An interview with Jalander Ramagiri, Ericsson Software Technology | Conducted by Maria Ashby, Armory
We are just a few days from Spinnaker Summit. This year it is co-located with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and CD Summit in Detroit on October 24-25, 2022.
Spinnaker Summit has speakers from a wide range of industries, countries, and technical backgrounds. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to interview one of the Summit’s speakers, Jalander Ramagiri, Senior Software Engineer at Ericsson Software Technology in Ireland. Like me, Jalander started his Continuous Delivery earlier this year and he brings a unique perspective from his previous decade of IT experience. He is currently working with both the CDEvents team and the Spinnaker project. Here’s what Jalander had to say about his experience working with open source projects and their communities.
How did you get involved in Open Source and the Continuous Delivery space?
Before my time in open source, I worked as a software engineer for ten years. My CI/CD journey began when I started working for Ericsson last year. Over time, I have become more interested in the deployment part of the Software Development Life Cycle. To me, this is the most critical part. It’s where your user accesses your services and has the ability to use it every time. Developing the code is not the whole story but how we maintain and integrate that code and then how we process it in the CD environment is the most important part. Now, I work in the continuous delivery domain and with open source integration particularly. Through Ericsson, I started working with CDEvents and I am currently working on integrating CDEvents with Spinnaker.
What has been your experience working with the CDF community?
It has been a great experience to network and connect with people from all over the world. I recently attended Open Source Summit Europe and it has been eye-opening to see all the different ways open source is being used all over the world. It is very different from working in a product-based company where you tend to get siloed around a particular product or feature. Open source is the opposite of this. You get to see all the different use cases for the tools you use. There’s much I didn’t know about before working with open source and I am excited to learn more through going to conferences and just attending the event’s meetings.
Do you have any advice for people just getting started working with Open Source?
You need to have a clear picture of what you are going to work on. In open source the opportunities are endless. But, you need to focus on what you are capable of doing so that you can be visible in the community. Pick the right things so that you can deliver as early as possible and you will have some things you can commit and showcase publicly to start building your reputation in the community.
Could you tell us a little bit about CDEvents and its interaction with Spinnaker?
Before working with CDEvents, I never knew how many different CI/CD tools there are to automate your CI/CD pipeline. From building testing, decision making and process and release and monitoring, there’s just so much out there. These tools need to be able to communicate with each other. An example of this would be Spinnaker and Jenkins. This is a very common use case. Most people will use Jenkins for testing and Spinnaker for production deployment. Spinnaker can do its production deployment work, only after the Jenkins testing part gets done. Jenkins needs to be able to communicate with Spinnaker, so you can send something that’s going to deploy some artifact or some application in production. That’s where CDEvents comes in.
The communication is happening, but it requires additional code that you have to write between tools. So you need to write your own code for each tool and product that you use. So it’s very difficult to maintain. CDEvents will be in the middle and will help facilitate communication between tools. We have raised an RFC proposal with the Spinnaker community and hope to integrate CDEvents with Spinnaker on a larger scale.
Spinnaker Summit
Come check out Jalander’s talk on the integration of CDEvents with Spinnaker “Events in Action With Spinnaker, Tekton and Keptn” – Jalander Ramagiri & Adam Kenihan, Ericsson Software Technology
Register here to catch up with him and many more CI/CD leaders at Spinnaker Summit this year.
