The New Stack Context: KubeCon EU and the Zombie Workloads

Intuit's Pratik Wadher joins the Context team to discuss the company's experience as a Kubernetes end user and its involvement in the Argo Flux project

Aug 21st, 2020 1:00pm by Joab Jackson

Featued image for: The New Stack Context: KubeCon EU and the Zombie Workloads

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Pratik Wadher, vice president of product development at Intuit, to discuss the company’s experience as a Kubernetes end user, as well as its involvement in the Argo Flux project — a single toolchain for continuous deployment and automated workflows using GitOps. We also share our experiences attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2020, held this week “virtually.”

The New Stack editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS Founder & Publisher Alex Williams, TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.

Episode 130: KubeCon EU and the Zombie Workloads

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Intuit is a giant in the space of offering financial software and services to individuals and small businesses and perhaps, not surprisingly, the company invested early on in Kubernetes to better manage its large and extremely dynamic workloads. The company started using Kubernetes a little over two years ago, and now runs a fully operational production environment, with over 200 clusters that support 2,500 services, including company flagship properties, TurboTax, and QuickBooks.

Wadher is well-versed in many aspects of the company’s sprawling operations, so we had a lot to talk about, including:

The challenges of using Kubernetes at production scale.
Intuit’s investigation into the use of the Istio service mesh.
The values for Intuit in joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Intuit’s role in Argo and what does Argo do for Intuit.
How Argo works with Flux to enable GitOps.
Red Hat’s new Argo operator on OpenShift.
Intuit’s new Kubernetes-based data processing platform Spok?
The challenges of multi-region tracing for thousands of apps.
Takeaways from this year’s Kubecon EU.

For the second half of the show, we discussed the highlights from KubeCon, including Holly Cummins’ discussion of environmentally friendly computing, the growing use of Rancher’s K3s for edge workloads, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s increased emphasis on end users.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, and Red Hat are sponsors of The New Stack.

Feature image: Holly Cummins, Worldwide IBM Garage Developer Lead, IBM, presenting at the KubeCon EU.

Joab Jackson is Editor-in-Chief for The New Stack, assuring that the TNS website gets a fresh batch of cloud native news, tutorials and perspectives each day. He has reported on infrastructure IT for over 25 years, including stints at IDG...