UPDATED 17:00 EDT / APRIL 08 2014

Infrastructure as code : the DevOps service model | #PerconaLive

Laine Campbell, Blackbird, #PerconaLive, PerconaLive 2014, interviews, #theCUBEEdging us ever closer to adding our 100th female tech athlete to #theCUBE alumni list, Blackbird CEO and Co-Founder Laine Campbell joined #theCUBE host Jeff Frick in between her keynote presentations this past week at PerconaLive 2014. Campbell chatted about her company’s recent merger, DevOps as a strategic focus, Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) roadmap, and the role of data in the future.

Blackbird is a merger of two companies, PalaminoDB and DriveDev. PalaminoDB was a MySQL database operations and consulting company, while DriveDev was an operations shop with a DevOps focus. The companies completed their merger January 1st of this year to form Blackbird, an organization focused on taking everything up the stack. Campbell and her team wanted to create a company that could build everything with a heavy database focus.

Campbell spoke candidly about AWS throughout the interview, noting that Blackbird started with AWS when clients started going to it. Campbell describes that, on more than one occasion that as her company’s clients require or use different technologies, Blackbird has added supporting services from a management and build perspective. About 75 percent of Blackbird’s customers are in some sort of cloud — Amazon, Google Compute, Rackspace, says Campbell. Realistically, she believes that the cloud is where everything is going.

Every piece of infrastructure will be abstracted, says Campbell. The concept of DevOps’ maturity and infrastructure-as-code becomes significantly more important in the world she describes. We get a much clearer picture of Blackbird’s bread and butter when Frick asks Campbell what Blackbird’s value-add is atop of AWS’s infrastructure.

Campbell explains that Amazon itself only wants to be a utility, not interested in running systems. So what Blackbird offers is to help clients from a strategic standpoint, as well as the selection process to determine which virtualized environment is the best choice.

Until recently, Blackbird worked predominantly with start-ups that had reached mid-level maturity, with few enterprise clients. However, Campbell eludes that having a virtualized environment isn’t simply ‘optional’ anymore, so her company’s enterprise business is seemingly picking up. The largest portion of clients’ Blackbird services are retail and gaming verticals.

Cost of renting vs. buying infrastructure-as-a-service

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“In RDS there was a point where people were getting priced-out of RDS, which is more expensive than the instances underneath. At that point we had a lot of customers coming to us asking to move. I think they dropped most of their prices in RDS by 40 percent last week. So it gets a lot better,” says Campbell.

As far as relational databases go, Blackbird is great at helping its clients manage costs and fine-tune their AWS instances. Campbell believes that companies who can leverage elasticity and the dynamicity of Amazon, will come out huge winners. Retail clients that can scale up and scale down around shopping holidays is a perfect example of leveraging elasticity.


 

The next big thing is…

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“Right now for us it’s DevOps, this culture of bringing the development operations teams together. As we have more infrastructure-as-code, as we get to a point where you cannot compete if you cannot continually push code out, push change out — that’s why we merged. With every customer we’re working on, we’re pushing development velocity, getting them the ability to push out code as fast and rapidly as they want, and as safely as they want,” said Campbell.

DevOps is the now, but in a few years it’ll be ubiquitous, Campbell goes on to say. So what is ‘it’ in a few years then? Data, data, data. Infrastructure as an utility, and data is really it, thinks Campbell. She believes we’re only at the basics right now: how to get the data in, how do you keep it available, how do you manage these huge farms of data. “Eventually it will be about the machine learning and the continued evolution of pulling insights,” Campbell concludes.


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