Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ohad Maislish, CEO of env0 (Part 1)

Ohad talks about trends and open problems within the DevOps space. This is a deeply technical conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to env0.

Ohad Maislish: I just relocated from Israel to the Bay Area. This is my second startup. My background is technical. I was a programmer from a very young age. I worked for Microsoft, mostly as an R&D manager. About three years ago, I noticed what I believe is one of the biggest shifts in cloud – Infrastructure-as-a-Code. Nobody is clicking buttons anymore to provision cloud resources. Engineers are writing and maintaining Infrastructure as a Code such as Terraform. With this shift, everything is more automated and deserves new kinds of solutions. 

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers do you work with?

Ohad Maislish: Our target audience is DevOps engineers and managers in all kinds of companies. It can be small startups of five people. It can be the biggest banks in the world. Everybody who develops in the cloud eventually move to Infrastructure-as-Code. They then need a management solution like env0 or Hashicorp. We are in the same category as Hashicorp’s Terraform. 

Sramana Mitra: What does the ecosystem that you play in look like?

Ohad Maislish: Infrastructure, cloud operations, cloud management, that’s where we play. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take some use cases to illustrate what you do and how you do what you do.

Ohad Maislish: Before I go into use cases, I’ll first go into talking about the difference between Git and GitHub. Git is a technical solution to save files with versions. Eventually, a company needs a business solution. We’re doing the same with Infrastructure-as-Code. We’re managing Infrastructure-as-a-Code technical frameworks. One of the basic uses cases is predictability.

Suppose that I want to change some of my Terraform code. I’d want to understand what would happen if I execute it. One engineer develops that code. The colleague needs to decide whether or not to approve that change. Without Env0 or Terraform, you don’t have this visibility to understand what’s going to happen if you’re going to approve it.

The second use case is also related to GitHub. You change the code. You must ensure that there is no drift. The code changes reflect in the cloud resources. Now you have resources in AWS and Terraform. They need to be aligned. Otherwise, there is a drift. One thing that you want to ensure is that if the code is changed, it’s being deployed into the cloud.

Another way is if somebody accidentally changes cloud resources in AWS, Azure or GCP, you want them to update the code as well. Sometimes you don’t update the code. This change would be diverted in the next deployment where the next version of the code will be executed. That scenario is how you anticipate what changes are going to happen. Once you approve those changes, you need to make sure it’s not just code changes. It needs to be reflected in the cloud resources. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ohad Maislish, CEO of env0
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