 Hi, this is Josef Lepartia and today we have with us Pratik Udayar, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Intuit. Pratik, it's great to have you on the show. Great to be here, Josef Lepartia. Thank you for inviting me. And today the primary focus is going to be on Argo projects, graduation, and of course to understand the roadmap at the end of 2022, so I would also like to hear your thoughts on where the project is heading and all those things. But before we go deeper into that, tell us a bit about what is Argo project all about? We graduated Argo. Argo has now joined the highest level of maturity in the CNCF, it joins products or projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and as founders and one of the largest maintainers of the Argo project, we're sort of proud and honored by this huge milestone. So you asked what Argo is. Argo is actually a collection of projects, Argo workflows, Argo CD, Argo events, Argo rollouts, but primarily it was really born to enable scale with developing and running applications in the public cloud. And we created the project with a very specific focus on creating a GitOps driven Kubernetes native workflow engine to run complex workflows for CI CD and machine learning workflows. And as our journey into it went on in our cloud adoption and moved to a container-based ecosystem, we continued to enhance and build projects into Argo. If we just look at not only CNCF landscape but cloud knitting in general, talk a bit about some of the pain points that are there. Of course, when we talk about CI CD because when we look at the early days of CI CD, it was more or less like patching a lot of things together, then a lot of projects came out. Now there's also a CDN foundation as well there. So talk a bit about the evolution that you have seen in the market, which is also with the, you can say, maturity of these projects at the same time maturity, the market maturity of the Kubernetes ecosystem as well. What have you seen? Yeah, that's actually a good question because, you know, so as you may not know, but as you, Argo was born out of a company that I co-founded, it was called Aplatics that was then acquired by Intuit. And when we founded Aplatics, what we were observing was essentially a move to cloud by large enterprises. So that movement had started. This was around 2015. At the time, there were a number of competing platforms, you know, and Kubernetes was kind of in its infancy, but it was sort of growing to be the mainstream, you know, cloud native platform. And as we were observing this, we saw a need for the complex, you know, workflows in the cloud environment, right? When you look at the cloud environment, CICD, you know, in the traditional environment is just about, you know, packaging software, building software and deploying it. When you start thinking about cloud native environments or even just moving to cloud, building, operating in the cloud, deploying in the cloud is a whole new way of doing things. And so that's what we were observing. And we felt that there was going to be a need to essentially revamp, you know, either the CICD architecture of the current existing tool sets or to build something that was very native to containers and Kubernetes. And that's kind of where we started. We focused on building a very cloud native Kubernetes or container native CICD project. And Intuit is, you know, of course, a consumer of the project itself. You folks are, you know, creators and consumer. But the project is being used widely across industries as well. Can you also talk about any specific use cases where the project is being used or you feel that, hey, like many other cloud native projects, just the Linux kernel or Kubernetes, you know, we did not even think about it could be used there and folks are using it. Yeah. So, you know, let's start with Intuit's journey because, you know, when Intuit acquired Applatics, Intuit was on its own journey to the cloud. You know, they had made a determination to move all of the platforms and capabilities and products, products like TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, you know, onto cloud. And one of the thoughts that was really driving this was really that as they were making the switch, the idea was really, how do you make a leap forward and essentially get to where, you know, the market or, you know, the products of the future are going to be built. So what we started doing at Intuit was really building a modern SaaS development environment. Today, all of Intuit's products run on this modern SaaS development environment, which is a Kubernetes environment. And as we started doing this work, we quickly realized the limitations of the existing tools, which are really built for on-prem environments. And, you know, so we quickly revamped Argo. We essentially started with Argo workflows. And then we saw a quick need to have an efficient deployment mechanism where Argo CD was born. And as the community started adopting it, you know, BlackRock contributed Argo events, which is something that was very natural in the process. You know, you have workflows, you have events, events trigger workflows, and then eventually you do deployments. And then as we started, you know, moving further down the chain, you know, where, you know, the migration of these products worked, we also clearly saw a need for things like, you know, A-B testing and, you know, progressive roll-ups, right? So as you do a deployment, you don't really do a wholesale deployment. So we have thousands of microservices running over hundreds of clusters. In order for us to deploy, you know, something say like TurboTax, it would not be feasible to just say we're going to migrate, you know, hundreds of clusters and do it in one fell swoop, right? So the idea was really, you need some kind of a progressive delivery mechanism, you know, which is watching out for signals and then would roll back if things do not work out or if things are working out, then it does a progressive deployment and continues over, right? So these were some of the challenges that you encounter very quickly, especially in the cloud. Talking a bit about what does Graduation mean for a project as met? You're actually interestingly in CSEA plan escape. Most of these projects are already being used in production when they enter these different label stages. But what does Graduation mean for the project, for the community, for the whole ecosystem? Yeah, so it's interesting you say this because, you know, Argo actually joined the CNCF as an incubating project in 2020, you know, and today we have over 8,000 contributors, over 190k, you know, contributions, and we have over 500 plus companies that are using Argo, publicly referenced companies. So from a community standpoint, you know, Argo has probably achieved everything that, you know, everything and more that I could have dreamed of, okay? So it's a very humbling experience to see the widespread adoption and the community building around Argo. What does Graduation mean? Graduation fundamentally means that the community now sees Argo as a valid project, you know, standing, you know, head to head with projects like Kubernetes or Prometheus or Envoy. And it has, you know, the weight of the CNCF behind it supporting it as a community project, right? So I think the Graduation, first of all, the criteria for Graduation, things like security, compliance, governance, it's a long road, right? And to meet all of these criteria requires a lot of effort across the community. So for example, the security posture of Argo took a long time, you know, and now we can safely say that it is a pretty secure, you know, open source project and is widely deployed across enterprises. So that's really the fundamental, you know, position of Graduation. No, I also wanted to talk a bit about, because this is important talk, I mean, I come from your open source background. We're at one point, people used to frown at commercialization, but the fact is without commercialization, open source will not succeed. So talk a bit about, of course, Linux Foundation has played a very critical role in creating a kind of, you know, level playing, vendor-neutral field where players can come here and your competitors can, you know, use those projects without worrying about you pulling the plugs or getting worried about, hey, you may change a license or something like that. But talk a bit about the importance of, you know, competing into it. When they invest in this project, it actually ensures the sustainability, the health of these projects. Yeah, so the best way to think about it is that, you know, of course, an open source project has, you know, contributors, it has maintainers, you know, it has some form of governance driven by the community, a roadmap that is also agreed upon by the community based on requests that's coming in. But having the backing of a company like Intuit, for example, which has put all of its weight behind running all of the core flagship products on this platform, but also providing, you know, technical and developers, you know, to actually maintain and run the project. So it's essentially a testament and a validation that, you know, open source as a project or open source projects do require this sort of commitment, right? Because there are large security, governance, scale issues that come by running a product like this, right, in an environment like Intuit. And if you have a company that is now standing behind you, then it actually validates the project, you know, just like Google did with Kubernetes, right? I mean, that was really the fundamental balance of having a company validated. This is a new platform, right? But secondly, you asked about commercialization, right? So this is something that we put a lot of thought behind. As we were growing the community, it was very natural to have companies, you know, development companies, tools companies, companies developing, you know, cloud native developer ecosystems or products to be interested in figuring out, you know, how to adopt Argo and then potentially commercialize it, right? So we approached this very, you know, carefully because we wanted to make sure that the project always maintained an independent identity that was driven by the community. All of the work that we did was done transparently in the community. But we also wanted to make sure that, you know, we gave vendors a commercial path to, you know, monetizing and there's a number of reasons we want to do that. First of all, what Intuit has achieved, not many companies can do that, right? The scale of Intuit allows us to actually deploy developers and actually support the program. But there are a lot of companies that just want to use the open source project and make sure that, you know, it has a backing and a support or a partner that they can trust. And I think that's where the commercialization comes in, where we have, you know, companies like Red Hat for example, CodeFresh, Acuity, you know, that are actually providing the community with, you know, the support that is needed to run these products at scale and monetizing it. And I think it's a fine balance, but it's something that I truly support and I feel like the community gets stronger when you have this. What are the things that are in the pipeline of what are the things that are in your roadmap? What are the challenges, problems that you're looking at solving or the improvements that you want to make to the project? Yeah, as we start thinking about it, you know, first of all, there's just the matter of scale and I talked to you about the different projects that we have, right? We have workflows and CD events and rollouts. Interestingly enough, as the community has been, you know, picking this up, we've started to see use cases that we had not anticipated before. So for example, the ML community has picked up Argo workflows because it's a very, you know, lightweight, but very extensible and scalable workflow engine. And it essentially brings the power of Kubernetes, the scale of Kubernetes very easily to deploying workflows like this. And I think that is going to be the next frontier because what we are seeing, for example, is that we're moving it into another way of running it at scale. And we have, you know, a large number of users. We have over eight or 9,000 developers that use, you know, the system on a daily basis. What is still missing, you know, is things like, how do you make it easier for developers to start using this? There's still a challenge, you know, in terms of having developers quickly adopt this and use this, right? The other thing that comes into it, you know, you know, more recently, actually, I led a panel at KubeCon to actually understand what were the biggest obstacles today in adopting cloud-native technologies and, you know, security, consistency and operational excellence and just overall achieving development velocity, right? What are the sort of three key themes that actually popped up. So when you start thinking about these, you know, especially on operational excellence, you know, and then increasing the development velocity, the next, you know, fundamental change will be to actually incorporate AI ops, you know, to make the platform smarter and to make, you know, the user experiences even simpler, right? And I think the key here is that you need to start using data to essentially drive, you know, the next phase of development here. So at Intuit, for example, we have really focused on observability, you know, because operational excellence starts with observability. And then once you start collecting the data, the next phase of this is how do you make it intelligent? So how do you now start applying smarts, right? And more recently, we added an add-on to Argo CD and observability add-on to Argo CD, which essentially allows you to do this, which takes all of the data that's coming in and then presents core signals that you can now use to make decisions about whether you want to roll forward or backward or, you know, very quickly identify anomalies that are happening in the system. Intuit recently launched an open-source project called NUMA project, which is, you know, a collection of open-source tools for real-time data analytics in AI ops, right? And I believe that that is going to be the next phase and shift of even Argo where we start seeing Argo and now essentially allowing customers and users to incorporate smarts into the platform. Pratik, thank you so much for taking the time out today. And of course, walk us through the journey of, you know, a project, how Intuit is using it internally and also the importance of commercialization of all those vendors who are offering your support at the project and also share the roadmap for the project. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.