DevOps: Tintri drives scalable app development through automation – News

Today’s companies face increasing infrastructure complexity as artificial intelligence and Kubernetes push systems to scale, putting DevOps and infrastructure teams under growing pressure to modernize systems that weren’t designed for it.

That challenge has sharpened as organizations try to balance legacy architecture, modern application development and rising security risk. Research shows that 70% of information technology and security leaders consider public cloud the riskiest part of the tech stack, while 92% of developers say they need modern platforms to innovate. Vendors such as Tintri by DDN Inc. are positioning themselves to address these gaps by focusing on how virtualized workloads are managed across increasingly hybrid environments.

“We see application modernization and application development as … the new oil of the machine,” said Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst for theCUBE. “When we think about Tintri’s involvement, you have modern infrastructure delivering intelligent VMware, [with] storage purpose-built application centric environments. That is incredibly important when we look at the research because Kubernetes adoption accelerated with a lot of this.”

Nashawaty spoke with Phil Trickovic, senior vice president of revenue at Tintri, as part of theCUBE’s coverage for the AppDev Done Right Summit. They discussed how DevOps is changing, the impact of AI on data management and Tintri’s plans for AI and automation.

This feature is part of News Media’s ongoing exploration of how enterprises are adapting infrastructure, operations and DevOps practices for AI-scale workloads. (* Disclosure below.)

The evolving role of DevOps teams

The changes in modern infrastructure, accelerated by AI and Kubernetes adoption, has transformed the role of DevOps teams. Seventy-five percent of survey respondents now use different tools to manage their ecosystems, according to theCUBE Research, which reflects the growing complexity of data management and ongoing application sprawl.

“The role of DevOps is really a hybrid role between a platform engineer and DevOps teams,” Nashawaty said. “The last thing DevOps teams want to think about right now is whether or not the infrastructure is going to work for them. So, to make that infrastructure available and working is really powerful.”

Tintri addresses these issues with a platform designed to be application- and object-aware from the ground up. Having those attributes built in saves developers time by automating parts of their integration and continuous delivery pipelines, according to Trickovic.

“We greatly simplify CI/CD pipelines,” he said. “Those flows are also changing and accelerating, and we are perfect for that. It’s still required that [developers] manage these products and … support multiple different protocols, multiple different hypervisor methodologies and, in some cases, multiple different containerization methodologies. We do all of that out of the box, turnkey.”

Infrastructure teams of highly skilled employees have been stuck managing outdated workloads while under pressure to scale applications quickly, according to Trickovic. Tintri frees them up by automating the process of managing virtual workloads.

As the role of DevOps shifts, experts predict developers will no longer need as much specialized expertise. Automation and agentic AI could take over tedious tasks, such as managing RAID sets, simplifying the overall ecosystem for developers.

“Research is showing that 67% of organizations hire generalists over specialists,” Nashawaty said. “That simplicity that these organizations are looking for, they’re pushing back to vendors to reduce the complexity and provide the simplicity, so generalists can do the work that historically [required] a specialist to do the job.”

Solving infrastructure complexity

The rapid pace of Kubernetes is exposing gaps in legacy architecture. Its microservices and flexible container orchestration require data-aware environments with scalable infrastructure. Any business that hasn’t updated its data infrastructure already risks falling behind if it doesn’t modernize quickly. This, coupled with the regulatory requirements for data and AI, has left many companies in an uncertain position, where their data isn’t being harnessed or protected. A recent study suggests that 80% of critical data resides on-premises, while another report shows that 70% of firms protect less than half of their AI-generated data.

“If data has to reside in-country, it has to reside in certain cloud environments,” Nashawaty explained. “There’s also the growing demand for simplicity across distributed environments.”

Tintri provides full-stack intelligence to protect Kubernetes environments and disaggregated systems as users scale up their applications. In addition, the platform’s aforementioned object awareness supports both hypervisor and container environments, enabling developers to work with much greater operational efficiency.

“We were very lucky because we were designed for object awareness at the lowest level that is extended into what you’re doing with containers,” Trickovic said. “That’s required to do any of this at scale and at an expense that’s tolerable and actually profitable for businesses to deploy.”

One way Tintri tackles infrastructure complexity is by using predictive analytics, which estimates the compute power needed for a customer’s application. A common challenge companies face is scaling applications when infrastructure hasn’t been fully modernized. Apps that work with fewer customers can slow down or crash when faced with larger numbers.

“What I have seen a lot of is people make an absolutely amazing application … works great for four people, doesn’t work at all for 4,000,” Trickovic said. “I’m asking the audience not to slow down but kind of pause for a second, look at are you doing things the most efficient because they’re really going to matter when you launch it to the point of detriment.”

Tintri’s AI-ready storage solutions

AI is changing the life cycle of applications. Faster, more streamlined pipelines are required to manage the large amounts of data needed to fuel AI models, and that increased data access introduces new security challenges. Those infrastructural gaps must be addressed for any company looking to automate its workloads.

“You need to have that automation and data-driven platform that really does play a critical role in simplifying the day-zero to day-two operations,” Nashawaty said. “Also, enabling DevSecOps teams and optimizing performance, scalability and security across the entire outpatient lifecycle.”

Tintri began as the first AI-enabled operating system on the market. Now, the company’s role in enterprise AI centers on supporting scalable application development and updating IT with AI and automation services. The goal is to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs for customers as they implement AI into their workflows, according to Trickovic.

“Our predictive analytics will take [developers’] workload, so if they’re developing an app that’s got 20 users and they have to scale to 200 users, our AI engine will go out, scan all resources, available CPUs … and come back and recommend, ‘OK, you want to add 100 users,’” he said. “It will tell you horsepower-wise exactly what you need.”

So what is Tintri’s roadmap for the next year of AI innovation? Tintri signed a deal to be an OEM provider for Platform9 Systems Inc., supporting real-time VMware migration, and it announced the general availability of VMstore T7290. It plans to develop more tools for automating virtualized workloads and implementing AI into CI/CD pipeline management.

“The new apps that are coming out, to be developed from the ground up with an AI engine and an AI platform, are going to crush any other application that’s doing similar functions, period,” Trickovic said. “And you’re not going to do legacy stuff. It’s not going to happen. You’ll never be able to manage, produce and deploy it at scale.”

Here’s Trickovic’s recent video interview, part of theCUBE’s coverage of AppDev Done Right Summit:

(* Disclosure: Tintri is a sponsor of theCUBE’s AppDev Done Right Summit. Neither Tintri nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

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