In this episode of the Open at Intel podcast, host Katherine Druckman spoke with Intuit’s Henrik Blixt about his work with the CNC apps end user Technical Advisory Board, focusing on creating reference architectures to assist end users in navigating the cloud native landscape. She also fanned out over his role as an Argo maintainer as they reflected on the project's growth and impact. Enjoy this transcript of their conversation.
“There aren't really, out of the thousands and thousands of end users out there, not that many are going to be the scale of Apple, for example. We need to make sure that we have reference architecture that also caters to everyone else.”
— Henrik Blixt, Group Program Manager, Intuit
Katherine Druckman: Hi Henrik, thank you for joining me. I know you're super busy, so thank you for taking the time.
Henrik Blixt: Of course. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Katherine Druckman: Thank you. I would love it if you could tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Discussion on Argo and Developer Tools
Henrik Blixt: My name is Henrik Blixt. I'm a product manager at Intuit. I run one of our platform engineering product management teams. My team is responsible for anything that touches Kubernetes, service mesh, API gateway, API management, but also things like our build platform. We have some remote development cloud workspaces, Argo of course, and a couple of other things. We're part of the developer organization, development experience organization at Intuit. We're about 600 engineers in total. We do all the product management that needs to happen to make that a product organization.
Katherine Druckman: Awesome. Big fan of Argo, by the way. Very lovely developer experience. In my previous life, I was a user of it quite a bit, so I'm a big fan.
Henrik Blixt: I'm glad to hear that. I'm also an Argo maintainer, so that warms my heart.
Katherine Druckman: Software engineering is fun and exciting, but there can be a lot of drudgery, and we use a lot of tools along the way. When a tool is a little bit more joy to use than another one, that sticks in your mind, and I carry that with me and I have positive feelings about that project.
Henrik Blixt: And we have a really cute mascot too.
Open Source Community Involvement
Katherine Druckman: And you have the cute mascot. It does not hurt. I mean, even just like the UI, it's nice. It's very user friendly. Argo aside, tell us a little bit more about your open source community involvement. You're here because we were connected based on your work in the end user Technical Advisory Board.
Henrik Blixt: Yes. It just rolls off the tongue.
Katherine Druckman: Yes, with the CNCF. And tell me a little bit about that. I am not so familiar with that program.
Henrik Blixt: It's more than a program because I think everyone in CNCF is familiar with the governing board and the TOC. They've been staples of CNCF for a long time. But then CNCF realized that there is a need for a stronger voice and more room for end users within CNCF. So, about a year ago, they created the technical advisory board, which is basically a group of end user technologists from various end user companies across CNCF that help drive technical decisions, be a strong end user voice in the community and CNCF, and help foster end user interests within the community. We're really here to be similar to how the product manager is the voice of the customer. The TAB is really the voice of the end users.
Katherine Druckman: That's great, and is ultimately an important voice because who are we building all of this for?
Henrik Blixt: Exactly.
Katherine Druckman: What exactly do you do in that group?
Reference Architectures and Initiatives
Henrik Blixt: We have three initiatives that we started this year. There's one thing that's been highly requested over the last couple of years from CNCF. It’s in reference to architecture because we have this massive, I think you all have seen the cloud native landscape model with …
Katherine Druckman: Absolutely.
Henrik Blixt: 500 boxes, right?
Katherine Druckman: 208 projects.
Henrik Blixt: Yes. And a bunch of other miscellaneous projects that are associated with it. But a lot of end users struggle with figuring out how to take all these 200 plus LEGO pieces and build something that actually works in production.
Katherine Druckman: Yes, I do.
Henrik Blixt: Something beautiful that I can use.
Katherine Druckman: Yes, it's nearly impossible to make a decision on a starting point.
Henrik Blixt: Exactly. And CNCF struggled a bit with that, because there's some friction in freaking out. CNCF doesn't want to recommend a project to another. Being end users, we can be a bit more pragmatic, and we have a little bit more carte blanche to do this because of the reference architectures that we're going to present, and since this is airing in a couple of weeks, I'm not giving away the thunder of my keynote tomorrow.
Katherine Druckman: No, please don’t.
Henrik Blixt: We can be a lot more pragmatic. The reference architecture that we are going to put out there for people to see and use are things that are running in production with end users. That means these are actually proven and true things that work. Along with those reference architectures will be best practices on what worked and what didn't. I think that's going to be really helpful to the end users in figuring out how to navigate the cloud native landscape.
Katherine Druckman: That is fantastic.
Henrik Blixt: I think we're going to build a hub where people can come in and learn a lot from what other end users have done.
Katherine Druckman: It's fabulous to have that practitioner perspective.
Henrik Blixt: Exactly. And the fact that our end users give us that leeway and that cover to do whatever we want, because you can't argue with what we have running in production, right?
Katherine Druckman: Absolutely. So, you're providing people with a collection of blueprints effectively. How many are there as a starting point?
Henrik Blixt: We have two right now, so we just had a soft launch. We have two in the hub or in the directory now. But we're hoping to grow this, because there's a lot of figuring out governance.
Challenges and Solutions for End Users
Katherine Druckman: Sure.
Henrik Blixt: All the things around this.
Katherine Druckman: Human problems, yes.
Henrik Blixt: Exactly. It takes a while to get the frameworks figured out and settled. I think now we have this, we can start scaling it up, and now we'll talk about this and announce this more in the keynote tomorrow, which will be a couple of weeks ago when you hear this.
Katherine Druckman: Are you planning to issue these by vertical, by use case? What do I go looking for?
Henrik Blixt: Yes.
Katherine Druckman: Yes, all of those things. You're going to do everything.
Henrik Blixt: All of those things.
Katherine Druckman: We're going to solve all the problems.
Henrik Blixt: It also depends. We're not going to make things up. The important thing here is that these are real.
Katherine Druckman: Real production examples.
Henrik Blixt: Exactly. We need to work with other end users and have them see the value of providing their reference architecture.
Katherine Druckman: That's great.
Henrik Blixt: The TAB is not going to make ones up. It’s also going to depend on who submits a reference architecture. Our goal is to have a very representative spread across technologies and types of infrastructure, cloud or on-premise or verticals and size of companies. People can go in and search and look for something that fits their situation. But like I said, we're starting small, we're starting with two. There's something there to look at and then we'll expand from there.
Katherine Druckman: That's very cool. It sounds like a really great opportunity, especially for people who are entering the space or creating something new or migrating from something, but really getting an opportunity to lift the hood on something that really works in the real world.
Henrik Blixt: For sure.
Katherine Druckman: From a big established company into Intuit, for example, or any other that you're working with. Who else is working in the group?
Henrik Blixt: In the TAB as a whole?
Katherine Druckman: Yes
Henrik Blixt: There's a bunch of companies. Adobe is there, BlackRock, Apple, Boeing, Allianz, Mercedes-Benz.
Katherine Druckman: So, a really good kind of cross-section.
Henrik Blixt: I think they tend to lean more towards the large companies. We're hoping once we get these reference architectures, a lot of the users of cloud native are not Intuit size.
Katherine Druckman: You want people who can identify and see themselves in that solution.
Henrik Blixt: Yes. There aren't really, out of the thousands and thousands of end users out there, not that many are going to be the scale of Apple, for example. We need to make sure that we have reference architecture that also caters to everyone else.
Katherine Druckman: What does the roadmap look like? Obviously, more and more use cases. Is there any other kind of adjacent work that supports the reference architecture?
The Importance of Product Management
Henrik Blixt: There are a couple of different initiatives. I think the reference architecture is a big one. Another thing that end users have struggled with a little bit is working with the projects. I think the projects in general.
Katherine Druckman: Just engagement.
Henrik Blixt: Engagement and feedback. I'm a product manager. I love working with users and getting feedback. But as an end user of an open source technology or project, how do you work with not just one project, but 10 projects? How do you provide them feedback? Maybe you want to give an enhancement request, but you're not really sure which project it should go to, how do you handle that? Making that feedback loop easier, making sure that there is a more structured way of giving feedback to projects. So projects can work with end users. They can go and talk to end users, maybe doing some end user studies and things like that. Providing that bi-directional mutual benefit of working together is another initiative that we have been working on over the last year.
Katherine Druckman: Very cool. Just in practical terms, how do you organize an initiative like this? How do you go about making sure you're collecting the right amount of feedback in the right areas? Are we all just guessing?
Henrik Blixt: I hope not. As a product manager, I can't say yes to that, but I think it's a little bit about being agile as well. Some of it's going to be, some of it we know because some of the things we can apply regular product metrics and good product development practices to. This works well when you develop a product. Something similar should work equally well for open source. Applying some of that product management, product operation, release management process should work. You start at least with a pretty decent hypothesis, but some of it's going to have to be just iterating and being agile and figuring out what works and fine-tune it as we go along.
Katherine Druckman: So, you're an Argo maintainer.
Henrik Blixt: Yes.
Katherine Druckman: You're heavily involved in the CNCF. So, first two questions really, and you can answer them together if you like, but what attracts you to this kind of open source community work and then how does that fit in with your work at Intuit? How much justification do you need from the business angle to do the kind of community-driven work that you do?
Henrik Blixt: I started getting into open source back in the mid-nineties in college. I found Unix when I started in college and that was love at first sight. And then just a couple of years later in the mid-nineties, I explored or found Linux. I was like, "I can run Unix at home." And it was like, wow. And this is built …
Katherine Druckman: It's like Jurassic Park.
Henrik Blixt: Yes
Katherine Druckman: This is a Unix system. I know this, sorry.
Henrik Blixt: Exactly like that.
Katherine Druckman: Yes
Henrik Blixt: Just the fact that this is built by volunteers and engineers doing this in their spare time. I grew up programming, doing assembly on my C-64's. This was built by other hobbies, just like me to run Unix at home was just mind-blowing. I was sold right away. It's like this can change my life. I've been in and out of the open source community ever since. I've been working on Linux kernel stuff; I've been doing OpenStack and Kubernetes. It's been a long journey with a lot of different things, but it's been a lot of fun.
I've been fortunate enough that now in the last four years, I've actually been able to incorporate that into my professional role as well. We use a lot of open source as Intuit, but we're also pretty pragmatic about the use of open source. Since we use so many open source projects, we want to make sure that we know what's going on in the community. We want to make sure that we have engineers that know the projects we have running in production. Some of it is figuring out standard product management, figuring out what's next for our strategy, are the open source projects that match with that? Should we start a new open source project?
Some of it's just part of my regular product management job of looking strategically at open source, existing and new projects. The other part is making sure that what we have running in our platform, are open source projects that are maintained. Is this something that maybe we need to invest in to make sure it has a future. Being a platform product manager meshes very well with open source, mostly thanks to us using so much open source. I'm very blessed and fortunate that way that I can.
Katherine Druckman: That's fabulous. I like how you put it. If it is business critical, you need to have a seat at the table.
Henrik Blixt: Yeah, exactly.
Argo Project Insights
Katherine Druckman: It's behooves you. It makes sense to me. The marriage of being a project maintainer on something like Argo and then getting heavily involved in this end user community. What can you tell us about the Argo project? I'm really excited to get to talk to a maintainer of Argo.
Henrik Blixt: I don't know what there is to say. It's the best.
Katherine Druckman: It's so great. It really is.
Henrik Blixt: The best CNCF project out there. I think we had ArgoCon yesterday, so there's a lot of exciting things there. For those that were there, saw there was the trailer to an Argo movie that's coming out.
Katherine Druckman: I saw. I didn't see the trailer actually, but I did see that there was an Argo movie. That's wild.
Henrik Blixt: Yes, there's an Argo documentary. That's really interesting and cool to see the start of Argo and how it's grown to where it is today. I think that's one really cool thing for your listeners to look at or watch because that should be out there for everyone to take a look at now. There are also some really cool projects and initiatives around Argo and Argo promotions. There's more work around some RBAC features. I think Argo has grown up as well. It's been about seven years now, and you can see how it's not getting stale. It keeps growing. Some projects you can see after a few years you've built most of the features and it's plateauing a little bit. And most of the features are there. Maintain is starting to doze off a bit because it has the functionality.
Katherine Druckman: Seven-year itch or …
Henrik Blixt: But seven years in, and we still have so many new initiatives.
Katherine Druckman: I wonder if I'd even recognize it. It's been three years I think, since I worked with it at all. And I bet I wouldn't recognize it. I bet it's much shinier and cooler now.
Henrik Blixt: It is a lot shinier. Some of the UI is still the same or very familiar at least, but I think it's definitely grown up. There's a lot more enterprise-grade features as people start to use it at scale. It's interesting to see how that has evolved at my time at Intuit as well. There's been an argument here working at Intuit, people coming up asking very super basic Argo questions or why is Intuit at KubeCon? What are you doing here too? To not going to the booth now, and you have people come up and ask this super detailed question, "How does this work under the hood in Argo? And how do I do this in Argo?" And so it's interesting to see how quickly that has changed and how quickly the adoption has been.
The Importance of Product Management
Katherine Druckman: That's very cool. Awesome. Well, is there anything that you really wanted to talk about that we haven't gotten to? Anything you're particularly excited about?
Henrik Blixt: I think we've covered the two biggest things on why I'm here: the TAB and Argo, and I think one thing, the third thing that I wanted to bring up just for general knowledge. The third thing is the product management side of my life. I think that not too many people and not many companies have actual product management in their platform organizations. I think it's really exciting how Intuit has done that and has built such a strong product management group within the platform engineering organization and how valuable that has been and how that has helped us do a lot of our platform engineering work. Because a lot of people talk about platform engineering as a product, and then they have a 300 person platform engineer team and no product managers. How do you build a product without a product?
I think that's something that I would implore your listeners to think about as well. If you're part of a platform engineering team, if you're building platform products, where is product management? I think there's a lot of really good work that my team and the product management team at Intuit has done for our platform and with Argo and other things that I think that can be replicated at many other companies as well. Don't underestimate the power of product management in platform engineering.
Katherine Druckman: That's great advice. Well, thank you so much. It's been a delight and good work on Argo. I'm a fan.
Henrik Blixt: Thank you so much.
Katherine Druckman: You've been listening to Open at Intel. Be sure to check out more about Intel’s work in the open source community at Open.Intel, on X, or on LinkedIn. We hope you join us again next time to geek out about open source.
About the Guest
Henrik Blixt, Group Product Manager, Intuit
Henrik Blixt leads a product management team responsible for the Intuit core platform, where he defines the strategy and direction that has shaped Intuit’s cloud native platform based on CNCF projects like Kubernetes, Envoy, Istio, Prometheus, Argo (and many more!) that’s used by 7000 developers and serving over 100M users.
Being a passionate member of the open source community for almost 30 years, from Linux through OpenStack and Kubernetes, Henrik is currently focused on the Argo project as a core maintainer. He also represents Intuit across other committees, like the CNOE project and the broader Linux Foundation, where he shares experiences and best practices from Intuit’s use of open source, making sure end users are heard and their pain points understood.
He loves engaging with the community and has been a prolific speaker and event program committee member across ArgoCon, GitOpsCon, Kubecon over the years. A native of Sweden, earning his B.Sc in information systems from the University of Gothenburg, he now resides in California with his family.
About the Host
Katherine Druckman, Open Source Security Evangelist, Intel
Katherine Druckman, an Intel open source security evangelist, hosts the podcasts Open at Intel, Reality 2.0, and FLOSS Weekly. A security and privacy advocate, software engineer, and former digital director of Linux Journal, she's a long-time champion of open source and open standards. She is a software engineer and content creator with over a decade of experience in engineering, content strategy, product management, user experience, and technology evangelism. Find her on LinkedIn.