Complex Workload Deployment with Will Stewart

Deploying and managing cloud workloads is a complex task that requires developers to handle infrastructure, scaling, CICD pipelines, and database hosting. Configuring and maintaining Kubernetes, ensuring smooth deployments, and integrating various services efficiently is a common challenge. Will Stewart is the cofounder and CEO of NorthLink, which is a platform focused on streamlining application deployment and management. In this episode, he joins the show to talk about the contemporary challenges and solutions around workload deployment. This episode is hosted by Sean Falconer. Check the show notes for more information on Sean's work and where to find him. Will, welcome to the show. Hi, Sean. Great to be here. Yeah. Thanks for doing this. I'm looking forward to it. You know, I was digging into your background a little bit, and it seems like, you know, outside of some time that you spent in university, most of your career has been sort of, like, founding companies. I'm trying to choose, like, what has been that interest in being a founder, and how did you go from where you grew up to essentially now founding and running a major infrastructure company? That's absolutely true. Most of my professional life have been a founder. Whilst at school, I was always trying to work on-site projects, deploying game servers, trying to build a game server hosting platform whilst at university. And then we realized that myself, my cofounder, that potentially that was an opportunity for us to do full time. We want to take on that opportunity. And during my university years, we learned how to program and iterating on things we're being able to source like Rancher and Mesos. And we were able to really start pushing the boundaries with container deployment, post the university as a side project. And then we saw us think, do we want to get full time jobs, or could we build a company? Could we build a platform? And we were having a look, you know, could we join an accelerator program? And there was an accelerator in Europe called the family, And that really put us on a journey of building a startup and meeting the right people. So for transforming for me, I was in a small city in the North Of England called Lincoln. There isn't much of a technology hub, especially in technology. It's the home for the Magna Carta and the the birthplace of the tank in World War one, but it doesn't have sort of a core software engineering history. So being able to join this accelerator and learn what building a startup was all about, it was great for myself and my cofounder Fred went to university in Switzerland, and just always been interested in side projects and building. And then on during university, I studied IT management for business, which gave me optionality in starting with a little bit of business, little bit of computer science. And during my third year of university, I joined up as a placement …