Verica Partners with DISH for 5G Network – Techstrong TV
DISH Network Corporation will leverage the Verica Continuous Verification Platform (CVP) for Kubernetes and Kafka on its 5G Smart Network. Verica uses a chaos engineering approach to simulate adverse conditions, allowing DISH to proactively identify and fix software issues before customers experience connectivity disruption. Casey Rosenthal, CEO and cofounder of Verica, and Alan talk about this and more in this video interviewThe video is below followed by a transcript of the conversation.
Alan: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another TechStrong TV segment. My guest this segment is my friend, Casey Rosenthal. Casey is the CEO of Verica, and author of a great book, and all kinds of great stuff. Casey, it’s good to see you, not in person, but at least it’s great to see you.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah, great to be here. Thanks, Alan.
Alan: Absolutely. I was actually hoping, you know, next week we would all be out in San Francisco for RSA, but it looks like, you know, they pushed that June. So, hopefully by June maybe we’ll see you there in person.
Casey Rosenthal: The weather will be nice, so we have to look forward to.
Alan: That should be true. It’s usually a little chilly there in February. It’s chilly in San Francisco. You’re in Maine, so.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah.
Alan: It’s all relative.
Casey Rosenthal: Chilly’s relative, yeah.
Alan: Yeah, I mean, I’m in South Florida, so chilly takes on a whole different connotation here. But, anyway, Casey, for people who aren’t familiar with Verica, maybe we should start there.
Casey Rosenthal: Sure.
Alan: Why don’t you give them a quick Verica kind of background?
Casey Rosenthal: Sure. So, Verica is a continuous verification company. We make software in the realm of continuous verification. And that’s kind of rooted in chaos engineering, which I defined and developed at Netflix. And so, what that is is we’ve seen this evolution in the industry over the past, say, 15, 20 years as systems get bigger and more complex, the industry moved into first CI, continuous integration, where, you know, jamming everybody’s code together limited the rate at which we made bugs. And so, that allowed engineers to create features faster. So, that was continuous integration. Then, CD, and that was, you know, around 2005-ish that kind of really took hold.
And then, CD, continuous delivery, picked up and said, okay, now that we can create features faster, how do we get those features in front of customers faster. And so, continuous delivery, CD, automates the process of getting those features in front of customers faster. So, we can build the features faster, we can get them in front of customers faster; we’re moving fast. Now how do we not break things? And that’s where CV, continuous verification, comes in as kind of the third and final piece of that evolution, where we see large enterprises, you know, developing CV, continuous verification programs, or, you know, buying commercial products like Verica makes to verify that they still get the properties that they want out of a system while all of those changes are being made asynchronously under the hood.
Alan: Excellent. Excellent, excellent, excellent. That was a great, you know, definition there.
Casey Rosenthal: Cool.
Alan: Casey, well, and I’d be bereft if I didn’t mention – you guys also have a great team at Verica, you’ve got some great projects under way, and our friend James Wicket, of course. And what was the project? I interviewed, a couple months ago, when they launched it?
Casey Rosenthal: Oh, the void?
Alan: The void, yes, the void.
Casey Rosenthal: Yes. Yeah, so the void is great.
Alan: While we’re here, tell them about that, too.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah, the void is great. So, we basically started researching public incidents, publicly available data on incidents. So, you know, Facebook outages, you know, AWS outages, stuff like that, down to companies, you know, less popular and in the limelight. But, basically, we grabbed as many public resources as we could on those. Originally, for product development, for us, so that as we’re building verifications for infrastructure, we can say, all right, you know, there’s a category, a class of outages. Our software could have helped prevent that or, you know, ameliorated the effects of that particular kind of outage. But, the LFI community, the learning from incidents community, as we were sharing research with them, they were like, you know what? There’s a lot of value in this data.
So, we went ahead and made it public at thevoid.community. So, that’s the Verica open incident database, and people can contribute incidents, but we’re still developing out a research platform there where people can go and basically search incident data to find, you know, for example, information on outages on, you know, if you wanted to know about US East One going down, you could get a list of not only AWS information, but information from different journals and public sources about US East going, you know, having issues, if that, you know, hypothetically, were to ever happen. Not that anything ever happens to AWS, but.
Alan: Never.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah.
Alan: Never, in recorded history.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah.
Alan: All right. So, Casey, recent news out of Verica is around this new partnership you guys have announced. I don’t want to say more. I’m going to let you tell the story. Why don’t you tell our audience?
Casey Rosenthal: Sure. So, we recently signed a deal with Dish Cellular, so they’re launching the first large ORAN, open radio access network cellular service in the United States. And it’s just going to be a massive infrastructure launched on top of AWS. They’re heavily utilizing Kubernetes and Kafka in that set up, and Verica’s primary infrastructure modules address Kubernetes and Kafka availability and security aspects of those pieces of infrastructure. So, they came to us as their continuous verification solution to make sure that they can build out this network and, you know, verify that the business gets the business properties that they need out of the system while they’re, you know, evolving this next generation cellular network.
So, very exciting for us. Obviously, you can imagine how critical, you know, a wireless network is to, you know, everything from first responders to businesses to regular consumers. So, being a part of that journey of, you know, ensuring that call quality and all of those network services are reliable is really exciting for us.
Alan: Sure. Hey, I’m going to need you to help me out here. So, I’m not sure what an – ORAN, is that what you called it?
Casey Rosenthal: Oh, yeah, ORAN stands for open radio access network. So, it’s basically a new open source stack for delivering 5G, and it’s kind of a consortium-backed method for doing that. And so, Dish Cellular will be the first one to do that in the U.S. There’s, you know, a couple companies internationally that are rolling out similar networks, and then the rest of the industry is kind of sitting back and watching, and, if that’s successful, then, you know, it’s expected that they’ll jump in as well. The really interesting capability that Dish Cellular will be able to provide that I haven’t heard of before, at least here in the U.S., is basically they’ll be able to sell slices of 5G as private networks. So, like, you could get a sim for your company and then, you know, your company could have some amount of bandwidth, you know, even throughout – yeah.
Alan: Guaranteed. Almost like going back to selling T1 lines, except now in 5G, don’t you think?
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah, yeah, or ISDN or something like –
Alan: Right.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah, it’s, yeah, it’s –
Alan: So, are they going to sell the same bandwidth pattern over and over again, or –
Casey Rosenthal: I – I –
Alan: Just kidding.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah, I have no idea. The use cases that they spoke about with AWS, with an announcement they made with AWS last month, were use cases along the lines of if a hospital wants a secure 5G network for, you know, I don’t know, IOT devices within a hospital, they can, you know, add sim cards to those devices, and then they don’t have to establish a wifi network with routers. You know, they get the benefits of cellular and the benefits of having a private secure network.
Alan: Well, I mean, it sounds great. I mean, look, from Verica’s point of view, I guess the takeaway, though, is that, you know, this is a mass scale, right, scale, hyper-scale kind of environment, and –
Casey Rosenthal: Absolutely.
Alan: You know, for Verica to be able to perform here, it’s got to be able to perform at scale.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah, and –
Alan: And a scale that, you know, few applications will see.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah, I would be surprised if Dish Cellular wasn’t the largest or, you know, close to the largest AWS customer by the end of the year. So, this is – it’s really fun for us to be able to, you know, work on a project this big. I haven’t been, you know, that excited about such a big project since I managed the traffic team at Netflix.
Alan: Really?
Casey Rosenthal: It’s cool.
Alan: I mean, just think about that, the largest AWS customer, that says it all. Now, I would have to assume, like, if Dish Cellular jumps in here, the Verizons and the ATTs and the T Mobiles and so forth are not far behind.
Casey Rosenthal: Hey, I mean, you know, stay tuned for other announcements from us throughout the year. But, yeah, certainly we –
Alan: That would be good.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah, we’ve got a lot of interest in the telecom community, certainly, and it goes back to the criticality of phone calls. People know, I mean, you know, Verizon bet its reputation on, you know, the whole can you hear me now thing.
Alan: Can you hear me now, yep.
Casey Rosenthal: Like, reliability, yeah, reliability is their blood. So, if –
Alan: But it’s not just phone calls, to be fair. Look, the promise of 5G – I mean, phone calls work pretty good right now for the most part, much better than they did five, 10 years ago.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah.
Alan: But, you know, the promise of 5G is really we’re – in a lot of places, we’ve replaced our ethernet with wifi. But, you know what? For any of my audience out here who’s sat in Zoom calls over wifi, you know at some point you get that little dreaded the network’s become unstable –
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah.
Alan: or all of a sudden everybody freezes mid, like, mid-smile. They can’t get the, you know? And then it comes back on 30 seconds later. It’s not the end of the world, but there’s always those little gotchas, right? The promise of 5G is we’re going off of wifi. We’re going off ethernet, but we’re still going to have that depth of, you know, that wide bandwidth.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah.
Alan: But it’s with the reliability of the cellular network versus a wifi network. Or maybe it’s a little of both, you know? You have those options.
Casey Rosenthal: That’s the dream. That’s the promise.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah, that is the promise, you’re right. But, you know, you also look at – so, I’m a half glass – I’m a glass half full kind of guy. It’s not going to be tomorrow, but will it be the day after or the day after that? Yeah, I think eventually you’re going to see that kind of, you know, what’s the word? What’s Facebook new name –
Casey Rosenthal: Progress, I don’t know.
Alan: Meta, right.
Casey Rosenthal: Metaverse.
Alan: It’s all part of this metaverse, right? Who knows? We’ll see. We’ll see what happens. But, anyway, you know what, Casey? Kudos to you and Verica team, though, because it really is – I mean, I’m sure they put this through a, you know, a proof of concept and did their tests and their due diligence, and it really says something important about the Verica solution, you know, to be able to scale up like that.
Casey Rosenthal: Oh, thank you. I really appreciate it. Like you mentioned earlier, we’ve got a great team. Aaron Rinehart, James Wicket –
Alan: Aaron, yeah, I forgot to mention, yep. It is a great team.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah, Mia Cunningham runs out engineering team. Courtney Nash, who runs the void, some of your viewers might remember her from – she was responsible for content at O’Reilly, basically, the books and the conferences, back when they were doing Velocity. So, it’s –
Alan: It’s a great team.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah, knock on wood. It’s a lot of fun.
Alan: It’s also great that you can talk about this, though, Casey. You know, I remember back in my days at Still Secure, we were provider of knack. We had a knack solution. And, you know, our biggest knack customers were in the DOD, some three letter agencies. And, you know, I would go to a Gartner conference and the Gartner analysts would be up there with one of our competitors talking about a knack implementation at a financial institution for 10,000 end points. And the Gartner guy was saying this is, by far, the largest knack implementation in the world and it show how scalable Vendor A is. And I know I’m on a network with 400,000 nodes doing knack, right? 10,000 is baby crap compared to what I’m dealing with over here. But we’re not allowed to say anything. You know, I’m just sitting there shaking my head because we can’t say anything.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah.
Alan: But, you know, the fact that you can talk about this is great.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah, yeah. I agree, and that’s a credit to Dish. They’re really doing a lot of great work to get the word out about how, you know, cutting edge their implementation is. And so, to be, you know, a part of that, and to be able to talk about it, I mean, it just helps everybody, you know? It helps keep the enthusiasm going, it helps attract more bright people to the hard problems.
Alan: Yep.
Casey Rosenthal: So, it’s really fun.
Alan: Agreed. So, hey, Case, we’re almost out of time, but, for people out here saying, you know what, if good enough for Dish, good enough for me, I’d like to find out more about this, how can they?
Casey Rosenthal: Oh, so our website, Verica.io. If people have questions about, you know chaos engineering or continuous verification, it’s pretty easy to find me online. You know, I’m Casey Rosenthal on Twitter. And if you’re interested in incident analysis, thevoid.community is the address for the void research project, and there’s our first big white paper last year, talks all about MTTR and root cause analysis and what we can know and not know about those things. So, there’s a lot of great takeaways that can influence policy, large enterprises. And, yeah, those would be the primary ways to get ahold of us. Like I said, it’s, you know, knock on wood, it’s a fun time to be working in this space.
Alan: Yeah it is.
Casey Rosenthal: Yeah.
Alan: And crazy stuff happening. Hey, man, thanks for coming on. Say hello to Aaron and James and everyone.
Casey Rosenthal: Will do.
Alan: Keep up the great work, Casey, and hopefully, fingers crossed, I’ll see you in June in RSA.
Casey Rosenthal: Hopefully, I’ll see you there, Alan. Thank you so much.
Alan: All right. Thank you. Casey Rosenthal, CEO of Verica here on TechStrong TV. We’re going to take a little commercial break and we’ll be right back with our next guest.
