(upbeat music) >> Hey, girls and guys. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Stanford University, covering the 8th Annual Women in Data Science Conference. One of my favorite events. Lisa Martin here. Got a couple of guests from Total Energies. We're going to be talking all things data science, and I think you're going to find this pretty interesting and inspirational. Please welcome Alexandre Lapene, Tech Advisor Data Science at Total Energy. It's great to have you. >> Thank you. >> And Myriam Fayad is here as well, product and value manager at Total Energies. Great to have you guys on theCUBE today. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you for - >> Thank you for receiving us. >> Give the audience, Alexandre, we'll start with you, a little bit about Total Energies, so they understand the industry, and what it is that you guys are doing. >> Yeah, sure, sure. So Total Energies, is a former Total, so we changed name two years ago. So we are a multi-energy company now, working over 130 countries in the world, and more than 100,000 employees. >> Lisa: Oh, wow, big ... >> So we're a quite big company, and if you look at our new logo, you will see there are like seven colors. That's the seven energy that we basically that our business. So you will see the red for the oil, the blue for the gas, because we still have, I mean, a lot of oil and gas, but you will see other color, like blue for hydrogen. >> Lisa: Okay. >> Green for gas, for biogas. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And a lot of other solar and wind. So we're definitely multi-energy company now. >> Excellent, and you're both from Paris? I'm jealous, I was supposed to go. I'm not going to be there next month. Myriam, talk a little bit about yourself. I'd love to know a little bit about your role. You're also a WiDS ambassador this year. >> Myriam: Yes. >> Lisa: Which is outstanding, but give us a little bit of your background. >> Yes, so today I'm a product manager at the Total Energies' Digital Factory. And at the Digital Factory, our role is to develop digital solutions for all of the businesses of Total Energies. And as a background, I did engineering school. So, and before that I, I would say, I wasn't really aware of, I had never asked myself if being a woman could stop me from being, from doing what I want to do in the professional career. But when I started my engineering school, I started seeing that women are becoming, I would say, increasingly rare in the environment >> Lisa: Yes. >> that, where I was evolving. >> Lisa: Yes. >> So that's why I was, I started to think about, about such initiatives. And then when I started working in the tech field, that conferred me that women are really rare in the tech field and data science field. So, and at Total Energies, I met ambassadors of, of the WiDS initiatives. And that's how I, I decided to be a WiDS Ambassador, too. So our role is to organize events locally in the countries where we work to raise awareness about the importance of having women in the tech and data fields. And also to talk about the WiDS initiative more globally. >> One of my favorite things about WiDS is it's this global movement, it started back in 2015. theCUBE has been covering it since then. I think I've been covering it for theCUBE since 2017. It's always a great day full of really positive messages. One of the things that we talk a lot about when we're focusing on the Q1 Women in Tech, or women in technical roles is you can't be what you can't see. We need to be able to see these role models, but also it, we're not just talking about women, we're talking about underrepresented minorities, we're talking about men like you, Alexander. Talk to us a little bit about what your thoughts are about being at a Women and Data Science Conference and your sponsorship, I'm sure, of many women in Total, and other industries that appreciate having you as a guide. >> Yeah, yeah, sure. First I'm very happy because I'm back to Stanford. So I did my PhD, postdoc, sorry, with Margot, I mean, back in 20, in 2010, so like last decade. >> Lisa: Yeah, yep. >> I'm a film mechanics person, so I didn't start as data scientist, but yeah, WiDS is always, I mean, this great event as you describe it, I mean, to see, I mean it's growing every year. I mean, it's fantastic. And it's very, I mean, I mean, it's always also good as a man, I mean, to, to be in the, in the situation of most of the women in data science conferences. And when Margo, she asked at the beginning of the conference, "Okay, how many men do we have? Okay, can you stand up?" >> Lisa: Yes. I saw that >> It was very interesting because - >> Lisa: I could count on one hand. >> What, like 10 or ... >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Maximum. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And, and I mean, you feel that, I mean, I mean you could feel what what it is to to be a woman in the field and - >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> Alexandre: That's ... >> And you, sounds like you experienced it. I experienced the same thing. But one of the things that fascinates me about data science is all of the different real world problems it's helping to solve. Like, I keep saying this, we're, we're in California, I'm a native Californian, and we've been in an extreme drought for years. Well, we're getting a ton of rain and snow this year. Climate change. >> Guests: Yeah. We're not used to driving in the rain. We are not very good at it either. But the, just thinking about data science as a facilitator of its understanding climate change better; to be able to make better decisions, predictions, drive better outcomes, or things like, police violence or healthcare inequities. I think the power of data science to help unlock a lot of the unknown is so great. And, and we need that thought diversity. Miriam, you're talking about being in engineering. Talk to me a little bit about what projects interest you with respect to data science, and how you are involved in really creating more diversity and thought. >> Hmm. In fact, at Total Energies in addition to being an energy company we're also a data company in the sense that we produce a lot of data in our activities. For example with the sensors on the fuel on the platforms. >> Lisa: Yes. >> Or on the wind turbines, solar panels and even data related to our clients. So what, what is really exciting about being, working in the data science field at Total Energies is that we really feel the impact of of the project that we're working on. And we really work with the business to understand their problems. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Or their issues and try to translate it to a technical problem and to solve it with the data that we have. So that's really exciting, to feel the impact of the projects we're working on. So, to take an example, maybe, we know that one of the challenges of the energy transition is the storage of of energy coming from renewable power. >> Yes. >> So I'm working currently on a project to improve the process of creating larger batteries that will help store this energy, by collecting the data, and helping the business to improve the process of creating these batteries. To make it more reliable, and with a better quality. So this is a really interesting project we're working on. >> Amazing, amazing project. And, you know, it's, it's fun I think to think of all of the different people, communities, countries, that are impacted by what you're doing. Everyone, everyone knows about data. Sometimes we think about it as we're paying we're always paying for a lot of data on our phone or "data rates may apply" but we may not be thinking about all of the real world impact that data science is making in our lives. We have this expectation in our personal lives that we're connected 24/7. >> Myriam: Yeah. >> I can get whatever I want from my phone wherever I am in the world. And that's all data driven. And we expect that if I'm dealing with Total Energies, or a retailer, or a car dealer that they're going to have the data, the data to have a personal conversation, conversation with me. We have this expectation. I don't think a lot of people that aren't in data science or technology really realize the impact of data all around their lives. Alexander, talk about some of the interesting data science projects that you're working on. >> There's one that I'm working right now, so I stake advisor. I mean, I'm not the one directly working on it. >> Lisa: Okay. >> But we have, you know, we, we are from the digital factory where we, we make digital products. >> Lisa: Okay. >> And we have different squads. I mean, it's a group of different people with different skills. And one of, one of the, this squad, they're, they're working on the on, on the project that is about safety. We have a lot of site, work site on over the world where we deploy solar panels on on parkings, on, on buildings everywhere. >> Lisa: Okay. Yeah. >> And there's, I mean, a huge, I mean, but I mean, we, we have a lot of, of worker and in term of safety we want to make sure that the, they work safely and, and we want to prevent accidents. So what we, what we do is we, we develop some computer vision approach to help them at improving, you know, the, the, the way they work. I mean the, the basic things is, is detecting, detecting some equipment like the, the the mean the, the vest and so on. But we, we, we, we are working, we're working to really extend that to more concrete recommendation. And that's one a very exciting project. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Because it's very concrete. >> Yeah. >> And also, I, I'm coming from the R&D of the company and that's one, that's one of this project that started in R&D and is now into the Digital Factory. And it will become a real product deployed over the world on, on our assets. So that's very great. >> The influence and the impact that data can have on every business always is something that, we could talk about that for a very long time. >> Yeah. >> But one of the things I want to address is there, I'm not sure if you're familiar with AnitaB.org the Grace Hopper Institute? It's here in the States and they do this great event every year. It's very pro-women in technology and technical roles. They do a lot of, of survey of, of studies. So they have data demonstrating where are we with respect to women in technical roles. And we've been talking about it for years. It's been, for a while hovering around 25% of technical roles are held by women. I noticed in the AnitaB.org research findings from 2022, It's up to 27.6% I believe. So we're seeing those numbers slowly go up. But one of the things that's a challenge is attrition; of women getting in the roles and then leaving. Miryam, as a woman in, in technology. What inspires you to continue doing what you're doing and to elevate your career in data science? >> What motivates me, is that data science, we really have to look at it as a mean to solve a problem and not a, a fine, a goal in itself. So the fact that we can apply data science to so many fields and so many different projects. So here, for example we took examples of more industrial, maybe, applications. But for example, recently I worked on, on a study, on a data science study to understand what to, to analyze Google reviews of our clients on the service stations and to see what are the the topics that, that are really important to them. So we really have a, a large range of topics, and a diversity of topics that are really interesting, so. >> And that's so important, the diversity of topics alone. There's, I think we're just scratching the surface. We're just at the very beginning of what data science can empower for our daily lives. For businesses, small businesses, large businesses. I'd love to get your perspective as our only male on the show today, Alexandre, you have that elite title. The theme of International Women's Day this year which is today, March 8th, is "Embrace equity." >> Alexandre: Yes. >> Lisa: What is that, when you hear that theme as as a male in technology, as a male in the, in a role where you can actually elevate women and really bring in that thought diversity, what is embracing equity, what does it look like to you? >> To me, it, it's really, I mean, because we, we always talk about how we can, you know, I mean improve, but actually we are fixing a problem, an issue. I mean, it's such a reality. I mean, and the, the reality and and I mean, and force in, in the company. And that's, I think in Total Energy, we, we still have, I mean things, I mean, we, we haven't reached our objective but we're working hard and especially at the Digital Factory to, to, to improve on that. And for example, we have 40% of our women in tech. >> Lisa: 40? >> 40% of our tech people that are women. >> Lisa: Wow, that's fantastic! >> Yeah. That's, that's ... >> You're way ahead of, of the global average. >> Alexandre: Yeah. Yeah. >> That outstanding. >> We're quite proud of that. >> You should be. >> But we, we still, we still know that we, we have at least 10% >> Lisa: Yes. because it's not 50. The target is, the target is to 50 or more. And, and, but I want to insist on the fact that we have, we are correcting an issue. We are fixing an issue. We're not trying to improve something. I mean, that, that's important to have that in mind. >> Lisa: It is. Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> Miryam, I'd love to get your advice to your younger self, before you studied engineering. Obviously you had an interest when you were younger. What advice would you give to young Miriam now, looking back at what you've accomplished and being one of our female, visible females, in a technical role? What do you, what would you say to your younger self? >> Maybe I would say to continue as I started. So as I was saying at the beginning of the interview, when I was at high school, I have never felt like being a woman could stop me from doing anything. >> Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. >> So maybe to continue thinking this way, and yeah. And to, to stay here for, to, to continue this way. Yeah. >> Lisa: That's excellent. Sounds like you have the confidence. >> Mm. Yeah. >> And that's something that, that a lot of people ... I struggled with it when I was younger, have the confidence, "Can I do this?" >> Alexandre: Yeah. >> "Should I do this?" >> Myriam: Yeah. >> And you kind of went, "Why not?" >> Myriam: Yes. >> Which is, that is such a great message to get out to our audience and to everybody else's. Just, "I'm interested in this. I find it fascinating. Why not me?" >> Myriam: Yeah. >> Right? >> Alexandre: Yeah, true. >> And by bringing out, I think, role models as we do here at the conference, it's a, it's a way to to help young girls to be inspired and yeah. >> Alexandre: Yeah. >> We need to have women in leadership positions that we can see, because there's a saying here that we say a lot in the States, which is: "You can't be what you can't see." >> Alexandre: Yeah, that's true. >> And so we need more women and, and men supporting women and underrepresented minorities. And the great thing about WiDS is it does just that. So we thank you so much for your involvement in WiDS, Ambassador, our only male on the program today, Alexander, we thank you. >> I'm very proud of it. >> Awesome to hear that Total Energies has about 40% of females in technical roles and you're on that path to 50% or more. We, we look forward to watching that journey and we thank you so much for joining us on the show today. >> Alexandre: Thank you. >> Myriam: Thank you. >> Lisa: All right. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Stanford University. This is our coverage of the eighth Annual Women in Data Science Conference. We'll be back after a short break, so stick around. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, friends. Welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022 in Sin City. We are so excited to be here with tens of thousands of people. This is our third day of coverage, really the second full day of the show, but we started Monday night. You're going to get wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. You probably know that because you've been watching. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm here with Paul Gill. Paul, this is great. We have had such great conversations. We've been talking a lot about data. Every company is a data company, has to be a data company. We've been talking about developers, the developer experience, and how that's so influential in business decisions for businesses in every industry. >> And it's a key element of what's going on here on the floor at re:Invent is developers, the theme of developers just permeates the show. Lots and lots of boots here devoted to DevOps and Agile approaches. And certainly that is one of the things that the Cloud enables is your team to rethink the way they develop software, and that's what we're going to talk about next. >> That is what we're going to talk about next. We have two guests from Split. split.io is the URL if you want to check it out. Chris Demars joins us Developer advocate. Chris, great to have you and PaaS, VP of Engineering guys thank you so much for joining us on the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Talk to us Pierre, we'll start with you. For the audience that might not know Split what does the company do? What's the value in it for customers? What are you all about? >> Sure. So in very simple terms, for those who are familiar, we do feature flags, feature management and experimentation. And essentially that two essential feature of the Agile transformation as you were mentioning and elements that really helps getting as much art we can from the team in term of productivity and in term of impact. And we basically help with those elements. And so that's a very short... >> 'Excellent, very nice. Chris, you were saying before we went live you do a lot of speaking at conferences, you're often in front of large audiences. As the developer advocate, what are some of the key requirements you're hearing from the developer community that organizations need to be encompassing? >> I think community is key. Like community is at the forefront of developer advocacy and developer relations. Like you want to go where the developers are and developers want to hear those stories in those personalized pieces of the puzzle. And when you're able to talk about modern Web and software technology and loop in product with that and still keep talking about those things and bring that to them, like that is on top of the list when it comes to developer advocacy and being embedded within the developer community. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Tell us about feature flags, because I would assume that for our viewers who are not developers, who are not familiar with Agile technologies, the Agile approaches that might be, may be a new term, what are feature flags? How do you use them? >> Sure, I can start with that. So feature flag is a tool that you embed in your code that allows you to control the activation of your code essentially. And that's allows you to really validate things in a much better and solve way and also attach measurement to it. So, when you're writing your new feature, you just put essentially an if statement around it, if my feature flag is on, then I actually do all those things with soft, then I don't do any of those things and then within our platform, then you can control the activation. Do you want to turn it on for yourself just to try it out? Do you want your QA team to start validating it? Do you want 5% of your users 10%? And start seeing how they interacting with the product. That's what feature flag is. >> It's an amazing piece of any part of the stack, right? 'Cause I'm a Web accessibility and an UI specialist and being able to control the UI with a feature flag and being able to turn on and off those features based on percentage, locale, all of those things. It's very, very powerful. >> What are some of the scenarios which you would use feature flags? You have been testing? >> Yeah, yeah. We actually, you can imagine we use it for pretty much everything. So, as Chris was saying, in the front-end, everything you want to change, you basically can validate and attach measurements. So you can do AB testing, so you can see the impact, you can see if there is a change in performance. We use it also for a lot of backend services and changes and a lot of even infrastructure changes where we can control the traffic and where it goes. So we can validate that things are operating the way that they should before we fully done the market I think. >> 'It can be as small as, you know having a checkout button here and then writing an AB test and running an experiment and moving that checkout button somewhere else because then you can get conversion rates and see which one performed better to a certain amount of people and whatever performed better, that's the feature you would go with. >> Chris, talk about the value of the impact in feature flags for the developer from a developer experience perspective, a productivity perspective. >> So I think that having that feature and being able to write that UI, let's say that you have a checkout button, right? And there's specific content there's verbiage on that checkout button. And then let's say that another team within the organization wants to change that because the conversion is different. You can make those changes, still have it in production and then have it tested. So you don't have to cut specific branches or like test URLs to give to QA, you can do all of that behind that flag. And then once everything is good to go, push it out there and then based on those metrics and that data, see which one performs better and then that's the one that you would go with. >> One of the things with feature flag and it goes to like our main theme of 'What a Release, What a Relief' is that it gives autonomy to the teams and to the developers, enable them to move independently from others. So the deployment can go but their code is not activated until they decide to. And so, they are not impeding anybody else. It makes releases a lot safer, a lot simpler and it gives a lot more speed to everybody because when you do releases with five teams, 10 teams, pushing the code at the same time, you have such a high-risk of breaking something that it's you know... So it's a huge effort and it requires a lot of attention from a lot of people. If anything happens, all those teams needs to investigate. When you decouple all those things, the deployments are essentially not doing anything per se until every individual team activate those things independently. So if anything goes wrong, only them are affected and they don't have to depend on anybody else to get their thing out. So it really helps them making their life a lot safer and gives them a lot more speed because they have autonomy. >> So, why come to re:Invent? What do you get with this audience that you don't get elsewhere? >> Why to re:Invent? I think like re:Invent in the Cloud and AWS is a lot about getting speed to companies to build better product and faster. And essentially like the tool we provide and the technology and the platform we provide is really at the heart of that in itself. And so that's why we feel we have really great conversation with all the people on the floor. >> 'the people who have the right mindset for adopting... >> For me, it's very much community and networking, I love developer community and just community in general is my lifeblood. That's why I travel so much and I talk about these things and I'm with people and if it's not about the products, the story and the story is what gets people. That's why I love being here and being with my team and it's amazing. >> And what is that story? If you had an elevator pitch to give, what would you tell me? >> Hoo, if you were in a late release or deploy at night. I've been there, I'm sure you've been there, it doesn't matter what you're doing. We don't want be up until two, three in the morning doing those things, right? Our product helps alleviate those stresses. And you talking about accessibility, what I do, you know, a big piece of that are hidden impairments like anxiety will stress and anxiety go hand in hand and you want to alleviate that all across the board for everybody involved. >> As you see organizations shift Agile technologies and to parallel development and continuous release cycles, what are some of the biggest barriers they encounter in changing that mindset? >> Ooh, what do you think? >> It depends on where they are in the organization. The Agile transformation is a journey and it's also a change of mindset, it's a change of process. So depending on where they are then they might have some areas where they need a little bit more effort in those directions. What we see is that feature flag just the control of the layout. It's usually something that's fairly easily adopted. Thinking about measurement and attaching measurement to it is often something that requires a little bit more thinking. Like engineers are not really used to thinking about AB testing. It feels like more of a product management thing but AB testing is important also for performance informations like errors and all those things. There is a lot of risk management to be done. We do that through monitoring with APMs, but with feature flag and with Split, you can do that at a feature level and it really gives a great insight. And that's usually something that takes a little bit more digestion from the developers to really get their mind around it and get to it. But there's a lot of value to it. >> I'm looking at the split I/O website and I like the tagline shorten time from code to customer. As customers in any industry, as consumers, we have this expectation that we can get whatever we want anytime 24 by 7 and it's going to be a relevant experience. So it sounds to me like from a speed perspective, there's a lot of business impact that Split can help organizations make from getting releases faster, getting cut faster time-to-market, delivering what customers expect because we all expect real-time these days. Nobody wants to wait. >> Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think that has to do with the going back to the decoupling of things that, you know... Not having to go through so many teams to have it tested and getting away from all the meetings about meetings to review the metrics, right? We all love meetings about meetings. >> No. (laughs loudly) >> Right, exactly, exactly. So being able to take that away and being able to push all of that stuff into production, getting it tested while it's in production and then being able to turn those features on, it's already there without having to do another deployment. And I think, like that's really powerful to me at least. >> Does your solution have value at the security level as well? >> Yes. So that's one of the particularity on the way we do things is like the way you control the feature flag, you have kind of two ways of doing it. Either the piece of code, the SDKs that we provide, the library we provide, you that you put in your code could come back to our platform and check. The way we do it is we send the rules back to the SDK so the whole evaluation is local. The evaluation is extremely fast and it's very secure because it's all happening within your environment. You never have to share any information, no PI whatsoever, contrary it to some of the other tools that you might find on the market. >> So the theme of the booth is 'What a Release, What a Relief'. What are some of the things that you're hearing as you're engaging folks on the show floor this week? >> Oh, what is Aura Photography and can I take a picture of. (everyone laughs loudly) I think just a lot of the stresses of... They're like the release cycle and you know, having to go through so many teams. I feel like that's a common theme that I've heard of. >> Yeah, we see a number of teams organization that still have like really big deployments with like a lot of teams basically coming together, pushing the code together, and there's a lot of pain in it. It's like, it's a huge effort by huge teams. You get 10, 20 people that have to have watch over it at always weird hours, and I think there is a lot of pain to that and that resonate a lot with people. And when we talk about monitoring at the future level, that also helps a lot. Like I was part of organizations before where we had a dedicated staff engineer to just monitor and fix performance on a daily basis because it's such a huge problem and it affects so much the performance of the company. And so essentially, you have this person that tries to look at is a performance being degraded today with the deployment of yesterday and what went out yesterday and you have so many things that went out. It's so hard to control. With what we provide, we tell you exactly which feature flag is responsible for the degradation. And so, you don't need that person to focus on that anymore. And you can focus on delivering value a lot better. >> I think it also might take away the need for extensive release notebooks and playbooks, right? 'Cause when you do bring all those teams together, it's certain people that are in that meeting and there's a PDF saying, all right, we check this off the list, we check this off the list. I think that might alleviate some of that overhead as well. >> Streamlining processes, process efficiencies, workforce productivity improvements, big impact. >> And that gets code quicker to the user. >> You talk about decoupling deploy from release. What do you mean by that? What's the value? >> So the deployment in my definition is essentially getting the code out to production. The release is activating the code in production. And often people do both of those things at the same time, right? But there's a huge risk when you do that because if anything goes wrong, now you need to revert everything which is not a short operation often and takes a lot of effort. And so now, if you can basically push your code to production but separate the activation of it, the release of it, then it goes a lot faster. It's a lot. You have a lot of autonomy and decoupling and if anything goes wrong, it's the click of a button and it's off. So like there's a lot of safety that comes with it and we know that any outages as a high cost for all the companies. So it's like, if you can reduce the outage to like five seconds... >> Right. >> It's a lot better than basically several hours. >> Can you talk about the value out of Split versus DIY and where are most of your customers in this process? Do they have a bunch of tools, a bunch of processes, a bunch of teams, and you're really helping them consolidate streamline? >> The one thing I hear a lot is we rolled our own AB testing and feature flagging system, but some of the issues I've seen and I've heard are that they don't have all those metrics or they have to work with a specific data team to get those metrics. And then you go back to having those meetings about meetings... >> Lisa: Dependencies. >> Right, you have a data team that's putting together a report that is then presented to you and then that's got to be presented to a stakeholder and then that stakeholder makes a decision whether to turn on feature A or feature B, right? Our product from my understanding is we have those metrics already built in and you can have that at your disposal. >> Yeah, the other thing I would add to that is like we see a number of people, they start on the feature flag journey just because they have a high risk thing that they need to put out. So they do the minimal thing to basically control it somehow, but it works only in one part of the stacks. They can't basically leverage it anywhere else and it's very limited in capability so that it just serve the purpose that was needed at that time. They don't have a dedicated team to manage it. So it just there, but it's very constrained and it's not supported effectively. The other thing is like for those companies is like they have a question to ask themselves. It's like do they want to invest resources in managing that kind of tool or is it not so core to their business that they want essentially to have vendor deal with it at a much lower price and they would have to invest resources for them to support it, and... >> Sounds like feature flags are kind of a team building. Have you have a team building dimension to them? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> It takes a team for sure. >> Yeah, and then once you add like AB testing and the feature flag, it's the collaboration between product management and engineering. It can go even further. Like two executives like to basically, you know, view the impact, understand the impact. So it goes from the control to the risk management to the product and to the impact and measuring the flow of delivery and the communication around it. >> Here we are at re:Invent, so many thousands of people as I mentioned, we're on the second full-day of the event. What have you heard from AWS that really excites you about being in their ecosystem? Any news in particular that jumps out at you that really speaks to improving that developer experience as if we've heard a lot of focus on the developer? >> Chris: Yeah, I haven't heard much, have you? >> So, I arrived yesterday, I haven't followed yet all the announcement, I'm just like, >> there's so many- >> on the news, yeah, yeah. >> So I'm on the booth at the same time. >> I stopped counting at 15 during the Keynote this morning. >> Many of them just can't keep up, there's so much happening at one time's so much. >> This event is a can of content, can of news re:Invent. It is hard. But yesterday they were spent so much time talking about data and how... And I always think every company today has to be a data company, have to be a software company, we were just talking with Capital One and they think of themselves as a technology company that does banking. And sometimes, I'll talk with retailers that think of themselves as technology companies that do retail and they love that but that's what companies like Split have to enable these days. It's companies to become technology companies, deliver code faster to customer because the customer's demanding it. We're not going to want less stuff slower. >> Yeah, I mean it's so essential I think for me like I joined Split because of that premises. Like every company now is a software company and every company has really to compete in innovation. You know all those banks, Capital One like we see it a lot in the financial industry where our message resonates extremely strongly is really in a high-competitive environment and they have to be innovative and innovation comes when people have speed and autonomy. And if you basically provide that to teams and the tools to basically get some signals and some quick feedback loop, that's how you get innovation. Like you can't decide what to build but you can basically provide the tools to enable them to think about. >> Right, you can experiment more flexibly right, faster. >> And developers have to be empowered, right? >> Yes. >> I think that's the probably one of the number one messages I've heard at all the shows we've done this year. How influential the developer is in the direction of the business. >> Autonomy and empowerment are two main factors 'cause I'm a front end developer at heart and I want to work on cool stuff and we're doing cool stuff. Like we are doing cool stuff. We can't talk about all of it, right? But I think we're doing a lot of cool things at Split and I'm really stoked to be a part of the team and grow developer relations, grow developer advocacy and be along for the journey. >> Yeah, I love that. Last question for both of you, same question. If you had a bumper sticker and you were going to put it on a fancy shiny new car, car of your choice about Split, what would it say? Pierre I'll start with you then Chris. >> Bumper sticker. >> On the spot question. >> On the question, (everyone laughs happily) I mean the easy answer is probably written on my t-shirt. Like, you know, 'What a Release, What a Relief'. I think that the first step for teams is like, you can have a message that's very like even further, you know, the Agile transformation is a journey and I basically tell people, you need to first crawl, walk and run and I think the 'What a Release, What a Relief' is a good step to like getting to the working. And I think like that would be the first bumper sticker before I get to the further one about AP testing and innovative. >> Love it. Chris, what would your bumper sticker say? >> It would say Split software, feature flags for the masses. Hard stop. >> Mic drop. >> Done. >> Awesome guys, thank you so much for joining Paul and me on the program. It's been outstanding introducing Split to our audience, what you do, how you're impacting the developer experience and ultimately, the business and the end customer on the backend who just wants things to work. We appreciate your insights, we appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Appreciate it. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and Paul Gillin, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, which you know is the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

>> [] From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020. Virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and the ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And this is theCUBE coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe the virtual edition and you've reached the final stage. This is our last interview so hopefully, learned a lot talking to the CNCF members. We've had a few great practitioners, of course, some of the important vendors and startups in this space. And when we talk about what's happening in this, this cloud native space, one of the things that gets bandied about a lot is scale. What does that mean? You know, when it first rolled out, of course, there is only one Google out there, and only a handful of true hyperscalers. But there absolutely are some companies that really need scale, performance global and so happy to bring in he is the final boss. It is Alexandria McLean. He's a technical architect at Ubisoft. And yes, I do have a little bit of background in gaming. But here's someone that is helping enable in one of the largest gaming companies in the globe. So Alexandra, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, thanks for the invitation, happy to be here. >> All right, so you're no novice to this ecosystem. I know you and I have both been at many of the Docker cons, the KubeCons over the years. So if you could just give our audience a little bit of your background and what is your team responsible for Ubisoft? >> Okay, sure, so I am part of the one of the IT teams inside Ubisoft. So we're responsible mainly to provide cloud computing resources and Kubernetes infrastructure for the whole company. So again, and if you want to know more about basically, I've been, I've been leading the Kubernetes initiative, the past few years right now. So we started the journey maybe in 2016. We're already pretty busy, you know, working on the growth for the cloud, the cloud industry to stand Ubisoft, for the growth of the expansion, different data centers and supporting the needs of the different teams and development teams inside Ubisoft. And one thing we wanted to do back then was really to enable and accelerate the adoption of cloud native, the cloud native mindset and cloud native architectures. So what we did back then is did, we did a short analysis of our different technologies that was available at the time, and we decided to jump full head on Kubernetes and make this as the foundation for the different workloads, container workloads that will be that will enable drive adoption inside Ubisoft to grow and boost the productivity of many things. >> Alright, I'm really glad you brought up that cloud native mindset, if you could just up-level a little bit for, you know, the business leaders out there, they hear about, you know, Kubernetes and they won't know how to spell it. They hear something like a cloud native mindset, and they say, you know, I don't understand, what does this mean for our business? So what architecturally are you doing and what does that mean for you know, your games and ultimately your end users? >> Yeah, so I would say that basically, I mean, if you want to have a cloud native architecture, really want to make your application, first of all, very portable, very easy to deploy and manageable, and at the same time very resilient to failure. So you want to make sure that your application once it's deployed, that it's highly resilient to failure, that it was built for failures and that you can manage the project and the service to meet the expectation of either the gamers or the service owners basically. >> Yeah, you know, absolutely. I'm curious, here in 2020, we see the ripple effects of what the global pandemic has. I have to imagine that from a gaming standpoint, that has had an impact. So maybe if we use that as an analogy, if it's valid from your standpoint, I have to imagine more people are using it. What did this mean to your infrastructure? How were you ready from an IT's perspective to support that, you know, increased usage, kind of rippling around the globe as more people are home all the time? >> Hmm, yeah, that's a good question I guess. I mean, we really have like two kind of, I would say, audience inside Ubisoft in the IT team that I serve. So we have the people who are building the softwares and the applications to help the developers to, I mean the game developers in general, so we have different services, internal services, and tooling that needs to be hosted somewhere. And we need to enable these people in these teams to have a way to manage applications efficiently. And the other side we are looking at right now, I mean, we the game server and the gaming industry, is really, I think there's a shift right now in the way that she prefer doing, the way that you're going to manage the game servers in the future. And I would say that back then, there was a lot of in house tooling, things that were really, I mean, appropriately proprietary to each gaming company. But right now, what we wanted to do in the past few years, we work for instance on a solution called hygienist. So we were involved in the beginning to design this kind of next gen game server, dedicated server hosting infrastructure that was all built around communities. So, in the future, we were already started to work on that, and the next gen of games are going to be difficult to stay on top of Kubernetes, which is going to enable a lot more efficiency of resource usage and now at the same time, we'd say manageability and the profitability about all these services. Because I think that one key thing about cloud native and Kubernetes is that, once you know Kubernetes, I mean, basically, it's very easy to onboard new people in the team, the project, because they know what is Kubernetes how to operate it. So it will be much more efficient in the future for all the workflows that we have internally and the next game server infrastructure as well to be hosted in Kubernetes, it's going to be much more easy to standardize and unify that whole stack. >> Well, the skill sets are so critically important. And it's great to hear you say that onboarding somebody in Kubernetes, is easier than it might have been a couple of years ago. If you could bring us inside a little bit, you know, what's your stack look like? You know, you know, can you say what cloud or cloud you use? When it comes to Kubernetes, you know, what are the key tools that you're using and partners that you have? >> Yeah, sure. So early on, I would say, almost 10 years ago, we really started to focus on adding on prem cloud infrastructure and the technology that we chose back then was OpenStack. So we have a large footprint of OpenStack called install, installed internally and different data centers all over the world so people and different teams and anyone at Ubisoft can easily have computers or compute resources available for them. And with Kubernetes, we initially we wanted to have, you know, to make your Kubernetes a commodity. We wanted to ask people be very I mean in a position to easily experiment new things, new applications on top of Kubernetes. And for that we decided to go with Rancher. So Rancher is an open source solution made by Rancher labs, and we, initially after we started to build and in our solution, the first year because we talked back then the landscape was quite different and we thought it was the best choice for us to do. But we realized shortly after, I mean, when Rancher 2.2 came out, I think it was in something like April 2018, that we will benefit a lot go with this kind of solution which was open sourced, there was a lot of traction behind it and it will enable us to I mean, accelerate, accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes and cloud native in general, much more faster, than the you know solutions that we had built at that time. So we went with Rancher and right now we have, I would say, I mean, we have maybe 10 data centers with the cloud installed on top of it, much more data centers was going to grow in the next couple of months and years, and we have over 200 clusters and 1000 nodes that are managed by Rancher and people can just deploy on demand, to own Kubernetes cluster and get started with it if they want to. >> Okay, so if I heard you right, it's Rancher on top of the OpenStack solution in your data centers. >> Yes. >> You talk about how many clusters you have, you know, what's the state of managing those environments? You said, you're using Rancher that's one of the things we've seen a lot of discussion over the last couple of years is you know, went from managing containers to managing you know, part or cluster to now, multi clusters around multi sites, you know, what's the maturity today? Anything that you're looking for that would make your life easier to manage such a broad environment? >> Yeah, well, I would say that's one of the drawback, I mean, when we enabled that solution with Rancher we didn't see, I mean, here's the views of launching provisioning new clusters, is that right now, we have a lot of clusters, maybe too many, because we try to consolidate, I mean, the next, the next logical step for us is we try to consolidate the workloads maybe as much as possible, and see if there's really a need for people to have their own dedicated cluster for them. And initially, there was a lot of demand for that, because people basically they came to us and they said, you know, we want to use Kubernetes. And what we want to do is we want to have films which we have access to it, we want to be able to do whatever we want with it, upgrade it at our own pace. And I don't want to have any neighbor on it. I want to be completely isolated in terms of computer resources. So we said all right, we're going to make a solution that is going to provision new clusters on demand for everyone. And the intro stuff may very well. But now, after a while some people and we as especially as an IT provider and operator, we realized that, you know, maybe people don't have to be completing alone to cluster, maybe we should try to consolidate that a little bit. So we're trying to migrate workloads from certain services and tooling and say maybe you can, instead of running your own cluster, you can use this one that is going to be shared. And there will be a team dedicated I mean dedicated to support and operate is faster for you because we want to in the end, we want to offload the burden of infrastructure and Kubernetes although it's I mean, it brings a lot of abstraction in simplicity, you still have to manage your cluster in the end. So we'd rather have people focus on the application side than on the Kubernetes infrastructure side. So we will start a path of maybe try to consolidated friend workloads, and see if we can reduce the amount of clusters that we have and also to unify the way that people are using the different providers because although we have, a huge open OpenStack cloud offering internally on prem, there are still people who need to use GKE or EKS and a couple of other external cloud providers. So for these people, some of them are not using really Rancher, although it's possible with Rancher to just directly using the providers. But what we want to do is try to unify the way that you're going to get access to this cluster, try to make a central governance model for people to pass through a central team to get access and prevent the cluster. So they will be standardized, we will be able to add more maybe security policies and compliance and rules and everything. So the cluster will be created in certain ways and that too much fragmented as they are today. >> Yeah, that's ultimately what I was trying to understand is most customers I talked to, they have hybrid environments, they're using multiple clouds, if you're using Kubernetes you know, how do you get your arms around that. So I'd love to get your viewpoint just 'cause you've been involved since, kind of the early Kubernetes days, you know, what's, what's better now than it was a few years ago? You know, I heard you say that you looked at possibly, you know, creating a solution to yourself so a company like Rancher helps simplify things. So when you look at the maturity, you know, how happy are you with what you have now? And are there any things that you say, boy, I'd love my team to not have to worry about this. You know, maybe the industry as a whole would be able to, you know, standardize or make things simpler? >> Well, you know, when we started to use Rancher maybe there were a couple of things that we wanted to simplify for the users because what Rancher does is essentially is that, there's a lot of configuration options. It's very flexible because it's first mining providers. So the first few things that we did was try to simplify the user experience who we will extend we modified ventures in some ways to make It's simpler to be consumed. And also, the experience is much more simpler than it was, let's say two years ago when we started, we still want to simplify it even further, we want to ideally provide a fully manage experience. So peoples don't even have to worry about the control plane components that is currently being deployed with their competitors clusters. We want to remove that away from them so that we, once again fully focus on the application side of development. And I think one other aspect that we need to maybe improve in the future is that, when you want to deploy your application and make it resilient and geographically distributed, then you need to manage multiple clusters, and you need to deploy your applications and performance cluster. So, the whole multi cluster aspect of things like, how do I deploy my application from a version? How do I make it like consistent between the different clusters that where it needs to be deployed. How do I make service discovery possible? Or do I mesh everything all the application together to make sure that it's easy to operate, it's easy for the developers, and that it's resilient in the end. So we will start to look at the, I mean, the multi cluster multi region aspect for Kubernetes. Because that's a big challenge to us. >> All right, well, Alexandre, want to shift for a second, let's talk about the conference, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, obviously, it's virtual this year, so there is a little bit of shift but you know, you've attended many of these in the past. What are their projects that you're interested in learning more or are there you know, peers of yours that you're looking to collaborate with? What have you seen in the past that that you're hoping you still get, from a virtual event like we have this year? >> Well, you know, I think that it has become so big, it's hard to keep up with everything that's happening at the same time, you know, nowadays, but, things that we're looking at really, is maybe like, I think chapters maybe, in terms of service mesh to a lot of technologies, I think it's maturing slowly. So we'll have, we'll always try to have a look about what is the most, the best fit for us and the use cases that we have. And some people thought you're using Kubernetes, some other people are using, you know more traditional stacks, So we try to bridge that together and see what's possible to migrate the existing workloads from the traditional cloud VMs, and call applications toward Kubernetes and everything. So maybe try to see if it's possible to bridge that path and migrate gradually for the users that we have. And other things in general, I think that it will be very interesting to see the whole bear setups, I mean, evolving to run out and see are we can try to add conformance and compliance rules to different clusters that we have to manage to make sure that it's no longer like, just add a matter of I want to create a cluster, I get access to it. We need to centralize the governance. We need to centralize that, the rules of our everything's going to be managing the end and make sure that security is a big aspect to it so make sure that there's no vulnerabilities and everything's being audited. And especially for the game students is going to be a big factor for us. So we definitely our interested into all the security discussion that's happening right now. >> All right, no shortage of lots of information. Alexandre, by the way, that there's no way that anybody can keep up on everything that's happening in this very robust community. But thank you so much for sharing your journey. It's always great to hear from the practitioner. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, awesome. >> All right, and thank you for joining us, for all the coverage. Be sure to go to theCUBE.net, you can see not only all the interviews from this show, you can go search find previous shows as well as see what events we will be at, of course right now all virtually, so, am Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)