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Rafay at HashiConf 2023 in San Francisco

In October 2023, the Rafay team participated at HashiConf 2023 in San Francisco. We had several users ask us last week about our thoughts on the conference itself and things we presented and demonstrated. In this blog, we will briefly describe our learnings and observations from this major conference.

HashiConf

Rafay's Partnership with HashiCorp

For readers that may not be aware, Rafay invests heavily in our integrations with HashiCorp's products. Specifically, Rafay's Terraform Provider and our integration with Vault are heavily used by our mutual customers.

Rafay is HashiCorp's Premier Partner and we were proud to be a gold sponsor at this conference. We had the opportunity to meet and speak with many of our mutual customers. We also share a long list of mutual partners such as global system integrators etc.

Important

We are very thankful to the HashiCorp alliances team for being extremely responsive and supportive. We really appreciate the collaborative nature of this partnership.

Our Latest Integration

At the conference, we had the opportunity to demonstrate our latest integration with HashiCorp's Terraform Cloud (TFC) and Terraform Enterprise (TFE). We find that TFC and TFE are heavily used by our mutual customers esp. the practitioners.

Over the last three years, Rafay has focused on and developed significant integrations with cloud provider native Kubernetes distributions i.e. Amazon EKS, Azure AKS and Google's GCP.

Almost all these users have Kubernetes resident applications that also use managed services from the cloud providers. For example, their applications may be deployed on an Amazon EKS Cluster, but may persist data in an AWS RDS managed database and AWS S3 object storage. We have seen these customers struggle with two issues in particular:

  • The creation and lifecycle management of these environments
  • Provide a self service experience of these environments to their application developers esp. for things like testbeds etc to ensure innovation velocity is not impacted.

For example, wouldn't it be nice if a "data scientist can just click a button (or run a single command) to launch a complete operating environment for their machine learning experiments"

  • Be able to templatize and encapsulate IaC and policies for complete environments
  • End users do not require access to privileged credentials
  • End users do not require any knowledge or visibility to Terraform code
  • Environments are always standardized and compliant?
  • Be able to enforce company policy seamlessly

This is the type of experience platform teams can now deliver internally with a combination of "Rafay Environment Manager" and "Terraform Cloud/Enterprise". No wonder, we had so many attendees line up to hear us demonstrate this to them at the Rafay booth.

Rafay Booth at HashiConf

Almost everyone that stopped by our booth on the opening day asked us if there was a video recording they could share with their teams that could not attend HashiConf in person. We had to literally scramble in the hotel lobby late that night to create a video recording so that they could share this with their teams right away.

Observations

At the conference in the Rafay booth, we had the opportunity to meet hundreds of leaders and practitioners focused on platform engineering and cloud operations. The following are the things that bubbled up to the top.

Hybrid and Multi Cloud seems real

It should no surprise that the vast majority of attendees at this conference would be at least on one of the major cloud providers (i.e. AWS, Azure or GCP). But, we were a little surprised to see that instead of being all-in on a single cloud provider, there were a large number of enterprises that were already operational with two or more cloud providers.

The DORA Deadline

Many organizations we met at the event have a global presence and they shared their concerns about the imminent deadline for EU's Digital Operational and Resilience Act aka DORA for the Financial sector.

In a nutshell, as part of the operational resilience requirement in this act, organizations such as banks need to demonstrate the ability to "quickly migrate" their applications from one cloud provider to another or on-premises in case the provider is not deemed compliant by the EU authorities.

Perhaps, this is the reason why there were so many questions about support for multi cloud and hybrid?

Generative AI

Everyone seems to be talking about it. But, they are also struggling to get started and seem to be unsure where to apply it first in their applications.

Important

Given the frequency with which we hear about this from users, we intend to address this. Stay tuned for an update next week.

Next Steps

If you are interested in learning more about Rafay's "Kubernetes Management" or "Environment Management" offerings,

  1. Sign up for a Free Trial. Note that Environment Manager is feature flagged. So, contact us to get this enabled in your Org.

  2. Schedule a demo of Rafay Environment Manager

  3. Reach out if you would us to create and post videos of specific use cases or scenarios related to Environment Manager.

  4. Meet us at upcoming events, Kubecon North America 2023 and AWS re:Invent, Gartner IOCS and several other regional events.

Sincere thanks to readers of our blog who spend time reading our product blogs. Please Contact the Rafay Product Team if you would like us to write about other topics.