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Michaela Light: 00:00:01 Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Ashish Garg, he's the VP of, uh, one of the director of engineering. Sorry, gave you a promotion then accidentally. Um, and when we talk, yeah, you're welcome. And you will to this podcast because we're on this, it's an exclusive look at ColdFusion 2020 roadmap and we're going to be looking at all the exciting features that are coming up in, uh, 2020 first time that you're going to hear about this. We'll look at some of the cool multi-cloud stuff, microservices, major improvements in deployment and containerization, uh, monitoring, logging, all kinds of cool things. So welcome Ashish.
Ashish Garg: 00:00:44 Thank you so much. Michella like to be here.
Michaela Light: 00:00:48 You're welcome. And if you haven't heard of him, he's actually been with Adobe for 15 years. Beavering away writing, you know, in charge of teams for several successful products there. And now he's with a cold fusion and I think he did a lot of Jay run in the past too, didn't you when you won that product.
Ashish Garg: 00:01:06 So yeah, that's, that's true. So j run is still one of my favorite products I ever worked on in my career. So I worked on Dayton for four years and I'm proud to say that I still remember the code. I, I can still look at the code and debug it. So it was like clearly the best time of my technical career. Like when I was coding, when I was doing the coding day in night out type of stuff.
Michaela Light: 00:01:31 Oh yeah. You're not allowed to code anymore.
Ashish Garg: 00:01:34 I wish I am. Yeah, you can say that. I'm not allowed to code anymore, but I wish I could call it more. It's not so much and yeah, the developers don't want me to code because obviously the same day then they have to wait on me and lets us, they use talk there on the, on the coding.
Michaela Light: 00:01:55 So you're in charge of the whole ColdFusion engineering team?
Ashish Garg: 00:01:57 Yes. That's the bucks buck stops with you about making sure cold fusion 2020 works wonderfully and does all these amazing things. Right.
Michaela Light: 00:02:12 No pressure, no pressure. So I think we should just start off, I, I know you have this, a really exciting vision for ColdFusion 2020 so right. Tell us, maybe you can just say what the vision is and then we'll talk more in detail about what it means.
Ashish Garg: 00:02:30 Sure. So, and I'm just quoting it word by word. So the ColdFusion 2020 vision is to be the modernized platform of choice for building cloud native microservices application with an absolute focus on ease of use without getting locked to a particular cloud vendor. So this is the vision and if we just break it down into different parts, it actually means a lot. Uh, it basically is a quantum leap from where ColdFusion is today and where it can be. So the way I look at it is, and again, as I said, like say I, I was associated with Jira and enhance, I was associated with ColdFusion, uh, in my early career.
Ashish Garg: 00:03:18 So I remember when ColdFusion six came out. That was a quantum leap at that time because it moved from C++ implementation of ColdFusion five to Java implementation of ColdFusion six. And at that time, the territory, the order the galaxy entered was j two ee. So all the, all the developers who are working on ColdFusion in one shot, they became J two e developers. And that was a big deal at that time. And it was a quantum leap. It was a total change of model. It was even total change of the target where ColdFusion could be applied, not just developing small to medium applications, but cold vision could be used to develop enterprise grade applications. So this vision is taking ColdFusion to the next level, to the cloud. So in one step we want to upgrade all the ColdFusion developers or all the ColdFusion application, not just enterprise ready but cloud ready as well. The applications should be able to take advantage of the cloud, that developers should be able to upskill themselves to be cloud developers. So that's, that's a massive vision that we are, we are committing to ourselves or committing ourselves to, uh, for the next year.
Michaela Light: 00:04:44 That is very exciting. So, you know, I know cloud is very hot in the enterprise right now. I'll let you know, right? Uh, I think you did a survey that showed maybe 70% of enterprises, uh, moving into the cloud for their apps. Um, right. May Have called that number slightly wrong, but it's a lot of people are moving into the cloud.
Ashish Garg: 00:05:05 It's, um, it's a lot of people who are moving into the cloud. And actually the survey that we did, it was based on today and, and you know what some of the people are planning for till the end of next year. So based on that, more than three, four of all the enterprises would move to the cloud in one way or another. Either they will like totally move to the cloud or they will have a hybrid model where in some part of it is in their cloud, in, in their data center. But some part of it is, it is being used from the cloud, uh, platforms. It's, it's, it's a massive shift like, you know, uh, going happening over three years, four years time period, uh, assuming that the wave has already started. It's a massive shift that we are seeing and we are aligning ourselves with that
Michaela Light: 00:05:55 That's great. And I'll, I'll put a slide in here in the show notes, uh, that gives those statistics and graphs of cloud adoption that you talked about. I got those slides from the talk you gave at CF, some east, which was a great talk. Uh, unfortunately you didn't have enough time there to talk about CF 2020. So that's why I was really sorry to get you on a show to talk about all the cool features that are coming up. And, uh, also just, um, for anyone listening who's going to CF summit west in Las Vegas, I know you're going to be giving a whole keynote on this topic, but this is a chance to get a sneak peek at, uh, all exciting stuff that's coming up. But I'm sure you'll go into even more detail, uh, uh, CF summit in Las Vegas. So I think before we go into the details of all the technical features, maybe we should just back up a minute and just ask, why is the cloud so important to enterprises these days? Why are organizations moving to the cloud? What's the motivation here? Because maybe some people listening alike cloud, why should I bother?
Ashish Garg: 00:07:01 Yeah, right. That's true. And, and you're not in my journey, honestly. I have also faced that dilemma. You know, I built a new product two years ago and, and so that gave me a good perspective as to when I started, uh, elaborating my options, enumerating my options, I realized that what are the key benefits of, uh, going into the cloud, on the cloud? So the first factor, and that's a very common factor that you know, is, is the cost. So when I go on the cloud cloud, you pay like a utility bill. You don't buy something, you don't have to spend so much of money to get all the machines and everything that you need. So first and foremost, like, you know, in a, in a traditional sense, it's called capital expenditure versus the operational expense. So you don't have to invest your lot of capital into buying the hardware, buying the software and the cost of starting is so high.
Ashish Garg: 00:08:07 So you just get started very lean. You can get started very, very easy and you don't have to worry too much about it. Like all the approvals.
Michaela Light: 00:08:17 Well then I think related to that, that it's more flexible. It's not just, you don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on server hardware up front, but you don't have to get the number of servers right upfront either.
Ashish Garg: 00:08:29 Right. Right. And, and that, sorry, something happened that
Michaela Light: 00:08:36 we lost your video for a moment, but you're back. We don't want to lose your beautiful face.
Ashish Garg: 00:08:41 Okay. Yeah. So, so you're not like, and that's the, that's what happened that, um, when we left into that journey, after few months we realized that the, the overall flexibility that we get with this model, like, you know, when I'm safe, for example, if I'm doing performance testing and at that time I can bump up my, all the machines and everything.
Ashish Garg: 00:09:03 I can change the size to something so I can control my bill rather than, you know, paying for the fixed thing. I don't have to buy the maintenance of those machines and I don't have to manage the licenses of all those services that I'm using. So that was a big thing like [inaudible] not just the, the fixed dollars in terms of my focus on the product. That increases, I can focus on my product more than focusing on the infrastructure, which as a director of engineering, which has a leader of engineering was very, very important for me because I just didn't want to get bogged down by the details of machines and how they are. They are, uh, all the, you know, to that level. Like where in like say even the, the power and the air conditioning and the, their rotation cycles and whether the antiviruses and star and all those things like that, that takes them a lot of your bandwidth and, and you know, the people who are listening and who are in this side, they would probably agree with me on this.
Ashish Garg: 00:10:02 The second point was the, the man, his services bet like so many services are available on these modern cloud platforms. Like, if you go to Amazon or they go to Azure, so many things are available to you as a service and you just use them. You, you don't worry about not just installing, we just don't worry about even taking back up. You don't worry about, uh, you know, if, if I'm going to, if I need it bigger tomorrow, how I will do it. Like say for example, I'll take very, very simple instance. We all use databases, no enterprise application use this chance of without a database, right? But the thing is if I have to do it myself, then I have to worry about not as the machine licensed and all how it will run, how it will replicate, how it will be backed up.
Ashish Garg: 00:10:52 Uh, is the backup proper if I want to pay, if there is a backup policy, is that getting managed properly? Uh, if I want to restore after some time, if I want to move it to cheaper storage, can I do that? All those things are taken care of by the cloud services. So, so the common services that I felt, which are very, very useful for us, uh, in that journey where, uh, databases, uh, both, both types actually and uh, not as a sequel one, but the no sequel one, uh, then the, the caching service like memcache and red is the queuing services. Otherwise we have to, sorry about that actually somebody is calling and that yeah, at that time, I don't know.
Michaela Light: 00:11:42 That's when your video keeps going out. Yeah. So, so I tell them you're going want a very important podcast.
Ashish Garg: 00:11:48 Yeah. I just decline it, bang to it.
Ashish Garg: 00:11:52 My video goes off. So yeah. So I have the saying that, you know, there were so many services like with which we could, um, uh, I could utilize just an a and. P. That's what people also do. They, they will look at any cloud and they'll see that there are so many services, which I don't even have to worry about installing, building and all. They are just there. I just go and use them. It's just like, you know, plugging your new device into the power socket and the device just works. You don't have to worry about, uh, you know, how this devices, right,
Michaela Light: 00:12:23 so don't have to have you the electricity just there. You don't have to build the whole generating plants in, do the [inaudible] and all that.
Michaela Light: 00:12:33 I put a diagram in the show notes for shows this progression from physical machines to virtual machines to cloud and also, you know, moves on to containers and serverless, which we'll talk about where cold fusion is going to fit in that in the future.
Michaela Light: 00:12:48 But the whole progression here is less detail of having to dig the hall, the operating system, um, or the whole setup. So you can focus on application and delivering wonderful results to your customers.
Ashish Garg: 00:13:03 And Yeah, and, and you know, you, that's it, that's a wonderful point. You're making an impact, like ColdFusion is almost 20, 40 years old product and
Michaela Light: 00:13:11 happy birthday.
Ashish Garg: 00:13:13 No, I don't know whether it's about this today or not, but it's almost 24 years old. So at times it's sort of in a very fulfilling like if we just look at those and those 2040 years and yeah, first and foremost knowing that it's like really alive. It is making progress. There are so many languages, there are so many platforms which came probably within these 24 years came and went, but confusion is still staying strong. So that's, that's really a very good feeling.
Ashish Garg: 00:13:41 But then we also look at how the world has evolved and the reference that you made that's very, very relevant. Like you know we see that 20 years ago maybe everything was on the physical machines. Like not just your, you were managing not just your application, you are managing your physical machines. Everything was the problem that you have. Everything was a task that you have to do. Then maybe around 10 years ago the virtual machines became the main line, main mainstream wherein you just don't, you don't have to worry about the physical machines, but you have to worry about the machine instances and application servers and then came the cloud. Like, you know, if, if I can be a little flexible in saying that like last five to seven years, then you just got rid of the machine instances as well. They also became utility and you then you started working only on your application servers three years ago.
Ashish Garg: 00:14:39 Microservices became the, they came into being and people started noticing it and those application servers actually became containers where in you will just break down the functionality into smaller pieces and manage the deployment of the full life cycle just with that container. And we have seen in the last one, one and a half year survivor less piece taken care wherein you just worry about the specific functionality that you want. You don't worry about anything else. So the cloud end, it's just magic, right? So, so you just write the code that you want to do and everything gets provisioned for you automatically. Like you know, it's just that like, you know that somebody is putting every piece together, everything together to make our code work, which is like really fascinating from the technology standpoint for me to see. So we think that ColdFusion now cultivation has played a very strong role when the era was of physical machines and the virtual machines. And, but now we think that ColdFusion is like really ready that overall climatic conditions are like really, really favorable for cold fusion to play a very strong role on cloud container in serverless.
Michaela Light: 00:15:51 That's great. And this is the cutting edge because I don't think there are many other languages that give this kind of support. No,
Ashish Garg: 00:15:58 no. Like you have to the way we are and massaging ColdFusion 2020. It will, it will really allow you to focus on your business logic. The rest of it will be taken care of by confusion. A lot of it will be taken care of by cold fusion. It means that cold fusion will also have to change a lot, but that's what we are working hard to achieve.
Michaela Light: 00:16:24 Well that's great. So this'll put a cold fusion ahead of the, uh, programming language heat and you know, it's being there on top several times in the last, uh, 24 years. Um, and you know, I think it, to be honest, it's near the top of the heat already before you do all this, we've looked at in all the great things you've got all added in and a ColdFusion 2016 and 2018, um, just for rapid application development and ease of use, a fast learning, great performance, high security, uh, many other things. Of course, as I said, it runs on top of Java, so it's enterprise ready. Um, but this takes it to a whole other level here,
Michaela Light: 00:17:09 So yeah, go ahead. Do you want me to add some more on that or
Ashish Garg: 00:17:16 no, no, no, this is good. I was just saying to hear you are saying that, uh, where did I play that it's still at Eh, is at the top of, he with all the parameters that are required for an enterprise application, um, which are critical, but this is a quantum leap. As I say, this is like really taking it into the end of the next level
Michaela Light: 00:17:39 and, and just to check if, if people still want to deploy on virtual servers or physical servers, they'll, will they still be able to do that instead of 20, 20 or…
Ashish Garg: 00:17:49 of course. So ColdFusion has always been backward compatible like it, it has really done a lot to make sure that uh, all the applications developed in the previous versions. They continued to work. So many settings, so many configurations changes have happened but the previous one will always be be supported. So, so people who wants to stay with a physical machines or virtual machines, they would happily be able to do it as they won't face any challenge or any change with this transition that we are trying to make.
Michaela Light: 00:18:26 Great. And um, you've made a great diagram that you shared in your keynote at CF summit East and I'll put that in the show notes that shows this progression from physical service through virtual machines, cloud containers and serverless and goodness knows what's going to come in the future after serverless. I'm sure people will think up something there. Um, so maybe we should just talk about it cause it's a lot of people currently moving to the cloud. They kind of lock themselves into one cloud vendor. They say yet we're going on AWS or we're going on as your or whichever cloud vendor they're into and they, they basically lock themselves into Amazon or Microsoft c ecosystem, right? Is ColdFusion going to work that way that you, you get stuck with one cloud vendor. Cause I know in the past ColdFusion has done a great job of saying it doesn't matter what database use or operating system or or Java runtime end in a how will this work in the cloud?
Ashish Garg: 00:19:23 Well so we are going to take this similar philosophy even for the cloud platform. So we want ColdFusion to be a platform with truly supports that multi cloud application development. So the way we are imagining called vision 2020, it will allow you to develop your application for one cloud and, and take it to the other cloud transparently. So to start with we would be focusing more on Amazon and Azure. So those would be the two clubs that we will support. But as we grow, as we go further, we'll add support for other popular clouds. So just to put the things in perspective, we see that these two Amazon and Azure together, they are more than two third of the, the market share right now for the ColdFusion developers. So we think that it will give us a very strong start. Uh, so confusion being a language that gives us that strength that we can put that power into the language itself, that, that you code, you just tell the behavior that you want and ColdFusion will do the, the required work for you the way it has done always, right? So we have seen that the code that you have to write to achieve something in confusion is typically less than 25% what you would need to do in Java.
Ashish Garg: 00:20:49 So, so that thing stays, that thing progresses. That's what we are trying to do. That, that to start with, we will do with uh, Amazon, AWS and Azure. There is a set of services that that would be supported out of the box. And of course, like, you know, um, we realize that still like, you know, you would have a case wherein you are trying to use a specific surveys or a specific functionality from cloud or like trying to use an enhanced, uh, sort of side of any service which may not be supported on the common platform. So that support will also be there though it will eventually lock you to the cloud. But if you go with the standard set of parameters which will be exposed across the clouds, you would be able to take the same application and this deployed on the other cloud, it would work as it is.
Michaela Light: 00:21:50 Wow. And that's currently pretty hard to do. I'm not aware of a lot of people doing multicloud, but there's a lot of desire for that because, you know, I'm sure people remember, you know, AWS was down for a few hours last year and this year has had some, uh, issues as well. Um, you know, right. You know, it's great when the cloud vendor gets it right and they're doing all the hardware and operating system updates and the it okay. But there's always a risk that there's a problem
Ashish Garg: 00:22:18 that's, that's definitely one point. And you know, the other thing is that's a trick question at times. Say what's the best architecture for a cloud? Like if you're are building an application, what's the best architecture for the cloud? And that's a trick question because the answer is the cheapest that protected, which gives me the least costs, right? Because it's cloud, right? So once you have these types of capabilities, just imagine what you can do. Actually you can run your application partly in one cloud and partly in other cloud. So if you figure out that something in Azure is cheaper, say database in Azure is cheaper while the silvers in Amazon are cheaper. So you can still deploy the application in Amazon and you can use the database service from Azure because we work with both.
Michaela Light: 00:23:13 So I think this whole situation of the multicloud where you can have your ColdFusion app at least switch between cloud vendors is very similar to how ColdFusion deals with databases. You know, if you code in generic SQL, you can have the app move between different, you know, a relation databases. If you start using, you know, special functions in Oracle, PC equal a special functions in Microsoft sequel, uh, then it's not compatible. And the same thing's going to be true here. If you keep it, you know, the common functions and you use this abstraction layer that you're providing, you'll be able to switch easily. If you, uh, you know, use things that have specific tweaks, cloud vendor and they all have a myriad of services which we'll talk about later, then you're not going to be able to switch quite so easily that,
Ashish Garg: 00:24:07 that that's, that's very correct. And, and that's one side of it. The other side that I was trying to to tell was that, which is actually, which goes a little bit more than the database scenario wherein you can make your applications, which is using services from both the clouds. So because you have this abstraction, you can stay code as single application. You can do that because, because that's a, when you, when you go with a multi cloud strategy, actually you can look at, there are two ways to achieve multi cloud strategy. Like, so one is that you have a single application which would apply both in Amazon and Azure. That's one strategy, right? The second is that you have an application but it uses the best from best services or the services which are best in the individual cloud, right? So or cheap or, or maybe specific functionality. If for example, if you want to my seat, if you want to Ms Sequel server as a database which is available in Azure, but you want something else which is just available in AWS, you would be able to do that. So that's the second type of multi cloud architecture that that is coming up common. And in fact, that's what is getting a lot of traction, a lot of highlight because it really allows you to do stuff, uh, pick the stuff which is best in the, in each of the platform and still do an application working out fully, properly. So this is the kind of best of breed, uh, cloud plus where you can use waltz best from Amazon or Microsoft or Google or robust cloud services I want to use. Yeah.
New Speaker: 00:25:56 Now I think before we go into some more of these technical, uh, features in more detailed as coming in CF, uh, 2020, let's just talk about the licensing, cause I know that has been an issue with ColdFusion 2018 on the cloud. And I'm hoping, you know, you've got some plans to, you know, make licensing easier cause the current situation is, it's kind of licensed per instance I guess in 2018 and you have to like know how many instances you're going to have, which kind of defeats the whole object of having a cloud setup where you can scale up and down and you know, a lot of cloud services are priced per hour or in the case of serverless per minutes, you know, um, is there going to be more flexibility in the cloud licensing in the future?
Ashish Garg: 00:26:42 Yes. So that's that's a very good question and, and unfortunately, very complex question also. So, uh, but definitely like when CF 2020 comes out, it will have the right licensing which is suited for the cloud, uh, environment because otherwise whatever else we do, it will defeat the purpose. People will not be able to use the, the ColdFusion. So, so we are working on that. There are, uh, uh, so we, we are leaning towards an activation based model and the other granularity we are finalizing with the, with the rest of the, the compliance teams in Adobe, but we are working very, very actively towards that. This is one of the key pillar of making CFA 2020 successful. So this is a key requirement from our side, uh, to make CFO and totally successful.
New Speaker: 00:27:35 Well that's great that you're doing that. And you know, just be clear to listeners, this is really not so much of a technical issue that there are technical challenges to solve there.
Michaela Light: 00:27:44 It's more of a compliance and legal issue and keeping all the attorneys happy and keeping the European Union happy with all that privacy legislation they have that, you know, you've got to get permission if you're going to give information out on, on staff. So yes, quite right. Quite a complicated thing. So great that you'll be working on getting that done. Also I, you know, ColdFusion 2018 already on AWS already has this alley pricing model I believe.
Ashish Garg: 00:28:14 Yeah, there is an aim out am I for for cold fusion and actually it's, it's used a lot so that's, so you'll download the Ami and the licensing and everything that pricing is built into that emi pricing so you don't have to buy licenses yourself
New Speaker: 00:28:37 Well I think we should move on to some of these new cool features coming in. So, uh, I know one of them is a better monitoring in the cloud cause you're just introduced in 2018 the performance monitor tool set.
Michaela Light: 00:28:54 Um, is that going to expand out into the cloud? So you can monitor your whole cloud cluster that's scaling up and down and you know, I can imagine it's quite a headache to monitor that when you, you don't know how many servers you're going to have.
Ashish Garg: 00:29:06 Yeah, it is. And a other scope will fit scope of performance monitoring tool set or PMT as we call it internally. The scope of that is going to explain a lot. So not just the sowers or the cold fusion services that it shows right now. It'll have to start showing the stuff from the cloud services as well, like say, just imagine some sort of integration with cloudwatch for Amazon and equivalent for Azure. So it would if, say you are using, uh, you using SQS, so it would show you the stats for sq as so that you can monitor your application and doin in the BMV itself.
Michaela Light: 00:29:47 And that w would, is that gonna be centralized for all the cluster that you're running in the cloud?
Ashish Garg: 00:29:53 Right, right. So that's what, that's a model PMT follows today also. Like if you're able to cluster so you can monitor your cluster, uh, at one place. So it will follow the same same paradigm. So you have an application in the cloud, which is basically a cluster. So you would be able to monitor the entire cluster.
Michaela Light: 00:30:11 Wow. And will that work with, you know, Kubernetes or other orchestration software, you know, where it automatically scales,
Ashish Garg: 00:30:20 right? It will, yes.
Michaela Light: 00:30:23 Great. And then I know that the performance monitor already has some messaging stuff built in, you know, where it can alert you when there's an issue. Is that going to move forward into the cloud too or …?
Ashish Garg: 00:30:36 that we, we are, we are still elaborating that feature fully, but it's would sort of push of effort, get the notification, support and et Cetera type of thing so it can message out for you. But it can do more stuff with the notification stuff like notifying, uh, using the notification engines that these cloud systems have. They can push out many more things.
Michaela Light: 00:31:03 Now, I, I know I saw Elishia (Dvorak) give a demo of the performance monitoring tool set at CF summit east and there were all kinds of cool features where you could drill down if there was an issue happening, you could find out which piece of code or which sequel statement or which server in your cluster was causing. The problem is that they're going to be that kind of a handful of there. Cause I know that's an issue currently with cloud deployment, you know, that's an issue. You're like, you know, these servers spin up and down and you know, maybe the server dies, you know, and it gets automatically restarted by the orchestration software but you, it's sometimes hard to get a handle on exactly what's happening inside each license.
Ashish Garg: 00:31:46 Right. So, so that's what, so all those have to be part of the PMT because using the PPM, they should be a one stop shop for figuring out all the issues with your applications and and B, it either the functional side or the or the performance side or anything. But it should be able to give you the very detail level of diagnostics. So that you can take it back to your application and fix it.
Michaela Light: 00:32:15 Great. Well that's really exciting because you know, we will want to go to the cloud to get all those scaling and um, costs issues and better technology. But if you can't keep control of the application, it's a little bit like that Disney fantasia scene where Mickey Mouse, you know, conjures up police, different, you know, a cleaning. And if you've seen this movie, he does, he, he learned some magic. He doesn't learn it very well and he ends up with millions of brooms and mops getting out of control. [inaudible] happening. You're seeing that can happen in the cloud cause you've got all this ability to scale up. But like, right. You know, if you can't monitor it and log it, it's hard to know what the heck's going on up there. Now speaking of logging, is there are going to be some way to, to, you know, currently call fusion logs a lot of things, but how will that work in the cloud? So logging like we are, uh, we are evaluating or strategies. So one of the parts is to go our dedicated logging service along with cold fusion. But you know we got [inaudible] and we, we know that there are dedicated services like Splunk, they are doing a good job on the logging part of it.
Ashish Garg: 00:33:34 So the way we are thinking right now and for the specifically for the logging, like this is a little at least stage, but how it may evolve as we go is that we give something on the logging but we also give a good integration with the established logging services like Splunk and all. So when you're deployed in the cloud you bring in your Splunk count and we can send all the logs to the Splunk also. So because doing the logging is easier, but building the visualization part of it, like you know when you have to get into that, that massive amount of data and find something and do some visualization on top of that, that becomes a very hard problem. And, and we know, we understand, we acknowledge that there are players who have done it. They have already had a good head start on this.
Ashish Garg: 00:34:28 So and being on cloud we have to be, that's another beautiful part of cloud that there are so many services actually which you can use to assemble your solutions. So, so that's the other uh, aspect that, you know, we can, we will look into but there are so many things that we are doing. So some of them are ahead in terms of elaboration. Some of them they are yet to take off. So logging is, is, is yet to take off fully.
New Speaker: 00:34:56 So and, and how does the API manager fit into that? We'll then move into the cloud too cause that's a really cool feature that a lot ripe we'll haven't really checked out in CF 2018 to monitor and control your API. You, you say
Ashish Garg: 00:35:10 yes. And you know it becomes even more relevant because we want to be very, very strong on the micro, on the container side, like the microservice side.
Ashish Garg: 00:35:21 So microservices, the, the founding principle for any microservices are, the API is like, you assemble a bunch of functionality with an but baroque microservices, which is every one of them are bringing their own APIs. So APA manager can play a very, very central role in that like as an orchestrator of the API APIs. So there are these bunch of microservices which are very tight on my confusion, deployed in a container service on Amazon or Azure. And then you manage the API via the API manager. So that also will be deployable today. All of that is deployable on, on, on the cloud. But we think that the role of more than the functionality of the features, the role of API manager is going to become even more critical when you build this microservice based application.
Michaela Light: 00:36:15 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If your whole application is basically a bunch of API, it's whether they're private or they're exposed publicly. Um, you know, your application could get, if you have a public API, you could be being hammered by someone misusing your API. You've really gotta, you know, keep track of that. And right, not only is that affecting performance, but if you've got this in the cloud and it's also scaling, you suddenly end up with an enormous cloud bill if you didn't pay attention to that.
Ashish Garg: 00:36:43 exactly. So all the, all the throttling or monitoring or measuring. So that's why it becomes even more relevant when we go to the cloud, when we go to the microservice architecture.
Michaela Light: 00:36:57 So let's, let's move on to containers because a lot of people are moving to containers. Um, is cold fusion going to, you know, now more fully support containers like docker, uh, for coding, right,
Ashish Garg: 00:37:11 right. So the, at present, like what's the biggest challenge for developing a microservice, uh, application on container? The basic talent is the size. So ColdFusion is so big that it just doesn't fit into the container. And then because it's big, it takes a while to start, which defeats the whole purpose because in a container it should be able to start up very fast because you get a burst of load and bunch of containers should spawn automatically so that the load is shared and they work perfectly. But so that's like, you know, uh, again, just like the way we talked about licensing, one of the foundational change that we are trying to bring into ColdFusion is we are trying to make it modular. So at present you get a full server as a single unit or in classical terms, cigarette monolith. What we are trying to do right now and that's where we are making a lot of progress because that's a foundational thing that can be divide cold fusion into certain modules.
Ashish Garg: 00:38:20 And when you are sort of, when you are done coding and when you are want to deploy at that time, it just assembles and uses only the, the modules which are referred in your code. So one example, if you're not using that document functionality, there is no reason why the cord and the classes for pdf, uh, are the CF doc tag should be bundled for you and make your rent time heavy or the overall startup time heavy. That services no longer required, right? So, so that's, that's one foundational thing that we are doing right now. So there would be a CF core, which is required or you can say the core sia front time. And then there would be certain modules which you can, uh, you would be able to assemble your run time only for the functionality that you're using in your code. So usually as microservice is a small functionality.
Ashish Garg: 00:39:18 It's not that, you know, you're writing a lot of the projects or a lot of functionality into that. It could be a lot of logic, but the overall functional pointwise it may not be too many, it should not be too many. So it would use something which is, which is like really, really specific to a, to a task. And then you know, you can just build a cold fusion run time, which is specifically for that task. It would be very small, it would start up very fast and that's where it would start supporting the microservice or the containers much more, uh, in a much more fuller way or in a much more, uh, uh, stronger way.
Michaela Light: 00:39:56 That is great. And you know, we've, we've had several podcast episodes about using containers, so link close in the show notes, but briefly why should developers be looking at using containers for their applications was what's the benefit from the development point of view?
Ashish Garg: 00:40:16 So the biggest benefit is uh, you know, you just take a small slice of functionality and you code it in one place and you assemble the entire functionality by having these small small services and they are called microservices and then you just deploy them into their own containers. It's just like, you know, you take a small functionality and tell that, hey, this is your home, this is where you can expand. Like if you have more load, more containers will come in, but you really don't have to worry about rest of the things.
Ashish Garg: 00:40:53 The biggest advantage is like how you can divide your work and second how you can maintain it. So if this small function, if some functionalities changing, then you can just change that microservice and deploy it and test it. And the interface between these microservices is always a rest based API. So you test the API. If the API is working, you can be sure about the entire functionality working unlike monolith wherein you don't basically, you cannot be sure where all that code would have changed and what all you should test to make sure that that application, nothing has been broken in application. So that's why it's a big day for programmers that not just it gives them much more sort of, or do you call it, identity into the changes that they are bringing in. It also gives them a lot of agility. I, let me take the negative side of it. Right? So suppose your application is built using 200 microservices on 50 microservices. You chain some microservice and but the thing is like the change is not right. So you can just take out that in very easily because you can take out the new Newburn and just deploy the old build for that microservices. Out of those 200 microservices, hundred and 99 have not been even touched, just one has been touched. So you can be very, very certain about the impact of change that you're making. And if something goes wrong, it's very, very easy to bring back to, to roll back the system and to the previous state. So in a funny way, like that's what we were thinking. Like say Amazon, it's such a huge site, right? It never goes down. It keeps on working. Don't they have bugs? Of course they have bugs. So that's the model they follow like so the entire site is built up of uh, I think some, some massive number of microservices and they follow this continuous integration CIC pipeline. So the developer checks that code text in the Gourd, the automation process and that it's deployed to production automatically. If anything goes wrong, they just redeploy the previous version. That's it. So they, they can be more risk taking also, they really don't have to go through this long QE cycle to, to validate something and then push it to production. You can be far more risk taking. That's a speed at which you are moving forward probably becomes 10 times because you have this flexibility of deploying and if not something is not working or taking it out. So, so you build robust CIC pipeline with very, very robust automation and it gives you a lot of scalability to move forward to, to neuro scalability and lot of speed to uh, to take your reputation forward.
Michaela Light: 00:43:40 I think that's an important enterprise reason why people are moving towards containers and the cloud, right? Because the speed of business just increases every year with more technological and social changes happening. Being able to, to make, take small risks, take micro risks, raise, um, with this microservice architecture. And then because you've got the automation where it automatically tests out, it can spin up a test server in the cloud, automatically test it out and run a bunch of automated tests on it, and then you're comp more confident than that. Yes. It's going to work well. And I think that's one of the other band.
Michaela Light: 00:44:20 Yeah. It's people see of the cloud that instead of that having the physical hardware or even the virtual servers with containers, you know, that the configuration of your cold fusion, uh, is the same between development and production production and all that. Yeah. Yeah. So, Yup. And you know, I know with the people using tools like command box, you know, you can spin up a new cold fusion instance, um, you know, in a container in seconds. So, um, you know, compare that to how long it takes to, to install on, on, you know, physical hardware, its, which could be days, uh, by the time you've ordered the hardware and got it set up. Right. So a major advantage for developers and uh, enterprises here. Yeah. So, um, you're gonna for the installation, you're going to have a whole new installer here I guess. Yes, right? Yes, yes. Currently cove isn't cold fusion quite, you know, on the heavy side, you know, it's about a [inaudible] story. What's your goal for, you know, these micro uh, installations?
Ashish Garg: 00:45:31 So the goal for having the, the core and time is like, we imagined that it would be somewhere like a hundred, 250 MB maybe. Um, we are still, you know, evaluating because we have done one pass, but then we think that we can divide it further and we can do that. We can, uh, we can make it even smaller. But for the oral thing we want to keep for in normal functionality, everything should be less than two for PMB so that it's put straight into it. And the startup time also we are will improve so that it starts in like five seconds or maybe less. So a new, the load increases, new new container comes up and it's ready to be used in like five, six, five, six seconds type of thing. That's the goal. Right.
Michaela Light: 00:46:21 Yeah, that, that's great. Um, so is this something where you know, the Dev ops people or the developers will have to figure out what features they're using and manually make this run time or will be some kind of automatic scanning of the code to see what tags are used, what the functions inside your CF script used?
Ashish Garg: 00:46:43 Yup. So at present we are shooting for the automated mode. Like, so you just innovate. You will say that for the lack of any better term, I'll say the screen, my package, which I can deploy on the container. So it will just scan your code, build your application, build your world fusion on time or that application and you will have a package that you can go and deploy on your container. So that's the vision that we have for [inaudible].
Michaela Light: 00:47:10 So that's a bit similar to the node packet manager that automatically pulls stuff in when it detects.
Ashish Garg: 00:47:16 Right, right, right. So, so something like that though, we are not going to use a npm, we are looking at something else. So we, but we are working on that and but it would be in terms of if you want to draw similarities, yes it would be something like that.
Michaela Light: 00:47:34 So this is really advanced stuff and this will tie in with your automated continuous integration, continuous development tools like Jenkins or what are the next Jenkins. Right,
Ashish Garg: 00:47:45 right. So there would be more, uh, support on the CIC pipeline side. So if you are using Jenkins for your ca CD pipeline, there would be more tools and, and, and commands and everything for making this process automated. So from the Checkin to the deployment, you should be able to automate the entire stuff.
Michaela Light: 00:48:09 Now. Now this brings up a question, you know, some of the things in cold fusion, you said in the cold fusion Admin, where will that now be? Scriptable so that when you're creating these containers you can, yes, that's great. That alone is an a major improvement that um, right, so you can have some script and I'm guessing that script will be called fusion script, I hope.
Michaela Light: 00:48:33 Huh? Yeah. So, uh, again we are looking at, so generally we would try to give the script in a way which is much more palatable for the Dev ops engineer, right? So the devops in the units typically are not ColdFusion developer. So they, they have, so we are trying to see that it is very, very close to the language or the tools or the technologies that they work with. Uh, so that's what we're trying to do.
Michaela Light: 00:49:05 But now talking, talking, that makes sense. Now, talking of CF script, what, what changes are you going to make to the language she CF stripped gonna change in some way
Ashish Garg: 00:49:16 it will change in a big way. So that's like in the vision I talked about a modern platform and we believe that, uh, a CF script is now a long overdue for modernization. So we are, uh, we are making politicians crib, we are an end. We are internally, we are calling it CF strip to dot. Oh. We are making it ECMAScript compliance. So the syntax and the usage and everything would be very, very, uh, it would be ECMAScript compliance. So for the practical purposes it would be very, very close to how you do java script or any other popular scripting, web scripting language, uh, this not just we'll make it modern, but, uh, it will also allow, uh, more developers to adopt ColdFusion very easily because, uh, anybody who has coded with Java script or or such, they will be able to code into, into ColdFusion also very easily, uh, in, in the cloud pled in the, uh, one.
Ashish Garg: 00:50:28 This polyglot programming is also a very common term. I don't know if you have heard about it or know. So which basically say that you can build your application using multiple languages. Like you really don't have to go that classical way of finding out the entire stack that you want to use for your application and just, uh, use that. But you build your application using the, the technology which is much more easier for you. And again, say a zoom again, if you are doing microservices and microservices are interacting with each other using rest API. So does it matter which language that microservice was developed now? So you can end up with a system where an out of 50 20 microservices are developed using no 20 applications are developed using ColdFusion. So that gives us a lot of flexibility. So you can pick the language which is right for the job or the best for the job and create the, the application microservice in that.
Ashish Garg: 00:51:31 So ColdFusion will become very competitive there because now we know that cold fusion in terms of the oral productivity, ColdFusion is right at the top. You can develop an application, you know, probably in, in almost one fourth time or one third time of, of uh, what it would take in any other, any of the platform like Java or anything. So that's where like, you know, even with the Musk, with the CF script two dot o and with the other micro surveys or the cloud based stuff that we are trying to do, you would be able to use ColdFusion in your existing applications as well and enhance the application and take their advantages over ColdFusion has giving you
Michaela Light: 00:52:13 that is great. And you know, I know one of the issues like we've seen in our state of the union annual ColdFusion [inaudible] say is difficulty in hiring ColdFusion developers. And so April you could hire anyone who already knows JavaScript unless they say anyone who is a full stack developer knows JavaScript. Um, and then they can be immediately productive in ColdFusion. I think that is great. And I think it's good for existing ColdFusion developers because instead of now having to know two languages, now, you know, you've got basically one language, which is you ha, yeah.
Ashish Garg: 00:52:46 So, but yeah, it is broadly right, which is very broadly similar. And, and not just that like, you know, if they move to ColdFusion right now, the cloud developers are in very high demand. This is probably right.
Michaela Light: 00:53:03 Very high. It's basically impossible to hire a cloud developer.
Ashish Garg: 00:53:06 Exactly. So there wasn't a certain way that 94% of the IP managers said that they, the strategy of the enterprise is moving towards cloud and they're not able to hire cloud developers. And just imagine with this one release all the ColdFusion developers, you know, getting into that pool. So the overall, in terms of upscaling, I think it's huge. It's huge. And they, they still stay, they can still do ColdFusion. They can do probably other things also. And they are doing cloud. I take it, it should be a game changer for, for the existing ColdFusion people as a newer people who are getting into the confusion because getting onto the cloud would be so easy with confusion as compared to many of the platforms out there.
Michaela Light: 00:53:56 It's much easier. I mean, you know, there's that site learn CF in a week. Uh, it really is easy to learn. And uh, now with this change to the new scripting, um, you know, many people who know Java script will be able to pick it up. Now I do have one concern here. If you've got existing CF script 1.0 for sake of calling it that code, is it still gonna run in ColdFusion 2020 or
Ashish Garg: 00:54:22 yes, of course. As I said, I'm going to also be an always backward compatible. So this CF, the existing CF scope will continue to work. If you would just going to upgrade to CF 2020 and you don't want to take the advantage of newer stuff, it will continue to work that couldn't be supported fully. There would be no change on.
New Speaker: 00:54:45 Wow. So you mentioned earlier that you'll be able to access all the Amazon and Azure services. So what are some of the cool things you'd be able to do from ColdFusion 2020 on that?
Ashish Garg: 00:54:58 Okay. So as you can imagine that this is going to be a long journey and we will have to divide it into milestones or see up 20, 20, you can say the first step towards that, which will be probably the biggest step that we are going to take in this direction because we are making it cloud capable or not. So as I said earlier also, so in the beginning called fusion 2020, we are looking at supporting Amazon and Azure as a cloud vendor in that the abstraction or the uniform interfacing will be provided for the storage services like, uh, you know, uh, all the, the storage service that like is three in Amazon and they couldn't. And, and Azure, uh, fight an, I know much more about Amazon because I have a product there. Uh, no disrespect to Azure, uh, uh, and databases, uh, like rds and, and the, uh, in AWS and uh, in Azure, no sequel services like Dynamo db or the table and, and Azure guessing services, uh, which is elastic cash, uh, on, um, on AWS. And we are also looking at like, you know, if we can support credits and all then messaging and notification messaging. Uh, we are, we are trying to start with, uh, SQS. Uh, we are because kindnesses are, is also they're on AWS and we are seeing, but we will, we will first, uh, attack the SQS one because that's the one which is used a higher than kindnesses. And finally the, the notifications, uh, and emailing services like, which is all the push notifications are the emails that we see that both of these cloud shopper. So the reasoning of choosing the service is, is that only that most of the enterprise, most of the apps which are getting very, these are the core components that all of these enterprise services use. So many, uh, enterprise services can be, uh, so many services or so many applications can be built by just using them. The, the, the usage of the rest of the services on Bordeaux clouds, they are very, very, it's very, very specific. So in the first go and in 2020 we want to come out with this and then we will, we'll be very aggressive in adding rest of the stuff to the, to the floor or to, to, to the, to the culture. Um, so I know we only got a few minutes left. Let's just briefly talk about configuration and serverless. So, right. W what do you changing on configuration? Okay, so the configuration, the, the, one of the challenges that we know that all the ColdFusion administrator pays is that they have multiple ColdFusion servers, but they want to keep the configuration same. So, but ColdFusion today does not have any centralized configuration server, our configuration repository or whatever you might want to call it. So we are looking at ways to push, uh, a configuration to each of the server. So if you have a bunch of servers in your cluster and they want to push a configuration to all the servers, you should be able to do that. So that's one big thing, uh, that we are trying to do, uh, on the, on the, yeah, that, that, that's what you asked right? On the contribution here. Yup. And then, okay, what about serverless? Because that's like the current final frontier. That's the frontier.
New Speaker: 00:58:42 Yeah. We're just running Lambert functions or you know, and you're just being charged for the CPU. This, the server doesn't even, you don't even care where the server is or what the hardware is. Our vendor deals with all of that. You just care that your code gets from efficiently charged a second of use on it.
Ashish Garg: 00:59:02 Right. So then also the modularization better that I spoke about. That plays a key role because it will give the barebone ColdFusion is on time to run your function because generally on the several less what you run is a function. Like it's not a big piece of code or anything. Run a function which does a specific task. So, so the whole modulation will help you, a will help confusion to get into the server less space. Uh, so it, because it has two parts, like the starting the gold lose useless. Oh, okay. I can hear you. All right. Oh, okay. Well let's hope it recorded. Okay. Okay. Okay. I can say it again. I can say that. Yes, I was just saying that though. Old Modular ideation bit that will help us in moving to the server less space, uh, because it will give us that tiny run time that is required to run the code on the server, less, uh, systems like lambda. And um, um, that's where we will be. So, so the, the whole modularization Britt is, is being taken care that it should be really, really working for the serverless piece as well.
Michaela Light: 01:00:15 Fabulous. So just to sum all this up, how do you feel about this whole CF 2020 visions?
Ashish Garg: 01:00:23 Incredibly excited. I just gone tell you like, you know how, sorry, sorry, again the battery. So I feel incredibly excited. Uh, I, I have a huge respect for convene as a product because I saw it going through all the stages, uh, throughout my career because I was associated with Jaron between 2002 to 2006 and, and ColdFusion six game in between and all that. And I have, uh, though not directly responsible for cultivation at that time, but I have, uh, sort of grown up alongside confusion. And for me seeing called vision, taking such a hugely is so exciting. And I, I believe that this is the push that ColdFusion need to become even more competetive and to, to become even more relevant. We briefly touched upon this thing that 24 years old history and so many things have come up and gone and some of those things actually even written very high on the height cycle and still they went out and ColdFusion is still thriving. 70% of the fortune 500 companies using cold fusion for their application development and the number of customers are still growing for confusion. So for me, doing all these things, thinking not just from the newer customer or the newer frontiers doing this thing for the existing ColdFusion users or the people who believe in confusion, it's so, so exciting. Like, you know, I just can't explain it in words, but I'm really thrilled. Margaret.
Michaela Light: 01:02:11 So, um, I know you're gonna be at CF summit west in Las Vegas in October. So if anyone's interested in this, a, is it okay to come up and talk to you about this [inaudible] summit?
Ashish Garg: 01:02:23 I would love to, you know, I, it, I would love to talk to people. I would love to talk to interact with anyone who has any question about ColdFusion, who has any idea about ColdFusion that we can take forward. So I would love to sit down and, and discuss and debate about this vision and, and this effort that we're putting on ColdFusion. Uh, I'm really passionate about it.
Michaela Light: 01:02:51 Well, that's great. And uh, you know, I know people can reach out to you. Uh, what, what's the best way for people to reach you online?
Ashish Garg: 01:02:59 The best way for me is my email address so people can write to me. And, uh, I, uh, my linkedin profile, like, you know, if they want to get connected with me and also they can do so by linkedin. I am not so much present on rest of the social media, like Facebook and all. I have my profile, but I'm not so much there. So on the social media, I think linkedin is the best way. Uh, or for one on one conversation. Uh, email is best way because you know, I'm based out of India. So for most of the people that time zone may not work very nicely. So, uh, email is the best way to reach out to me. And then, you know, we'll take the conversation from where you get together the way we are talking now so we can set up some time and talk about ColdFusion. So we'll put your linkedin profile and your email in the show notes so people can reach out to you. Um, and um, we'll look forward to seeing you at uh, CF summit. Very exciting this year. Um, last year there were like roughly 500, uh, CMS developers, right? CEOs, other folks there.
Ashish Garg: 01:04:18 It was the biggest ever, right? Yeah, the biggest ever. And again, that's what keeps on e, you know, we keep on, we keep on wondering and we get one. If we keep on feeling humble, that in spite of 24 years of age, still it is growing. We are, we are able to grow the product. We are able to grow the revenue. We are able to grow the excitement, like 500 people coming in to attendance and probably like, you know, this year in a CF summit west, we are launching the ColdFusion certification program.
Michaela Light: 01:04:46 So people can the Elishia Dvorak, uh, all about the details of that very excited, right training. So like the episode two on that as well. Um, so lots of exciting things happening. I'm really, uh, interested in how Adobe is moving forward with co and really making it a more alive this year with all these micro services and multicloud, uh, improvements that we talked about today. So fabulous. Well, I know you've got to go home for dinner. It's pretty late there in India. Uh, uh, so, uh, thanks so much for coming on to the CF alive podcast and look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas.
Ashish Garg: 01:05:30 Sure. And thank you so much for giving me this opportunity. It is really wonderful communicating with you and I really enjoyed this show. Thank you so much.
