Solving the Enduring Pain of Authorization | Aserto’s Omri Gazitt

**Omri Gazitt** (0:00)
We asked ourselves, what's still hard to do as developers? And you still find that access control is one of those things that doesn't make your beer taste any better, right? You need it.
It's like cost of doing business, you have to have it if you have a business application, but it's not like it's differentiating in any way. And so it's just like toil, that if you could actually go build a set of tools for developers, you could save them a lot of the hassle of building it, and you could actually help them build it correctly.

**Adam** (0:29)
Producer Adam here. Conor, what is your favorite thing about in-person interviews?
The energy that you get at a live event is second to none. And I love the input you get from community members.
Sure, remote interviews do work great, but they miss some of that spontaneity that you can get in person. I know exactly what you mean, which is why there's something that I think we should tell our audience about. We do have some exciting news. Dev Interrupted is going on the road to Lead Dev New York March 14th and 15th. We're bringing back the Dev Interrupted Dome to do a series of live interviews with key leaders while we're in New York City. Best of all, we'll be doing a live streamed episode of the podcast with special guest Nick Cobb, who's head of product and engineering at Kite at 8 a.m. Eastern on March 15th. Dan Lines will be joining me as we interview Nick about the AI behind self-driven cars, on-demand vehicle platforms, and why Uber, controversy, has lost its product innovation DNA. So mark your calendars for March 15th from 8 a.m.

**Dan Lines** (1:25)
to 9 a.m.

**Adam** (1:26)
Eastern. You're not going to want to miss this.
Register for the live stream today and we'll put a link in the show notes. And if you're in New York and you want to come say hi to the Dev Interrupted team, we'd love to meet you.

**Dan Lines** (1:36)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host Dan Lines, and today we're joined by Omri Gazitt, co-founder and CEO at Aserto.
Omri, welcome to the show.

**Adam** (1:50)
Thanks, great to be here.

**Dan Lines** (1:51)
Yeah, awesome to have you.
Now you have a really cool background. I checked out your background a bit. You've worked at a lot of big name companies, a few of them like Microsoft, HP, Puppet, which is a really cool company. I guess you had a front row seat there with their transition to the cloud. You have great insight into what works and what doesn't work. I think you founded maybe a few companies, definitely Aserto, which is an authorization company that we're going to get into and talk about today.
But before we go into all of that and things around authorization, your experience as a founder, we want to make sure that we get to know you a little bit better. So could you start by telling us, how did you get into engineering and how did you get to become a founder, from engineer to founder?

**Omri Gazitt** (2:44)
Well, it's kind of hard to believe, but I've been doing this for now over three decades. I started out, I was a computer science major in college and that's what I thought I'd do for the rest of my life because I love writing code. Right out of college, I met a guy who was just about to start a company and I became what's known today as a founding engineer of a startup.
That was my first one, Neon Systems, and they went public seven years later. So I called that my rose-colored tour through startup land. They're not all like that, right? No.
I didn't know that.
But I got to Microsoft and again, got super lucky in terms of timing. Joined right when we were about to start a new platform. So I was one of the co-founders of the.NET project there. And then ended up also helping start Azure, including some of the Azure services that had to do with enterprise, like Azure Access Control Service and Azure Service Bus. And of course, the Access Control Service kind of connects a lot to authorization. I left Microsoft about 10 years ago to start another company and ended up building software in open source. So OpenStack and Cloud Foundry and Docker and Kubernetes and most recently Puppet. So Aserto was really my third startup. So it's been kind of a long journey to get here, but being this my third startup, there's some things that you kind of learned from the first two, hopefully. So it gets a little easier.