PurePerformance - Inside Africa - Cloud Native Observability Journeys with Kelvin Klein

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Africa is not only the second largest continent in the world - its also top when it comes to adoption of cloud native technologies. I was fortunate to spend a week in South Africa and had the chance to spend a lot of time with Kelvin Klein, Dynatrace Product Manager at Mediro ICT. After two observability events in Johannesburg and Cape Town and several meetings with local tech leaders I got to sit down with Kelvin and learn more about the status of Observablity, Cloud Native and Security in South Africa.

It's time for Pure Performance! Get your stopwatches ready, it's episode of Pure Performance. I'm still in South Africa and believe it or not, I'm currently standing in a wine cellar surrounded by many, many different barrels. The place is called the Rickety Bridge and with me I have Kelvin Klein. Kelvin. Hey Andy, how are you doing? Good. Thank you so much for, first of all, an amazing week in South Africa.

We did events this week in Johannesburg and then in Cape Town and then you were nice enough to extend the stay and actually bring me up here to what's the place called again? So we're in the France region in the Western Cape, in Cape Town, which is really well known for the wine that South Africa provides to the rest of the world. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And then, so today we are actually on a so-called wine train tour, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's like different train tracks and they basically bring you from estate to estate and you can just explore wine and taste everywhere yeah 100% and I think the one we know is called Rickety Bridge which is a really well-known wine estate within France which was owned by the first woman you know we heard that earlier today yeah and yeah we tried white wine all the way to red

wine but I think what's really cool for everyone on the podcast is that we're actually recording on a wine barrel so if the sounds don't look bassy it's because of some good wine that we we got the microphone sitting on top of. Exactly. And then before we go into observability and performance, we told the manager here, we asked, can we just record in here? And if so, we wanted to at least give back a little bit. So folks, if you ever travel to South Africa, ever to the Cape Town region, ever to France, stop by at Riccati Bridge, because they allowed us to use their wine cellar to record this episode. Now, Kelvin, I want to say Africa is for many, I think, including me, but especially I think

for many of our listeners, a continent and a place that is very unknown. 100%. Because we are, at least personally, I also operate more in Europe in North America sometimes Latin America sometimes a pig but Africa is really an unknown territory for many you in your capacity working at Madeira you are working with a lot of clients not only here in South Africa but I believe across the continent correct that's correct so that means we we are the sub sub-saharan distributors of the diamond trace across Africa. So every part of Africa that doesn't speak French, we're involved into.

So the likes of Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, quite a few others. And it's a really interesting dynamic because different parts of Africa has different challenges and different ways that they overcome those challenges, which is really interesting. And so one of the things that I have to, I didn't tell you this this week, but I wanted to keep it to this episode. When you opened up the event in Johannesburg,

you made some really interesting comments because you said you're here in South Africa and South Africa, it's not always easy, right? Because when I arrived here, I was never aware of the whole concept of load shedding because you have some challenges now here with electricity, where electricity is turned off. So there's a lot of challenges that you have to face. But you always said, as South Africans, you always go forward. And I think that was such a nice statement when you opened it.

And going forward is also what we saw in many of the presentations and many of the people we visited here. It's amazing how mature your companies are here. We talked with most of the banks, financial institutions, retailers. And when it comes to technology and when it comes to, especially the topic that is interesting to both of us, observability, performance, security, a lot of organizations are really mature here, but they always think they are not, because everybody's asking me when I get to a region, you know, how far behind are we,

behind Europe and the US? And the thing is, if I look at NetBank, at Investec, at Old Mutual, at all this, PicPay, Flash, right? These are some of the companies that come to mind because we visited them. It's amazing what they're doing. It really, really is, Eddie. And I think, you know, exactly what you're saying there with the challenges that we've had, I think South Africa has always had this culture of being resilient. So for many years, we have our own national challenges. But South Africans would complain a little bit. I think all people in the world.

But even though they complain, they say, we can do more. You know, and when we look at our government sector, our government sector needs a lot of work. But I think all over the world, that's usual. But wherever we're lacking in our public sector, the private sector tends to pick it up and say okay Well, that's a gap that's affecting all South Africans What can we do to make a difference and I think that's the way we think is if there's a problem is always opportunity And we saw this with the likes of NetBank the likes of Investec this week and what's what is interesting I mean we've seen in the sense of maturity in South Africa specifically, you know, going on to topics like DevOps or doing things like platform engineering,

a lot of the guys were like, wow, what is this platform engineering? But yet they're doing it without even knowing it. Exactly. And that was quite interesting this week. The guys are like, oh, wow, we're actually learning on the same page. I have to admit, conferences like KubeCon, which I think you're going to be triggering now and the next week, a lot of these developers and architects do go to those conferences and they take a lot of those learnings back as well. And it was really interesting to see what happened in our events this week, where a lot of the people were like, wow, observability is not just my metrics, it's my logs, it's my business data.

And it's going to be interesting to see what the private sector does with that in the next year and how they're going to transform themselves. But one thing that was really interesting in some of the challenges we've seen in our region is, you know, which Harper's Caterers to choose from in the past year or two. That was a big challenge where the customers were like, do we go Azure, do we go AWS? And they ended up going with both. That was something we saw. And then deciding what do we do for Azure, what do we do for AWS?

So one thing that I find interesting in our sector is that almost every customer has both. So the diversity of hyperscanners and technologies, the cloud ecosystem. It's really, really vast. And it's just interesting how they're bringing all that data from an observability point of view. That's one thing we've seen quite a bit, especially in the banking sector. Yeah. And so the true hybrid cloud, also Kubernetes everywhere, as you said. I mean, it's amazing to see that adoption here and the technology. Now, another thing that I was really fascinated about,

because I've been talking about service level objectives for the last couple of years, obviously you've done a great job here in that region to also advocate for SLOs. And because every customer, every user that presented here was talking about how they're using SLOs to bridge the gap between business and IT to provide a business view on what matters to them.

And I thought that was really amazing. Like all the dashboards, every conversation I had was starting with these are the SLOs. I mean, it's amazing. It really is. And I have to admit that was a challenge for a long time to be honest because We'd normally always you know coming from Dynatrace at least we'd always talk to infrastructure teams or monitoring teams and you'd be boxed into this category of okay you do monitoring which never really had a

opportunity to talk to the business and so as Madeira We really put a lot of effort into building a team that only focused on functional consulting, which was, hey, you've got tools like Dynatrace as an example. Why is it not being used where the data can be usable for the business? And with that whole journey, we've been able to touch on business individuals to say, well, you know, are you able to make decisions based on your data? And what really became interesting there was that there were two streams where SLOs for example became powerful one was business agreed that if I can measure my outcomes I want it so SLOs would be pushed from the business side into technology then you had it from the site reliability engineering movements so

before I mean it was always there when but when it was given a label, social reliability engineering, all of a sudden now operational people were like, I want SLRs, I want SLAs. And then we started to see that adoption a lot faster. So I think we're going to see a lot more in the next few years as to how those SLAs as an example become a lot more entrenched in different parts of the business, which is exciting. Yeah. those as an example become a lot more entrenched in different parts of the business which is exotic yeah another topic that I thought was really interesting because he got a lot of attention was the topic of security in

my application security but going beyond application security our colleague Thomas did a great job this week in talking about it they different security use cases and he had like a really great visualization of an onion where basically at the center of the onion, there was like your critical data and then how the different layers of security make sure to protect this critical data. And then I also saw some of your customers

talking about how important security is for them and what they're doing. And for me, what was interesting, we also tried to then figure out what type of data do you need from an observability perspective to actually build up the right protection against any security-related incidents.

And I think what we all agreed on, while many look at logs for security, which is very important, you cannot cover everything just with logs and then we saw again Thomas Abandal he did an awesome job on this talking about there's use cases around logs metrics traces and user behavior and if you put all of this together you can really protect yourself against your precious assets your critical data being potentially

stolen or however impacted. But quickly on the security side, what else do you see? I mean, which customer was it? There was one... AltMutual. AltMutual, thank you so much. Yeah, exactly, AltMutual. They talked about how much they've invested in application security and how much money

would be involved in case of a security breach. It was amazing numbers in what they have achieved to secure their perimeters. It was amazing. I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but I think 4.6 million or billion was saved in data breaches because of security tools in total. Having Dynatrace part of that gave them a different dimension to make sure that they prevented these data breaches exactly because of security tools in total and I mean having Dynatrace part of this gave them a different dimension to make sure that they're prevented these data breaches you know when you look at something like a topic of security I mean observability how many times Andy for many years we

looked at the data we had it's like we know everything about the customer rights where they come from what devices they're using if their devices are rooted you know all their standard and we know which load balances they're going through the roots and i'm not going to go into all that detail but there's so much valuable data that you'd question why would this not be used for security so you know having a look now what dynatrace is doing with security bringing that type of data and aligning it with potential vulnerabilities or potential attacks, that is for me priceless. And I mean, that's just the starting point we heard about.

And, you know, why don't we bring that into the world that security already has with the logs and so forth and so on. But when we started looking at the one slide that, you know, Thomas was talking to us, I know he spoke about an onion. Yeah. But for me, I thought of like a gum, like a chewing gum. Oh, yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Because you chew, chew, chew until you get to the juicy parts in the middle. And that's what the hackers are probably trying to do. It's like, that's mine. And when you bring it all together, you spoke about the movement investigation. And I mean, something like that isn't just a vulnerability. There's so many layers, so many legs that happen

that can really damage a customer. And seeing how you can bring logs, bring vulnerabilities, bring user performance data all together to make that investigation simpler, I think that's where the penny dropped for me, was being able to see, well, wow, actually, all our data should be considered part of security, right? And I think that's going to be interesting,

the journey, not just what we have now, but what we're going to see also in the next few years with converged analytics on security. It's going to be interesting, the journey, not just what we have now, but what we're going to see also in the next few years with converged analytics on security, it's going to be really exciting. Yeah. Hey, before we wrap it up, because I really want to give people a little bit of sense on what Africa is really all about, because I know we are in South Africa. I think South Africa is probably known the best, if you think about Africa what people know at least what I knew about Cape Town Johannesburg these are all places but you are operating as you said in more than just South Africa can you just give us a quick overview of what other countries you are operating in and

okay actually all of them but I'm going to take talk about the ones that come to mind very immediately some of the some of the things I've seen if we look at a country like Angola for example, very very beautiful culture of people really love it but a country like Angola is still struggling with normal issues that we've faced in the area of monitoring for the past 10 years around infrastructure. So you know something like that when we went in with a solution like Dynatrace, we noticed that, hey, we still need to remember the fundamentals.

And I think the biggest lesson I learned there was we have all these new things about automating software, but the fundamentals are still important. You know, how are my networks? How are my devices? How are my, you know, my normal infrastructure monitoring before you start expanding?

One of the biggest things I noticed was in a country like Angola is that user experience wasn't important because everyone's focusing on the infrastructure. So people are used to a bad experience for now, but once that infrastructure issue gets resolved, then they come on our bandwagon of user experience is the next thing that becomes important. However, that's one part. Then you go to a country like Nigeria or Kenya. Kenya has actually got the most developments, investments across the globe, more than South Africa right now, in the sense of property.

So Kenya is booming. And two or three years ago, it was normal monitoring, normal user experience. But now they're actually investing in Kubernetes they're investing in DevOps and they're actually going at a rapid pace so I'm very I would definitely say keep an eye on what's happening in Kenya I think we're gonna have some interesting solutions coming out of Kenya as well and ways of doing things Nigeria in the banking sector fraud detection is actually probably some of the best in the world. We've seen that even in South Africa

we actually get individuals from from Nigeria to help us with that. So when we when we're using Dynatrace for banks we see some really interesting ways in how they manage fraud, how they manage transactions and they're actually at a similar maturity as to what we have in South Africa which I actually didn't know five years ago and that's been really interesting so different type of challenges a lot more primitive challenges in parts of Africa but if you keep your eye on Nigeria and Kenya they're actually they're actually progressing really quickly which is quite interesting so folks look at the map figure out where these countries are

and it seems that Kenya and Nigeria are booming. And I think I remember this week you told me about that you're bringing in experts from Nigeria because fraud is a big topic there. And obviously, they know how to fight fraud. And then taking these experts and bringing it into your country, into your territory or your organization makes a lot of sense, right? 100%. That's pretty cool

Kelvin, I think it's probably time to get back on the wine train I think it's about time It's time to go to the next estate But as I said, folks, if any one of you that listens in ever makes it to South Africa ever make it to Cape Town and Franshoek Rickety Bridge is where we've recorded this We'll probably take a picture here as well and then post it on the podcast. If you make it here, say thank you to the staff for letting us record in here in the wine cellar.

Interesting. And, Kelvin, again, thank you so much for being such a great advocate here in that region. You, Medeiro, and the rest of the team. It's just great to have have somebody like you not only as a partner but also as a very close friend. Thank you Andy and it's always a pleasure to talk to you and thank you so much for inviting me on your channel I'm excited to just to see how everyone gets together and moves forward with performance. Yeah perfect.

Thank you Andy. Bye bye.