Brainwave Podcast: Volterra – Marco Rodrigues – CNC Series

About Marco Rodrigues:

Marco is VP of Products and Solutions at Volterra. He brings deep experience in networking, telco cloud architecture and applications. Prior to Volterra, Marco was VP of Solutions Architecture at Juniper and managed the architecture, design and deployment of clouds for AT&T Mobility, Deutsche Telekom, GE, Workday and other global companies. In his role as Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for the AT&T account team, he worked with AT&T Labs and innovation teams to define the architecture of the AT&T Integrated cloud, global backbone and enterprise connectivity services enabling Fortune 100 companies, millions of consumers and US federal and state governments. He has a BS in Telecommunications from Sheridan College in Canada.

About Volterra

Volterra provides a distributed cloud services platform to deploy, connect, secure and operate applications and data across multi-cloud and edge sites. Line-of-business leaders can drive business transformation and automation by distributing workloads closer to business activity. DevOps teams can manage fleets of applications and infrastructure with less complexity. Network teams can simplify application connectivity and security across clouds. Visit www.volterra.io or follow us on Twitter @Volterra_ to learn more.

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Transcript of the podcast:

Jason English: Hello and welcome to the Intellyx Brainwave Cloud-Native Computing Poster podcast series today. We’re featuring Volterra. They’re a platform for distributed cloud services. and joining me today is Marco Rodrigues, the VP of Products and Solutions for Volterra.

Marco Rodrigues: Great. Thanks for having me, Jason.

Jason English: Volterra is one of the proud sponsors of this upcoming Cloud-Native development poster. And it really includes a whole broad landscape of different types of vendors. So can you just give me an introduction, Marco, to what your company does?

Marco Rodrigues: I  guess at a high level, if you were to really look at the problems we’re trying to solve , if you actually take it a step back and look at our overall mission statement as a company — we want to enable cloud for everyone everywhere. Ideally what that means of course is the next critical infrastructure, for any modern organization will be cloud services.

And we’re determined to essentially deliver that as a universal cloud access to these users. What that means is from the inception of Volterra, at least we’ve been really innovating a broad set of cloud services that give you the flexibility to build your own distributed cloud across multiple cloud providers and locations.

And as a company, we kind of have four core building blocks to do that. One of them was VoltMesh, which is a SaaS powered offering that delivers high performance networking and zero-trust security across all these clouds and edge sites, along with the ability to offload those apps.

Then we have another core offering called VoltStack, which is also another SaaS-powered offering, but it’s for the automation, and deployment, and security of distributed applications and infrastructure across again, all the different heterogeneous environments, meaning edge, public and private clouds.

and then of course, this is where I like to say we’re a bit, a bit obsessed, at least I am. And I’m sure a lot of people have challenges with this too, is the obsession with making day two operations, as easy as day zero pods, because that’s essentially where kind of the rubber hits the road when you go to scale.

And that’s where our SaaS component of the entire offering. through something which we call VoltConsole, it’s kind of a single pane of glass for all the distributed application and infrastructure, where we provide end to end observability across all this infrastructure and applications across all these different environments and then kind of tying it all together.

We have our own global backbone, in, 20 POPs in 13 cities across the world. all connected through private multi terabit fiber infrastructure.

Jason English: That’s a lot of broad coverage, I would say. How do you fit into the overall Cloud-Native vendor landscape? It seems like a lot of the focus of, if you look at the CNCF or something like that, or when you go to your next  KubeCon, if there is another one, you know, you see a lot of emphasis on the development side of things, but so how do you fit into the overall, vendor landscape here?

Marco Rodrigues: Sure. If you look at the Cloud-Native vendor landscape that’s currently on the CNCF website and if you were to kind of categorize us, which it’s hard to do, because we are a platform we like to call ourselves with Cloud-Native edge platform, which touches various components.

So we’ve taken a lot of the work and integrated with all the different, Vendors and offerings in that landscape diagram. And we leveraged different projects as well, either augmenting them or using them for our own needs. But if I was to kind of pick at least three off the top of my head, you know, from a service proxy standpoint, we build on top of Envoy and we’ve added a lot of functionality to that.

But what the value we bring as a service proxy is we’re a globally distributed proxy that’s centrally managed. Then on top of that, we added API gateway functionality into Envoy, which gives us a globally distributed high-performance API gateway. In terms of service mesh, we integrate with a lot of the existing service mesh technologies, and again, provide a global service mesh all SaaS powered to our full console.

And if you were to look at us from an orchestration and management point of view. We, fall under, scheduling and orchestration typically through our virtual Kubernetes solution, which is part of our VoltStack application, management solution. and then ultimately, if you were one last thing I’d probably point out is from a platform point of view, we provide a container as a service mechanism using our application delivery network.

So we kind of crisscross all these different elements. I wouldn’t say that’s the only ones, but those are the ones that kind of come top of mind.

Jason English: Yeah. That’s interesting. So I kind of wonder what kinds of challenges you find customers are facing when they find you?

Marco Rodrigues: I’d say in general, customers they’re going through that journey. The journey of migrating from private data centers to, public clouds for the hybrid cloud migration. But I think ultimately the challenge there becomes the operations. how do you operate and deal with this infrastructure once you get there?

And the operationalizing of this environment becomes kind of monumental for the organization. Not just, not just for like the NetOps team, but you have DevOps teams, SecOps teams, and even the developers who have to consume this infrastructure. And now that it becomes more distributed across the edge, how do we. There’s specifically one customer.

If I was to take a customer as an example from their transformation journey, one story I enjoy talking about is an automotive OEM. They had a business need to collect high definition mapping data across an entire city. So they decided to retrofit all of these taxis.

As part of the electrification effort, the idea was once the taxis would come in to charge, they would use a high definition camera to pull up their license plate, query a database, essentially a key management server, somewhere in the cloud with that certificate, be able to connect to the car, download the data, pass it back in for processing and get some vector analysis done.

And then they update the AGD maps. So in short, that was kind of the business need. The challenge of course, was a solution. that was either inbuilt, or required some type of system integrator, required all these different software vendor solutions. So ultimately, any situation they got to was multiple vendors, usually a combination of five or six different software components, different software integration needs, which ultimately increased their operational costs.

Tooling was different from the cloud team to how they were being proposed with new tooling elements for this edge, for this new distributed infrastructure across all the EV charging stations.  Then end to end policy and observability. Now you have four or five, potentially six different solutions by different vendors.

How do you get end to end? Not only observability and monitoring across this infrastructure, but how do you even ensure consistent policy across all of these as well. So that’s typically an example of a customer who came to us and they were faced with this challenge and not to mention they had a need, right?

They had a need to get this environment up and running. And again, the POC is one thing, but getting it to like a large scale running across 20,000 different charging stations in the country, was a big challenge for them.

Jason English: Yeah, that’s a pretty impressive array there to implement. So how would you say this field is different from what companies normally encounter?

They’re thinking maybe from the central point of view, distributing my centralized applications and servers, outwards. I have customer-facing applications, but they’re not really thinking about how that’s going to extend to the edge.

And so how does that change the scenario for you?

Marco Rodrigues: You mean, how does the edge migration scenario work? So actually there’s a couple of elements. There are changes customers are realizing, first of all, edge is relative to a customer and enterprise and edge. For example, in a retailer or manufacturer, the edge is obviously in the store.

If I’m an OEM manufacturer, it can be in my factory or could be at these EV charging stations. recently with this, all the, this pandemic that, people are dealing with, there’s all this interest, not for thermal imaging, in stores as well to kind of get. Kind of normalcy back to a lot of these businesses.

So ultimately this means more process, more data being generated. The more data has to be processed at the edge, meaning applications have to be deployed there, with a certain life cycle management and tooling. That’s, that’s familiar with most people, which is Cloud-Native. So, that’s where I see the need for a lot of the businesses going and the ones who can pivot and adjust to that quickly, will see the need.

The question is whether or not they can, adopt an infrastructure, you know, ultimately a SaaS-powered one or a SaaS-enabled one, which is the route we took to kind of simplify the needs for infrastructure, and application management and security while focusing on their business needs. So, that’s that’s I think where we offer a uniqueness in our solution.

Jason English: that’s definitely, a unique capability that, I don’t know if we could have said that before otherwise you’d be saying basically, You know, there’s two components are never connected. Yeah. You’d basically have a remote implementation team, remote applications, and then you’d be in this constant cycle of updating and upgrading.

Marco Rodrigues: just to quickly add, for example, the, customer I gave you with that journey that they came to us with. Ultimately, the reason when they came to us, you know, as a company, we ultimately knew we had to, when we started the company and ultimately as we start to address this, this need in the market, we had to kind of go to the drawing board, to kind of really think this architecture from the ground up.

So based on that, we decided, for networking and security, that, that was our VoltMesh offering. And for infrastructure and application management, we call that VoltStack. But ultimately what we’re doing here is we lower the total cost of ownership and all the overall complexity by consolidating all these layer 3 through layer 7 services into one software stack that can be deployed anywhere, whether it’s sitting on prem in a CPE device, like an Intel NUC or sitting in my public cloud instance in AWS. And then the fact that it’s completely turnkey and SaaS operated by us and we provide security and performance through our global network to the point where you can even run applications on our network. And then to kind of wrap that all up we enable that all through a single pane of glass through our Volt Console SaaS offering, which gives these enterprises end to end policy and observability. but I think the most important thing, and you literally kind of hinted out of there at the end, which is how to deal with all these different lines of businesses and all the different needs across all these different teams.

That’s typically where the highest friction point, you have the NetOps team who’s trying to deploy and operate network equipment. You have the security team trying to, deploy, or set certain security standards and manage and set those across the entire organization. Then you have the DevOps team and developers, having their needs as well.

And how do you build something that’s so distributed kind of encompasses everything while at the same time, meeting the company’s needs for agility to move quickly. So that’s ultimately why we decided to have a consolidated services, software stack pretty much allowing them to deploy it anywhere.

The fact that it’s SaaS operated, and more importantly, the SaaS portal that we’ve built really kind of tunes the, the view, or the workflows. Based on the personas from a SecOps guy I can view and enforce security policy across different parts of an application deployment process, or even a network process.

If I’m a NetOps team, I focus on the infrastructure. If I’m a developer or DevOps team, I focus on the apps and that’s all kind of slice and dice naturally through very pretty cookie cutter, but also customize the workflows on our, SaaS-based portal.

Jason English: So what would you see as the trend to watch over the next one or two years?

Marco Rodrigues: I mean, specific to a specific Cloud-Native, you know, obviously, the ones I would say, the public cloud adoption, that’s clearly accelerating. but I think what’s accelerating further is edge adoption, Gartner put out some interesting numbers as well. but I think one thing a lot of us didn’t expect was recent events, right? COVID-19 will, drive entirely new business dynamics and requirements at the edge for data processing. I mean, minus the fact that we’re all working from home and we’re recording these podcasts from home, I think that’s almost, that’s almost implied, you know, zoom is now part of our critical infrastructure, but for example, you know, you know, Humans that ultimately in my mind, long for social interaction.

So to get back to like a pre-COVID world, at least I envision a place where real time safety is going to ultimately be provided by trying to minimize these guarantee the minimizing of exposure. So, you know, whether it’s at the County, State or federal level, ultimately tools for things like thermal imaging, at scale, at real time, restaurants, large public events are going to be a thing that’s going to have to be deployed.

And we see it today in some restaurants already doing it by hand. So I think this is just another example. Of all this amount of data that needs to be, processed at the edge in order to process the data you have to deploy applications. And if you’re going to ask a, you know, mom and pop or SMBs or food truck owners to either, deploy and operate a, Cloud-Native infrastructure and build their own DevOps team, which is very unlikely or will they consume a turnkey infrastructure and allow them, or an ecosystem of application vendors to come in and enable that kind of environment?

I think it will be extremely important. So, to kind of summarize it, I think. Cloud-Native is obviously going to grow with the public, public cloud adoption is accelerating of course, with AI and data processing needs. I think we’ll continue to grow at the edge. If anything, the, driving force will probably be pivoted a bit towards the recent pandemic, but that just, I think further exemplifies the need to process data at the edge at scale and quickly.

Right.

Jason English: Just the essential nature of being able to drive workloads, wherever they’re best suited. Whether it is your existing on-premises scenario or are in all of these edge cases, it’s almost like franchising your whole business model out to, out to the edge, where it really needs to work.

Well, thanks Marco. Do you have anything else you’d like to add?

Marco Rodrigues: Nope, that was it. I appreciate your time, Jason. It was a fun time with you.

Jason English: Yeah. Thanks Mark. Thanks for joining me. And, on the Intellyx Cloud-Native Poster preview, and I’m glad you could join us.

Marco Rodrigues: Thank you.

Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Intellyx podcast. If you have any questions or ideas for future episodes, feel free to drop us an email at PR@Intellyx.com. Until next time, keep on transforming.