Navigating the Cloud Native Ecosystem with Harness Evangelist Ravi Lachhman

Cloud native journeys can be complex and confusing. Now more than ever, companies need guidance about the business and technical implications of using systems like Kubernetes, to help make informed choices during each step of the process.In this episode of The Business of Cloud Native, host Emily Omier talks with Harness Evangelist Ravi Lachhman, who helps field teams navigate the cloud native ecosystem.The conversation covers:

  • An overview of Ravi’s role as an evangelist — an often misunderstood, but important technology enabler.

  • Balancing organizational versus individual needs when making decisions.

  • Some of the core motivations that are driving cloud native migrations today.

  • Why Ravi believes it in empowering engineers to make business decisions.

  • Some of the top misconceptions about cloud native. Ravi also provides his own definition of cloud native.

  • How cloud native architectures are forcing developers to “shift left.”

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Transcript

Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, I am your host Emily Omier. And today I'm chatting with Ravi Lachhman. Ravi, I want to always start out with, first of all, saying thank you—Ravi: Sure, excited to be here.Emily: —and second of all, I like to have you introduce yourself, in your own words. What do you do? Where do you work?Ravi: Yes, sure. I'm an evangelist for Harness. So, what an evangelist does, I focus on the ecosystem, and I always like the joke, I marry people with software because when people think of evangelists, they think of a televangelist. Or at least that’s what I told my mother and she believes me still. I focus on the ecosystem Harness plays in. And so, Harness is a continuous delivery as a service company. So, what that means, all of the confidence-building steps that you need to get software into production, such as approvals, test orchestration, Harness, how to do that with lots of convention, and as a service.Emily: So, when you start your day, walk me through what you're actually doing on a typical day?Ravi: a typical day—dude, I wish there was a typical day because we wear so many hats as a start-up here, but kind of a typical day for me and a typical day for my team, I ended up reading a lot. I probably read about two hours a day, at least during the business day. Now, for some people that might not be a lot, but for me, that's a lot. So, I'll usually catch up with a lot of technology news and news in general. They kind of see how certain things are playing out.So, a big fan of The New Stack big fan of InfoQ. I also like reading Hacker News for more emotional reading. The big orange angry site, I call Hacker News. And then really just interacting with the community and teams at large. So, I'm the person I used to make fun of, you know, quote-unquote, “thought leader.” I used to not understand what they do, then I became one that was like, “Oh, boy.” [laughs].And so just providing guidance for some of our field teams, some of the marketing teams around the cloud-native ecosystem, what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, my opinion on it. And that's pretty much it. And I get to do fun stuff like this, talking on podcasts, always excited to talk to folks and talk to the public. And then kind of just a mix of, say, making some sort of demos, or writing scaffolding code, just exploring new technologies. I'm pretty fortunate in my day to day activities.Emily: And tell me a little bit more about marrying people with software. Are you the matchmaker? Are you the priest, what role?Ravi: I can play all parts of the marrying lifecycle. Sometimes I'm the groom, sometimes I’m the priest. But I'm really helping folks make technical decisions. So, it’s go a joke because I get the opportunity to take a look at a wide swath of technology. And so just helping folks make technical decisions. Oh, is this new technology hot? Does this technology make sense? Does this project fatality? What do you think? I just play, kind of, masters of ceremony on folks who are making technology decisions.Emily: What are some common decisions that you help people with, and common questions that they have?Ravi: Lot of times it comes around common questions about technology. It's always finding rationale. Why are you leveraging a certain piece of technology? The ‘why’ question is always important. Let's say that you're a forward-thinking engineer or a forward-thinking technology leader.They also read a lot, and so if they come across, let's say a new hot technology, or if they're on Twitter, seeing, yeah, this particular project’s getting a lot of retweets, or they go in GitHub and see oh, this project has little stars, or forks. What does that mean? So, part of my role when talking to people is actually to kind of help slow that roll down, saying, “Hey, what’s the business rationale behind you making a change? Why do you actually want to go about leveraging a certain, let's say, technology?”I’m just taking more of a generic approach, saying, “Hey, what’s the shiny penny today might not be the shiny penny tomorrow.” And also just providing some sort of guidance like, “Hey, let's take a look at project vitality. Let's take a look at some other metrics that projects have, like defect close ratio—you know, how often it's updates happening, what's your security posture?” And so just walking through a more, I would say the non-fun tasks or non-functional tasks, and also looking about how to operationalize something like, “Hey, given you want to make sure you're maintaining innovation, and making sure that you're maintaining business controls, what are some best operational practices?” You know, want to go for gold, or don't boil the ocean, it’s helping people make decisive decisions.Emily: What do you see as sort of the common threads that connect to the conversations that you have?Ravi: Yeah, so I think a lot of the common threads are usually like people say, “Oh, we have to have it. We're going to fall behind if you don't use XYZ technology.” And when you really start getting to talking to them, it's like, let’s try to line up some sort of technical debt or business problem that you have, and how about are you going to solve these particular technical challenges? It's something that, of the space I play into, which is ironic, it's the double-edged sword, I call it ‘chasing conference tech.’ So, sometimes people see a really hot project, if my team implements this, I can go speak at a conference about a certain piece of technology.And it's like, eh, is that a really rational reason? Maybe. It kind of goes into taking the conversation slightly somewhere else. One of the biggest challenges I think, let's say if you're kind of climbing the engineering ranks—and this is something that I had to do as I went from a junior to a staff to a principal engineer in my roles—with that it's always having some sort of portfolio. So, if you speak at a conference, you have a portfolio, people can Google your name, funny pictures of you are not the only things that come up, but some sort of technical knowledge, and sometimes that's what people are chasing. So, it's really trying to have to balance that emotional decision with what's best for the firm, what's best for you, and just what's best for the team.Emily: That's actually a really interesting question is sometimes what's best for the individual engineer is not what's best for the organization. And when I say individual engineer, maybe it's not one individual, but five, or the team. How do you sort of help piece together and help people understand here's the business reason, that's organization-wide, but here's my personal motivation, and how do I reconcile these, and is there a way even to get both?Ravi: There actually is a way to get both. I call it the 75/25 percent rule. And let's take all the experience away from the engineers, to start with a blank slate. It has to do with the organization. An organization needs to set up engineers to be successful in being innovative.And so if we take the timeline or the scale all the way back to hiring, so when I like to hire folks, I always like to look at—my ratio is a little bit different than 75/25. I'm more of a 50/50. You bring 50 percent of the skills, and you'll learn 50 percent of the skills, versus more conservative organizations would say, “You know what? You have 75 percent of the skills, if you can learn 25 percent of the skills, this job would be interesting to you.” Versus if you have to learn 80 percent, it's going to be frustrating for the individual.And so having that kind of leeway to make decisions, and also knowing that technical change can take a lot of time, I think, as an engineer, as an engineer—as talking software engineering professions as a whole, how do you build your value? So, your value is usually calculated in two parts. It’s calculated in your business domain experience and your technical skills. And so when you go project to project—and this is what might be more of, hey, if you’re facing too big of a climb, you'll usually change roles. Nobody is in their position for a decade. Gone are the days that you're a lifetime engineer on one project or one product.It's kind of a given that you'll change around that because you're building your repertoire in two places: you're building domain experience, and you're building technical experience. And so knowing when to pick your battles, as cliche as that sounds, oh, you know what, this particular technology, this shiny penny came out. I seen a lot of it when Kubernetes came out, like, “Oh, we have to have it.” But—or even a lot of the cloud-native and container-based and all the ‘et cetera accessories’ as I call it, as those projects get steam surrounding it. It’s, “We have to have it.”It's like, eh. It's good for resume building, but there's your things to do on your own also to learn it. I think we live in a day of open source. And so as an engineer, if I want to learn a new skill, I don't necessarily have to wait for my organization to implement it. I could go and play, something like Katacoda, I can go do things on my own, I can learn and then say, “You know what, this is a good fit. I can make a bigger play to help implement it in the organization than just me wanting to learn it.” Because a lot of the learning is free these days, which I think it's amazing. I know that was a long-winded answer. But I think you can kind of quench the thirst of knowledge with playing it on your own, and that if it makes sense, you can make a much better case to the business or to technology leadership to make change.Emily: And what do you think the core business motivations are for most of the organizations that you end up talking to?Ravi: Yeah, [unintelligible] core motivation to leveraging cloud-native technology, it really depends on organization to organization. I'm pretty fortunate that I get to span, I think, a wide swath of organization—so from startups to pretty established enterprises—I kind of talk about the pretty established enterprises. A lot of the business justification, it might not be a technical justification, but there's a pseudo technical business reason, a lot of times, though, I when I talk to folks, they're big concern is portability. And so, like, hey, if you take a look at the dollar and cents rationale behind certain things, the big play there is portability. So, if you're leveraging—we can get into the definition of what cloud-native resources are, but a big draw to that is being portable—and so, hopefully, you're not tied down to a single provider, or single purveyor, and you have the ability to move.Now, that also ties into agility. Supposedly, if you're able to use ubiquitous hardware or semi-ubiquitous software, you were able to move a little bit faster. But again, what I usually see is folk’s main concern is portability. And then also with that is [unintelligible] up against scale. And so as—looking at ways of reducing resources, if you could use generics, you're able to shop around a little bit better, either internally or externally, and help provide scale for a softer or lesser cost.Emily: And how frequently do you think the engineers that you talked to are aware of those core business motivations?Ravi: Hmm, it really depends on—I’m always giving you the ‘depends’ answer because talking to a wide swath of folks—where I see there's more emotion involved in a good way if there's closer alignment to the business—which is something hard to do. I think it is slowly eroding and chipping away. I’ve definitely seen this during my career. It's the old stodgy business first technology argument, right. Like, modern teams, they're very well [unintelligible] together.So, it's not a us versus them or cat versus dog argument, “Oh, why do these engineers want to take their sweet time?” versus, “Why does the business want us to act so fast?” So, having the engineers empowered to make decisions, and have them looked at instead of being a cost center, as the center of innovation is fairly key. And so having that type of rationale, like, hey, allowing the engineers to give input into feature development, even requirement development is something I've seen changed throughout my career. It used to be a very special thing to do requirements building, versus most of the projects that I've worked on now—as an engineer, we’re very, very well attuned to the requirements with the business.Emily: Do you think there's anything that gets lost in translation?Ravi: Oh, absolutely. As people, we're emotional. And so if we're all sum total of our experiences—so let's say if someone asked, Emily, you and I a question, we would probably have four different answers for that person, just because maybe we have differences in opinions, differences of sum totals of experience. And I might say, “Hey, try this or this,” and then you might say, “Try that or that.” So, it really depends.Being lost in translation is always—it's been a fundamental problem in requirements gathering and it's continued to be a fundamental problem. I think just taking that question a step further, is how you go about combating that? I think having very shortened feedback cycles are very important. So, if you have to make any sort of adjustments, gone are the days I think when I started my career, waterfall was becoming unpopular, but the first project or two I was on was very waterfall-ish just because of the size of the project we worked on, we had to agree on lots of things; we were building something for six months. Versus, if you look at today, modern development methodologies like Agile, or Scaled Agile, a lot of the feedback happens pretty regularly, which can be exhausting, but decisions are made all the time.Emily: Do you think in addition to mistranslations, do you think there are any misconceptions? And I'm talking about sort of on both sides of this equation, you know, business leaders or business motivations, and then also technologists, and let's refocus back to talk about cloud-native in particular. What sort of misconceptions do you think are sort of floating out there about cloud-native and what it means?Ravi: Yeah, so what cloud-native means—it means something different to everybody. So, you listen to your podcasts for a couple episodes, if you asked any one of the guests the question, we all would give you a different answer. So, in my definition of cloud-native—and then I’ll get back to what some of the misconceptions are—I have a very basic definition: cloud-native means two pillars. It means your architecture, or your platform needs to be ephemeral, and it needs to be [indibited]. So, it needs to be able to be short-lived, and be consistent, which are two things that are at odds with each other.But if you kind of talk to folks that, hey, they might be a little more slighted towards the business, they have this idea that cloud-native will solve all your problems. So, it reminds me a lot of big data back in the day. “Oh, if you have a Hadoop cluster, it will solve all of our logistics and shipping problems.” No. That's the technology. If you have Kubernetes, it will solve all of our problems. No. That's the technology. It's just a conduit of helping you make changes.And so just making sure that understand that hey, cloud-native doesn't mean that you get the checkmark that, “Oh, you know what? We're stable. We're robust. We can scale by using all cloud-native technologies,” because cloud-native technologies are actually quite complicated. If you're introducing a lot of complexity to your architecture, does it make sense? Does that make sense? Does it give you the value you're looking for? Because at the end of the day, and this is kind of something, the older I get, the more I believe it, is that your customers don't care how you did something; they care what the result is. So, if your web application’s up, they don't care if you're running a simple LAMP stack, they just care that the application is up, versus using the latest Kubernetes stack, but using some sort of cloud-native NoSQL database, and we're using [Istio], and we’re using, pick your flavor du jour of cloud-native technology, your end customer actually doesn't care how you did it. They care what happened.Emily: We can talk about misconceptions that other people have, but is there anything that continues to surprise you?Ravi: Yeah, I think the biggest misconception is that there's very limited choice. And so I'll play devil's advocate, I think the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, there's lots of projects, I've seen the CNCF, they have something called the CNCF Landscape, and I seen it grow from 200 cards, it was 1200 cards at KubeCon, I guess, end of last year in San Diego, and it's hovering around 1500 cards. So, these cards means there's projects or vendors that play in this space. Having that much choice—this is usually surprising to people because they—if you're thinking of cloud-native, it's like saying Kleenex today, and you think of Kubernetes or other auxiliary product or project that surrounds that.And a lot of misconception would be it's helping solve for complexity. It's the quintessential computer science argument. All you do in computer science is move complexity around like an abacus. We move it left to right. We’re just shifting it around, and so by leveraging certain technologies there's a lot of complication, a lot of burden that's brought in.For example, if you want to leverage, let's say, a service Istio, Istio will not solve all your networking problems. In fact, it's going to introduce a whole set of problems. And I could talk about my biggest outage, and one of the things I see with cloud-native is a lot of skills are getting shifted left because you're codifying areas that were not codified before. But that's something I would love to talk about.Emily: Tell me about your biggest outage that sounds interesting.Ravi: Yeah, I didn't know how it would manifest itself. It’s ways, I think, until, like, years later that I didn’t have the aha moment. I used to think it was me, it probably still is me, but—so the year was 2013, and I was working for a client, and we were—it's actually a large news site—and so we were in the midst of modernizing their application, or their streaming application. And so I was one of the first applications to actually go to AWS. And so my background is in Java, so I have a Java software engineer or J2ED or JEE engineer, and having to start working more in infrastructure was kind of a new thing, so I was very fortunate up until 2013-ish up until this point that I didn't really touch the infrastructure. I was immune to that.And now being more, kind of becoming a more senior engineer was in charge of the infrastructure for the application—which is kind of odd—but what ended up happening that—this is going to be kind of funny—since I was one of the first teams to go to AWS, the networking team wouldn't touch the configurations. So, when we were testing things, and [unintelligible] environments, we had our VPC CIDR rules—so the traffic rules—wide open. And then as we were going into production, there were rules that we had to limit traffic due to a CIDR so up until 2013, I thought a C-I-D-R like a CIDR was something you drink. I was like, “What? Like apple cider?” So, this shows you how much I know.So, basically, I had to configure the VPC or Virtual Private Cloud networking rules. Finally, when we deployed the application, unknowing to myself, CIDR calculation is a significant digit calculation. So, the larger the number you divide by, the more IPs you let in. And so instead of dividing by 16, I divided by 8. I was like, “Oh, you’ll have a bigger number if you divide by a smaller number.”I end up cutting off half the traffic of the internet when we deployed to production. So, that was a very not smooth way of doing something. But how did this manifest itself? So, the experts, who would have been the networking team, refused to look at my configuration because it was a public cloud. “Nope, you don’t have a slot in our data center, we look at it.” And poor me, as a JEE or J2EE engineer, I had very little experience networking.Now, if you fast forward to what this means today, a lot of the cloud-native stack, are again, slicing and dicing these CNCF cards, a lot of this, you're exposing different, let's say verticals or dimensions to engineers that they haven't really seen before. A lot of its networking related a lot of it can be storage related. And so, as a software engineer, these are verticals that I’d never had to deal with before. Now, it's kind of ironic that in 2020, hey, yes, you will be dealing with certain configurations because, hey, it's code. So, it's shifting the burden left towards the developer that, “Oh, you know what, you know networking—” or, “You do need to know your app, so here's some Istio rules that you need to include in your packaging of your application.” Which folks might scratch your head.So, yeah, again, it's like shifting complexity away from folks that have traditional expertise towards the developer. Now, times are changing. I seen a lot of this in years gone by, “Oh, no. These are pieces of code. We don't want to touch it.” Being more traditional or legacy operations team, versus today, everybody—it's kind of the merging of the two worlds. The going joke is all developers are becoming infrastructure engineers, and infrastructure engineers are becoming software engineers. So, it's the perfect blend of two worlds coming together.Emily: That's interesting. And I now think I understand what you mean by skills shifting left. Developers have to know more, and more, and more. But I'm also curious, there's also people who talk about how Kubernetes, one of its failures is that it forces this shift left of skills and that the ideal world is that developers don't need to interact with it at all. That's just a platform team. What do you think about that?Ravi: These are awesome questions. These are things I'm very passionate about. I definitely seen the evolution. So, I've been pretty fortunate that I was jumping on the application infrastructure shift around 2014, 2015, so right when Kubernetes was coming of age. So, most of my background was in distributed systems.So, I'm making very large distributed Java applications. And so when Kubernetes came out, the teams that I worked on, the applications that were deployed to Kubernetes were actually owned by the app dev team. The infrastructure team wouldn't even touch the Kubernetes cluster. It was like, “Oh, this is a development tool. This is not a platform tool.”The platform teams that I were interacting with 2015, 2016, as Kubernetes became more popular than ever, they were the legacy—well, hate to say legacy because it’s kind of my background too—they were the remaining middleware engineers. We maintained a web server cluster, we maintained the message broker cluster, we maintained XYZ distributed Java infrastructure cluster. And so when looking at a tool like Kubernetes, or even there were different platforming services, so the paths I've leveraged early, or mid-2010s was Red Hat OpenShift, before and after the Kubernetes migration inside of OpenShift. And so looking at a different—how teams are set up, it used to be, “Oh, this is an app dev item. This is what houses your application.”Versus today, because the workloads are so critical that are going on to say platforms such as Kubernetes, it was that you really need that system engineering bubble of expertise. You really need those platform engineers to understand how to best scale, how to best purvey, and maintain a platform like Kubernetes. Also, one of the odd things are—going back to your point, Emily, like, hey, why things were tossed over either to the development team or going back to a developing software engineer myself, do we care what the end system is?So, it used to be, I'll talk about Java-land here for a minute, give you kind of long-winded answer of back in Java land, we really used to care about the target system, not necessarily for an application that have one node, but if we had to develop a clustered application. So, we have more than one node talking to each other, or a stateful application, we really had start developing to a specific target system. Okay, I know how JBoss WildFly clusters or I know how IBM WebSphere or WebLogic clusters. And so when we're designing our applications, we had to make sure that we play well into those clustering mechanisms. With Kubernetes, since it's generic, you don't necessarily have to play into those clustering mechanisms because there's a basic understanding. But that's been the biggest Achilles heel in Kubernetes. It wasn't designed for those type of workloads, stateful workloads that don't like dying very often. That's kind of been the push or pull. It's just a tool, there's a lot of generic, so you can assume that the target platform will handle a certain way. And you're slowly start backing off the case that you're building to a specific target platform. But as Kubernetes has evolved, especially with the operator framework, you actually are starting to build to Kubernetes in 2018, 2019, 2020.Emily: It actually brought up a question for me that, at risk of sounding naive myself, I feel like I never meet anybody who introduces themselves as a platform engineer. I meet all these developers, everyone's a developer evangelist, for example, or their background is as a developer, I feel like maybe once or twice, someone has introduced themselves as, “I’m a platform engineer,” or, “I’m an operations specialist.” I mean, is that just me? Is that a real thing?Ravi: They’re very real jobs. I think… it's like saying DevOps engineer, it means something else to who you talk to you. So, I'll harp on, like ‘platform engineer.’ so kind of like, the evolution of the platform engineer, if you would have talked to me in 2013, 2014, “Hey, I'm a platform engineer,” I would think that you're a software engineer focused on platform tools. Like, “Hey, I focus on authentication, authorization.”You're building—let's say we had a dozen people on this call and we're working for Acme Incorporated, there's modules that transcend every one of our teams. Let's say logging, or let’s say login, or let's say, some sort of look and feel. So, the platform engineer or the platform engineering development focused platform engineering team would make common reusable modules throughout. Now, with the great rise of platforms as a service, like PCF, and OpenShift, and DCOS, they became kind of like a shift. The middleware engineers that were maintaining the message broker clusters, maintaining your web application server clusters, they’re kind of shifting towards one of those platforms.Even today, Kubernetes, pick your provider du jour of Kubernetes. And so those are where the platform engineers are today. “Hey, I'm a platform engineer. I focus on OpenShift and Kubernetes.” Usually, they're very vertically focused on one or more specific platforms. And operations folks can ride very big gamut. Usually, if you put, “operations” in quotes, usually they’re systems or infrastructure engineers that are very focused on the infrastructure where the platform’s run.Emily: I'm obviously a words person, and it just seems like there's this vocabulary issue where everybody knows what a developer is, and so it's easy to say, “Oh, I'm a developer.” But then everything else that's related to engineering, there's not quite as much specificity, precisely because you said everybody has a slightly different understanding. It's kind of interesting.Ravi: Yeah, it's like, I think as a engineer, we're not one for titles. So, I think a engineer is a engineer. I think if you asked most engineers, it’s like, “Yeah, I’m a engineer.” It's so funny, a good example of that is Tim Berners-Lee, the person who created WWW, the World Wide Web. If you looked at his LinkedIn, he just says he's a web developer. And he invented WWW. So, usually engineering-level folks, you're not—at least for myself—is not one for title.Emily: The example that you gave regarding the biggest outage of your career was basically a skills problem. Do you think that there's still a skills or knowledge issue in the cloud-native world?Ravi: Oh, absolutely. We work for incentivization. You know, my mortgage is with PNC, and they require a payment every month, unfortunately. So, I do work for an employer. Incentivization is key. So, kind of resume chasing, conference chasing there's been some of that in the cloud-native world, but what ends up happening more often than not is that we're continuously shifting left.A talk I like to give is called, “The Engineering Burden is on the Rise.” And taking a look at what, let's say, a software engineer was required to do in 2010 versus what a software engineer is required to do today in 2020. And there's a lot more burden in infrastructure that, as a software engineer you didn't have to deal with. Now, this has to do with two things, or actually one particular movement. There's a movie company, or a video company in Los Gatos, California, and there's a book company in South Lake Union in Seattle.And so these two particular companies given the rise of what's called a full lifecycle developer. Basically, if you run it, or if you operate—you operate what you run, or if you write it, you run it. So, that means that if you write a piece of code, you're in charge of the operations. You have support, you're in charge of the SLAs, SLOs, SLIs. You're ultimately responsible if a customer has a problem.And can you imagine the number of people, the amount of skill set that requires? There's this concept of a T-shaped skill that you have to have experience in so many different platforms, that it becomes a very big burden. As an engineer, I don't envy anybody entering a team that's leveraging a lot of cloud-native technology because most likely a lot of that onus will fall on the software engineer to create the deployable, to create how you build it, to fly [unintelligible] in your CI stack, write the configuration that builds it, write the configuration deploys it, write the networking rules, write how you test it, write the login interceptors. So, there's a lot going on.Emily: Is there anything else that you want to add about your experience with cloud-native that I haven't really thought to ask, yet?Ravi: It's not all doom and gloom. I'm very positive on cloud-native technologies. I think it's a great equalizer. You're kind of going back—this might be a more intrinsic, like a 30-second answer here. If you taking back that I wanted to learn certain skills in 2010, I basically had to be working for a firm. So, 2010, I was working for IBM. So, there's certain distributed Java problems I wanted to solve. I basically had to be working for a firm because the software licensing costs were so expensive, and that technology wasn't very democratized.Looking at cloud-native technology today, there's a big, big push for open source, which open source is R&D methodology. That's what open source is, it helps alleviate some sort of acquisition—but not necessarily adoption—problems. And you can learn a lot. Hey, you could pick up any project and just try to learn, try to run it. Pick up these particular distributed system skills that were very guarded, I would say, a decade ago, it's being opened up to the masses. And so there's a lot to drink from, but you can drink as much as you want from the CNCF or the cloud-native garden hose.Emily: Do you have a software engineering tool that you cannot live without?Ravi: Recently, because I deal in a lot of YAML, I need a YAML linter. So, YAML is a space-separated language. As a human, I can't tell you what spaces are. Like, you know, if you have three spaces, and the next line you have four spaces. So, I use a YAML linter. It puts periods for me, so I can count them because it's been multiple times that my demo is not syntactically correct because I missed a space and I can't see it on my screen.Emily: And how can listeners connect with you?Ravi: Oh, yeah. You can hit me up on Twitter @ravilach, R-A-V-I-L-A-C-H. Or come visit us at Harness at www.harness.io. I run the Harness community, so community.harness.io. We have a Slack channel and a Discourse, and always excited to interact with people.Emily: Thanks for listening. I hope you’ve learned just a little bit more about the business of cloud-native. If you’d like to connect with me or learn more about my positioning services, look me up on LinkedIn: I’m Emily Omier, that’s O-M-I-E-R, or visit my website which is emilyomier.com. Thank you, and until next time.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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