Two University of Washington students were messing around with the rough beginnings of cloud infrastructure in the mid-2000s. They quickly surmised that managing resources and security across multiple clouds would the biggest infrastructure challenge for years to come. They were correct.

“It’s over 10 years later, and it is the problem that enterprises are hitting right now,” said Mitchell Hashimoto (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of HashiCorp Inc. Hashimoto and co-founder Armon Dadgar spun this realization into a startup, built on open-source technologies, to unpack these challenges and produce tools to solve them. 

The answer is largely to abstract infrastructure resources and services away from underlying machines, according to Hashimoto. Workload scheduling is an example of this and is what Kubernetes open-source platform for managing containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications) builds on.

“Let’s just assume we always have compute and storage and network, and what freedom does that give you? And I think that’s really what schedulers give you,” he stated. This abstraction away from machines presents new challenges to service management and security.

Hashimoto spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Mayfield People First event in Menlo Park, California. They discussed multicloud challenges and the need to control the chaos in open source. (* Disclosure below.)

Multicloud-service traffic control

Another open-source technology for multicloud application is Istio service mesh. The sheer volume of services in a distributed multicloud environment demands a new approach to configuration, Hashimoto pointed out.

“When you have thousands of services that are coming and going, and people are trying new services all the time, that has to all be automated,” he said. “So the idea of service mesh is automating that and making it invisible, automatic, free.”

This swarm of services talking to each other from across different environment requires a new type of security. The old idea of a parameter is dissolving. “We have to sort of firewall and protect right at the app layer, and that’s hard to transition [to],” he said. “That’s tooling change; that’s education change; that’s team change.”

Hashicorp has a “freemium” model that offers some open-source-based software for free and packages some for sale.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mayfield People First event. (Disclosure: TheCUBE’s coverage of the Mayfield People First event is presented by Mayfield Fund LLC.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE