How storage startup Rubrik models DevOps

On the extreme end of the DevOps spectrum, organizations collapse the development and operations teams—application and infrastructure monitoring become part of the application. The collapsed model of DevOps is a natural outgrowth of building modern, cloud-based applications. But, cloud-based infrastructures aren't the reality of today's typical infrastructure.

Recently, I sat down with the technical evangelist for storage startup Rubrik, Chris Wahl. Rubrik takes an interesting approach to helping customers adopt a DevOps strategy in protecting traditional enterprise applications.

Before talking about the solution, I think it's interesting to take a look at the culture of this small organization. Rubrik was founded in 2014, and has quickly grown to 160 employees. Wahl said the company takes a DevOps approach to managing their internal resources, and that means automation of any task that requires scale in the future.

For Rubrik, this resulted in automating even simple tasks such as user creation. When observing an administrator manually provisioning a new early employee, Wahl figuratively slapped their hand. While it only took a few minutes to manually provision the account, versus several hours to automate the process, Wahl was sure the effort would pay off in the long term.

It's this mentality that Rubrik brings to their storage management product. One of the more interesting user conference presentations I've attended was a Windows Powershell introduction delivered by Wahl. Interestingly enough, Chris helped show how to use Powershell to automate backup policies. The irony is that the product, on the surface, looks like most storage appliances.