Solving Application Networking Challenges with with Idit Levine

This conversation covers:

• Idit’s role at Solo.io, and what she typically does on a daily basis. Idit also talks about how her job duties have changed over the last two years, and the impact that COVID-19 had on the company.
• The common business reasons why customers come to Solo.io — and where they typically are in terms of cloud-native maturity.
• Some things that Idit has learned about customers over the last two years. In addition, Idit talks about her own journey at Solo.io and what she’s had to learn along the way.
• How Idit’s customers typically benefit from using distributed systems — and some of the top misconceptions that they tend to have about using them.
• Idit’s thoughts on the market for cloud-native technologies.

Links

• Solo.io
• Follow Idit on Twitter
• Slack

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.

Emily: Welcome to the Business of Cloud Native. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and today I'm chatting with Idit Levine of Solo.io. Idit, I want to start out, first of all, by thanking you for joining me.

Idit: Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Emily: And then, second of all, I wanted you to just start off by introducing yourself: what you do, what your company does, and also a little bit about how that translates into what you do every day, like, what activities you spend your day doing.

Idit: Oh, for sure. Okay, so as you said, my name is Idit Levine. And I’m, right now, the founder and the CEO of Solo.io. I started Solo two years ago, and when I started it, my focus was try to solve our [00:01:24 unintelligible] application networking problem that we know that will come up.

So, what does it mean? As you guys all know, there was a huge shift in the market between monolithic to microservices and, kind of like, moving from technology of monolithic to microservice stack mean that now we also moved to a distributed application. And it was clear to me that now everything is basically will go on the wire; any communication, small communication, between those two microservices basically will have to go to the network. And I thought that would become a big problem because stuff that we didn't need to take care of when everything was the same binary, now we need to actually figure out how to solve. And basically, I was really passionate, thought that that will be a huge problem in the ecosystem and I was very passionate to actually try to solve that. So, the idea was, how to connect, right? How to connect the application, how to connect everything related to your, eventually, application to the user.

Emily: And then tell me a little bit, what do you do every day? When you start, what does an average day actually consist of?

Idit: Oh, wow. So, it's really interesting, that I think it's a huge difference between now and what I was doing a year ago. Right now, basically, it's pretty simple. Corona came by and it was influence a lot of companies. I was assume that it will influence also my company, and therefore I basically freeze hiring, freeze everything, and try to do the best I can with the resources that we had.

What happened is that actually, not only that we didn't was influenced, we actually over doubled our revenue every quarter. That's basically forced me to immediately grow the team to be able to actually serve all those customers. Right now, basically, the main thing that I'm focusing on is—besides the technology, of course, in the strategic of the company—is basically on growing the team. So, it's hiring, it's interviewing, it's looking for the right people, it's building. You know, basically try to grow the team as much as I can in order to basically, yeah, serve well, the customer that are asking for us to—you know, for our products. That's a lot of my focus this day.

Emily: And what do you find are the business reasons? What's the business problems that cause somebody to come to you?

Idit: So, as I said, once people basically is moving from monolithic to microservices, there is a lot of simple stuff that before that just natively happened inside of the organization; right now, it's a little bit more complex. So, first of all, they needed to find something to run it on, and this is what Kubernetes so great in this ecosystem is the ability to install, upgrade, and basically orchestrate their microservices. But then, as I said, simple stuff that before that people were baking into the microservices created a lot of issues, like small stuff, like how do two microservices communicate with each other? How do you make sure that they're doing it safely right now? Because as right now, it's all on the wire, so potentially, there's always a third party that could, you know, join the party.

So, you really need to be safe and make sure that there is a very secure line between those microservices. And then the last thing is that because there is so many because the idea of microservices was to allow you to scale, the question is how do where the request is actually routed? So, in the [00:04:52 unintelligible], request is coming, and there is a lot of replication of the same microservices, and you have no idea basically where it's coming and where it's landing. And then it will go to the next level of the microservices, and again, not know which instance of it is basically being hit.

So, now the question is, how do you get visibility to something like that? How do you know what's going on in your cluster? How do what to look for the logs when now it's distributed all over the place. So, that's a lot of problem that the organization basically started to have. As well as with this—if—before that, there was a technology called [00:05:26 api-get] that was relatively popular, but people somehow—it wasn't a must.

Right now, when microservices was adopted specific in environment like Kubernetes, when everything is very cloud-wise, you know, stuff is coming up and coming down, you really wanted to make sure that you have a place that you can actually control the policy, control the [00:05:50 unintelligible], the [00:05:51 unintelligible]. And that's basically where API can help. So, that is basically—how do you manage all this networking, basically, of all these systems and applications, as an edge gateway? It's something that going inside your cluster, as well as what's going on inside the cluster after it. And that's basically, yeah, the main problem that you're solving.

So, every traffic to your infrastructure, node to start, we're basically taking care of exactly of everything that you then have traffic between what called East and West, inside your cluster. And that's basically the st...