Key Factors to Consider During Containerization with Travis Jeppson

Some of the highlights of the show include

• How containerization enabled Nav to spread roughly 250 virtual machines across multiple environments, while drastically reducing infrastructure spend
• Travis’s thoughts on buying cloud native software tools versus building them, and what engineers should consider during this process
• The difficulty of finding security solutions that work inside of a cloud-native ecosystem
• Why companies should expect to encounter unique challenges when migrating to Kubernetes
• Why companies need to understand their end goal, and determine an overall objective before beginning a migration
• Travis’s must-have engineering tool, and why he can’t live without it 

Links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stmpy/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/stmpy 

Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native Podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I’m Emily Omier, your host. And today I’m here with Travis Jeppson. Travis is currently at Kasten, but he’s also going to talk about his time as a director of engineering at Nav.

Travis: At Nav, my role shifted quite a bit while I was there. I started as a software developer, writing Ruby back end applications for them, and then shifted into—actually within a month of being there, they shifted me over to the operational side because I had previous experience working with containerization, and also in infrastructure. So, they quickly moved me over into that realm and from there, I worked there for about a year until they told me, go spin up a team and get things moving. Help us move to containerization. Help us move to a more modern infrastructure and stuff. And so, about a year after that I became a director of engineering to where I had our ops team that had spun up, and then I also acquired both our QA team and our IT team that was there. And then, about a year after that, I ended up acquiring a little bit more than that. So, I ended up with a fair amount of our front end and some of our backend teams as well, and where they moved me into the senior director position. So, a day in the life, towards the end of when I was at Nav was a lot of working with the teams, helping them to do a lot of architectural perspective, and changes, and outlook to where we were trying to get as far as the company is concerned. We were building a product that we could address both first-party customers where they would log in to the Nav website directly, as well as working with partners so that we could issue out Nav functionality to those partners that they could incorporate to their pages as well. And so, we worked very hard to try to segment those two pieces together so that what we were building could be dispersed between both first-party customers and our third-party customers. And so, towards the end of my time there, it ended up being a lot of working within all of engineering to help facilitate those purposes. Then, just about six months ago, I ended up shifting my role over to a company called Kasten. And, Kasten is strictly working within the Kubernetes ecosystem. So, we do data management for Kubernetes based applications, and I am the site lead in Utah for Kasten, and so my day in and day out, a lot is, it's, kind of, all over the place. Sometimes it's working with engineering to help figure out some things going on there, sometimes it's working with brokers to help find office space for it. And sometimes it's dealing with insurance. It ended up being quite dynamic. But overall, I'd say most of my time is really spent more on the engineering side, just from the perspective of having worked at Nav and having been a consumer of a lot of these technologies, I think that they really appreciate my insights that I'm able to give there. So, I end up working, a lot, with the engineers to help facilitate what we're doing.

Emily: Sounds like you end up serving as a bridge from having been an end-user. But do you think that there is common miscommunications that happen, or what do those conversations sound like? Why is that experience valuable?

Travis: Yeah, so I don't know if it's as much as a miscommunication as much as what are customers looking for? And what are they trying to achieve? And why are they purchasing different software solutions? And what makes sense for them, more than anything. And I think that, having been a consumer of those products, I was more or less on the front lines there. When I was building our operational team at Nav, that was basically what I was doing is trying to figure out what things are we going to spend time on? And what things are we going to build ourselves, or what things do we need to just go find a solution for and bring them in-house? And the funny thing is when I was doing that for Nav is actually when I was introduced to Kasten and to the CEO here. And so, that ended up changing the way my career went. But overall, I think what Kasten—what those conversations really end up becoming is what are customers trying to do, and where are they trying to go?

Emily: Yeah, and in fact, that is exactly what I want to talk about more on this podcast. So, tell me a little bit about what your experience at Nav was. What were you looking for? What did you want to prioritize? What was the company hoping to get out of moving to containers?

Travis: So, I would say maybe the piece that really facilitated a lot of the progress in that sense was starting to understand our infrastructure spend. And then, to couple with that was also trying to become more agile. More agile in the sense of being able to push on demand, where previous to that we were pushing—you know, when we push our code, we did it on a bi-weekly basis—well, every other week, and it was always very cumbersome. If we have pictures of us in the early days of Nav, where there would be 10 engineers around someone’s desk, and they were the one person that was pushing the code into production, just waiting for the other shoe to fall, or waiting for something to happen. And so, when I started doing operational things for Nav, it started addressing those two things. What can we do to help control our infrastructure, and to understand it a little bit better? And how can we also create more of a dynamic infrastructure? Like, Nav is very much a US-based company. And so, the traffic that we're getting onto our website was regional very, very much. And so, there would be periods where it would be very busy, and then there'd be periods where it wasn’t. And the way that our infrastructure was designed, and a lot of times the way that they are designed, especially with virtual machines, is that you're building for capacity. You're building to be able to handle that load, and that has to stay there all the time, regardless of whether that capacity is being used or not. And so, that was one of the biggest questions, and that bill was—we were completely in the clouds. We were completely in AWS, but that bill continued to get more and more expensive every month. To the point of where it warranted the executive team to come down and say, “This needs to be fixed. This is going at an outrageous pace, and we need to be able to figure out how to control this.” And so, that's when they came to me and said, “Okay, get a team spun up, and let's figure out how to control this.” And so, I would say that those wer...