VMblog:  Can you give VMblog readers a quick overview of your company?

Lior Koriat:  Quali is leading the Environments as a Service category, aiming to democratize cloud and make programmable infrastructure accessible to application developers in a safe and productive manner. With more than a million users worldwide and over a hundred enterprise customers, our solution eliminates infrastructure bottlenecks by providing self-service access to complete environments for application development. It allows organizations to leverage and better manage existing IaC assets like Helm and Terraform. As an IaC control plane it offers greater control and visibility over infrastructure, so businesses can increase engineering productivity and velocity, understand and manage cloud costs, optimize infrastructure utilization and mitigate risks.

VMblog:  Your company is sponsoring this year's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.  Can you talk about what that sponsorship looks like?

Lior Koriat:  We are excited to be a Silver Sponsor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America. For us, it's an opportunity to connect with CNCF members and the broader community of Kubernetes users, experts, and stakeholders. Several members of our leadership and technical staff will be on-site to demonstrate how our users automate discovery, orchestration, and governance for Kubernetes manifests and complete application environments.

VMblog:  How can attendees of the event find you?  What do you have planned at your booth this year?  What type of things will attendees be able to do at your booth?  

Lior Koriat:  We'll be at booth S6, three rows in from the main entrance, and located on the left-hand side of the expo hall. We'll be demonstrating how to automate discovery for Kubernetes manifests and Helm Charts, then show the process of orchestrating complete application environments, self-service access for developers within their IDE and IDP, and automated deployment within the CI/CD pipeline. Our team will also help attendees set up automation for their own Kubernetes assets. And anyone who creates and activates a new trial account of our Torque platform at the booth has the chance to enter a raffle for a prize we'll be giving away at the end of the show-so be sure to stop by our booth for details.

VMblog:  Are you and your company excited for this event to be in person this year in Detroit?  What are your thoughts and expectations for the show?  Are attendees ready to come back in person, in full force? 

Lior Koriat:  I believe that everyone attending gets more value out of in-person events as opposed to virtual events. It's important for us to talk to people face to face and have meaningful conversations; it is the only way to build real relationships and to understand the problems these people are trying to solve within their organizations. We've had an incredible response from in-person conferences this year, so we're excited to see what KubeCon/CloudNativeCon has in store.

VMblog:  Have you sponsored KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in the past?  If so, what is it about this show that keeps you coming back as a sponsor?

Lior Koriat:  This is our first time sponsoring this event. It became clear that we needed to support the community once we saw how ubiquitous Kubernetes-based infrastructure-whether configured natively or through Helm Charts-is becoming within our users' application environments. Our users are finding that automation is critical not only for its ability to deliver and maintain those environments, but to keep developers happy and productive. Sponsoring this event is an important step toward advocating for automation to support and enable the infrastructure experts within the Kubernetes and cloud-native community.

VMblog:  What do you attribute to the success and growth of this industry?

Lior Koriat:  Companies are increasingly moving workloads to the cloud because of its flexibility and scalability. But with increased cloud adoption comes other unanticipated business challenges. Cloud infrastructure is much more complex than just the cloud platform itself. It's further complicated by the proliferation of tools throughout the DevOps pipeline. As a result, companies have ended up with fragmented toolchains and processes which make it difficult to scale, to enforce security and compliance policies, and to manage costs. That's why many are turning to platforms like Quali's Torque to overcome these challenges, so they can better understand and manage infrastructure across the entire environment lifecycle.

VMblog:  What are you personally most interested in seeing or learning at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon? 

Lior Koriat:  Again, for us, it's really about learning more about the real-world pains that people in the industry are contending with. Our platform addresses many of these challenges, but it's important to us at Quali that we continue to evolve the capabilities of Torque to tackle future challenges as they develop. Meeting directly with industry professionals at conferences like KubeCon, allows us to continue to have our finger on the pulse.

VMblog:  Can you double click on your company's technologies?  And talk about the types of problems you solve for a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendee.

Lior Koriat:  The market has reached a point of great saturation of IaC assets, and a significantly elevated level of infrastructure complexity and cloud cost. Quali is changing the dynamics of cloud and infrastructure consumption. By that, I mean we are bringing frictionless centralized control to DevOps teams that allows the business to maintain governance over infrastructure and gain greater visibility into costs and consumption, all while getting out of the way of their developers to accelerate product development and time to market. That also applies to containerized technology and Kubernetes due to the distributed nature of application development, operational and technological opportunity for scale, and the associated need to govern anything that has a security and cost risk associated to it.

VMblog:  What kind of message will an attendee hear from you this year?  What will they take back to help sell their management team and decision makers?

Lior Koriat:  First of all, with the economy potentially softening, there's increased scrutiny on costs within almost every business. Instead of just knowing what the monthly cloud bill is, Quali can put business context around that cloud consumption, so organizations can manage ballooning cloud costs by measuring value, prioritizing spend and predicting future costs.

Secondly, there are too few people with the cloud infrastructure expertise to accommodate the number of developers within most organizations and the number of technologies each company relies on. With Quali, DevOps teams can maximize and "multiply" those skills to alleviate the bottleneck created by that skills gap.

We want people to understand how Quali can make not only infrastructure management and the software development process quicker, easier and more consistent, but from a business perspective that the time to value on Quali's platforms is remarkably quick.

VMblog:  While thinking about your company's solutions, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique?  What are your differentiators?  What sets you apart from the competition?

Lior Koriat:  Quali's Torque platform serves as a control plane, so it adds value by automatically discovering your existing IaC assets (within your source control), normalizing different IaC tech like Terraform, Helm, etc., and presenting them in the form of stackable blueprints that allow users self-service access to complete application environments. Torque is also cloud agnostic and multi-cloud/hybrid-cloud capable.

VMblog:  Where does your company fit within the container, cloud, Kubernetes ecosystem?

Lior Koriat:  Quali bridges the vertical gap between consumers of automated infrastructure (developers, testers, SREs, etc.) and the producers of it (DevOps and automation teams). That also applies to containerized/Kubernetes environments running on-prem or in the cloud.

We plug ourselves into the "day in a life" of a developer (populating our environments into the IDE, IDP the developer uses) and provide environment services to developers and the CI/CD pipeline (on-demand governed launch, access, logs and observability, debug, teardown, etc.).

At the same time, we allow the DevOps, Platform Ops and ITOps teams to automatically discover all of their IaC and Helm assets, normalize them into blueprints, apply consumption, compliance and security policies, enforce custom tagging and govern the launch of such environments.

Such environments can be launched on any target infrastructure from your laptop to the public cloud in a governed fashion, monitoring all infrastructure data (cost, drift, diffs, etc.) and owning the launched environment all the way to its eventual teardown.

VMblog:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is typically a great venue for a company to launch a new product or an update to an existing product.  Will your company be announcing anything new?  If so, can you give us a sneak preview?

Lior Koriat:  Our Torque infrastructure automation and control plane platform allows the automation and management of application environments and works in any cloud, and across all major infrastructure types like Kubernetes.

Ahead of KubeCon, we are announcing enhanced features for our Torque platform. For example, we have expanded our environment drift detection capabilities to include Helm charts; we previously announced this capability for Terraform. Our new release also allows organizations to import existing Terraform definitions into Torque, so users can leverage their existing work to define policies. We've added an Environments View in a single pane of glass that lists all elements in environment blueprint definitions pulled from the customer's Git.

VMblog:  Where are we at in 2022 with regard to containers and Kubernetes?  Is there anything still holding it back from a wider distribution?  If so, what is it?  And how do we overcome it?   

Lior Koriat:  Containers and Kubernetes offer great flexibility, scalability and development velocity. It enables distributed application development and deployment and supports all modern application architectures. It's here to stay and because it is a favorite target for developers, despite all odds (as it is complex) Kubernetes adoption is taking off. Developers love containers, so Docker isn't going anywhere either.

VMblog:  Are companies going all in for the cloud?  Or do you see a return back to on-premises?  Are there roadblocks in place keeping companies from going all cloud? 

Lior Koriat:  Most companies are sold on the virtues of the cloud. The elasticity of the cloud provides organizations with a high level of flexibility, and they can avoid the massive capital outlay and maintenance associated with on-premises infrastructure. I think the move to cloud is going to continue.

However, many companies still have existing investment in on-prem infrastructure, whether because of legacy applications, industry compliance requirements, or simply better budget control. While they might also be utilizing some cloud resources, that can keep them from going all in on the cloud.

Migrating completely from on-prem to the cloud is certainly a strategy for many companies, but even then, we see multi-cloud strategies to help manage cost over time and offer redundancy.

VMblog:  The keynote stage will be covering a number of big topics, but what big changes or trends does your company see taking shape as we head into 2023?

Lior Koriat:  With cloud adoption continuing to grow, companies will have to come to terms with cost management, and control planes will be the next big thing in the world of cloud. The threat of a recessionary environment will separate category leaders from laggards in the industry. Organizations will look for consolidation across the board-from architecture tools to collaboration apps.

VMblog:  Are you giving away any prizes at your booth or participating in any prize giveaways?

Lior Koriat:  We'll be holding a raffle for a free drone for anyone who signs up and activates a free trial of Torque at our booth during the event.