How Systematic Approaches Cloud-Native with Thomas Vitale

Nov 11, 2020

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This conversation covers:

An average workday for Thomas as senior systems engineer at Systematic.
How Systematic uses cross-functional collaboration to solve problems and produce high quality software.
How security and data privacy relate to cloud-native technologies, and the challenges they present.
Systematic’s journey to cloud native, and why the company decided it was a good idea.
Why it’s important to consider the hidden costs and complexities of cloud-native before migrating.
What makes an application appropriate for the cloud, and some tips to help with making that decision.
The biggest surprises that Thomas has encountered when moving applications to cloud-native technology.
Thomas’s new book, Cloud Native Spring in Action, which is about designing and developing cloud-native applications using Spring Boot, Kubernetes, and other cloud-native technologies. Thomas also talks about who would benefit from his book.
Thomas’s background and experience using cloud-native technology.
The biggest misconceptions about cloud-native, according to Thomas.

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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 your host, Emily Omier, and today I'm chatting with Thomas Vitale. Thomas, thanks so much for joining us.

Thomas: Hi, Emily. And thanks for having me on this podcast.

Emily: Of course. I just like to start by asking everyone to introduce themselves. So, Thomas, can you tell us a little bit about what you do and where you work, and how you actually spend your day?

Thomas: Yes, I work as a senior systems engineer at Systematic. That is a Danish company, where I design and develop software solutions in the healthcare sector. And I really like working with cloud-native technologies and, in particular, with Java frameworks, and with Kubernetes, and Docker. I'm particularly passionate about application security and data privacy. These are the two main things that I've been doing, also, in Systematic.

Emily: And can you tell me a little bit about what a normal workday looks like for you?

Thomas: That's a very interesting question. So, in my daily work, I work on features for our set of applications that are used in the healthcare sector. And I participate in requirements elicitation and goal clarification for all new features and new set of functionality that we'd like to introduce in our application. And I'm also involved in the deployment part, so I work on the full value stream, we could say. So, from the early design and development, and then deploying the result in production.

Emily: And to what extent, at Systematic, do you have a division between application developers and platform engineers, or however else you want to call them—DevOps teams?

Thomas: In my project, currently, we are going through what we can call as maybe a DevOps transformation, or cloud transformation because we started combining different responsibilities in the same team, so in a DevOps culture, where we have a full collaboration between people with different expertise, so not only developers but also operators, testers. And this is a very powerful collaboration because it means putting together different people in a team that can bring an idea to production in a very high-quality way because you have all the skills to actually address all the problems in advance, or to foresee, maybe, some difficulties, or how to better make a decision when there's different options because you have not only the point of view of a developer—so how is better the code—but also the effects that each option has in production because that is where the software will live. And that is the part that provides value to the customers.

And I think it's a very important part. When I first started being responsible, also, for the next part, after developing features, I feel like I really started growing in my professional career because suddenly, you approach problems in a totally different way. You have full awareness of how each piece of a system will behave in production. And I just think it's, it's awesome. It's really powerful. And quality-wise, it's a win-win situation.

Emily: And I wanted to ask also about security and data privacy that you mentioned being one of your interests. How do those two concepts relate to cloud-native technologies? And what are some of the challenges in being secure and managing data privacy specifically for cloud-native?

Thomas: I think in general, security has always been a critical concern that sometimes is not considered at the very beginning of the development process, and that's a mistake. So, the same thing should happen in a cloud-native project. Security should be a concern from day one. And the specific case of the Cloud: if we are moving from a more traditional system and more traditional infrastructure, we have a set of new challenges that have to be solved because especially if we are going with a public cloud, starting from an on-premise solution, we start having challenges about how to manage data.

So, from the data privacy point of view, we have—depending also on the country—different laws about how to manage data, and that is one of the critical concerns, I think, especially for organizations working in the healthcare domain, or finance—like banks. The data ownership and management can really differ depending on the domain. And in the Cloud, there's a risk if you're not managing your own infrastructure in specific cases. So, I think this is one of the aspects to consider when approaching a cloud-native migration: how your data should be managed, and if there is any law or particular regulation on how they should be managed.

Emily: Excellent. And can you actually tell me a little bit about Systematic’s journey to cloud-native and why the company decided that this was a good idea? What were some of the business goals in adopting things like Docker and Kubernetes?

Thomas: Going to the Cloud, I think is a successful decision when an organization has those problems that the cloud-native technologies attempt to solve. And some goals that are commonly addressed by cloud-native technologies are, for example, scalability. We gain a lot of possibilities to scale our applications, not only in terms of computational resources, and le...