited to:

• What problem did Chivukula and Ranganathan see in the market that they wanted to solve with a new company?
• How does no-code enable companies to embrace the latest open source cloud native technologies and move fast with their solutions and service without having to worry about highly skilled DevOps teams?
• How critical is security to Opsera?
• Where does Opsera fit into the stack of its users
• What vision do they have for 2021?

We provide the capability to build pipelines in a drag and drop manner without writing any code from a UI and integrate security and quality into those pipelines dynamically at any stage,” Opsera co-founders.

Opsera is a continuous orchestration platform for next gen DevOps, which orchestrates tools, pipelines and insights by combining both – choice of any CI/CD tools and no code automation.

Learning from their experience at Symantec building private cloud and then expanding it to multi cloud, an experience which was validated by Uber and Adobe, Opsera creators found that DevOps is addressed in two ways today: One) companies want to use best of breed tools across the DevOps ecosystem, but it comes with a lot of complexity in manually integrating and making all of those tools work and 2) Go with a single vendor solution, but then lose out on choices and flexibility that they need. It also locks them into that vendor and developers don’t like to be boxed into a single solution.

“What we try to do with Opsera is to bring both of those together. We give the choice as well as bring the choice together with no code automation,” said Chandra Ranganathan.

There are a couple of trends today, especially with the migration to multi-cloud. One is the proliferation of new technologies driven by the adoption of serverless, infrastructure as code, microservices, containers and so on. “It led to the need for more and more CI/CD tooling in order to deliver software,” said Ranganathan.

“There is a shift left of security and quality which makes it important for these tools to be integrated at every level of developer pipelines versus adding them at or post-deployment.”

Then there is the need for holistic analytics versus siloed analytics from different tools. All of this makes automation across the software development lifecycle extremely important.

The way Opsera address this problem is by trying to integrate a) provide choice of any tools that can be self-provisioned by choosing from a catalog or bring your own tools into the catalog. We provide the capability to build pipelines in a drag and drop manner without writing any code from a UI and integrate security and quality into those pipelines dynamically at any stage. Finally, there is a data transformer with Opsera that takes the data from all these diverse tools and normalizes contextualizes and provides unified and actionable insights across the ecosystem.

“What this allows you to do is focus your time and resources on doing what is more important for the company, which is building and shipping your own core product versus building and managing these tools and pipelines, which is very complex to do,” said Ranganathan.

Security by design
Chivukula said that they believe in the principle of ‘security by design’ as part of the DevSecOps and DevOps as well – as part of the various stages of code that you move from development to all the way to production.

“If you include the security the early stage the chances of delivering the secure code at production is much higher,” said Chivukula.