 Welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. We have a great guest coming in remotely from LA, Christian Hernandez, developer experience lead at CodeFresh, CodeFresh.io. Recently they were on our feature at AWS startup showcase series, season two, episode one, cloud data innovations, open source innovations, all good stuff. Christian, thanks for coming on this CUBE Conversation. Thank you, thank you, John. Thank you for having me on. You know, I was really impressed with CodeFresh when I met with the founders here on the CUBE because GitOps, AI, everything's something ops. DevOps, DevSecOps, you got AIOps, you got now GitOps. Essentially operationalizing the software futures here and software's eating the world, as was written many years ago. But it's open source is now all soft. All things software is open source and that's kind of a done deal. It's only getting better and better. Mainstream companies are contributing. You guys are on this wave of this open source tsunami and you got cloud scale, automations right there, machine learning, all this stuff is now the next gen of code, right? So you're at CodeFresh and your title is developer experience lead. What does that mean right now? What does it mean to be a developer experience lead? Like you make sure people have a good experience. Are you developing? You figure out the product. What does that mean? Yeah, that's, and it's also part of the whole DevRel explosion that's happening right now, I believe. It's, you know, everyone's always asking, you know, what is developer advocate? What does that mean developer experience? What does that mean? So you kind of hit the nail on the head a little bit up there in the beginning is that the experience of the developer when using a particular platform, right? Especially the CodeFresh platform. That is my responsibility there at CodeFresh to enable end users, to enable partners, to enable anyone that wants to use the CodeFresh platform for their CI CD and get ops workflows. So that's really my corner of the world is to make sure their experience is great. So it's really what I'm here to do at CodeFresh. You know, one of the things I can say on my career, you've kind of become a historian over time. When I was a developer, back in the old days, it was simply you compiled stuff, you did QA on it, you packaged it out, you went out the door. And, you know, that was a workflow, right? Now, with the cloud, I was talking to one of your founders, you got new abstraction layers. Cloud has changed again, again, open source. So newer things are coming, right? Like Kubernetes, for instance, is a great example that came out of the open source, kind of the innovations. But that, and Hadoop, we were mentioning before he came on camera from a storage standpoint, kind of didn't make it because it was just too hard, and it made the developer's job harder, and then it made the developer's requirements to be specialized. So you had kind of two problems. You had hard to use, a lot of friction, and then it required certain expertise when the developers just want to code, right? So you have now the motion with GitOps, you guys are in the middle of, kind of this idea of frictionless based software delivery with the cloud. So what's different now? Can you talk about that specific point? Because no one wants to do hard work, have to redo things. Yeah, shift left and all that good stuff. What's hard now? What do you guys solve? What's the friction that you're taking out? What to become frictionless? Yeah, yeah, and you mentioned a very interesting point about how things that are coming out almost makes it seem harder nowadays to develop an application. You used to have it to where, kind of a sort of a waterfall workflow where you develop your code, you compile it, right? I guess back in the day, Java was king. I think Java still has a large footprint out there where you would just compile it and deploy it. If it works, it works all right, cool, and you have it, and you kind of just move it along in its process. Whereas I think the whole idea of, I think Netflix came out with the fail-off-in, fail-fast, release-off-in, the whole Atlassian CICD thing, Agile thing came into play where now it's a little bit more complex to get your code out there delivered, to get your code from one environment to the other environment, especially with the advent of Kubernetes and cloud-native architecture where you can deploy and have this immutable infrastructure where you can just deploy and automate so quickly, so often that there needs to be some sort of new process now into place where to have a new process like GitOps to where it's frictionless, meaning that it makes that process a little easier, makes that complex process of deploying onto a cloud-native architecture easier. So that way, as you said before, returning the developers back to what they care about more, the most is just code. I just want to code that. You know, the other thing, cool thing, Christian, I want to bring up, and we'll get into some of the specifics around Argos, specifically CD, is that the community is responding as a kind of, it takes a village kind of mindset. People are getting into this, they're saying, hey, we can get our act together around some de facto workflows and de facto capabilities. Everyone wins. It's a rising tide, floats all boats kind of concept. CNCF certainly has been a big part of that. You've even seen some of the big hyperscalers getting behind it. But you guys are part of the founding members of the Open GitOps working group, Amazon, Azure, GitHub, Red Hat, WeaveWorks, and then a ton of contributors, okay? So this is kind of cool. This means that there's like people behind this thing, look, we got to get here faster. What happened at KubeCon this year? You guys had some news around Argo and you had some news around the hosted solution. Can you take a minute to explain two things? One, the open community vibe, and then two, what you guys announced at KubeCon in Spain. Yeah, yeah, so as far as Open GitOps, that was, you know, as you said before, CodeFresh was part of that founding committee, right? A group of people trying to figure out, define what GitOps is, right? We're trying to bring it beyond the hype word, right? Beyond just like a marketing term to where we actually define what it actually is because it is actually something that's out there that people are doing, right? A lot of people, you know, remember that the Chick-fil-A story where it's like they are completely doing, you know, this GitOps thing, we're just now wanting putting definition around it. So that was just amazing to see out there in KubeCon. And like you said, in KubeCon, we, you know, we're taking some of that acceleration that we see in the community to, and we announced our hosted GitOps offering, right? So hosted GitOps is something that our customers have been asking for for a while. Many times when, you know, someone wants to use something like Argo CD, they install it on their cluster, they get up and running. And, but with all that comes like the feed and care of that platform. And, you know, not only just keeping the lights on, but also management security, you know, general maintenance, you know, all the things that come along with a managing a system. And on top of that comes like the scale aspect of it, right? And so with scale, so a lot of people go with like a hub and spoke, others go with like a fleet design, in either case, right? There's a challenge for the feed and care of it, right? And so with CodeFresh, hosted GitOps, we take that management headache away, right? So we take the management of Argo CD, the management of all of that and kind of just offer Argo CD as a surface, right? Which offers, you know, allows users to, you know, let us take care of all the GitOps runtime. And so they can concentrate on, you know, their application deployments, right? And you also get things like Dora metrics, right? Integrated with the platform. You have the ability to integrate multiple CI providers, you know, like GitHub actions or whatever existing Jenkins pipelines. And really that CodeFresh platform becomes, like your GitOps platform becomes like, you know, your central view of the world of your, you know, GitOps processes. Yeah, I mean, that whole single source of truth concept is really kind of needed. I got to ask you though, the popularity of the Argo CD on GitOps internally, right? That's been clear, right? Kubernetes, the way that's going, it's accelerating fast, people want simple, it's scaling and you got automation built in, all that good stuff. What was the driver behind the hosted GitOps solution? Was it customer needs? Was it efficiency, all the above? What was specifically, and why would someone want to have the hosted versus say internal? Yeah, so it's, it was really driven by, you know, customer need, right? It's been something that the customers have been asking for. And it's also has been something that, you know, you have a process of delivering an application to, you know, a fleet of clusters. In a traditional, you know, I keep saying traditional GitOps practice as if GitOps was so old, in, you know, when people first start out, they'll start, you know, installing Argo CD on all of these clusters and trying to manage that at scale. It's, it seemed like there was, you know, it'd be nice if we can just like be able to consume this as a service. So we don't have to like worry about, you know, best practices, we don't have to worry about security. We don't just, all of that is taken care of and managed by us at Codefresh. So this is like something that, you know, it's been asked for and something that, you know, we believe will accelerate, you know, developers into actually developing their applications. They don't have to worry about managing the platform. So just getting this right, hosted managed service by you guys on this one. Correct, yes. Okay, got it. All right, so let me, let me get in the Argo real quick, just to kind of just level set for the folks that are leaning into this and when kicking the tires, where are we with Argo? What, why was it so popular? What did it do specifically? Did it just make it easier for developers to manage and monitor Kubernetes, keep them updated? What was the specific value behind Argo? Where did it come from? And why is it so popular? Yeah, so Argo, the Argo project, which is made up of a few tools, usually when people say Argo, they meet, they, they're talking about Argo CD, but there's also Argo workflows, Argo events, Argo notifications, and like I said before, CD with that, and that is something that was developed internally at Intuit, right? So for those of you who don't know Intuit is the company behind TurboTax. So for those of us in the US, we know, we know that season all too well, the tax season. And so that was a tool that was developed internally. And by the way, Intuit, we've done many here, they're very huge cloud adopters. They've been on that train from the day one. They've been, they've been driving a lot of cloud scale too. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah, and, and, and also, you know, they were always open source first, right? So they've always had, you know, they developed something internally. They always had the, the intention of open sourcing it. And so it was really a tool that was born internally and it was a tool that helped them, you know, get stuff done with Kubernetes. And that's kind of like the tagline they use for the Argo project is you get stuff done. They wanted their developers to focus less on deploying the application and more right, more than on writing the application itself. And so the, and so the Argo project is a suite of tools essentially that helps deploy onto Kubernetes, you know, using GitOps as that, you know, that cornerstone in design, right? In the design philosophy. It's so popular because of the ease of use and developer friendliness aspect of it. It's, it's, it's meant to be simple, right? And simple in a good sense of getting up and running, which attracted, you know, developers from, you know, all around the world, you know, other companies like Red Hat got into it as well. BlackRock also is a big contributor, thousands of other independent contributors as well to the Argo project. Yeah, Christian, you bring up a good point. I'm going to go on a little tangent here, but I want to get your reaction to something that Dave Vellante and I and our CUBE team has been kind of riffing on lately. You mentioned, you know, Netflix earlier, you mentioned Intuit. There's a kind of a story that's been developing and with traction and momentum and trajectory over the past, say, 10 years, the companies that went on the cloud, like Netflix Intuit, Snowflake, Snowflake not so much now, but in terms of open source, they're all contributing lift, they're all contributing back to open source, but they're not cloud providers, right? So you're seeing that kind of first generation, it's a massive contribution to open source. Open source has been around for a while, I remember the early days and we all participate on projects, but now you have real companies building IP, going open source first, because they're on a hyperscale cloud, but they're not the cloud themselves. They took advantage of that. So there's kind of this cycle of flywheel of cloud to open source, not from the vendors themselves, like Amazon with services or Azure, but the people who rode their CapEx and built on that scale, feeding into the open source and then coming back. This is kind of an interesting dynamic. What's your reactions to that? Do you see that super cloud kind of vibe there? Yeah, yeah. Well, and also I think it's indicative that, open source is not only a way to develop applications, a way to engineer your project, but also kind of like a strategic advantage in such a way, right? You see companies like, even like Microsoft has been going into open source, they've been going to open source first. They made a huge pivot to using open source as like a strategic direction for the company. And I think that goes back to a little bit for my roots. I always talk about, I always talk about Red Hat, right? I always talk about, I was in Red Hat previously and Red Hat being the first billion dollar open source company, right? We always joke is like, well, internally, like we were a billion dollar company that sold free software, how does that happen? But it's really built into the community, built into being able to tap into those expert resources. People love using software, people love the software they love using and they want to improve it. Companies are now just getting out of their way. Companies now essentially it's just like, let's just get out of the way, let's let people work on what they want to work on. They love the software, they want to improve it. Let's let them. It's interesting, a lot of people love the clouds of all this power. If you think about what we're just riffing on and what you just said, the economics and the organic self-governing has always been the open source way where commercial value is enabled if you play ball right, like Red Hat for instance. And now you're seeing the community kind of be that arbiter of the cloud. So hey, if everyone can create value on say AWS or Azure, bring it to open source, everyone benefits across all clouds hope eventually. So the choice aspect comes in. So this community angle is huge and I think it's changing a lot for the better. I think this is where we're seeing a lot of that growth and you guys have been the middle level with the Argo project and GitOps specifically in that sector. How have you seen that growth? What's some dynamics have you seen? Power dynamics, organic, is it governed well? What's some of the successes? What are some of the challenges? Can you share your thoughts on the community's growth around GitOps and Argo project? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've been, you know, part of some of these communities, right? Like the open GitOps community, the Argos community, pretty much from the beginning and seeing it developed from an idea to, you know, having all these contributors, having, you know, the buzzword come out of it, you know, the GitOps and that being the, you know, having it, you know, all over the, you know, social media, all over LinkedIn, all over all these different channels. You know, I've seen things like GitOpsCon, right? So, you know, being part of the GitOps open GitOps community, you know, one of the things we did was we did GitOpsCon. It started as a meetup, you know, a couple of years ago and now, you know, it was a, you know, we had an actual event at KubeCon in Los Angeles. You know, we had like, you know, about 50 people there, but then, you know, KubeCon in Valencia, this past KubeCon, we had over 200 people. It was a second largest co-located event at KubeCon. So that just seeing that community and, you know, from a personal standpoint, you know, being part of that, the community, being the event chair, right? Being one of the co-chairs was a moment of pride for me being able to just stand up there and just seeing a sea of people. I was like, wow, we just started with a handful of people at a meetup and now, you know, we're actually having conferences and speaking of conference, like the Argo community as well, we put in, you know, we put on a virtual only event on ArgoCon last year. We're going to do it in person today, you know, this year. You have a date on that? You have a date on that ArgoCon 22? Yeah, yeah, yeah, ArgoCon September 19, 2022. So, you know, mark your calendars if it's, you know, it's a multi-day event, you know, it's part of something else that I've seen in the community where, you know, first we're talking about these meetups. Now we're doing multi-day events where, you know, in talks of the open get-ups, you know, get-ups can also make that a multi-day event. There's just so many talks and so many people that want to be involved in network that, you know, we're saying, well, we're going to need more days because there's just so many people coming to these events, you know, and, you know, seeing these communities grow, not just from like the engineering standpoint, but also from the end user standpoint, but also from the people that are actually doing these things and, you know, seeing some of these use cases, seeing some of the success, seeing some of the failures, right? Like people love listening to those talks about postmortems. I think they're part of my favorite talks as well. So, seeing that community grow is, you know, on a personal level, it's a point of pride for me. It's like CSI for software developers. You want to get to know what happened, you know. You know, it's interesting you mentioned about the multiple events at KubeCon. You know, the vibe that's going on is a very festival vibe, right? You have organic groups coming together. I remember when they had just started doing the day zero programs. Now you have like almost like multiple stages of content at these events. It feels like like a Coachella vibe or some sort of like festival vibe. Like a lot of things going on and you pick your kind of area, but you can move around. I find that the kind of the format du jour, I think is going well these days. What do you think about that? Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. It's, and I love that analogy of Coachella. It does feel like, you know, it's there's something for everyone and you can find what you like and you'll find a little, you know, a little group, right? A little click of people. That's probably the wrong term to use, but you know, you find, you know, you know, like-minded people and you know, passionate about the same thing, right? Like the security guys, they, you know, you see them all clumped together, right? Like you see like the developers, CICD, GitOps guys, we all kind of clumped together to start talking, you know, about everything that we're doing and it's, that's, I think that's really something special that KubeCon, you know, some, you know, it's gotten so big that it's almost impossible to fit everything in a week because there's just so much to do and there's so much that interests, you know, someone, but yeah, that's- It's a code party is what we call it. It's a code party. Yeah, it's a code party, for sure, for sure. Nerdfest on steroids. Hey, I got to get, I want to wrap this up and give you the final word. Christian, thanks for coming on. Great insight, great conversation. This is a huge, you guys are in the middle of a hot area. Obviously large-scale data growth. Kubernetes is scaling beautifully and making it easier at managed services is what people want. Machine learning is kicking in and you get automation building in, all favoring the developer and CICD pipelining and all that good stuff. People want to learn more. Can you take a minute to put the plug in for CodeFresh on the certification? How do I get involved? Where are, is there levels? If I want to jump in and get trained and get fluent on CodeFresh, can you share commentary and what the status is? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So CodeFresh is offering a free certification, right? For GitOps, or Argo CD and GitOps. The first of its kind for Argo CD, first of its kind for GitOps is you can actually go get certified with Argo CD and GitOps. Their level one is out right now. You can go take that codefresh.io slash certification. It's out there to sign up. You don't need to pay anything, right? It's a free course you could take. Level two is coming soon, right? So level two is coming soon in the next few months, I believe. I don't want to quote a specific day. But soon. But soon, soon as in months, right? So we're counting that down where you can not only level one level certification but a level two more advanced certification for those who have been using Argo for a while. They can still, you know, take that and be able to get another level of certification for that. So also, ArgoCon will be there. We're part of the programming committee for ArgoCon, right? This is a community driven event, but CodeFresh is a proud diamond sponsor. So we'll be there. Where's it located? It's set for September 19th, multi-day or one day? It's a multi-day event. So ArgoCon from 1920 and 21 in Mountain View. So it'll be in Mountain View in the Bay Area. So for those of you who are local, you can just drive in. Great, I'm gonna write that down. I'll plug it. I'll put it in the show notes. Awesome, awesome, yeah. And you will be there. So you can talk to me. You can talk to anyone else at CodeFresh talking about Argo CD. You know, find out more about hosted getups, codefresh.io. You know, you can find us in the Argo project, open getups community. You know, we're deep in the community for both Argo and getups. So, you know, you can find us there as well. Well, let's do a follow-up when you're in town. It's the only couple of months away. Getting through the summer, it's already, I can't believe events are back. So it's really great to see face-to-face in the community. And it was responding, you know, KubeCon in October. I think that was kind of on the, that was a tough call. And then get to see your own in Spain. I couldn't make it. Obviously I had COVID, came down with it, but our team was there. Open source is booming, continues to go the next level. New power dynamics are developing in a great way. Christian, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights as the developer experience lead at CodeFresh. Thanks so much. Thank you, John. I appreciate it. Okay, it's a Kube conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.