- Hello everyone.
And thank you so much for joining us.
My name is Savannah Peterson
and I am joined with Portainer CEO, Neil Cresswell
here today, coming to you from San Francisco
with a bit of an overview of what's next
and what's going on and what's new with Portainer.
Neil, thank you so much for being here.
Are you enjoying your time in San Francisco?
- I am, I love San Francisco.
I love it. So much to see you so much to do.
- Good, you feeling like
a proper Silicon valley company now?
- Getting there.
Getting there, getting there.
- I love that.
- It's a long way from here to New Zealand,
that's for sure.
- Yes, and you've been a trooper the last few years
balancing that gap at the time zone
and the date line.
So we commend you for that,
but it is great to have you on this side of the Pacific.
Today we're gonna be talking a lot about
where we're at currently
and where we see trends in the market
and the future of a lot of different industries
that we are touching at Portainer
and we're lucky to have Neil to guide us through that.
To get us warmed up Neil,
talking about moving from the data center to the edge.
What are you seeing?
- Seeing a lot actually.
The whole move from data center to edge
has initially been kicked off I think from telco edge.
So how do we move applications closer to the user
on a network perspective?
So how do we bring things like web services?
How do we bring things like data ingest
closer to the user on a network perspective?
That was the first iteration of edge.
The second iteration of edge is now, well
how do we actually get devices closer to machines
collecting data, you're making making changes to systems,
SCADA type systems.
How do we get that as well?
So you've got multigenerational of edge.
So you've got the let's get applications close to users
on a network.
Let's get devices close to data sensors.
Those two edge things are what we're seeing a lot of now.
- And how is Portainer supporting those
in the journey between data center to edge?
- So for Portainer, all we really care about
is that the application runs in a container.
We don't actually care where it runs,
what operator it runs on.
We don't care from day one we've always been
a system to run applications in containers that's it.
So, moving from data center to network edge
for us is is really quite trivial.
It's simply a data center over there not here.
Once you get into the device layer though,
there are quite a few more complications.
The devices are far more resource constrained.
They're almost always in networks
that are heavily disconnected or expensive
and there are some uniqueness's.
Because of our background in Docker
and Docker is quite attuned to
running on resource constrained environments.
We're actually really well positioned
to manage these remote IoT based devices
running some kind of orchestration.
So yeah, I mean, taking application
running the data center,
running a network edge
and running in a device for easy.
- Love that,
and this is something that
we're really committed to in the future.
We see this as a growing space.
- Yeah, we're seeing a lot more interest in IIoT,
industrial IoT,
which is where people are trying to take
traditional SCADA systems which are very proprietary,
expensive control systems
and opening them up to IoT.
And we are really, really focused
on expanding our capabilities into that space
because it really is an untapped market.
And going from proprietary to open standards
lets the users of this
IIoT start to write their own applications to visualize data
and visualize metrics.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Well I'm excited about it
and it's great to see us developing in this space.
We are in the wild.
So if you see me pause just briefly,
it's only so that loud sounds happening on the street
can pass we appreciate your patience.
Wanted to give you that real
in the heart of San Francisco feel,
we know a lot of you haven't had a chance to travel
as much as we would like to last few years.
So hopefully we are immersing you.
You mentioned Docker and Kube in that last answer
and we know this is something that comes up
for Portainer a lot.
We have a very large community in both spaces.
Where are we now?
- Wow, it's it varies day by day.
So, we still have a very, very strong footprint in Docker
and interestingly enough,
and this still surprises me,
we still see net new deployments of both Docker
and Docker Swam month on month it surprises me.
Obviously our pacing growth is is our Kubernetes traction.
So we need more and more users each month
coming into Portainer
using us to manage Kubernetes,
which is exactly what I want to have happen.
It still surprised me, as I said, that Swarm adoption
still keeps growing.
You would've thought with all of the media
that Swarms there long live Kubernetes,
that it would be dying off but it still seems
double digit growth month to month
is staggering stuff.
- My interpretation of this
is that people are still using both for different things.
Who should use what, when?
- So Docker is great if you're a resource constrained
or if you just wanna get your application running.
So, if you're a developer
and you are actually developing on your machine
and you are you're writing real life code changes
and you wanna see what does my change look like in reality
Docker's perfect for that.
It's really fast you can spin up environments,
devs can do it.
Any machine with VS Code or whatever,
spin up an environment and see it live.
Iterate their changes, iterate their changes,
iterate changes push it through.
Kubernetes is obviously a production thing.
So it has a lot of overhead,
a lot of operational controller management
and governance that's required
for prod, it's not necessarily desired
for highly transient development environments.
So, we see a mix of Docker for a developer
Kubernetes in prod
and we are seeing a lot of Docker at the edge as well.
- Yeah, so really hybrid and.
- Really hybrid.
- Do you think that's what it's gonna be like for a while?
- I think so.
I think the, with the resource overhead of Kubernetes
and the operational overhead still being where it is,
running it on a dev machine is quite quite a challenging one
to live with.
Like on my own machine just to idle Kubernetes
is about six giga RAM to have the thing to sit there.
So it's quite inefficient from a an actual dev perspective.
- Yeah, definitely.
Let's talk a little bit about ClickOps to GitOps.
What trends are you seeing there?
It's been a hot topic at the office lately.
- It's interesting 'cause ClickOps
which is simply managing through a UI
that's historically how people managed infrastructure.
And then we went on this journey and said,
everything should be as code infrastructure is code.
Everything is code.
And so all of a sudden, anything that was in in UI
was kind of shunned
and you needed to be doing everything as code.
Well that's, that's cool
if you know how to write code
and you are you're comfortable writing
and then maintaining the code forever
because you know code is never static it always changes.
Infrastructure is never static it always changes.
So you're always adjusting things,
the code to accommodate the change.
And it's like, well hang on a second.
Now, as you start to widen the spread of the technology
and it gets into the mainstream
not everyone can write this code.
So now there's a trend to say,
well actually let's use lets use ClickOps
to create the code.
Once the code's created,
then we can modify the code from that point on
to keep it up to date.
So that's kind of where we are going inside Portainer
as well. Let's use our rich immersive UI
to help you build a code for the first time.
And then you can maintain the code directly
from then on in GitOps style model.
- And you think this is gonna help accelerate team agility
and ability to do things faster?
- Oh absolutely.
If the only way that you can get started
with everything is code is to know code.
You've now just wiped out,
I don't know how many millions of citizen developers,
these are the non non-professional developers or web devs
you've just written off all these guys.
That's not good.
So to have this capability across the board
it needs to be simple for everyone to understand.
- Yeah, absolutely
and how does Portainer fit into that?
- Well, right now we're in the transition phase
from being a true ClickOps UI where you click and click,
and click and deploy
and GitOps engine where you have code and deploy
we're in the middle of transitioning.
So you've got the ability to create with Portainer,
save as code, schedule that code to run as a GitOps instance
and then deploy.
So that's something to expect in the next three months.
- Nice, yeah some more to come in the space,
watch the space y'all.
Let's talk about our community edition.
A lot of people find us through that as a gateway
or are using us at home before they realize
the advantages of Portainer Business in production.
What's the impact of that shift for a user?
- Well, so Community Edition has has always been designed
to be used by a person, a developer, my team,
maybe two teams together,
that was kind of a sweet spot
where it kind of fell down was,
well now it's used across multiple teams
or it's used across my organization.
How do we get better at auditing
and controls and governance?
How do we have centralized security,
centralized access control, all of the RBAC fundamentals?
How do we get that going?
And that, adding that into the community version
would simply annoy those who just wanna get it running.
So I just want it running at my machine.
I don't want the burden of all this other complexity.
So that's why we had the two different variants.
One is really focused on just get it running now
and one which is focused on let's get it running
in my corporate with all of my corporate policies
and principles and have it in here.
So, the CE edition is really really focused
and we're still investing really heavily adding features
to make me as a person
or my team way more efficient.
That's what we focused.
- Yeah, so if I'm just learning about Portainer
through this video,
it's all about team size really.
If I'm trying to do things in production at scale business,
no questions asked.
- Yeah, if you, generally, I say, if you have a CIO
and a CISO you will probably need Portainer Business
because the moment the CIO or CISO finds out
that using the CE version without any kind of audit controls
or are RBAC the old "everyone is an admin" principal
you're likely to be told to get it out
or replace it with something that actually
is far more robust and resilient.
And that's where our business version comes in.
It has all those controls that a CIO or CISO needs.
- Yeah, absolutely.
It's fantastic
and incredibly useful.
It is a very exciting time at Portainer.
What has you personally, as CEO most excited right now?
- So right now it's our upcoming GitOps capability.
So we've really struggled in the past to say,
well how do we transition
from being this really immersive UI
ClickOps type UI.
How do we transition from that
into a mode of automation
and moving to a fully automated GitOps sort of environment.
It's quite challenging.
We looked at the other GitOps platforms on the market
and we were trying to figure out
how can we integrate with them?
How can we make deploying them and using them easier?
And the answer was, we couldn't.
They're simply two feature rich
to get started with in a really easy way.
They all required to be installed in cluster,
maintained in cluster.
They have to have the right versions
that match the right Kubernetes versions.
There are too many dependencies, too many complications.
So we said, well, let's go find the 20 most common features
used across all these platforms
and let's embed those in Portainer.
And that's what we did,
we said, well 80% of people
would only ever use these 20 features,
80% is pretty awesome as far as we're concerned
that's really gonna help us get mainstream adoption.
That's put those features in Portainer and get cracking.
- Yeah, absolutely gets me excited too
and hopefully gets our community equally excited.
What's next.
Can you give us any preview?
- As I said before, lots and lots of focus around IIoT
and bringing better device management to the edge,
we've got that recently completed with Intel
around zero touch device onboarding
and lights out device management.
So extending that even further now to better support,
very very sparsely connected devices
and very very resource constrained devices.
So that kind of stuff is up and coming.
We're also really bolstering
a lot of our core foundational capabilities as well.
So we spend a bit of time going through and saying,
well, let's understand each of the user types
that use the product.
What are the four or five core features
each of those those user types use.
These make sure those those four or five features
are absolutely bulletproof.
Make sure that we haven't actually regressed any capability
as we've added features moving forward
make sure that they're super reliable,
make sure that they're, they're a hundred percent,
product market fit for those features.
Let's make sure those things are rock solid.
And so we, we are spend in next three months at least
making sure we've got all of those foundations
squeaky clean before we do the next iteration of features
which is all around now making management monitoring,
alerting, far more accessible as well.
- Why should people learn Portainer?
Why are we a partner for the long term?
- Just because we make things so easy.
The actual learning curve for Portainer is incredibly short.
It really is.
It just works out of the box.
It just works.
You don't actually have to learn too much.
I mean, if you come into retainer with no prior experience
to containers, you're gonna have
a bit of a steep learning curve.
It's very different from a VM type environment.
But if you already know the fundamental of Docker
Portainer will feel natural to you.
So yes, of course you have to understand the flow
but we've worked really, really hard to make the flow
as intuitive of as possible.
So it really is follow your nose simplicity
and if you are embracing Kubernetes or Docker at scale
you have a learning curve ahead of you.
Make no mistake, no one can convince me otherwise,
there is a huge learning curve.
- For me for that matter.
- With Portainer, we wanna,
lower that learning curve
and make it much, much quicker as well.
- Yeah, absolutely.
And I love that in our partnership with Intel
we're all about humanizing the experience.
We're all about making it more intuitive.
A lot of shared vision and mission
around truly making the user experience.
So, a smooth one so that we can build and create
and deploy and do whatever we want,
which is absolutely fabulous.
- Absolutely. - I'm gonna throw in
one closing question that I wasn't thinking about
until we started chatting,
it gets me really excited.
I don't know if you've noticed if you're on the job hunt
on LinkedIn, but we've been seeing Portainer as a skill
that companies are hiring for.
How does that make you feel seeing that?
- It's pretty cool.
Especially when you see the brands
that are actually using Portainer.
One of the things about Portainer CE
it's completely anonymous.
we have no idea who's using it.
We know roughly how many people are using it,
who actually using it.
No idea.
So to see big brand names come
up and actually requesting people
apply for jobs, with Portainer that's pretty awesome.
It lets me start, start to connect A and B to say,
now we know we're actually used in very large corporates
'cause it's not just a home user thing.
It's a large, large corporate tool as well.
So I really like that.
- Yeah, it's exciting for all of us to see
and makes it feel like we're really having
a much broader impact.
So congratulations on that
and a very exciting...
Neil for folks who are just so inspired
after listening to this,
what's the best way for them to say hello and learn more?
- So always start with our website
and on the website there is a link out
to all of our community channels.
So Reddit and Slack and Discord
are our three primary community channels.
But we're always available on email as well.
So there is a contact us form on the website
drop us a line and we'll always respond.
- Can they tweet you or find you on LinkedIn?
- They can find me on LinkedIn.
They can, I'm also the person often behind
the Portainer Twitter thread,
as much as people want to remove my fingers
off our own Twitter channel
that's not gonna happen.
So, often you'll see me responding
and answering deeply technical questions on Twitter
'cause I can't help myself.
- Yes, this also means that Neil unfortunately
sees everything that I tweet.
So you can go ahead
and find him behind portainer.io, Neil Cresswell
thank you so much for your insights today.
It is always an honor to get you share thoughts
and hear your future predictions
and your trend watching
and what a joy to be around the Portainer community.
Thank you all so much for tuning in today.
We appreciate your subscribe, your follow, your questions
your positive vibes, whatever it is you wanna give us today.
My name is Savannah Peterson
and it has been a treat.
We hope you and yours are staying safe.