>> Announcer: theCUBE presents "Kubecon and Cloudnativecon Europe 2022" brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE coverage of Kubecon 2022, E.U. I'm here with my cohost, Paul Gillin. >> Pleased to work with you, Keith. >> Nice to work with you, Paul. And we have our first two guests. "theCUBE" is hot. I'm telling you we are having interviews before the start of even the show floor. I have with me, we got to start with the customers first. Enterprise Architect Adnan Khan, welcome to the show. >> Thank you so much. >> Keith: CUBE time first, now you're at CUBE-alumni. >> Yup. >> And Haseeb Budhani, CEO Arathi, welcome back. >> Nice to talk to you again today. >> So, we're talking all things Kubernetes and we're super excited to talk to MoneyGram about their journey to Kubernetes. First question I have for Adnan. Talk to us about what your pre-Kubernetes landscape looked like? >> Yeah. Certainly, Keith. So, we had a traditional mix of legacy applications and modern applications. A few years ago we made the decision to move to a microservices architecture, and this was all happening while we were still on-prem. So, your traditional VMs. And we started 20, 30 microservices but with the microservices packing. You quickly expand to hundreds of microservices. And we started getting to that stage where managing them without sort of an orchestration platform, and just as traditional VMs, was getting to be really challenging, especially from a day two operational. You can manage 10, 15 microservices, but when you start having 50, and so forth, all those concerns around high availability, operational performance. So, we started looking at some open-source projects. Spring cloud, we are predominantly a Java shop. So, we looked at the spring cloud projects. They give you a number of initiatives for doing some of those management. And what we realized again, to manage those components without sort of a platform, was really challenging. So, that kind of led us to sort of Kubernetes where along with our journey new cloud, it was the platform that could help us with a lot of those management operational concerns. >> So, as you talk about some of those challenges, pre-Kubernetes, what were some of the operational issues that you folks experienced? >> Yeah, certain things like auto scaling is number one. I mean, that's a fundamental concept of cloud native, right? Is how do you auto scale VMs, right? You can put in some old methods and stuff, but it was really hard to do that automatically. So, Kubernetes with like HPA gives you those out of the box. Provided you set the right policies, you can have auto scaling where it can scale up and scale back, so we were doing that manually. So, before, you know, MoneyGram, obviously, holiday season, people are sending more money, Mother's Day. Our Ops team would go and basically manually scale VMs. So, we'd go from four instances to maybe eight instances, but that entailed outages. And just to plan around doing that manually, and then sort of scale them back was a lot of overhead, a lot of administration overhead. So, we wanted something that could help us do that automatically in an efficient and intrusive way. That was one of the things, monitoring and and management operations, just kind of visibility into how those applications were during what were the status of your workloads, was also a challenge to do that. >> So, Haseeb, I got to ask the question. If someone would've came to me with that problem, I'd just say, "You know what? Go to the plug to cloud." How does your group help solve some of these challenges? What do you guys do? >> Yeah. What do we do? Here's my perspective on the market as it's playing out. So, I see a bifurcation happening in the Kubernetes space. But there's the Kubernetes run time, so Amazon has EKS, Azure as AKS. There's enough of these available, they're not managed services, they're actually really good, frankly. In fact, retail customers, if you're an Amazon why would you spin up your own? Just use EKS, it's awesome. But then, there's an operational layer that is needed to run Kubernetes. My perspective is that, 50,000 enterprises are adopting Kubernetes over the next 5 to 10 years. And they're all going to go through the same exact journey, and they're all going to end up potentially making the same mistake, which is, they're going to assume that Kubernetes is easy. They're going to say, "Well, this is not hard. I got this up and running on my laptop. This is so easy, no worries. I can do EKS." But then, okay, can you consistently spin up these things? Can you scale them consistently? Do you have the right blueprints in place? Do you have the right access management in place? Do you have the right policies in place? Can you deploy applications consistently? Do you have monitoring and visibility into those things? Do your developers have access when they need it? Do you have the right networking layer in place? Do you have the right chargebacks in place? Remember you have multiple teams. And by the way, nobody has a single cluster, so you got to do this across multiple clusters. And some of them have multiple clouds. Not because they want to be multiple clouds, because, but sometimes you buy a company, and they happen to be in Azure. How many dashboards do you have now across all the open-source technologies that you have identified to solve these problems? This is where pain lies. So, I think that Kubernetes is fundamentally a solve problem. Like our friends at AWS and Azure, they've solved this problem. It's like a AKS, EKS, et cetera, EGK for that matter. They're great, and you should use them, and don't even think about spinning up QB best clusters. Don't do it, use the platforms that exist. And commensurately on-premises, OpenShift is pretty awesome. If you like it, use it. But then when it comes to the operations layer, that's where today, we end up investing in a DevOps team, and then an SRE organization that need to become experts in Kubernetes, and that is not tenable. Can you, let's say unlimited capital, unlimited budgets. Can you hire 20 people to do Kubernetes today? >> If you could find them. >> If you can find 'em, right? So, even if you could, the point is that, see five years ago when your competitors were not doing Kubernetes, it was a competitive advantage to go build a team to do Kubernetes so you could move faster. Today, you know, there's a high chance that your competitors are already buying from a Rafay or somebody like Rafay. So, now, it's better to take these really, really sharp engineers and have them work on things that make the company money. Writing operations for Kubernetes, this is a commodity now. >> How confident are you that the cloud providers won't get in and do what you do and put you out of business? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. In fact, I had a conversation with somebody from HBS this morning and I was telling them, I don't think you have a choice, you have to do this. Competition is not a bad thing. If we are the only company in a space, this is not a space, right? The bet we are making is that every enterprise, they have an on-prem strategy, they have at least a handful of, everybody's got at least two clouds that they're thinking about. Everybody starts with one cloud, and then they have some other cloud that they're also thinking about. For them to only rely on one cloud's tools to solve for on-prem, plus that second cloud, they potentially they may have, that's a tough thing to do. And at the same time, we as a vendor, I mean, the only real reason why startups survive, is because you have technology that is truly differentiator. Otherwise, I mean, you got to build something that is materially interesting, right? We seem to have- >> Keith: Now. Sorry, go ahead. >> No, I was going to, you actually have me thinking about something. Adnan? >> Yes. >> MoneyGram, big, well known company. a startup, adding, working in a space with Google, VMware, all the biggest names. What brought you to Rafay to solve this operational challenge? >> Yeah. A good question. So, when we started out sort of in our Kubernetes, we had heard about EKS and we are an AWS shop, so that was the most natural path. And we looked at EKS and used that to create our clusters. But then we realized very quickly, that, yes, to Haseeb's point, AWS manages the control plane for you, it gives you the high availability. So, you're not managing those components which is some really heavy lifting. But then what about all the other things like centralized dashboard? What about, we need to provision Kubernetes clusters on multicloud, right? We have other clouds that we use, or also on-prem, right? How do you do some of that stuff? We also, at that time were looking at other tools also. And I had, I remember come up with an MVP list that we needed to have in place for day one or day two operations before we even launch any single applications into production. And my Ops team looked at that list and literally, there was only one or two items that they could check off with EKS. They've got the control plane, they've got the cluster provision, but what about all those other components? And some of that kind of led us down the path of, you know, looking at, "Hey, what's out there in this space?" And we realized pretty quickly that there weren't too many. There were some large providers and capabilities like Antos, but we felt that it was a little too much for what we were trying to do at that point in time. We wanted to scale slowly. We wanted to minimize our footprint, and Rafay seemed to sort of, was a nice mix from all those different angles. >> How was the situation affecting your developer experience? >> So, that's a really good question also. So, operations was one aspect to it. The other part is the application development. We've got MoneyGram is when a lot of organizations have a plethora of technologies from Java, to .net, to node.js, what have you, right? Now, as you start saying, okay, now we're going cloud native and we're going to start deploying to Kubernetes. There's a fair amount of overhead because a tech stack, all of a sudden goes from, just being Java or just being .net, to things like Docker. All these container orchestration and deployment concerns, Kubernetes deployment artifacts, (chuckles) I got to write all this YAML as my developer say, "YAML hell." (panel laughing) I got to learn Docker files. I need to figure out a package manager like HELM on top of learning all the Kubernetes artifacts. So, initially, we went with sort of, okay, you know, we can just train our developers. And that was wrong. I mean, you can't assume that everyone is going to sort of learn all these deployment concerns and we'll adopt them. There's a lot of stuff that's outside of their sort of core dev domain, that you're putting all this burden on them. So, we could not rely on them in to be sort of CUBE cuddle experts, right? That's a fair amount overhead learning curve there. So, Rafay again, from their dashboard perspective, saw the managed CUBE cuddle, gives you that easy access for devs, where they can go and monitor the status of their workloads. They don't have to figure out, configuring all these tools locally, just to get it to work. We did some things from a DevOps perspective to basically streamline and automate that process. But then, also Rafay came in and helped us out on kind of that providing that dashboard. They don't have to break, they can basically get on through single sign on and have visibility into the status of their deployment. They can do troubleshooting diagnostics all through a single pane of glass, which was a key key item. Initially, before Rafay, we were doing that command line. And again, just getting some of the tools configured was huge, it took us days just to get that. And then the learning curve for development teams "Oh, now you got the tools, now you got to figure out how to use it." >> So, Haseeb talk to me about the cloud native infrastructure. When I look at that entire landscape number, I'm just overwhelmed by it. As a customer, I look at it, I'm like, "I don't know where to start." I'm sure, Adnan, you folks looked at it and said, "Wow, there's so many solutions." How do you engage with the ecosystem? You have to be at some level opinionated but flexible enough to meet every customer's needs. How do you approach that? >> So, it's a really tough problem to solve because... So, the thing about abstraction layers, we all know how that plays out, right? So, abstraction layers are fundamentally never the right answer because they will never catch up, because you're trying to write a layer on top. So, then we had to solve the problem, which was, well, we can't be an abstraction layer, but then at the same time, we need to provide some, sort of like centralization standardization. So, we sort of have this the following dissonance in our platform, which is actually really important to solve the problem. So, we think of a stack as floor things. There's the Kubernetes layer, infrastructure layer, and EKS is different from AKS, and it's okay. If we try to now bring them all together and make them behave as one, our customers are going to suffer. Because there are features in EKS that I really want, but then if you write an abstraction then I'm not going to get 'em so not okay. So, treat them as individual things that we logic that we now curate. So, every time EKS, for example, goes from 1.22 to 1.23, we write a new product, just so my customer can press a button and upgrade these clusters. Similarly, we do this for AKS, we do this for GK. It's a really, really hard job, but that's the job, we got to do it. On top of that, you have these things called add-ons, like my network policy, my access management policy, my et cetera. These things are all actually the same. So, whether I'm EKS or AKS, I want the same access for Keith versus Adnan, right? So, then those components are sort of the same across, doesn't matter how many clusters, doesn't matter how many clouds. On top of that, you have applications. And when it comes to the developer, in fact I do the following demo a lot of times. Because people ask the question. People say things like, "I want to run the same Kubernetes distribution everywhere because this is like Linux." Actually, it's not. So, I do a demo where I spin up access to an OpenShift cluster, and an EKS cluster, and then AKS cluster. And I say, "Log in, show me which one is which?" They're all the same. >> So, Adnan, make that real for me. I'm sure after this amount of time, developers groups have come to you with things that are snowflakes. And as a enterprise architect, you have to make it work within your framework. How has working with Rafay made that possible? >> Yeah, so I think one of the very common concerns is the whole deployment to Haseeb's point, is you are from a deployment perspective, it's still using HELM, it's still using some of the same tooling. How do you? Rafay gives us some tools. You know, they have a command line Add Cuddle API that essentially we use. We wanted parity across all our different environments, different clusters, it doesn't matter where you're running. So, that gives us basically a consistent API for deployment. We've also had challenges with just some of the tooling in general that we worked with Rafay actually, to actually extend their, Add Cuddle API for us so that we have a better deployment experience for our developers. >> Haseeb, how long does this opportunity exist for you? At some point, do the cloud providers figure this out, or does the open-source community figure out how to do what you've done and this opportunity is gone? >> So, I think back to a platform that I think very highly of, which has been around a long time and continues to live, vCenter. I think vCenter is awesome. And it's beautiful, VMware did an incredible job. What is the job? It's job is to manage VMs, right? But then it's for access, it's also storage. It's also networking in a sec, right? All these things got done because to solve a real problem, you have to think about all the things that come together to help you solve that problem from an operations perspective. My view is that this market needs essentially a vCenter, but for Kubernetes, right? And that is a very broad problem. And it's going to spend, it's not about a cloud. I mean, every cloud should build this. I mean, why would they not? It makes sense. Anto exist, right? Everybody should have one. But then, the clarity in thinking that the Rafay team seems to have exhibited, till date, seems to merit an independent company, in my opinion, I think like, I mean, from a technical perspective, this product's awesome, right? I mean, we seem to have no real competition when it comes to this broad breadth of capabilities. Will it last? We'll see, right? I mean, I keep doing "CUBE" shows, right? So, every year you can ask me that question again, and we'll see. >> You make a good point though. I mean, you're up against VMware, You're up against Google. They're both trying to do sort of the same thing you're doing. Why are you succeeding? >> Maybe it's focused. Maybe it's because of the right experience. I think startups, only in hindsight, can one tell why a startup was successful. In all honesty, I've been in a one or two startups in the past, and there's a lot of luck to this, there's a lot of timing to this. I think this timing for a product like this is perfect. Like three, four years ago, nobody would've cared. Like honesty, nobody would've cared. This is the right time to have a product like this in the market because so many enterprises are now thinking of modernization. And because everybody's doing this, this is like the boots strong problem in HCI. Everybody's doing it, but there's only so many people in the industry who actually understand this problem, so they can't even hire the people. And the CTO said, "I got to go. I don't have the people, I can't fill the seats." And then they look for solutions, and via that solution, that we're going to get embedded. And when you have infrastructure software like this embedded in your solution, we're going to be around with the... Assuming, obviously, we don't score up, right? We're going to be around with these companies for some time. We're going to have strong partners for the long term. >> Well, vCenter for Kubernetes I love to end on that note. Intriguing conversation, we could go on forever on this topic, 'cause there's a lot of work to do. I don't think this will over be a solved problem for the Kubernetes as cloud native solutions, so I think there's a lot of opportunities in that space. Haseeb Budhani, thank you for rejoining "theCUBE." Adnan Khan, welcome becoming a CUBE-alum. >> (laughs) Awesome. Thank you so much. >> Check your own profile on the sound's website, it's really cool. From Valencia, Spain, I'm Keith Townsend, along with my Host Paul Gillin . And you're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22, brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to the cube coverage of CubeCon 2022 EU. I'm here with my cohost Paul Gill. Please work with you, Keith. Nice to work with you, Paul. And we have our first two guests. The cube is hot. I'm telling you we are having interviews before the start of even the show floor I have with me. We gotta start with the customers first enterprise architect, a non-con Aon con. Welcome to the show. >>Thank you so >>Much. Cube time cube time. First now you're at cube alumni. Yep. <laugh> and, and, uh, has Havani CEO. Arai welcome back. Nice to, >>Uh, >>Talk to you again today. So we're talking all things Kubernetes and we're super excited to talk to MoneyGram about their journey to Kubernetes. First question I have for Anon. Talk to us about what your pre Kubernetes landscape looked like. >>Yeah, certainly. Uh, Keith, so, um, we had a, uh, you know, a traditional mix of legacy applications and modern applications. Uh, you know, a few years ago we made the decision to move to a microservices architecture. Um, and this was all happening while we were still on prem. Right? So your traditional VMs, um, and you know, we started 20, 30 microservices, but with the microservices packing, you know, you quickly expand to hundreds of microservices. Um, and we started getting to that stage where managing them without sort of an orchestration platform, uh, and just as traditional VMs was getting to be really challenging, right. Uh, especially from a day two operational, uh, you know, you can manage 10, 15 microservices, but when you start having 50 and so forth, um, all those concerns around, uh, you know, high availability, operational performance. Um, so we started looking at some open source projects, you know, spring cloud. Uh, we are predominantly a Java, um, shop. So we looked at the spring cloud projects. Uh, they give you a number, uh, you know, of initiatives, um, for doing some of those, um, management and what we realized again, to manage those components, um, without sort of a platform was really challenging. So that, that kind of led us to sort of Kubernetes where, um, along with our journey cloud, uh, it was the platform that could help us with a lot of those management operational concerns. >>So as you talk about some of those challenges, pre Kubernetes, what were some of the operational issues that you folks experienced? >>Yeah. You know, uh, certain things like auto scaling is, is number one, right? I mean, that's a fundamental concept of cloud native, right. Is, um, how do you auto scale VMs? Right. Uh, you can put in some old methods and stuff, but, uh, it was really hard to do that automatically. Right. So, uh, Kubernetes with like HPA gives you those out of the box, right? Provided you set the right policies. Uh, you can have auto scaling, uh, where it can scale up and scale back. So we were doing that manually. Right. So before, uh, you know, MoneyGram, obviously, you know, holiday season, people are sending more money mother's day. Um, our ops team would go in basically manually scale, uh, VMs. Right. So we'd go from four instances to maybe eight instances. Right. Uh, but, but that entailed outages. Right. Um, and just to plan around doing that manually and then sort of scale them back was a lot of overhead, a lot of administration overhead. Right. So, uh, we wanted something that could help us do that automatically right. In a, in an efficient, uh, unintrusive way. So, so, you know, that was one of the things, uh, monitoring, um, and, and management, uh, operations, you know, just kind of visibility into how those applications were during, what were the status of your, um, workloads was also a challenge, right. Uh, to do that. >>So, cause see, I gotta ask the question. If someone would've came to me with that problem, I'd just say, you know, what, go to the plug, the cloud, what, how does, uh, your group help solve some of these challenges? What do you guys do? >>Yeah. What, what do we do? So here's my perspective on the market as it's playing out. So I see a bifurcation happening in the Kubernetes space, but there's the Kubernetes run time. So Amazon is EKS Azure as EKS, you know, there's enough of these available. They're not managed services. They're actually really good, frankly. Right? In fact, retail customers, if you're an Amazon, why would you spin up your own? Just use EK. It's awesome. But then there's an operational layer that is needed to run Kubernetes. Uh, my perspective is that, you know, 50,000 enterprises are adopting Kubernetes over the next five to 10 years. And they're all gonna go through the same exact journey and they're all gonna end up, you know, potentially making the same mistake, which is, they're gonna assume that Kubernetes is easy. <laugh> they're gonna say, well, this is not hard. I got this up and running on my laptop. >>This is so easy. No worries. Right. I can do key gas, but then, okay. Can you consistently spin up these things? Can you scale them consistently? Do you have the right blueprints in place? Do you have the right access management in place? Do you have the right policies in place? Can you deploy applications consistently? Do you have monitoring and visibility into those things? Do your developers have access to when they need it? Do you have the right networking layer in place? Do you have the right chargebacks in place? Remember you have multiple teams and by the way, nobody has a single cluster. So you gotta do this across multiple clusters. And some of them have multiple clouds, not because they wanna be multiple clouds because, but sometimes you buy a company and they happen to be in Azure. How many dashboards do you have now across all the open source technologies that you have identified to solve these problems? >>This is where pain lies. So I think that Kubernetes is fundamentally a solve problem. Like our friends at AWS and Azure they've solved this problem. It's like a KSKS et cetera, GK for that matter. They're they're great. And you should use them and don't even think about spinning up Q B and a best clusters. Don't do it. Use the platforms that exist and commensurately on premises. OpenShift is pretty awesome, right? If you like it, use it. But then when it comes to the operations layer, right, that's where today we end up investing in a DevOps team and then an SRE organization that need to become experts in Kubernetes. And that is not tenable, right? Can you let's say unlimited capital unlimited budgets. Can you hire 20 people to do Kubernetes today? >>If you could find them, if >>You can find 'em right. So even if you could, the point is that see, five years ago, when your competitors were not doing Kubernetes, it was a competitive advantage to go build a team to do Kubernetes. So you could move faster today. You know, there's a high chance that your competitors are already buying from a Rafa or somebody like Rafa. So now it's better to take these really, really sharp engineers and have them work on things that make the company money, writing operations for Kubernetes. This is a commodity. Now >>How confident are you that the cloud providers won't get in and do what you do and put you out of business? >>Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think, I mean, in fact, I, I had a conversation with somebody from HBS this morning and I was telling them, I don't think you have a choice. You have to do this right. Competition is not a bad thing. Right? This, the, >>If we are the only company in a space, this is not a space, right. The bet we are making is that every enterprise has, you know, they have an on-prem strategy. They have at least a handful of, everybody's got at least two clouds that they're thinking about. Everybody starts with one cloud and then they have some other cloud that they're also thinking about, um, for them to only rely on one cloud's tools to solve for on-prem plus that second cloud, they potentially, they may have, that's a tough thing to do. Um, and at the same time we as a vendor, I mean the only real reason why startups survive is because you have technology that is truly differentiated, right. Otherwise, right. I mean, you gotta build something that is materially. Interesting. Right. We seem to have, sorry, go ahead. >>No, I was gonna ask you, you actually had me thinking about something, a non yes. MoneyGram big, well known company, a startup, adding, working in a space with Google, VMware, all the biggest names. What brought you to Rafi to solve this operational challenge? >>Yeah. Good question. So when we started out sort of in our Kubernetes, um, you know, we had heard about EKS, uh, and, and we are an AWS shop. So, uh, that was the most natural path. And, and we looked at, um, EKS and, and used that to, you know, create our clusters. Um, but then we realized very quickly that yes, toe's point AWS manages the control plane for you. It gives you the high availability. So you're not managing those components, which is some really heavy lifting. Right. Uh, but then what about all the other things like, you know, centralized dashboard, what about, we need to provision, uh, Kubernetes clusters on multi-cloud right. We have other clouds that we use, uh, or also on prem. Right. Um, how do you do some of that stuff? Right. Um, we, we also, at that time were looking at, uh, other, uh, tools also. >>And I had, I remember come up with an MVP list that we needed to have in place for day one or day two, uh, operations, right. To before we even launch any single applications into production. Um, and my ops team looked at that list. Um, and literally there was only one or two items that they could check, check off with S you know, they they've got the control plane, they've got the cluster provision, but what about all those other components? Uh, and some of that kind of led us down the path of, uh, you know, looking at, Hey, what's out there in this space. And, and we realized pretty quickly that there weren't too many, there were some large providers and capabilities like Antos, but we felt that it was, uh, a little too much for what we were trying to do. You know, at that point in time, we wanted to scale slowly. We wanted to minimize our footprint. Um, and, and Rafa seemed to sort of, uh, was, was a nice mix, uh, you know, uh, from all those different angles, how >>Was, how was the situation affecting your developer experience? >>So, um, so that's a really good question also. So operations was one aspect of, to it, right? The other part is the application development, right? We've got, uh, you know, Moneygrams when a lot of organizations have a plethora of technologies, right? From, from Java to.net to no GS, what have you, right. Um, now as you start saying, okay, now we're going cloud native, and we're gonna start deploying to Kubernetes. Um, there's a fair amount of overhead because a tech stack, all of a sudden goes from, you know, just being Java or just being.net to things like Docker, right? All these container orchestration and deployment concerns, Kubernetes, uh, deployment artifacts, right. I gotta write all this YAML, uh, as my developer say, YAML, hell right. <laugh>, uh, I gotta learn Docker files. I need to figure out, um, a package manager like helm, uh, on top of learning all the Kubernetes artifacts. >>Right. So, um, initially we went with sort of, okay, you know, we can just train our developers. Right. Um, and that was wrong. Right. I mean, you can't assume that everyone is gonna sort of learn all these deployment concerns, uh, and we'll adopt them. Right. Um, uh, there's a lot of stuff that's outside of their sort of core dev domain, uh, that you're putting all this burden on them. Right. So, um, we could not rely on them and to be sort of cube cuddle experts, right. That that's a fair amount, overhead learning curve there. Um, so Rafa again, from their dashboard perspective, right? So the managed cube cuddle gives you that easy access for devs, right. Where they can go and monitor the status of their workloads. Um, they can, they don't have to figure out, you know, configuring all these tools locally just to get it to work. >>Uh, we did some things from a DevOps perspective to basically streamline and automate that process. But then also office order came in and helped us out, uh, on kind of that providing that dashboard. They don't have to worry. They can basically get on through single sign on and have visibility into the status of their deployment. Uh, they can do troubleshooting diagnostics all through a single pane of glass. Right. Which was a key key item. Uh, initially before Rafa, we were doing that command line. Right. And again, just getting some of the tools configured was, was huge. Right. Took us days just to get that. And then the learning curve for development teams, right? Oh, now you gotta, you got the tools now you gotta figure out how to use it. Right. Um, so >>See, talk to me about the, the cloud native infrastructure. When I look at that entire landscaping number, I'm just overwhelmed by it. As a customer, I look at it, I'm like, I, I don't know where to start I'm sure. Or not, you, you folks looked at it and said, wow, there's so many solutions. How do you engage with the ecosystem? You have to be at some level opinionated, but flexible enough to, uh, meet every customer's needs. How, how do you approach that? >>Yeah. So it's a, it's a really tough problem to solve because, so, so the thing about abstraction layers, you know, we all know how that plays out, right? So abstraction layers are fundamentally never the right answer because they will never catch up. Right. Because you're trying to write and layer on top. So then we had to solve the problem, which was, well, we can't be an abstraction layer, but then at the same time, we need to provide some sort of, sort of like centralization standardization. Right. So, so we sort of have this, the following dissonance in our platform, which is actually really important to solve the problem. So we think of a, of a stack as sort of four things. There's the, there's the Kubernetes layer infrastructure layer, um, and EKS is different from ES and it's okay. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, if we try to now bring them all together and make them behave as one, our customers are gonna suffer because there are features in ESS that I really want. >>But then if you write an AB obsession layer, I'm not gonna get 'em so not. Okay. So treat them as individual things. And we logic that we now curate. So every time S for example, goes from 1 22 to 1 23, rewrite a new product, just so my customer can press a button and upgrade these clusters. Similarly, we do this fors, we do this for GK. We it's a really, really hard job, but that's the job. We gotta do it on top of that, you have these things called. Add-ons like my network policy, my access management policy, my et cetera. Right. These things are all actually the same. So whether I'm Anek or a Ks, I want the same access for Keith versus a none. Right. So then those components are sort of the same across doesn't matter how many clusters does money clouds on top of that? You have applications. And when it comes to the developer, in fact, I do the following demo a lot of times because people ask the question, right? Mean, I, I, I, people say things like, I wanna run the same Kubernetes distribution everywhere, because this is like Linux, actually, it's not. So I, I do a demo where I spin up a access to an OpenShift cluster and an EKS cluster and an AKs cluster. And I say, log in, show me which one is, which they're all the same. >>So Anan get, put, make that real for me, I'm sure after this amount of time, developers groups have come to you with things that are snowflakes and you, and as a enterprise architect, you have to make it work within your framework. How has working with RAI made that possible? >>Yeah. So, um, you know, I think one of the very common concerns is right. The whole deployment, right. Uh, toe's point, right. Is you are from an, from a deployment perspective. Uh, it's still using helm. It's still using some of the same tooling, um, right. But, um, how do you Rafa gives us, uh, some tools, you know, they have a, a command line, art cuddle API that essentially we use. Um, we wanted parody, um, across all our different environments, different clusters, you know, it doesn't matter where you're running. Um, so that gives us basically a consistent API for deployment. Um, we've also had, um, challenges, uh, with just some of the tooling in general, that we worked with RA actually to actually extend their, our cuddle API for us, so that we have a better deployment experience for our developers. So, >>Uh Huie how long does this opportunity exist for you? At some point, do the cloud providers figure this out or does the open source community figure out how to do what you've done and, and this opportunity is gone. >>So, so I think back to a platform that I, I think very highly of, which is a highly off, which has been around a long time and continues to live vCenter, I think vCenter is awesome. And it's, it's beautiful. VMware did an incredible job. Uh, what is the job? Its job is to manage VMs, right? But then it's for access. It's also storage. It's also networking and a sex, right? All these things got done because to solve a real problem, you have to think about all the things that come together to solve, help you solve that problem from an operations perspective. Right? My view is that this market needs essentially a vCenter, but for Kubernetes, right. Um, and that is a very broad problem, right. And it's gonna spend, it's not about a cloud, right? I mean, every cloud should build this. I mean, why would they not? It makes sense, Anto success, right. Everybody should have one. But then, you know, the clarity in thinking that the Rafa team seems to have exhibited till date seems to merit an independent company. In my opinion, I think like, I mean, from a technical perspective, this products awesome. Right? I mean, you know, we seem to have, you know, no real competition when it comes to this broad breadth of capabilities, will it last, we'll see, right. I mean, I keep doing Q shows, right? So every year you can ask me that question again. Well, you're >>You make a good point though. I mean, you're up against VMware, you're up against Google. They're both trying to do sort of the same thing you're doing. What's why are you succeeding? >>Maybe it's focus. Maybe it's because of the right experience. I think startups only in hindsight, can one tell why a startup was successful? In all honesty. I, I, I've been in a one or two service in the past. Um, and there's a lot of luck to this. There's a lot of timing to this. I think this timing for a com product like this is perfect. Like three, four years ago, nobody would've cared. Like honestly, nobody would've cared. This is the right time to have a product like this in the market because so many enterprises are now thinking of modernization. And because everybody's doing this, this is like the boots storm problem in HCI. Everybody's doing it. But there's only so many people in the industry who actually understand this problem. So they can't even hire the people. And the CTO said, I gotta go. I don't have the people. I can't fill the, the seats. And then they look for solutions and we are that solution that we're gonna get embedded. And when you have infrastructure software like this embedded in your solution, we're gonna be around with the assuming, obviously we don't score up, right. We're gonna be around with these companies for some time. We're gonna have strong partners for the long term. >>Well, vCenter for Kubernetes, I love to end on that note, intriguing conversation. We could go on forever on this topic, cuz there's a lot of work to do. I think, uh, I don't think this will over be a solve problem for the Kubernetes of cloud native solution. So I think there's a lot of opportunity in that space. Hi, thank you for rejoining the cube. I non con welcome becoming a cube alum. <laugh> I awesome. Thank you. Get your much your profile on the, on the Ken's. Website's really cool from Valencia Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my whole Paul Gillon and you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.