2019 is shaping up to be a busy year.

After my last post, I had a few meetings and ended out meeting the Gravitational team to see what they’ve been up. I have been following the founders and the growth of Gravitational since they left Rackspace to start Gravitational in 2015.

Gravitational helps companies securely deliver applications into any environment. Gravity provides a bubble of consistency for delivering applications. Teleport provides privileged access management for cloud-native infrastructure that doesn’t get in the way. More on that below.

These products solve two problems I’ve encounters in the past. While running Airbrake, I encountered many of the issues related to deploying software securely on-prem for customers. Gravity is a vastly more scalable and secure version of the various Heath Robinson solutions we shipped circa 2015. While at SolarWinds, I observed the deployment and scaling issues of disrupted software on-premise.

Teleport helps customers securely access servers/machines. Coming from almost a first-principles approach to security and access, Teleports connects to customers SSO providers to help them provide access to servers, by replacing public/private key with short lived SSH certificates.

Blood Moon in San Francisco at Sutro Tower taken by myself on January 2018.

OSS & Open Core

Both Gravity and Teleport are open core, this has a range of business advantages. and we are starting to see the growth of Open Core business models.

While running RedisToGo, I enjoyed working with the OSS community, running Redis SF meetup and RedisConfNano. The community and open nature of events often meant many more customers could use the software and in new and exciting ways.

I’m excited to be building in the open again and the possibilities of doing Product Management in the open.

Simplicity from the complexity

As I’ve been ramping up, I’ve had a chance to dive deeper in Kubernetes. Over the past 5 years, Kubernetes has become the defacto tooling fro managing machines, clusters and containerized application. While at a high level, the concepts are simple, the orchestration and management can seem very simple, but in reality, many things that can go wrong. Gravity helps streamline running Kubernetes for you, by providing a bunch of tooling to make debugging, monitoring and managing a cluster simpler.

Let’s get coffee.

I’m excited to be taking on this role and to share what we have to the broader DevTools community. If you think Gravitational products sound interesting to you, or are also looking for your next opportunity.

Please drop me a mail and we’ll grab a coffee.