Nick Durkin, Harness | Google Cloud Next ’24
[Savannah Peterson]
Welcome to Google Cloud Next
Good morning, NerdFam, and welcome back to Google Cloud Next. We’re here in Las Vegas. It’s day three of this absolutely fabulous power-packed event. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous co-hosts, Rebecca Knight and John Furrier.
Favorite Part of Google Cloud Next
John, what’s been your favorite part of Vegas this week?
[John Furrier]
I think the whole Gemini 1.5 proves that intelligent software is coming faster. You’re seeing better software stacks emerge with data. I think the question of how to run cloud at scale, high performance, gen AI will be the biggest opportunity for businesses to change their growth strategy.
Running Cloud at Scale with Gen AI
So to me, the tech question is, how do you run it? So this next segment will be really awesome.
[Savannah Peterson]
AI-Driven Workforce
Yeah, how are you doing this morning, Rebecca?
[Rebecca Knight]
I’m great. I’m great. And I second everything that John is saying. And what I find most fascinating, based on my beat, is how we are really entering this AI-driven workforce, and how it’s really going to change people’s day-to-day jobs.
[Savannah Peterson]
Removing the Worst Part of People’s Jobs
Yeah, I love it.
[00:01:00]
Well, our next guest is Ain’t His First Rodeo. Very happy to have you back, Nick. Thank you so much for being here.
[Nick Durkin]
Thank you so much for having me on. I genuinely appreciate it.
[Savannah Peterson]
Yes, absolutely. How are you feeling, day three?
[Nick Durkin]
Absolutely. Hey, you know what? Not as much energy as I had on day one, but we’re getting there.
[Savannah Peterson]
You’re still smiling. You’re bringing it. We’re feeling it here on the desk with you. You just said something before we started that I love. You spent the last few years taking away the worst part of people’s jobs at Harness. What does that mean now that we’re in this new AI era?
[Nick Durkin]
Look, everybody’s actually talking about AI, but they’re talking about removing the best part of the job. I think that’s a huge problem, because that causes resistance. What we’ve done for the last seven years, when we came into the world as continuous delivery using machine learning and AI, was actually doing it to remove that worst part. No one wants to babysit deployments. No one wants to wait for tests to run. No one wants to write policy and do all these tasks. Let’s let AI do the things that we hate doing, so we can do what we love.
[Rebecca Knight]
Taking Away Toil
Well, I want to dig into this, because this is exactly where I like to be thinking about how people actually experience work and their day-to-day.
[00:02:01]
You are taking away the toil, as you tech people call it, and giving people more time to be creative, to innovate, to think big thoughts about, where do I want to go to next? What’s my vision? What’s my strategy? Do you have any great examples of people that have actually done that at their company and said, hey, since AI took care of that, I could do this?
[Nick Durkin]
Absolutely. If you look at United Airlines specifically, they removed … You can look at the quote, 99% of their toil by using Harness. Now they give all of their operations folks, their developers, all of that time back, and now if you actually look at the performance of their applications, their mobile apps, infinitely better in that short period of time. Also allowing them to actually get to the cloud astronomically faster.
[Savannah Peterson]
Customer Examples
Yeah, that’s some serious data right there. Do you have any other customer examples you can drop like that for us, because that was powerful. I’m here for it.
[Nick Durkin]
No, absolutely. I think when you actually look at all these customers, regardless of whether it’s our largest financial services customers, so you look at Citibank, same kind of thing. When you’re going and you’re taking away all of the provisioning, the thought process of how do I onboard and get this through?
[00:03:06]
Now they’re actually doing this at a rate that’s 30 times faster. These are things that are massive. They’re huge game changers. It’s because what you’re doing is you’re providing a guarded path. You’ve made it easy for people to do the right things, and you’ve made it hard for them to do the wrong things. The reason the cloud started was because it was easier to do the wrong thing. We would go out and spin up a server. Now if we make it easy to do the right thing, we’ll actually get people doing it the way they’re supposed to.
[John Furrier]
Reframing ML Ops
One of the operational questions that’s been around, ML Ops, you mentioned that earlier. It’s come up and it’s being redefined. I won’t say redefined, but GNI is forcing it to be reframed, if you will. How would you reframe the ML Ops opportunity as language models are introduced, multimodal, runtime is starting to get much smarter in terms of the software side? As developers put this all together, how do you run this? What’s the vision?
[Nick Durkin]
The vision here, I think, if we don’t put it in a guarded path, we actually can’t trust it. If we look at anything that we generate with AI, we have to take it with a zero-trust methodology.
[00:04:03]
We have to literally treat it as if it was a bad actor. We don’t put it through a process that checks for all of the security options to make sure that all the tests are run. Our resiliency, that even if we apply these, they’ll actually meet not just the, is it up, but is it performant? If we’re not doing all of that through the delivery, we genuinely don’t achieve anything. We only add backlog and we don’t actually get to production.
[Savannah Peterson]
Customer Trends
That’s a really good point. You see a lot of different customers across verticals. Are you noticing any trends? Is everyone at a similar proof of concept or excited about AI stage? What are you seeing?
[Nick Durkin]
We’re seeing actually people somewhat consolidate because now they can’t do this with 17 different tools. They can’t string this together with scripts and parts and pieces. They actually have to use a platform to do this. They have to put policies in place and rules to make it, again, easy to do that right thing. That’s how they’re gaining the velocity because now you have a happy path or a golden path to production.
[Savannah Peterson]
Everyone wants a happy path to production.
[Rebecca Knight]
Innovate with Confidence
Here at Google Cloud Next, you are doing a session called Innovate with Confidence.
[00:05:02]
I’d love to hear what are the components that you advise and how you talk to customers about how this is how we get from proof of concept to this is going to add real value to our organization.
[Nick Durkin]
Absolutely.
[Rebecca Knight]
Even figuring out the proof of concept to start with.
[Nick Durkin]
Sure. I think one of the things is we’ve always talked about move fast and break things. The problem is in the enterprise, if you move fast and break things, that doesn’t work. It’s a big break. It’s a big break. You can’t do that at the largest financial institutions. What you can do is you can move fast. You can fail fast in earlier environments, but you can run them for all of the tests. I guess to that point is you have to make sure that what you deliver is guarded, that it has all of its protections. It’s doing all the right tests and all the measures, and it stops it and prevents you from making those mistakes. If you put that in place, now you can actually do anything. You can take ideas, and they’ll only make themselves as far as they’re actually allowed to go in a production if they meet those requirements. Ideas become quickly iterated. The good ones make their way to production. The other ones, we can go and iterate again.
[00:06:00]
[John Furrier]
Google’s Ecosystem in the New Era of Gen AI
Dick, I got to get your perspective because we’ve interviewed you across multiple ecosystems, AWS and other clouds, obviously on-premises developing with data centers are changing, becoming AI centers. Yes. Because you can do stuff on-prem with workloads end to end. Absolutely. Big theme end to end. As an ecosystem partner, Google’s presenting a pretty damn good package here. Stack’s looking good. You’ve got more performance, intelligent software layer orchestration. The Kubernetes is 10 years old. That bet’s playing out beautifully, serverless, that abstracted good call, and then the app’s obviously infused with engine AI, so check, check, check. As a participant, the ecosystems are critical for customer success. How is Google’s ecosystem, from your perspective, or ecosystems in the new era of gen of AI evolving? What are the table stakes? What are some of the key prerequisites for success? What’s your opinion?
[Nick Durkin]
I think the key to success here is actually looking at where you were, where you are, and where you’re going. Oftentimes, people are only looking at where they’re going, and they make decisions based on that. The problem is, if you’re constantly doing that, you’ll always have new tools, new policies, new procedures, and if we’re not looking at where we came from and actually incurring that into where we’re going, that’s a big one.
[00:07:08]
In order to have success, I believe you have to support where you were, where you are, and where you’re going, and that’s what will actually launch people, and it gives them an easy way to crawl, walk, and run. If we move them entirely, and you shift everything that they’re thinking about, and one day they’re on Tomcat, and the next they’re Kubernetes, or Lambda, or serverless functions, then that becomes a problem. If we can slowly give them a way to crawl, walk, run, now we can actually start achieving things, and you actually take people that would have been blockers, and you actually make them your champions.
[John Furrier]
Better Together Philosophy
Better together, too. The ecosystem is also a better together philosophy, technically. There has to be some room for innovation strategies for you guys, too, as participants.
[Nick Durkin]
100%. No, I think in the innovation side of life, if you’re not innovating, you’re dying, and you’ll see that here. We see people actually, again, so many companies are coming together, they’re either partnering or they’re acquiring, because now you can’t do this alone.
[00:08:01]
You can’t do this as a single product, you have to do this as a platform to truly enable people.
[John Furrier]
When to Use AI and When to Build Your Own
You can’t fake AI, it’s like security. The other thing, too, I’d love to get your thoughts on, has came up a lot, is when do I use AI, and when do I build my own? Those aren’t mutually exclusive. You can use a lot of other AI tools and technology, and figure out where you want to build your core competency with whatever you got that could be infused. What’s your opinion of that view?
[Nick Durkin]
Seven years ago, we came out with our first artificial intelligence. We built neural networks, and clustering around, thinking about things like your best engineers. Back then, I was telling people, people say, oh, we’re an AI world. No, they were barely doing math, they were doing standard deviation, it’s not even machine learning. And so, honestly, people constantly talk about this as if it is true. We’ve been doing this for a long period of time. We’ve created our own to think about things like our best engineers. However, we can use large language models to look at language infinitely better. Why am I going to recreate that? And genuinely, it’s about using what’s there in the ecosystem. That gives you the scale, but making sure it’s done in a secure, compliant manner.
[00:09:01]
Developer Experience
Awesome.
[Savannah Peterson]
Absolutely. Well, you just touched on it a little bit. The developer experience. How is AI improving that, and are you seeing, I’m curious because you just talked about buy-in as well within a company level. Who are the big champions of AI within an organization right now?
[Nick Durkin]
Right now, the champions are actually the business. The problem is, is we don’t give them a very good and easy way to actually leverage it. And so, unless a company is willing to put in the guardrails to make it happen, it doesn’t happen. But I think you brought up a very important point, developer experience. Right now, we’re in an awesome time. For the first time, look, every other engineer you have at a company, chemical engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, you give them every tool they need to succeed. You would not ask them to build their own hammer. And yet, our software engineers, for too long, we’ve said, go build your own hammer in order to start working. And for the first time, the entire ecosystem is actually looking after the people that we hire to do smart things.
[Savannah Peterson]
So what is that going to unlock in terms of potential?
[Nick Durkin]
I’ll tell you what, if you take the metrics, anyone says 25 to 30% of the time right now is used in actually writing code.
[00:10:04]
If we even doubled that, right, the amount of code that can make its way to production, it’s infinite. You take that on top of AI generative code, which is now, what, 20 or 30, X-ing even those numbers, now we’re taking good engineers and making them great. We’re making great engineers the best. And I think that’s the opportunity right now.
[Rebecca Knight]
Landscape for Startups
So over the course of your career, you’ve helped a lot of early stage companies find their market fit, devise their strategy, hire the right team. How do you see the landscape right now for startups, particularly when we are at this phase of a new dawn of Gen AI?
[Nick Durkin]
I think right now, startups are tough because if they’re a single point product, it becomes very difficult. Right now, we have a massive thing in consolidation around the entire industry, and so they’re not part of a larger platform, it actually becomes a problem. They’re just one other tool that has to be integrated into an ecosystem, that’s a challenge. We see platform companies truly thriving right now, which is great, because we started that journey.
[00:11:02]
[Savannah Peterson]
What Nick Hopes to Say Next Time
How convenient for you.
[Nick Durkin]
It works out.
[Savannah Peterson]
I got a question for you, Nick. Since you get to see so much action, what do you hope, and you’re a CUBE alum, what do you hope that you can say the next time we have you on the show that you can’t quite say yet?
[Nick Durkin]
That’s a great question. I think one of the things that I would love to be able to come here and say, and really be as a larger partner of Google, and come here and actually show, we’ve got some neat things coming out, and we’re doing some things with them, and I’d like to actually show those specific things on the CUBE specifically.
[Savannah Peterson]
Can you tell us anything about those things?
[Nick Durkin]
Right now, look, we have 13 models that do amazing things, and a lot of them, Google doesn’t do right now. We want to start helping people measure and understand their Dora metrics, their space metrics. We want to really help people understand the business the way the CTO needs to, and we’re really trying to help Google do that right now, so my hopes are to do that soon.
[John Furrier]
And Savannah, that’s the key, we’ve been saying on the CUBE, the ecosystem for Google this year is going to be the real test for them, because you can’t win without an ecosystem in cloud, because there’s so many white spaces, so many big opportunities for partners to be successful, and Google can sell through them.
[00:12:12]
So it’s like … There’s some power plays.
Ecosystem for Google
Well, it’s looking good right now, everyone’s standing tall, so good job.
[Savannah Peterson]
Energy Around Partnership with AI Tech Revolution
Yeah, no, I think it’s really, I think it’s interesting. Last question for you, do you find that this, just touching on that, do you find that there’s a different energy around partnership with the AI tech revolution versus other tech moments we’ve had?
[Nick Durkin]
I think this is following most revolutions, and you get a massive uptick, and everybody throws their name in the hat, and you have to sift through the ones that are actually doing it. So we’ve been doing it for the last seven years since inception, it’s something we’ve known well, but I do think that will, the difference will be who actually leverages artificial intelligence well, versus who just uses it for marketing, that’ll be the difference.
[John Furrier]
Real Players in AI
Yeah, yeah, the real players. You can’t fake AI, I mean, at some point, it’ll be obvious.
[00:13:04]
It’s moving so fast. Thanks for coming on.
[Savannah Peterson]
Thank You and Closing
Yeah, thank you so much, Nick, this was an absolute pleasure. I want to see some pictures of your ranch in Arizona, since we talked about it. Rebecca, John, always a pleasure to share the day with you, and thank all of you for tuning in to our three days of live coverage here in Las Vegas, Nevada. We’re at Google Cloud Next. My name’s Savannah Peterson, you’re watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.