(upbeat tech music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube! covering, AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Well, welcome back to the sands, we're here in Las Vegas, just off the strip, as the re:Invent show continues here with a really exciting day one. You talk about buzz on the show for it, the place has been jampacked since they opened the doors at 11 o'clock our time this morning, and continues to do so, and I imagine for the next two or three days, you're going to see a lot of people. 50,000 plus. A lot of exhibitors, a lot of people, a lot of buzz, a lot of excitement here around the AWS community. We have with us now, Chris Wahl, who is the chief technologist at Rubrik, and he knows so much about this space, it takes three hosts to surround him. >> It does, to talk to him. >> John Wahl is here, Lisa Martin to my left, Justin Warren on the far right. You're surrounded. >> I am, you've ganged up on me. >> Yeah right, and rightly so. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Justin can't wait. >> He's got the evil eye from Justin. >> Chris: This feels like a trap. >> There's some good history here going on, so we'll find out a little bit later on. First off, Chris, do welcome. Well, welcome the Cube. Tell us a little bit about Rubrik, and your place here and your feelings about the show. >> Yeah, yeah. So, Rubrik, about two and a half years in the market, about three and a half years old as a company. Really focused on solving the conundrum around, there's all this public cloud stuff out there, and everyone's kind of feeling the elephant with the blindfold on, describing it differently. And we're trying to figure out, how can we take that cloud type architecture that's out there in the world, and combine that with an almost 50 billion dollar TAM that is data protection, back up recovery archive. Put those two together to solve challenges within the enterprise is really struggling with. Onboarding into the cloud, and using those resources, as well as making sure their assets, be it the application, the data itself, or, a physical server, be protected and available for recovery in a really, really quick way. So that's kind of the high level pitch of Rubrik, around the last ten major releases of the product, and it's been a rocket ship, I've really enjoyed it. >> John: Great. >> So bigger focus in enterprise, or are you also playing with the startups and also helping the transition? >> That's a good question, I mean, originally we were kind of looking mid market, you know, like, let's kind of go for that sweet spot, but very early on, a lot of large enterprise customers came up and said, wow, you're fully restful API compliant, the full stack is distributed and scaled out, and really solves their problems, so they kind of pulled us into that space, and ever since, we've really embraced the large enterprise globally. It doesn't really matter where you are in the world, those are challenges that are kind of ubiquitous across verticals and the market. >> So, I've got a good storage and backup background, as you well know. >> Okay. >> There has been such a big shift in data storage and backup, and data protection in the last, say, three or five years. What do you think is driving that, because really, like backup recovery was always a hygiene function, it was boring, no one really wanted to spend any money on it, but now you're part of this guard of brand new ways of doing things, that has that part of the market being kind of exciting again. >> I almost feel like we got used to the horrible nature of that business. Because, as a technologist, I was a customer for about 13 years, I was in the channel for about five. And it was always, well, this is just the way it is, and you've got to put up with slower stores that were clunky, it was seen as an insurance policy. I think as the enterprise matured to the point, where everything else was amazing and hyper converged, and driven by APIs, and cloud is starting to eat up part of the data center, we finally saw, okay, this isn't going to stand, we can't operate in a model where an RTO is days, or even many hours, and it's really heavy lift, and I needed a full team of people to manage this stuff. So I think as the technology advanced, as well as kind of outpaced all of the data protection, software, and solutions are out there, it just kind of had to happen. And another thing, as cloud and object store also permeated the market, it really gave us a great opportunity to use that for long term retention. Beyond just the old tape and things like that. >> Yeah, okay. >> Yeah, that sounds fair. >> And what do you think has bene the biggest cultural change? Because, there's a lot of technology that goes into that, but you're talking about having whole teams of people who have to herd this stuff around with small little toothbrushes and stuff just to keep the thing running, whereas now, you can pretty much run it with one or two guys just sitting there, and go yeah, it just works. >> Well, it's similar to, remember when we went through virtualization, and it used to be whole armies of people managing all these pizza boxes, and tube servers, and there was just a lot of infrastructure and operation people necessary to run the data center, and then we virtualized, and I know my personal story was there was two of us managing 1,300 virtual machines. >> Wow! >> Right? So that scale is astronomical compared to what we're used to, we'll then apply that kind of mentality to data protection and it's yeah, it's a few minutes from one person, or distributed team that spends a few minutes a week, maybe a month, something like that, managing things more at the policy and the tag, and the meta data layer, and it's that journey all over again. So the nice part is we've done this before, we know it can be done, but kind of the hard part is, people are always the hardest part of the equation, and sometimes it's tough to put your hands off the handlebars of the bike and just say, I trust an intelligent system to manage this part of the stack, and I'm gonna go focus on where are we trying to go. >> Justin: Yeah, you know. >> Speaking of trust, you know, you talked about how your enterprise customers had pulled you into or up the chain there, a lot of what Andy Jussy said recently to John Furrier is, 18 billion dollar run rate, growing up 42% a year ... They haven't gotten this big with just startups alone. So he's talking about enterprise as really being on the precipice of this mass migration. How does being a young company, how does your relationship with AWS help give more credibility to Rubrik as a trusted advisor to these enterprises? >> Yeah, I'll kind of start at the end and work my way backwards. So we recently hit the advanced tier partner status with Amazon. And part of that I would site a couple of public references with Castalia schools, as well as Fuji Rabio, are two different companies in different parts of the market, but they're very much focused on, we need a partner that can bring us into the cloud, kind of on board us into that environment. AWS was the specific cloud provider they were looking to get into, without kind of operationally. That's a scary thing, you know? It's tough as an infrastructure, or as an operations focused engineer, or even as a developer I think sometimes, to say, I wanna take this data, and it represents my apps, and my servers, and my solution stack, and put that into public cloud. Either for archive and retention, or potentially to use our cloud instantiation solution that was recently renounced, where they can start building workloads into public cloud. So I think that's why, kind of at that point, we work backwards a little bit to say, as we work with the customers that we're looking to do that, before it was, well, you have to learn all this stuff, and really become super technically deep on it, and I love that article by the way, I thought it was really deep, but if you looked at this week in AWS, that by Quinny Pig on Twitter, he's always pointing out every week, the S3 bucket failure, because it's hard, cloud is really, really hard. So if you have that kind of abstraction layer that can make it really simple for customers, to on board in there. It's simple, but it's also abstracted from the nuances across multiple public cloud providers, including AWS. I think that's the magic sauce that really gets people excited about it. >> That abstraction also probably gives them a little bite more comfort, right? >> Exactly. >> Some of the sausage making, they don't have to see. >> Exactly, cuz part of our secret sauce, is as the data is entering into that environment, we're not just saying okay, it's there, done, it's now your problem. Part of our cloud data management story is that the data enters that environment, but we're constantly checking it, making sure it's valid, making sure that it's secure. We handle all of the encryption. The data efficiency. The whole end to end life cycle of the data is respected, whereas traditionally, it was, you just kind of scrape data out of the data center, you drop it off into an S3 bucket, you pray that it's going to be there when you need it, and who knows? Now it's IT offices problem. We don't just do the hand off and say good luck, we handle it from cradle to grave for all the data. >> Now, you mentioned a little bit ago, you were talking to Justin, you talked about the horrible nature of things four or five years ago, right? So, no matter what time you're in, there's always a horrible nature of things. There's always a problem, so now that whatever was the issue then, what is the issue now? As you, new capabilities will develop, it will open up a whole new Pandora's box of challenges and problems. You have unforeseen issues, so what do you guys, when you're looking at your headlights, twelve, eighteen months down the road, you say, oh yeah, this is our next one we've got to tackle, this is the baby we've got to get our arms around? >> For me more near term, it's around the transition from trusting infrastructure, to provide high availability and disaster recovery, and moving that more towards the application and the stack itself. So, holistically, in the past, you'd have two data centers, they'd replicate, one's for DR, one's not. The cloud wasn't really in that equation, and all of the redundancies was handled at the infrastructure layer. Well, okay, now, if we can kind of surround meta data around the application, provide instant search, global availability, replication, the ability to actually stand up those applications in a public cloud? Well now the question is, do I really need that infrastructure layer anymore? Do I need the second data center? Can't I just use public cloud, or an MSP, or someone that's providing Rubrik as a service as an example of a service to provide that for me? More long term, I tend to look at, kind of in the discussion that I saw between John and Andy Jassy, was around the part where I get really nerdy is around like server lists, and the ability to provide functions kind of in the data path. And now I start to imagine, okay, we're putting a lot of data for customers into public cloud and even into private object store resources, and there's the ability, I think there was Green Grass as an example, where you can kind of put that shim layer into the edge to do the function as the data's going in there. There's a lot of interesting opportunities that I'm looking forward to in the next year where, well, we already have an index of the data, we are already very cognizant and content aware when it comes to what we're protecting. Wouldn't it be cool if we could do more interesting things with the data in flight, as well as where it's ultimately resting, kind of like with the announcements with the media and the trans-coding and the video services that I think came out rather recently. So that's kind of the two stage answer to that question that I have. >> So Chris, one of the ways that AWS has succeeded, is by appealing to developers. And you're talking there about things that are in the application layer, that have nothing to do with infrastructure, and developers hate infrastructure. So what are some of the things that you're doing, that Rubrik is doing to appeal to developers specifically in being able to access their data and not have to manage it, as you say, the way we used to do it, which was, the very infrastructure centric problem? What are you using to expose the data and to manage it as a data problem, rather than an infrastructure problem? >> Well, I think that goes back to traditionally how we managed infrastructure. Especially on Prim, and it was all very manual, very imperative, meaning you're pulling the lever, and you're telling the system ... It's a dumb system that you're the intelligent layer of it and you have to control it. And that, it doesn't work in the cloud model at all, and it really, I don't think it works long term in the data center model. Because then I need, I always have to scale literally people to data. And that doesn't work. >> Yeah, humans don't scale. >> Right, we can't just get magically more of us. So what we've done differently from day one was designed a system where every component within the stack, even internal communications, are calling restful APIs, and the whole system is distributed. So there's no controller that you have to deal with, you don't have to become, you don't have to know anything about storage to use the product. It's not infrastructure bound, so you're able to control it completely through restful APIs, or through configuration management tools, cloud management platforms, etc. So if you're a developer looking to, alright, I have an application, I want to make sure that it's automatically protected as part of that process, and sent to AWS, and automatically build me a cloud instantiation, and EC2 is an instance ... Great, make one, two, maybe three API calls, you don't have to know anything about infrastructure, which is the panacea, no developer wants to like, dig into V lands and things like that. That's really cool, and it solves a very valid business case in that if one person can write the code, and it works, just repeat that process, and it scales infinitely. I don't need extra developers for that. >> So to be able to do that, I need to understand that that API exists, so what are you doing to actually show developers that hey, this thing is here and this is how it works? Here's something that you actually know how to do! How are you exposing that idea to the developers? >> Well, very early on, we worked with swagger, which ultimately has become the open API spec to that O, and so every node within our distributed system actually surfaces the entire API suite, in two formats. One, is like a playground, so you can, even if you're newer to APIs, maybe on the infrastructure side, you can kind of do a, try it now button, you can kind of say, what would happen? And it surfaces what the call would look like, and how to structure properly, and what the return codes are, but more importantly, there's also the why and the how of the API in a different kind of documentation suite, using redoc, where you can go in and literally see, okay, what's the mindset here? What's the use case? What's the example? And I feel like that's typically what's missing in a lot of these equations, where it's just, here is the nuts and bolts, here is the tactical information, here is, push this button, things happen. It's more like, here is why you would use it, here's an example, and a lot of the code to do that has already been created by our ranger team internally and made either exposed publicly as open source as privately as something that we share with out customer base. >> Cool. >> Well, Chris, you described, like you said, a rocket ship, right? You've been on for two and a half years, I think you better fasten that seatbelt, it's not going to slow down for you, I don't think. >> Chris: (laughing) I appreciate that. >> Which is a good thing, right? >> Chris: Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, it's all good. >> Chris: Yeah, I know. >> John: I hope you didn't feel ganged up on either, right? You came out here, it was okay? >> It's a pretty friendly crowd, I appreciate that. >> I think so. Chris Wahl from Rubrik joining us here as we continue our coverage live here on the Cube, we're at AWS's re:Invent, live in Las Vegas, back with more in just a bit. (soft tech music)