(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Native SecurityCon North America 2023. Obviously, CUBE's coverage with our CUBE Center Report. We're not there on the ground, but we have folks and our CUBE Alumni there. We have entrepreneurs there. Of course, we want to be there in person, but we're remote. We've got Ben Hirschberg, CTO and Co-Founder of Armo, a cloud native security startup, well positioned in this industry. He's there in Seattle. Ben, thank you for coming on and sharing what's going on with theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's great to be here, John. >> So we had written on you guys up on SiliconANGLE. Congratulations on your momentum and traction. But let's first get into what's going on there on the ground? What are some of the key trends? What's the most important story being told there? What is the vibe? What's the most important story right now? >> So I think, I would like to start here with the I think the most important thing was that I think the event is very successful. Usually, the Cloud Native Security Day usually was part of KubeCon in the previous years and now it became its own conference of its own and really kudos to all the organizers who brought this up in, actually in a short time. And it wasn't really clear how many people will turn up, but at the end, we see a really nice turn up and really great talks and keynotes around here. I think that one of the biggest trends, which haven't started like in this conference, but already we're talking for a while is supply chain. Supply chain is security. I think it's, right now, the biggest trend in the talks, in the keynotes. And I think that we start to see companies, big companies, who are adopting themselves into this direction. There is a clear industry need. There is a clear problem and I think that the cloud native security teams are coming up with tooling around it. I think for right now we see more tools than adoption, but the adoption is always following the tooling. And I think it already proves itself. So we have just a very interesting talk this morning about the OpenSSL vulnerability, which was I think around Halloween, which came out and everyone thought that it's going to be a critical issue for the whole cloud native and internet infrastructure and at the end it turned out to be a lesser problem, but the reason why I think it was understood that to be a lesser problem real soon was that because people started to use (indistinct) store software composition information in the environment so security teams could look into, look up in their systems okay, what, where they're using OpenSSL, which version they are using. It became really soon real clear that this version is not adopted by a wide array of software out there so the tech surface is relatively small and I think it already proved itself that the direction if everyone is talking about. >> Yeah, we agree, we're very bullish on this move from the Cloud Native Foundation CNCF that do the security conference. Amazon Web Services has re:Invent. That's their big show, but they also have re:Inforce, the security show, so clearly they work together. I like the decoupling, very cohesive. But you guys have Kubescape of Kubernetes security. Talk about the conversations that are there and that you're hearing around why there's different event what's different around KubeCon and CloudNativeCon than this Cloud Native SecurityCon. It's not called KubeSucSecCon, it's called Cloud Native SecurityCon. What's the difference? Are people confused? Is it clear? What's the difference between the two shows? What are you hearing? >> So I think that, you know, there is a good question. Okay, where is Cloud Native Computing Foundation came from? Obviously everyone knows that it was somewhat coupled with the adoption of Kubernetes. It was a clear understanding in the industry that there are different efforts where the industry needs to come together without looking be very vendor-specific and try to sort out a lot of issues in order to enable adoption and bring great value and I think that the main difference here between KubeCon and the Cloud Native Security Conference is really the focus, and not just on Kubernetes, but the whole ecosystem behind that. The way we are delivering software, the way we are monitoring software, and all where Kubernetes is only just, you know, maybe the biggest clog in the system, but, you know, just one of the others and it gives great overview of what you have in the whole ecosystem. >> Yeah, I think it's a good call. I would add that what I'm hearing too is that security is so critical to the business model of every company. It's so mainstream. The hackers have a great business model. They make money, their costs are lower than the revenue. So the business of hacking in breaches, ransomware all over the place is so successful that they're playing offense, everyone's playing defense, so it's about time we can get focus to really be faster and more nimble and agile on solving some of these security challenges in open source. So I think that to me is a great focus and so I give total props to the CNC. I call it the event operating system. You got the security group over here decoupled from the main kernel, but they work together. Good call and so this brings back up to some of the things that are going on so I have to ask you, as your startup as a CTO, you guys have the Kubescape platform, how do you guys fit into the landscape and what's different from your tools for Kubernetes environments versus what's out there? >> So I think that our journey is really interesting in the solution space because I think that our mode really tries to understand where security can meet the actual adoption because as you just said, somehow we have to sort out together how security is going to be automated and integrated in its best way. So Kubescape project started as a Kubernetes security posture tool. Just, you know, when people are really early in their adoption of Kubernetes systems, they want to understand whether the installation is is secure, whether the basic configurations are look okay, and giving them instant feedback on that, both in live systems and in the CICD, this is where Kubescape came from. We started as an open source project because we are big believers of open source, of the power of open source security, and I can, you know I think maybe this is my first interview when I can say that Kubescape was accepted to be a CNCF Sandbox project so Armo was actually donating the project to the CNCF, I think, which is a huge milestone and a great way to further the adoption of Kubernetes security and from now on we want to see where the users in Armo and Kubescape project want to see where the users are going, their Kubernetes security journey and help them to automatize, help them to to implement security more fast in the way the developers are using it working. >> Okay, if you don't mind, I want to just get clarification. What's the difference between the Armo platform and Kubescape because you have Kubescape Sandbox project and Armo platform. Could you talk about the differences and interaction? >> Sure, Kubescape is an open source project and Armo platform is actually a managed platform which runs Kubescape in the cloud for you because Kubescape is part, it has several parts. One part is, which is running inside the Kubernetes cluster in the CICD processes of the user, and there is another part which we call the backend where the results are stored and can be analyzed further. So Armo platform gives you managed way to run the backend, but I can tell you that backend is also, will be available within a month or two also for everyone to install on their premises as well, because again, we are an open source company and we are, we want to enable users, so the difference is that Armo platform is a managed platform behind Kubescape. >> How does Kubescape differ from closed proprietary sourced solutions? >> So I can tell you that there are closed proprietary solutions which are very good security solutions, but I think that the main difference, if I had to pick beyond the very specific technicalities is the worldview. The way we see that our user is not the CISO. Our user is not necessarily the security team. From our perspective, the user is the DevOps and the developers who are working on the Kubernetes cluster day to day and we want to enable them to improve their security. So actually our approach is more developer-friendly, if I would need to define it very shortly. >> What does this risk calculation score you guys have in Kubscape? That's come up and we cover that in our story. Can you explain to the folks how that fits in? Is it Kubescape is the platform and what's the benefit, what's the purpose? >> So the risk calculation is actually a score we are giving to clusters in order for the users to understand where they are standing in the general population, how they are faring against a perfect hardened cluster. It is based on the number of different tests we are making. And I don't want to go into, you know, the very specifics of the mathematical functions, but in general it takes into account how many functions are failing, security tests are failing inside your cluster. How many nodes you are having, how many workloads are having, and creating this number which enables you to understand where you are standing in the global, in the world. >> What's the customer value that you guys pitching? What's the pitch for the Armo platform? When you go and talk to a customer, are they like, "We need you." Do they come to you? Is it word of mouth? You guys have a strategy? What's the pitch? What's so appealing to the customers? Why are they enthusiastic about you guys? >> So John, I can tell you, maybe it's not so easy to to say the words, but I nearly 20 years in the industry and though I've been always around cyber and the defense industry and I can tell you that I never had this journey where before where I could say that the the customers are coming to us and not we are pitching to customers. Simply because people want to, this is very easy tool, very very easy to use, very understandable and it very helps the engineers to improve security posture. And they're coming to us and they're saying, "Well, awesome, okay, how we can like use it. Do you have a graphical interface?" And we are pointing them to the Armor platform and they are falling in love and coming to us even more and we can tell you that we have a big number of active users behind the platform itself. >> You know, one of the things that comes up every time at KubeCon and Cloud NativeCon when we're there, and we'll be in Amsterdam, so folks watching, you know, we'll see onsite, developer productivity is like the number one thing everyone talks about and security is so important. It's become by default a blocker or anchor or a drag on productivity. This is big, the things that you're mentioning, easy to use, engineering supporting it, developer adoption, you know we've always said on theCUBE, developers will be the de facto standards bodies by their choices 'cause developers make all the decisions. So if I can go faster and I can have security kind of programmed in, I'm not shifting left, it's just I'm just having security kind of in there. That's the dream state. Is that what you guys are trying to do here? Because that's the nirvana, everyone wants to do that. >> Yeah, I think your definition is like perfect because really we had like this, for a very long time we had this world where we decoupled security teams from developers and even for sometimes from engineering at all and I think for multiple reasons, we are more seeing a big convergence. Security teams are becoming part of the engineering and the engineering becoming part of the security and as you're saying, okay, the day-to-day world of developers are becoming very tangled up in the good way with security, so the think about it that today, one of my developers at Armo is creating a pull request. He's already, code is already scanned by security scanners for to test for different security problems. It's already, you know, before he already gets feedback on his first time where he's sharing his code and if there is an issue, he already can solve it and this is just solving issues much faster, much cheaper, and also you asked me about, you know, the wipe in the conference and we know no one can deny the current economic wipe we have and this also relates to security teams and security teams has to be much more efficient. And one of the things that everyone is talking, okay, we need more automation, we need more, better tooling and I think we are really fitting into this. >> Yeah, and I talked to venture capitalists yesterday and today, an angel investor. Best time for startup is right now and again, open source is driving a lot of value. Ben, it's been great to have you on and sharing with us what's going on on the ground there as well as talking about some of the traction you have. Just final question, how old's the company? How much funding do you have? Where you guys located? Put a plug in for the company. You guys looking to hire? Tell us about the company. Were you guys located? How much capital do you have? >> So, okay, the company's here for three years. We've passed a round last March with Tiger and Hyperwise capitals. We are located, most of the company's located today in Israel in Tel Aviv, but we have like great team also in Ukraine and also great guys are in Europe and right now also Craig Box joined us as an open source VP and he's like right now located in New Zealand, so we are a really global team, which I think it's really helps us to strengthen ourselves. >> Yeah, and I think this is the entrepreneurial equation for the future. It's really great to see that global. We heard that in Priyanka Sharma's keynote. It's a global culture, global community. >> Right. >> And so really, really props you guys. Congratulations on Armo and thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing insights and expertise and also what's happening on the ground. Appreciate it, Ben, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay, cheers. Okay, this is CUB coverage here of the Cloud Native SecurityCon in North America 2023. I'm John Furrier for Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We're back with more of wrap up of the event after this short break. (gentle upbeat music)

(pulsing music) (digital music) >> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. A lot of bummed out Bruins fans, but a lot of happy Celtics fans. We're optimistic for tonight, Boston's crazy sports town, but we're talking tech, we're talking open source. Dr. Amanda Purnell is here. She's the director of data and analytics innovation at the US Department of Veteran Affairs, and Ben Cushing is the chief architect for federal health and life sciences at Red Hat. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, thank for coming on. >> Thank you for having us. >> So glad to be here. >> So we heard your keynote this morning, project Arches. Now you were telling us just briefly about your previous life as a clinician. >> That's right. >> That's really interesting, because you know what the outcome has to be. So talk about that project in your perspective. What the goals were and how you actually got it done. >> I could tell the long view. I'm a psychologist by training. I spent the first 10 years of my VA career providing care to veterans. So engaging in healthcare behavior change, providing training to providers and really trying to understand what is the care pathway for veterans, what's the experience of veterans along each of those touchpoints, and it became clear to me over time that there were opportunities for us to improve the transitions of care and provide better information at the right time to improve those decisions that are being made at the point of care. Ben and I were just talking before we began today, part of the core of the development of Arches was beginning with human-centered design. We wanted to interview and better understand what was the experience across the VA of many different stakeholders and trying to access meaningful information, understand in that moment what do I need to make a decision with a veteran or what do I need to make a decision with my care team and how can I improve the quality of care for veterans? And so, hundreds of interviews later, it became clear to us that we wanted to help those individuals already working for the VA to continue to improve excellence of care and one of those ways that we're trying to do that is using technology to make life easier for our veterans and for our clinicians. >> I always like to say, they say, "Follow the money." I like to follow the data. And you said something in your keynote about nurses have to have access to information and it just gets to an architectural question, because as a caregiver, you have to get insights and data and you need it fast, 'cause you're saving lives, but a lot of times, architectures are very centralized. They're monolithic and you have to beg, borrow, steal, break through blockers to get to the data that you need. How do you square that circle in today's world? Maybe you could talk about that, and then specific to Arches, how you dealt with that. >> I can dive into that a little bit. I have to say, Amanda had touched on this during the keynote, VA was one of the first, if not the first, healthcare organizations in the world to actually adopt electronic health records and because of that, they just have this incredibly rich amount of historical data and the challenge, as you pointed out, is gaining access to it. So there are a number of programs within VA designed specifically for that. And they are bringing data not just from the data warehouses, but also data from the electronic health records that are running inside of VA right now, and then also third party community data sets, as well as applications that run inside the VA. Now the value here really happens when you produce insights. Data by itself is useless. >> Lot of data out there. They're plentiful. >> You need to create knowledge and then you need that knowledge to inform your process that comes next. Those actions are really what matters. All of healthcare is process and activity and data is really just a historical record. I mean, all data that we look at is happening in the past and then as we're reading it, we're producing knowledge, again, to inform our process. Arches, the program itself, is right in that space at the knowledge layer of actually taking that data and turning it into actual insight and something that is usable and insightful for clinicians to affect the ability to deliver better care and also to actually improve their own working experience. A lot of the models that are getting built out are specifically designed to help their workflow, help them reach better outcomes for the veterans, but also for themselves, because if we can care for the providers, it'll certainly help them care for the patients even more so. >> So how does it work? I mean, from the provider's perspective, how was their life improved by Arches? >> That's a great question. We want to make it easier to access the information. So as Ben noted, the average person providing care in the field doesn't know how to code, doesn't know how to pull a unique request for an individual data point, and what we're trying to do with Arches is provide a user interface that allows for both a non-technical person and a very technical person to access information, and then what gets provisioned in front of a provider is something that is farther abstracted from the underlying data layer and more like here's a specific insight. So I use the example in my keynote of chronic kidney disease. So what's provisioned to the provider in that moment is this person is at higher risk for chronic kidney disease based on this basic information. So it's surfacing just the right amount of information to allow for that care pathway to be improved, but the physician doesn't need to see all of the layers of code underneath. They need to trust that it's worthwhile, but they don't need to know all the background abstractions. >> So it's a self-service, essentially, infrastructure in that sense. You're hiding the underlying complexities. You gave an example in your keynote of an individual who realized that they were under counting the probability of a potential disease for African Americans. >> Yes. >> I believe she just rewrote the algorithm. >> She did. >> Describe that process, because in a lot of organizations, injecting that new algorithm may have required new data sources, would take an act of the Pope to do. How did it work in Arches? >> This is what I get excited about with Arches is that we have the opportunity to empower enthusiastic people like Dr. Joshi to discover an insight and she's a talented informaticist, so she could do the technical work and provision a container for her to work in, for her to do the data analysis, the underground stuff that we're not letting the average provider have to cope with. We were able to provision the tools that she need, the environment that she needed to be able to test and develop the new insight, confirm that they're there and then begin to validate that and test it in other facilities. So our thinking is, how do we bring the resources to the users rather than saying to the users, "This is what's available. Good luck." (chuckles) >> So we've been talking a lot about, I'm sorry, go ahead. >> I want to add on to that. What we're actually experiencing inside of healthcare right now is the emergence of of learning health systems. >> Yes. >> And this is a great example of that. The terrifying number is, it takes 17 years for new knowledge that gets created with healthcare research, whether it's NIH or VA or elsewhere, it takes 17 years for those practices to make their way into practice. Generally the way that happens is through the education of new staff. And so the dissemination of that knowledge is just so freaking slow that we cannot move nimbly enough to take on that new knowledge and actually implement it in clinical space. What Amanda's describing is something that now happens in months. New knowledge getting produced and then actually getting disseminated out, both the insights, whether they are those probabilities, predictions and recommendations and the actual processes, which are getting automated, as well. So if you think about healthcare as just a process, you can automate a whole lot of that and we can move that needle really fast and actually take that 70-year number down to a couple months. >> In the early days when we were all talking about AI and getting excited about digital, I would often ask the question, will machines be able to make better diagnoses than doctors and to your point, Ben, that's not the right question. >> Exactly. >> It isn't the right question. >> The question is, how can machines compress the time to better patient outcomes- >> Yes. >> in concert with humans and that's what we're seeing now. >> That's right, it's surfacing those insights to start a conversation. >> We've been talking a lot about artificial intelligence for the last two days. As clinician or someone with a clinical background, how do you see the clinical experience changing as machines grow more intelligent? >> I think that there's a learning curve for people to feel confident in an artificial intelligence. It makes sense. So someone spent decades, perhaps, of their life obtaining medical training, doing fellowships, doing additional training that they have trust in that deep training. There are times, however, where a technology is able to surface something that we didn't know that we didn't know and it's important, as we make use of artificial intelligence, that we clearly validate it with independent means and that we clearly also bring in additional analysis to understand what are the elements and then test that new technology in an environment before we scale it widely, so that clinicians can see, yes, this was useful. If it wasn't useful, how can we make it even better? So it goes back to what we were talking about earlier that we have to bring in human-centered design to figuring out how do we make use of AI or machine learning models and make sure that there's trust in those models and that we can clearly articulate value for the clinicians and care teams on the ground. >> Is that a natural evolution of Arches? >> This is all built around it. Arches is the technology platform, but there's no magical technology that's going to change how humans interact. And so the way we think about each project is we think about what are the technological components and what are the human factors components? And we have to think about the entire care pathway. I'll go back to that example, the chronic kidney disease. She identified that we were under identifying African Americans for chronic kidney disease. So she changed the algorithm. Not only did she change the algorithm, we also had to think about who would be informed of those changes, how would that change, who would be connected to the veteran in that point of care and build out the care pathway in the care team and that's really how you actually influence an outcome. Surfacing an insight is important, but it's one part of a much larger picture. >> So what is Arches? You said it's a technology platform built on open source. At least, there's a lot of open source in there. And it's got API connectors to all the legacy technologies that you need it to. Can you describe, paint a picture of what it actually is? >> Arches is evolving as it should. So it's designed to meet the unique needs that aren't being met by other infrastructure in the VA. So we started first by identifying the need for cloud compute, so it's in the cloud, it has open source technology so that we're not stuck with any one provider and also has the ability to use containers to be able to move insights out of Arches to an enterprise solution. We're also bringing in multi-cloud strategy, which also something had been discussed quite a bit at this conference, to make sure that we're not saying only one cloud provider can be the solution for veterans' needs. Our mission is serving veterans and so we want to have access to all the technology and not just one and so we're looking at how do we expand the scope to make sure that we have the most variety possible so we can meet the needs of veterans. >> I can add a little bit to it, as well. Think of Arches as a program. It's an incubation space under the office of innovation. So it's a place where the governance allows for trying new ideas and really pushing the envelope for VA in general. There's not a lot of organizations, if any at VA, that allow for that type of incubation and so Arches is in a unique position to create new technologies and new novel approaches to solving big problems. And then the next step to that is moving the work from Arches out into the enterprise, as you called it out. So for instance, the system of engagement where the actual clinicians interact with patients, the model needs to find its way there and we can't do that in a way that disturbs the current workflow that the clinicians have. We need to be able to bring the model to where the clinician is, have those recommendations, probabilities and predictions surfaced to the clinician in a way that is precise to their existing workflow. They need it at the time they need it. Arches itself is not delivering that part of it. It's more like the place where the innovation happens and the incubation really occurs and then it's about taking this container, really, and moving out to other systems that are already deployed out to the hospitals, the edge, and in the cloud. >> And the federated governance occurs in Arches or elsewhere? >> It happens across the continuum. It's starting in Arches. the clinical validation that happens there is wickedly important, because the clinicians need to know that what they're working with is actually legit. And so when they know that the researchers and the clinicians who are involved in that incubation period have done their work, they can feel confident with the recommendations they're getting from the machine learning models that are getting deployed to one of them. >> So many questions, so little time. What's the business impact? How would you describe that? >> For me, it's an emotional impact. People have a sense of, "I have a place to develop a solution and I can get in there quick, and I can test out an idea. I could potentially partner with an external partner or if I have the talents and skills to do it myself." It's empowering all of those innovators who have great ideas to work together to test and develop and validate solutions, and they're not waiting years to get the idea off the ground. >> Amazing. >> Go ahead, bring it. >> Is Arches open source? >> Arches is a platform and it has open source component. So that the underlying infrastructure of technology is open source. >> Why was it important to you that this be built on an open source platform? >> It's important for us that we not marry ourself to any one technology and that we allow for, as much as possible, transparency and many different tools and the right tools for the right solution. So we didn't want to find ourselves connected to only one way of doing things. We want to have versatility to have the right tool for the right problem at the right time. >> I'm so sorry, we're out of time. This is so interesting and I really appreciate you here guys, coming on and sharing your insights for theCUBE audience. All right, keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gillin. We're in day two of Red Hat Summit 2022. You're watching theCUBE. (digital pulsing music) >> Due to the pandemic, the federal government declared a public health emergency, which created an urgency for healthcare coverage. >> One of the biggest-

>>Welcome to the cube conversation here. I'm Sean ferry with the cube in Palo Alto, California. We've got two great guests here featuring armory who has with them Patrion open-source and talking open source and the enterprise. I'm your host, John ferry with the cube. Thanks for watching guys. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate. I've got two great guests, Ben mapping, and SVP, a strategic partner in the armory and Ian Della horn, S staff SRE at Patrion gentlemen, you know, open source and enterprise is here and we wouldn't talk about thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Yeah. Thank you, John. Really happy to be here. Thank you to the Cuban and your whole crew. I'll start with a quick intro. My name is Ben Mappin, farmers founders, lead strategic partnerships. As John mentioned, you know, it all, it really starts with a premise that traditional businesses, such as hotels, banks, car manufacturers are now acting and behaving much more like software companies than they did in the past. And so if you believe that that's true. What does it mean? It means that these businesses need to get great at delivering their software and specifically to the cloud, like AWS. And that's exactly what armory aims to do for our customers. We're based on opensource Spinnaker, which is a continuous delivery platform. And, and I'm very happy that Ian from Patrion is here to talk about our journey together >>And introduce yourself what you do at Patriot and when Patrion does, and then why you guys together here? What's the, what's the story? >>Absolutely. Hi, John and Ben. Thanks for, thanks for having me. So I am Ian. I am a site reliability engineer at Patrion and Patrion is a membership platform for creators. And what we're our mission is to get creators paid, changing the way the art is valued so that creators can make money by having a membership relationship with, with fans. And we are, we're built on top of AWS and we are using Spinnaker with armory to deploy our applications that, you know, help, help creators get paid. Basically >>Talk about the original story of Ben. How are you guys together? What brought you together? Obviously patron is well-known in the creator circles. Congratulations, by the way, all your success. You've done a great service for the industry and have changed the game you were doing creators before it was fashionable. And also you got some cutting-edge decentralization business models as well. So again, we'll come back to that in a minute, but Ben, talk about how this all comes together. Yeah, >>Yeah. So Ian's got a great kind of origin story on our relationship together. I'll give him a lead in which is, you know, what we've learned over the years from our large customers is that in order to get great at deploying software, it really comes down to three things or at least three things. The first being velocity, you have to ship your software with velocity. So if you're deploying your software once a quarter or even once a year, that does no good to your customers or to your business, like just code sitting in a feature branch on a shelf, more or less not creating any business value. So you have to ship with speed. Second, you have to ship with reliability. So invariably there will be bugs. There will be some outages, but you know, one of the things that armory provides with Spinnaker open sources, the ability to create hardened deployment pipeline so that you're testing the right things at the right times with the right folks involved to do reviews. >>And if there is hopefully not, but if there is a problem in production, you're isolating that problem to a small group of users. And then we call this the progressive deployment or Canary deployment where you're deploying to a small number of users. You measure the results, make sure it's good, expand it and expand it. And so I think, you know, preventing outages is incredibly incredibly important. And then the last thing is being able to deploy multi target multi-cloud. And so in the AWS ecosystem, we're talking about ECS, EKS Lambda. And so I think that these pieces of value or kind of the, the pain points that, that enterprises face can resonate with a lot of companies out there, including ENN Patriot. And so I'll, I'll, I'll let you tell the story. >>Yeah, go ahead. Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks for the intro, man. So background background of our partnership with armory as back in the backend, February of 2019, we had a payments payments slowed down for payments processing, and we were risking not getting creators paid on time, which is a doc great for creators because they rely on us for income to be able to pay themselves, pay their rent or mortgage, but also pay staff because they have video editors, website admins, people that nature work with them. And there were, they're a very, there's a very many root causes to this, to this incident, all kind of culminate at once. One of the things that we saw was that deploying D point fixes to remediate. This took too long or taking at least 45 minutes to deploy a new version of the application. And so we've had continuous delivery before using a custom custom home built, rolling deploy. >>We needed to get that time down. We also needed to be secure in our knowledge of like that deploy was stable. So we had had to place a break in the middle due to various factors that that can happen during the deploy previously, I had used a Spinnaker at previous employers. I have been set it up myself and introduced it. And I knew about, I knew like, oh, this is something we could, this would be great. But the Patriot team, the patron SRE team at that time was two people. So I don't have the ability to manage Spinnaker on my own. It's a complex open-source product. It can do a lot of things. There's a lot of knobs to tweak a lot of various settings and stuff you need to know about tangentially. One of the co-founders of, of armory had been, had to hit, had hit me up earlier. I was like, Hey, have you heard of armory? We're doing this thing, opens our Spinnaker, we're packaging this and managing it, check us out if you want. I kind of like filed it away. Like, okay, well that might be something we can use later. And then like two weeks later, I was like, oh wait, this company that does Spinnaker, I know of them. We should probably have a conversation with them and engage with them. >>And so you hit him up and said, Hey, too many knobs and buttons to push what's the deal. >>Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I was, I was like, Hey, so by the way, I about that thing, how, how soon can you get someone get someone over here? >>So Ben take us through the progression. Cause that really is how things work in the open source. Open source is really one of those things where a lot of community outreach, a lot of people are literally a one degree or two separation from someone who either wrote the project or is involved in the project. Here's a great example. He saw the need for Spinnaker. The business model was there for him to solve. Okay. Fixes rolling deployments, homegrown all the things, pick your pick, your use case, but he wanted to make it easier. This tends to, this is kind of a pattern. What did you guys do? What's the next step? How did this go from here? >>Yeah. You know, Spinnaker being source is critical to armory's success. Many companies, not just pastry on open source software, I think is not really debatable anymore in terms of being applicable to enterprise companies. But the thing with selling open source software to large companies is that they need a backstop. They need not just enterprise support, but they need features and functionality that enable them to use that software at scale and safely. And so those are really the things that, that we focus on and we use open source as a really, it's a great community to collaborate and to contribute fixes that other companies can use. Other companies contribute fixes and functionality that we then use. But it's, it's really a great place to get feedback and to find new customers that perhaps need that enhanced level of functionality and support. And, and I'm very, very happy that Patrion was one of those companies. >>Okay. So let's talk about the Patrion. Okay. Obviously scaling is a big part of it. You're an SRE site, reliability engineers with folks who don't know what that is, is your, your job is essentially, you know, managing scale. Some say you the dev ops manager, but that's not really right answer. What is the SRE role at patriotics share with folks out there who are either having an SRE. They don't even know it yet or need to have SRS because this is a huge transition that, and new, new and emerging must have role in companies, >>Right? Yeah. We're the history of Patrion covers a lot. We cover a wide swath of a wide swath of, of, of things that we work with and, and areas that we consider to be our, our purview. Not only are we working on working with our AWS environment, but we also are involved in how can we make the site more reliable or performance so that, so that creators fans have a good experience. So we work with our content delivery numbers or caching strategies for caching caching assets. We work inside the application itself for doing performance performance, a hassle. This is also in proving observability with distributed tracing and metrics on a lot of that stuff, but also on the build and deploy side, if we can, if we can get that deploy time faster, like give engineers faster feedback on features that they're working on or bug fixes and also being secure and knowing that the, the code that they're working on it gets delivered reliably. >>Yeah. I think I, you have the continuous delivery is always the, the, the killer killer workflow as both the Spinnaker question here. Well, how has Spinnaker, well, what, how, how does Spinnaker being an open source project help you guys? I mean, obviously open source code is great. How has that been significant and beneficial for both armory and Patrion? >>Yeah, I'll take the first stab at this one. And it starts at the beginning. Spinnaker was created by Netflix and since Netflix open source that four or five years ago, there have been countless and significant contributions from many other companies, including armory, including AWS and those contributions collectively push the industry forward and allow the, the companies that, you know, that use open-source Spinnaker or armory, they can now benefit from all of the collective effort together. So just that community aspect working together is huge. Absolutely huge. And, you know, open source, I guess on the go-to-market side is a big driver for us. You know, there's many, many companies using open-source Spinnaker in production that are not our customers yet. And we, we survey them. We want to know how they're using open-source Spinnaker so that we can then improve open-source Spinnaker, but also build features that are critical for large companies to run at scale, deploy at scale, deploy with velocity and with reliability. >>Yeah. What's your take on, on the benefits of Spinnaker being open source? >>A lot of what Ben, it's been really beneficial to be able to like, be able to go in and look at the source code for components. I've been wondering something like, why is this thing working like this? Or how did they solve this? It's also been useful for, I can go ask the community for, for advice on things. If armory doesn't has the, it doesn't have the time or bandwidth to work on some things I've been able to ask the special interest groups in the source community. Like, can we, can we help improve this or something like that. And I've also been able to commit simple bug fixes for features that I've, that I've needed. I was like, well, I don't need to, I don't need to go engage are very on this. I can just like, I can just write up a simple patch on and have that out for review. >>You know, that's the beautiful thing about open sources. You get the source code and that's, and some people just think it's so easy, Ben, you know, just, Hey, just give me the open source. I'll code it. I got an unlimited resource team. Not, not always the case. So I gotta ask you guys on Patrion. Why use a company like armory, if you have the open source code and armory, why did you build a business on the open source project? Like Spinnaker? >>Yeah. Like I see. Absolutely. Yeah. Like I, like I said earlier, the atrium, the Patrion SRE team was wasn't is fairly small. There's two people. Now we're six. People are still people down. We're six people now. So being sure we could run a Spinnaker on our own if we, if we wanted to. And, but then we'd have no time to do anything else basically. And that's not the best use of our, of our creators money. Our fans, the fans being the creators artists. We have obviously take a percentage on top of that. And we, we need to spend our, that money well, and having armory who's dedicated to the Spinnaker is dedicated, involved the open source project. But also there are experts on this Sunday. It was something that would take me like a week of stumbling around trying to find documentation on how to set this thing up. They done this like 15, 20 times and they can just go, oh yeah, this is what we do for this. And let me go fix it for you >>At score. You know, you've got a teammate. I think that's where, what you're getting at. I got to ask you what other things is that free you up? Because this is the classic business model of life. You know, you have a partner you're moving fast, it slows you down to get into it. Sure. You can do it yourself, but why it's faster to go with it, go together with a partner and a wing man as we will. What things did does that free you up to work on as an SRE? >>Oh, that's freed me up to work on a bigger parts of our build and deploy pipeline. It's freed me up to work on moving from a usage based deploys onto a containerization strategy. It's freed me up to work on more broader observability issues instead of just being laser-focused on running an operating spending. >>Yeah. And that really kind of highlights. I'm glad you said that because it highlights what's going on. You had a lot of speed and velocity. You've got scale, you've got security and you've got new challenges you got to fix in and move fast. It's a whole new world. So again, this is why I love cloud native. Right? So you got open source, you got scale and you guys are applying directly to the, to the infrastructure of the business. So Ben, I got to ask you armory. Co-founder why did you guys build your business on an open source project? Like Spinnaker? What was the mindset? How did you attack this? What did you guys do? Take us through that piece because this is truly a great entrepreneurial story about open source. >>Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you the abridged version, which is that my co-founders and I, we solved the same problem, which is CD at a previous company, but we did it kind of the old fashioned way we home role. We handled it ourselves. We built it on top of Jenkins and it was great for that company, but, and that was kind of the inspiration for us to then ask questions. Hey, is this bigger? We, when at the time we found that Spinnaker had just been, you know, dog food inside of Netflix and they were open sourcing it. And we thought it was a great opportunity for us to partner. But the bigger reason is that Spinnaker is a platform that deploys to other platforms like AWS and Kubernetes and the sheer amount of surface area that's required to build a great product is enormous. And I actually believe that the only way to be successful in this space is to be open source, to have a community of large companies and passionate developers that contribute the roads if you will, to deploy into various targets. >>And so that's the reason, number one for it being open source and us wanting to build our business on top of open source. And then the second reason is because we focus almost exclusively on solving enterprise scale problems. We have a platform that needs to be extensible and open source is by definition extensible. So our customers, I mean, Ian just had a great example, right? Like he needed to fix something he was able to do so solve it in open source. And then, you know, shortly thereafter that that fix in mainline gets into the armory official build and then he can consume his fix. So we see a lot of that from our other customers. And then even, you know, take a very, very large company. They may have custom off that they need to integrate with, but that doesn't, that's not in open-source Spinnaker, but they can go and build that themselves. >>Yeah, it's real. It really is the new modern way to develop. And I, you know, last 80 with startup showcase last season, Emily Freeman gave a talk on, you know, you know, retiring, I call it killing the software, SDLC, the lifecycle of how software was developed in the past. And I got to ask you guys, and, and this cube conversation is that this is kind of like the, the kind of the big wave we're on now is cloud scale, open source, cloud, native data security, all being built in on this in the pipelines to your point is SRS enabling a new infrastructure and a new environment for people to build essentially SAS. So I got to ask you guys as, and you mentioned it Ben, the old way you hand rolled something, Netflix, open source, something, you got to look at Lyft with Envoy. I mean, large-scale comes, are donating their stuff into open source and people getting on top of it and building it. So the world's changed. So we've got to ask you, what's the difference between standing up a SAS application today versus say five to eight years ago, because we all see salesforce.com. You know, they're out there, they built their own data center. Cloud skills changed the dynamics of how software is being built. And with open-source accelerating every quarter, you're seeing more growth in software. How has building a platform for applications changed and how has that changed? How people build SAS applications, Ben, what's your take on this? It's kind of a thought exercise here. >>Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't even call it a thought exercise. We're seeing it firsthand from our customers. And then I'll, you know, I'll, I'll give my answer and you can weigh in on like practical, like what you're actually doing at Patrion with SAS, but the, the costs and the kind of entry fee, if you will, for building a SAS application has tremendously dropped. You don't need to buy servers and put them inside data centers anymore. You just spin up a VM or Kubernetes cluster with AWS. AWS has led the way in public cloud to make this incredible easy. And the tool sets being built around cloud native, like armory and like many other companies in the space are making it even easier. So we're just seeing the proliferation of, of software being developed and, and hopefully, you know, armory is playing a role in, in making it easier and better. >>So before we get to Unum for a second, I just want to just double down on it because there's great conversation that implies that there's going to be a new migration of apps everywhere, right. As tsunami of clutter good or bad, is that good or bad or is it all open source? Is it all good then? >>Absolutely good. For sure. There will be, you know, good stuff developed and not so good stuff developed, but survival of the fittest will hopefully promote those, the best apps with the highest value to the end user and, and society at large and push us all forward. So, >>And what's your take, obviously, Kubernetes, you seeing things like observability talking about how we're managing stateful and services that are being deployed and tear down in real time, automated, all new things are developing. How does building a true scalable SAS application change today versus say five, eight years ago? >>I mean, like you said, there's a, there's a lot, there's a lot of new, both open source. So SAS products available that you can use to build a scale stuff. Like if you're going to need that to build like secure authentication, instead of having to roll that out and you could go with something like Okta raw zero, you can just pull that off the shelf stuff for like managing push notifications before that was like something really hard to really hard to do. Then Firebase came on the scene and also for manic state and application and stuff like that. And also for like being, being able to deliver before >>You had Jenkins, maybe even for that, you didn't really have anything Jenkins came along. And then now you have open-source products like Spinnaker that you can use to deliver. And then you have companies built around that, that you can just go and say, Hey, can you please help us deliver this? Like you just help us, enable us to be able to build, build our products so that we can focus on delivering value to our creators and fans instead of having to focus on, on other things. >>So bill it builds faster. You can compose stuff faster. You don't have to roll your own code. You can just roll your own modules basically, and then exactly what prietary on top of it. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's why commercial open source is booming. Guys. Thank you so much, Ben, congratulations on armory and great to have you on from Patrion well-known success. So we'll accompany you congratulate. If we don't know patriarch, check it out, they have changed the game on creators and leading the industry. Ben. Great, great shot with armory and Spinnaker. Thanks for coming on. Thank you >>So much. Thank you >>So much. Okay. I'm Sean Ferrer here with the cube conversation with Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this "CUBE" conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE", Here in Palo Alto, California, beginning in 2022, kicking off the new year with a great conversation. We're with folks from down under, two co-founders of Instaclustr. Peter Lilley, CEO, Ben Bromhead, the CTO, Intaclustr success. 'Cause he's been on "theCUBE" before, 2018 at Amazon re:Invent. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on "theCUBE". Thanks for piping in from Down Under into Palo Alto. >> Thanks, John, it's really good to be here, I'm looking forward to the conversation. >> So, I love the name, Instaclustr. It conjures up cloud, cloud scale, modern application, server list. It just gives me a feel of things coming together. Spin me up a cluster of these kinds of feelings. The cloud is here, open sources is growing, that's what you guys are in the middle of. Take a minute to explain what you guys do real quick and this open source cloud intersection that's just going supernova right now. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Instaclustr is on a mission to really enable the world's ambitions to use open source technology. And we do that specifically at the data layer. And we primarily do that through what we call our platform offering. And think of it as the way to make it super easy, super scalable, super reliable way to adopt open source technologies at the data layer, to build cutting edge applications in the cloud. Today used by customers all over the world. We started the business in Australia but we've very quickly become a global business. But we are the business that sits behind some of the most successful brands that are building massively scalable cloud based applications. And you did right. We sit at a real intersection of kind of four things. One is open source adoption which is an incredibly powerful journey and wave that's driving the future direction of IT. You've got managed services or managed operations and moving those onto a platform like Instaclustr. You've got the adoption of cloud and cloud as a wave, like open source is a wave. And then you've got the growth of data, everything is data-driven these days. And data is just excellent for businesses and our customers. And in a lot of cases when we work with our customers on Instaclustr today, the application and the data, the data is the business. >> Ben, I want to get your thoughts as a CTO because open source, and technology, and cloud, has been a real game changer. If you go back prior to cloud, open source is very awesome, still great, freedom, we've got code, it's just the scale of open source. And then cloud came along, changed the game, so, open source. And then new business models became, so commercial open source software is now an industry. It's not just open source, "Hey, free software." And then maybe a red hat's out there, or someone like a red hat, have some premium support. There's been innovation on the business model side. So, matching technology innovation with the business model has been a big change in the past, many, many years. And this past year in particular that's been key. And open source, open core, these are the things that people are talking about. License changes, this is a big discussion. Because you could be on the wrong side of history if you make the wrong decision here. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it's also worth, I guess, taking a step back and understanding a little bit about why have people gravitated towards open source and the cloud? Beyond kind of the hippie freedoms of, I can see the code and I have ownership, and everything's free and great. And I think the reason why it's really taken off in a commercial setting, in an enterprise setting is velocity. How much easier is it to go reach and grab a open-source tool? That you can download, you can grab, you can compile yourself, you can make it work the way you want it to do to solve a problem here and now. Versus the old school way of doing it which is with I have to go download a trial version. Oh no, some of the features are locked. I've got to go talk to a procurement or a salesperson to kind of go and solve the problem that I have. And then I've got to get that approved by my own purchasing department. And do we have budget? And all of a sudden it's way, way, way harder to solve the problem in front of you as an engineer. Whereas with open source I just go grab it and I move on. I've achieved something for the day. >> Basically all that friction that comes, you got a problem to solve, oh, open-source, I'm going to just get a hammer and hammer that nail. Wait, whoa, whoa. I got to stand in line, I got to jump over hoops, I got to do all these things. This is the hassle and friction. >> Exactly, and this is why it's often called one of the most impressive things about that. And I think on the cloud side it's the same thing, but for hardware, and capability, and compute, and memory. Previously, if you wanted to compute, oh, you're going to lodge a ticket. You've got to ask someone to rack a server in a data center. You've got to deal with three different departments. Oh my goodness. How painful is that just to get a server up to go run and do something? That's just pulling your hair out. Whereas with the cloud, that's an API call or clicking a few buttons on a console and off you go. You'd have to combine those two things. And I would say that software engineers are probably the most productive they've ever been in the last 20 years. I know sometimes it doesn't look like that but their ability to solve problems in front of them, especially using external stuff is way way, way better. >> Peter: I think when you put those two things together you get an- >> The fact of the matter is they are productive. They're putting security into the code right in the CICD pipeline. So, this is highly agile right now. So, coders are highly productive and efficient in changing the way people are rolling out applications. So, the game is over, open source has won, open core is winning. And this is where the people are confused. This is why I got you guys here? What's the difference between open source and open core? What's the big deal? Why is it so important? >> Yeah, no, great question. So, really the difference between open source and open core, it comes down to, really it's a business model. So, open core contains open-source software, that's a hundred percent true. So, usually what will happen is a company will take a project that is open source, that has an existing community around it, or they've built it, or they've contributed it, or however that genesis has happened. And then what they'll do is they'll look at all the edges around that open-source project. And I think what are some enterprise features that don't exist in the open-source project that we can build ourselves? And then sprinkle those around the edges and sell that as a proprietary offering. So, what you get is you get the core functionality is powered by an open-source project. And quite often the code is identical. But there's all these kinds of little features around the outside that might make it a little bit easier to use in an enterprise environment. Or might make it a bit easier to do some operations side of things. And they'll charge you a license for that. So, you end up in a situation where you might have adopted the open source project, but then now if you want a feature X, Y, or Z, you then need to go and fork over some money and go into that whole licensing kind of contract. So, that's the core difference between open core and open-source, right? Open core, it's got all these little proprietary bits kind of sprinkled around the outside. >> So, how would you describe your platform for your customers? Obviously, you guys are succeeding, your growth is great, we're going to get that second. But as you guys have been steadily expanding the platform of open source data technologies, what is the main solution that you guys are offering customers? Managing open source technologies? What's the main value that you guys bring to the customer? >> Yeah, definitely. So, really the main value that we bring to the customer is we allow them to, I guess, successfully adopt open source databases or database technologies without having to go down that open core path. Open core can be quite attractive, but what it does is you end up with all these many Oracles drivers. Still having to pay the toll in terms of license fees. What we do, however, is we take those open-source projects and we deliver that as a database, as a service on our managed platform. So, we take care of all the operations, the pain, the care, the feeding, patch management, backups. Everything that you need to do, whether you're running it yourself or getting someone else to run it, we'll take care of that for you. But we do it with the pure upstream open source version. So, that means you get full flexibility, full portability. And more importantly you're not paying those expensive license fees. Plus it's easy and it just works. You get that full cloud native experience and you get your database right now when you need it. >> And basically you guys solve the problem of one, I got this legacy or existing licensed technology I've got to pay for. And it may not be enabling modern applications, and they don't have a team to go do all the work (laughing). Or some companies have like a whole army of people just embedded in open-source, that's very rare. So, it sounds like you guys do both. Did I get that right, is that right? >> Yeah, definitely. So, we definitely enable it if you don't have that capability yourself. We are the outsourced option to that. It's obviously a lot more than that but it's one of those pressures that companies nowadays face. And if we take it back to that concept of developer velocity, you really want them working on your core business problems. You don't want them having to fight database infrastructure. So, you've also got the opportunity cost of having your existing engineers working on running this stuff themselves. Or running a proprietary or an open call solution themselves, when really you should be outsourcing preferably to Instaclustr. But hey, let's be honest, you should be outsourcing it to anyone so that your engineers can be focusing on your core business problems. And really letting them work on the things that make you money. >> That's very smart. You guys have a great business model. Because one of the things we've been reporting on "theCUBE" on SiliconANGLE as well, is that the database market is becoming so diverse for the right reasons. Databases are everywhere now and code is becoming horizontally scalable for the cloud but vertically specialized with machine learning. So, you're seeing applications and new databases, no one database rules the world anymore. It's not about Oracle anymore, or anything else. So, open source fits nicely into this kind of platform view. How do you guys decide which technologies go in to the platform that you support? >> Yeah, great question. So, we certainly live in a world of, I call it polyglot persistence. But a simple way of referring to that is the right tool for the right job. And so, we really live in this world where engineers will reach for a database that solves a specific problem and solves it well. As you mentioned, companies, they're no longer Oracle shops, or they're no longer MySQL shops. You'll quite often see services or applications of teams using two or three different databases to solve different challenges. And so, what we do at Instaclustr is we really look at what are the technologies that our existing customers are using, and using side-by-side with, say, some of the existing Instaclustr offerings. We take great lead from that. We also look at what are the different projects out there that are solving use cases that we don't address at the moment. So, it's very use case driven. Whether it's, "Hey, we need something that's better at," say, "Time series." Or we need something that's a little bit better at translatable workloads. Or something a bit of a better fit for a case, right? And we work with those. And I think importantly, we also have this view that in a world of polyglot persistence, you've also got data integration challenges. So, how do you keep data safe between these two different database types? So, we're also looking at how do we integrate those better and support our users on that particular journey. So, it really comes down to one, listening to your customers, seeing what's out there and what's the right use case for a given technology and then we look to adopt that. >> That's great, Ben, machine learning is completely on fire right now. People love it, they want more of it. AI everything, everyone's putting AI on every label. If it does any automation, it's magic, it's AI. So, really, we know what that's happening, it's just really database work and machine learning under the covers. Pete, the business model here has completely changed too, because now with open source as a platform you have more scale, you have differentiation opportunities. I'm sure business is doing great. Give us an update on the business side of Instaclustr. What's clicking for you guys, what's working? What's the success trajectory look like? >> Yeah, it's been an amazing journey for us. When you think about it we were founded it in 2013, so, we're eight years into our journey. When we started the business we were focused entirely on Cassandra. But as Ben talked about, we've gone in diversified those technologies onto the platform, that common experience that we offer customers. So, you can adopt any one to a number of open source technologies in a highly integrated way and really, really grow off the back of that. It's driving some phenomenal growth in our business and we've really enjoyed growth rates that have been 70, 80, 100 year on year since we've started the business. And that's led to an enormous scale and opportunities for us to invest further in the platform, invest further in additional technologies in a really highly opinionated way. I think Ben talked about that integrations, then that becomes incredibly complex as you have many, many kinds of offerings on the platform. So, Instaclustr is much more targeted in terms of how we want to take our business forward and the growth opportunity before us. We think about being deeply expert and deeply capable in a smaller subset of technologies. But those which actually integrate and inter operate for customers so they can build solutions for their applications. But do that on Instaclustr using its platform with a common experience. And, so we've grown to 270 people now around the world. We started in Australia, we've got a strong presence in the US. We recently acquired a business called credativ in Europe, which was a PostgreSQL specialist organization. And that was because, as Ben said before, talking about those technologies we bring onto our platform. PostgreSQL, huge market, disrupting Oracle, exactly the right place that we want to be as Instaclustr with pure open source offerings. We brought them into the Instaclustr family in March this year and we did that to accelerate it on our platform. And so, we think about that. We think about future technologies on their platform, what we can do, and introduced to even provide an even greater and richer experience. Cadence is new to our platform. Super exciting for us because not only is it something that provides workflow as code, as an open source experience, but as a glue technology to build a complex business technology for applications. It actually drives workloads across Cassandra, PostgreSQL and Kafka, which are kind of core technologies on our platform. Super exciting for us, a big market. Interesting kind of group of adopters. You've got Uber kind of leading the charge there with that and us partnering with them now. We see that as a massive growth opportunity for our business. And as we introduce analytics capabilities, exploration, visibility features into the platform all built on open source. So, you can build a complete top to bottom data services layer using open source technology for your platform. We think that's an incredibly exciting part of the business and a great opportunity for us. >> Opportunities to raise money, more acquisitions on the horizon? >> Well, I think acquisitions where it makes sense. I talked about credativ, where we looked at credativ, we knew that PostgreSQL was new to our market, and we were coming into that market reasonably late. So, the way we thought about that from a strategy perspective was we wanted to accelerate the richness of the capability on our platform that we introduced and became GA late last year. So, we think about when we're selecting that kind of technology, that's the perfect opportunity to consider an acquisition for us. So, as we look at what we're going to introduce in the platform over the next sort of two, three, four years, that sort of decision that will, or that sort of thinking, or frames our thinking on what we would do from an acquisition perspective. I think the other way we think about acquisitions is new markets. So, thinking about globally entering, say into the Japanese market. does that make sense because of any language requirements to be able to support customers? 'Cause one of the things that's really, really important to us is the platform is fantastic for scaling, growing, deploying, running, operating this very powerful open source technology. But so too is the importance of having deep operational open source expertise backing and being there to call on if a customer's having an application issue. And that kind of drives the need for us to have in country kind of market support. And so, when we think about those sort of opportunities, I think we think about acquisition there, isn't it like another string to the bow in terms of getting presence in a particular or an emerging market that we're interested in. >> Awesome, Ben, final question to you is, on the technology front what do you see this year emerging? A lot of changes in 2021. We've got another year of pandemic situation going on. Hopefully it goes by fast. Hopefully it won't be three years, but again, who knows? But you're seeing the cloud open source actually taking as a tailwind from the pandemic. New opportunities, companies are refreshing, they have to, they're forced. There's going to be a lot more changes. What do you see from a tech perspective in open-source, open core, and in general for large companies as opensource continues to power the innovation? >> So, definitely the pandemic has a tailwind, particularly for those companies adopting the cloud. I think it's forced a lot of their hands as well. Their five-year plans have certainly become two or three year plans around moving to the cloud. And certainly, that contest for talent means that you really want to be keeping your engineers focused on core things. So, definitely I think we're going to see a continuation of that. We're going to say the continuation of open source dominating when it comes to a database and the database market, the same with cloud. I think we're going to see the gradual march towards different adoption models within the cloud. So, server lists, right? I think we're going to see that kind of slowly mature. I think it's still a little bit early in the hype cycle there, but we're going to start to see that mature. On the ML, AI side of things as well, people have been talking about it for the last three or four years. And I'm sure to people in the industry, they're like, "Oh, we're over that." But I think on the broader industry we're still quite early in that particular cycle as people figure out, how do they use the data that they've got? How do they use that? How do they train models on that? How do they serve inference on that? And how do they unlock other things with lower down on their data stack as well when it comes to ML and AI, right? We're seeing great research papers come out from AI powered indexes, right? So, the AI is actually speeding up queries, let alone actually solving business problems. So, I think we're going to say more and more of that kind of come out. I think we're going to see more and more process capabilities and organizational responses to this explosion of data. I'm super excited to say people talking about concepts and organizational concepts like data mesh. I think that's going to be fundamental as we move forward and have to manage the complexities of dealing with this. So, it's an old industry, data, when you think about it. As soon as you had computers you had data, and it's an old industry from that perspective. But I feel like we're only just getting started and it's just heating up. So, we're super excited to see what 2022 holds for us. >> Every company will be an source AI company. It has to be no matter what. (Ben laughing) Well, thanks for sharing the data Pete and Ben, the co-founders of Instaclustr. We'll get our "CUBE" AI working on this data we got today from you guys. Thanks for sharing, great stuff. Thanks for sharing the open core perspective. We really appreciate it and congratulations on your success. Companies do need more Instaclustrs out there, and you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thanks John, cheers mate. >> Thanks John. >> It's "theCUBE" Conversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special CUBE program. We're going to help you better understand how to manage risk by securing your digital supply chain. And we're going to first give you a high level preview of what's happening in the market. And with me, is Ben Fischer, who's Emerging Security Technology Advocate at Red Hat. Hello, Ben. Good to see you again. >> Nice to meet you, David. I'm (indistinct) >> Yeah, so let's set it up. What can people expect to hear from this program? >> So today, I'm going to start off and you're going to, we're going to have a conversation about some of the business challenges related to the software supply chain. And then the next video will be with Vincent Danen, Red Hat's VP of product security, and Luke Hinds, our security lead from the office of the CTO. And they're going to discuss more of the security aspects of the software supply chain. Thirdly, you'll (indistinct) the newcomer director of hybrid platforms, security product management. We'll dig into some of the practices and the technologies, and that will be followed up by Andrea Hall and Andrew Block. Andrea is a specialist solution architect, and Andrew is a distinguished architect, and they're going to cover some of the change in environments. There's a lot of change in environments related to the regulations and different movements in the industry and organizations. And then lastly, we'll have a video from an interview you did with Luke Hinds, discussing a software sign in tool called Sigstore and how it can improve security supply chain. >> Excellent. Thank you for that. Okay. So Ben, people hear the term software supply chain, and makes them, "Oh. That's an interesting name." But what do we mean by the term software supply chain, Ben? >> So it's a loaded term. Simply, it's the supply chain but of software. And people think, "Oh well. I just go to a store, and I buy software and it comes packaged," maybe in the old days. But these days, we've got open source software. So there's repositories and collaboration upstream where a lot of people in a community contribute to all these different pieces of the software. It's kind of like when you go to a store. You go to a store and you just see this one piece, but that store carries lots of different products. And for each of those products, they have relationships with different vendors and different distributors to gather all those products into a store. And it's pretty complex. So there's been this kind of curation of products and softwares that's kind of come about kind of like a warehouse club. So like you would trust a warehouse club to be kind of a place to reduce the amount of shopping you might have, or you can kind of go there and you trust that they have good products that you'll like, and that fulfill most of your needs for your family, and you can go there and you can kind of get most of your shopping out of one place versus having to drive all around town to go get a bunch of different products that are carried in different stores, and then having to research all those products, warehouse clubs make that experience very simple. And so there's been kind of an upsurge of organizations like Red Hat that just help simplify your choices and do that curation. And the value there is in trying to not just give you everything, but also curate and try to make sure that what you have is secure. Make sure what you have is up to date. Kind of do all these kinds of nuanced things. The software supply chain is kind of complex in that there's all these extra details you need to be kind of aware of, and it's true. You know, you could run around town and shop for every product you would like yourself, just like in a software supply chain, you could go directly and get all the pieces of software and manage them and update them and do all the work yourself. But it it's a lot of work, and it is, as the word implies, it's a chain. So it's not just one relationship. It's a whole chain of relationships. And having a trusted entity as kind of a proxy, that you could put your faith in, and knowing that they're kind of doing some of that work for you makes life a lot easier just like in the warehouse club, right? You want to kind of go one place, get all your shopping done and be satisfied. And so just like you would in traditional times. You Know, before open source came about, there was a lot of proprietary software, and you'd put your trust and faith into them, that they would satisfy all of your needs, and they service you entirely. But even proprietary software now is an open source software so it comes into the same problem. So you need to have a trusted partner basically to help you understand and give you that level of trust in the software you're buying. >> Makes sense, yeah. And Red Hat plays that critical role. >> Yeah. >> So let's explain why all of a sudden this topic of digital supply chain, software supply chain has taken center stage. Ben, what should people understand about the digital supply chain and how it impacts their respective businesses? >> Well, the digital supply chain is really, really critical, I mean, if nothing else. I mean to bring up the kind of the COVID analogy, right? Everything changed with COVID. Things just got accelerated because we realized that the old way of doing things in person and a lot of physical ways slowed things down. And so when we were trying to social distance and have space, the pressure for doing everything in a digital form, and to make it easier to, you know, order your groceries and have them delivered to your door, or, you know, do a trunk delivery of your pizza at the local pizza shop, all this became really critical. So yeah. It's just, honestly, the COVID experience really accelerated the whole need for digital transformation. I'm not trying to go there, but that was part of the supply chain because all those companies also needed to have that digital experience with all of their vendors, and it's kind of accelerated in that respect. So the supply chain in general is something that's gotten a lot of attention. I think people actually understand, maybe have an idea what the word means over the last two years with all the incidents that have happened, and kind of the power of having it in digital electronic form, really really, I think, has hit home for a lot of people. And it's critical because now, I just don't feel like the world can ever really kind of go back from that. We're all so dependent on transacting in a digital form. Our businesses rely on it. We rely on a daily checking of phones, checking websites for information, doing everything. All this is run on software, right? And it's not just software that maybe one person wrote and can maintain for the rest of their lives, and do it in a perfect form. At some point, the software, you know, almost all of it, is using different parts of software that are open source and out there and available. And the pieces that were already developed, cause there's no reason to recreate the wheel. And they just kind of pulled in all these little open source components. If they didn't make a program, it was the programming around that to kind of make that usable for their particular use case. And everyone's just gotten very, very comfortable with this model of pulling software, what we would say, from the upstream down to the downstream and consume it and utilize it themselves. It's just pervasive everywhere. It's just, you know, open source, they say, is kind of eating the world and that's kind of where it's come from. >> Right. Yeah. And this is really a major issue for folks. We're seeing all kinds of new techniques. And for example, just imagine you've got dozens or even hundreds of suppliers, and the bad guys are targeting, you know, a victim, and they might put a piece of malware in an individual, one of the suppliers, you know. They'll get in to one of the suppliers, and that's a benign piece of code, but when it gets actually through the victims', you know, the targets' firewall, things will start to self-form in ways that we've really not seen before. And so this is really a big issue. There's a lot of talk coming from policymakers. Of course, the POTUS has issued an executive order and is putting pressure on businesses and technology companies to improve their security posture. I wish it were as easy as a sort of a swipe of a pen, but what's behind these trends, Ben? >> So, oh, there's so much behind there. So I think you're alluding to something really, really, really important. So in the security world, I mean, most of the issues in the security world is due to, you know, breaches, I should say. Hacks are due to kind of unpatched vulnerabilities. So the problem with that is then the answer is, well, you should patch and patch regularly, and that's absolutely true. You should patch as much as you can where it's not causing business disruptions. But when you get into a supply chain, or a digital supply chain issue, if you have a hacker who is able to penetrate into a vendor's software, and they're able to play something that gets placed into their update mechanism and then gets pushed out to all of our customers, it can be catastrophic and it can be, it will spread very fast and all the customers that are doing the right thing normally, by doing constant updates, will get infected. This is kind of the scary thing. Obviously, it is the right thing to do. And the right thing is for those vendors to secure their environment as much as possible and do everything they can to make that as tight as possible. But also, as in anything, it's really, we're in a world now where it's not if you're going to be breached or, you know, it's going to be when. Everybody in the world, especially the United States, we've all had breaches with our confidential information exposed, right? It's kind of the world we live in. It's what we expect. So with that understanding, you know, it becomes more about how we'll react to that. You know, if your credit card number gets exposed, you just don't throw your hands up in the air. You go, "Okay. Well, I need to put a credit freeze. I need to do certain diligent actions." Same thing in the industry. You know if something happens like that, an organization needs to respond properly and fast to share with the industry what has happened to stop those updates from continuing to perpetrate and provide guidance on what they can do. And this is one of the wonderful things, I think, about the security industry, is actually the willingness and interest to share. You'd kind of think of people in the old days wanting to hide their security secrets. Hide and protect what they do to make sure that, to safeguard all their assets and safeguard the company, their data, everything. And I'm not saying that everything is exposed, but there's a more willingness to share information on threats they're seeing and collaborate on fixes, and work through very difficult issues in a collaborative way, which is, I think it's really wonderful, and it plays perfectly in my mind, kind of the open source mentality of doing things together, out in the open, across organizations. >> Right. So, I mean, again, it's, you know, the very things that, the good behavior we're supposed to be doing with patching and what everybody's advising us to do, we have to be really careful. That can actually turn around and bite you. So how should we think about trust with software? What does that even mean today, Ben? >> Well, it's becoming more important than ever before, because before, you know, there, like I'll tell you way back when I, long time ago, when I was quite young, you'd just download software. And you would share it with friends and copy it, and there was no such thing as antivirus. And everybody was fine with that, and you didn't even think of an issue. And then I remember the first antivirus or viruses came out and then you went down to your local computer software store, and they're handing out free discs as antivirus fixes for that one particular issue. So you went down and you got it and you'd patch it up. And that was that. And you didn't really have any worries beyond that. These days, you know, and that's because you trust the store, and you knew there was only one issue and nobody was, it's kind of a free environment where nobody thought that anything bad would really happen. Today though, we hear in the news constantly about cyber attacks, about breaches, about just endless numbers of things that are happening. Ransomware. There's so many different types of attacks and it's happening in so many different ways across every industry, every geography. It's everywhere, you know. It's really, in my mind, the world's largest industry, cyber crime. And that's just a scary thing and that's because it's profitable. And so, you know, when you think of it as that, as a kind of an evil industry, if you will, it puts things into a little bit of a perspective that, okay, their motives, for the most part are money, and they're trying to do this. So if that's the case, then you're just trying to create enough friction that it's just not profitable for them. And so it's not about doing everything in terms of security. It's about trying to do, you know, for the right things to mitigate the risks for organization. And so getting back to your point about trust, how do you trust the software that you're given? You know, if you download a piece of software, you should be thinking about where's the software being downloaded from? There's lots of sites. There's lots and lots of ways to get it. There's absolutely millions of different pieces of open source code that's out there. And just because you downloaded it from a site, you don't know who posted it, you don't know a lot of these issues. So it can be scary. And as an organization, you can choose to take on all or part of that risk by trying to understand which locations are safe. You can try to understand, you know, which code is safe, and which code you can basically feel comfortable that there's a level of trust. Or simply you can shift that risk over to an organization that might do some of that work for you, like kind of in any business model. Red Hat is an entity, and it focuses on open source software. So, you know, you can go out and you could download any bit of open source software that Red Hat sells, and you can run it today. There's nothing stopping you, and that's wonderful, and we're happy that you're doing that, but Red Hat plays a particular role in that. We're trying to kind of curate that software. We're trying to pick the best piece of software that we feel we can trust. We have a lot of people in those communities, working with the people who actually work on that software. We believe in the open source model, partly because not only is it collaborative and just open and transparent, but in that transparency and in that collaboration, there is review of all the code that gets submitted. So if you can go to the right upstream article repositories, and you can work with those people, you have insight into what's happening, and you can pull down the pieces and the components that you feel are best that you can package into a product that you feel can meet all the needs for your particular customers, and you can do that in a particular way. And then having that close proximity to those communities, you also have an idea when there's updates and patches and you get to work on those, and that allows you to consume those faster, and bring those to your customers faster. And so this is part of the trust element. It's a matter of do you want to do it yourself? Like, you know, warehouse club analogy? Do you want to go to 100 stores when you do a shopping list, or, you know, 20, 30 stores driving around the whole day? I don't know. I don't want to do that on my Saturday. Or, you know, do you want to go to warehouse stuff? Yeah, you might pay a little bit more. There's a premium there. You have to have that warehouse club membership, but then you kind of go to one store and maybe get 80% of your shopping done there, and that's really good. And maybe get the 20% from a couple other stores down the street, but you're done in a matter of a few hours versus the whole day. And so I would implore you, in terms of trust, you need to think about what are the critical pieces of software that you have in your organization, right? What are the critical digital processes that your organization runs? Think about them, and also not just think about what the risks are around them, but also think about beyond them, what the risks are to the people you're trusting. So whether it's Red Hat, or whether it's a particular website you might be wanting to download that open source software from, you need to think about it's a whole chain of things. So you will need to know that, okay, I have access to these things. I have this information, and I have these risks. Now, if I extend that out one degree further, then what risks are those folks are exposed to? What do they have knowledge of? And do that, and then think about it, and think about and evaluate who has the most information? Where are the risks? And think about what makes sense for the organization in terms of mitigating those risks and giving you the best ability to respond when something does happen. I think you can reduce your risk exposure with an organization that curates open source, or even closed source, but also you can also kind of reduce the blast radius, I think, because if they can get you those updates faster, respond faster than you could yourself, then that's hugely valuable too. >> Yeah. I mean, you know, to your point about it's very lucrative for the hackers. I mean, the criminal algorithm is actually pretty simple. It's all about ROI for them, which is how much value can they extract and what does it cost them to extract that in a numerator denominator? And so to the extent that you can increase the cost to the hacker, there's less value to them, and they will go look somewhere else. So question is, what are the parameters of trust in software that can potentially help organizations increase that denominator? And how do you define trustworthy software? What are the attributes? >> Yeah. So there's a lot of attributes. Yeah. I come back to kind of warehouse club analogy. When you kind of go to the warehouse club, they've kind of already pre-picked for various use cases, kind of, you know. Here's the, you know. Here's the two brands of shavers and we have it in the disposable form and the replacement blade form. And you just have a few options there. And it's you know a nice, simple selection, and you look at it and, you know, you can see the price and you know the quantity and you have certain information. And if you did want to look up more information, it's either on the package or you pull out your phone and get more information. In the open source world, you know, some things you want to look at, you want to see its transparency. So everything in open source is very transparent. If you do want to go with a closed source provider, that's fine too. But you know, you do want to have as much transparency as possible. So you want to build up a good relationship, whether it's Red Hat, open source or a closed source vendor, you want to have that relationship to get insight. And if it's closed source, it's more important because you need to go deeper into that relationship to understand what's happening behind that veiled curtain. Accountability. So, you know, whether it is software that you're getting through another organization, you want to make sure you know who in that organization is accountable. You want to know how they're going to be accountable, how they're going to respond. If it's upstream, right now, one thing that's coming through is, and they call it S bomb, software bills and material, which has details about kind of an ingredient list, if you will, of that software. And that is something that will, in the future, make it a little bit easier for everybody, but also if you're going to get software yourself directly, give you an understanding of maybe who's accountable, who actually wrote the software or made the patch, or submitted the last update to a branch. That type of information is very useful because you need, at some point, you may need to know who did this to verify if something is trustworthy, if something was intentional or not, if you see something that might be curious or, I don't know, questionable in some nature. And traceability. You want to be able to have that ability to understand all the changes that have been done in that software, right? Software is, you know, it's highly versioned. So there's constantly new features or updates or patches. And you want to be able to go through and know what's happened there. So not only for the benefit of understanding the things that have been added and the benefits that have been added to the software, but if something happened or you were trying to make sure nothing bad happened, you'd want to make sure maybe there has been no malicious submissions into that code stream as well. And so by tracing that, that's good. And then the whole auditability of it, to go back and look at the software, and having somebody understand what might have happened by kind of digging into all the records for that particular software. I'd also say risk management, because you, as an organization, you really need to know what your risks are, and you need to be able to not just do that at the macro level, but now with the software supply chain, you need to bring that down to kind of a software level and really understand, you know, if my business relies on a particular software component, like open SSL for VPN software and site-to-site networking and whatnot, I need to make sure that if anything happens to this piece of software, which is a critical component for me operating my business, what am I going to do about it? You know do I just terminate all my VPN connections and leave my rural workers stranded and, you know, disable site-to-site networking so my different sites don't have direct networking connections? You have to kind think about what are the risks and, you know, what's my plan B? How would I possibly manage things? And it feels very overwhelming when you think about the number of components. And so this is where understanding this and trying to find ways to mitigate risk and manage it and make things a little bit simpler so you can really focus on things that matter and think are important. And then incident response, which is, there's going to be something that happens sometimes to some piece of software that your organization has. So how are you going to respond? How are you going to even find out? How are you going to know that something happened? How are you monitoring for vulnerabilities in the software? How are you connecting with the upstream communities and being aware that something is happening wrong, and there's a bunch of developers scrambling to try to fix something quick because maybe there's a known (indistinct) of some software out in the wild. So having that awareness and having that ability to building to respond really is probably one of the most critical things here. >> Ben, can you give us a sense of just kind of the scope of this problem? Are there metrics you can share to kind of frame the issue for the audience? >> Yeah. So in terms of open source supply chain attacks, some type, a software vendor, actually has reports every year. And they've reported that there was a 650% increase in open source supply chain attacks in the past year. And this is on top of a 430% increase the prior year. So it's scary, but it's basically literally exploding in terms of the threats happening in the supply chain attacks. Supply chain attacks are not new, but they've become quite popular. And the power of the supply chain, as an amplifying factor, is starting to get exploited really well by the attackers these days. >> Mm-hmm. Okay. So let's kind of go to best practice. I mean, what are businesses doing about these today? These problems today? What should they be doing that maybe they're not doing? >> So with the explosion, you can understand that with the spike of these supply chain attacks, organizations are honestly, and understandably pretty caught off guard. So while organizations have been working on their cybersecurity programs for some time now, they're mostly trying to react. And by react, they're reacting with maybe not the most efficient of incident response plans yet. And these attacks are spreading like wildfire, but as an industry, you know, it's not really helping us get ahead. So, you know, it's the unfortunate place where we're at. You mentioned that there's, obviously there's some guidance from POTUS and other folks in the industry, and various efforts in the industry to work on improving the supply chain, work on improving different components that can help make things dramatically better for the industry, but they're still pretty early stage. There's still a lot of work to be done. So as far as kind of what we can be doing as an industry, obviously, you know, I'll say collaboration again, because, you know, by working together, whether it's with the government or in an upstream organization setting standards, these things are all really important. And especially within verticals, I think it's really important to kind of get together because even if you have a general standard, things can vary quite a bit within the verticals. But besides that outwardly looking action, looking inside and trying to understand, in a sense, it's kind of a simple thing. It's a business process engineering a question of, okay, what are your critical business processes? You know, what do those business processes rely upon? You know, what software components are there? And then okay, for those pieces of software, they also have different components. So even if you go to, you know, whether you go to an open source provider or a closed source provider, there are open source components. So understanding the software that you use, understanding where you get that software from, and understanding the components in those software and how those are digested, whether it's from an organization like Red Hat that's open source, or maybe a closed source provider, is really important. Developing the relationships that you have, that bi-directional trust with those organizations that are running that critical software for your organization is really important. So it's a lot more of a mapping and awareness type exercise, because from there, you can start asking a bunch of different questions. And by engaging in conversations about those questions, you're going to learn more and more and more. And that will continue to lead forward. Eventually, you'll get an understanding of, "I have these risks," and you may not necessarily know everything, but along the way, you'll start developing awareness of risks, and then you can ask yourself along the way, "Okay. As an organization, let's come together and figure out how can we- Let's look at these risks and how can we think about mitigating these right within our budget? To meet our business needs," et cetera. But it's a hard question because there's so many software out there. Our businesses are so critical on so many ways. There's so much software, and each software has so many different components. It's a pretty overbearing problem. I just not trying to scare anybody, but it's just important to just take some time and think about it and understand what you have, and be diligent about kind of walking through those business processes, and start with the most critical ones and kind of keep walking forward. And as you're mitigating them, think about, do you want to have an organization help you with these, or do you want to hire people and have them invest their time into doing the work that an outside organization might do for you? >> Right. Hey, Ben, I've taken a lot of your time. Really appreciate your insights, and really great to have you on. Thank you. >> Well, thank you for having me, Dave. Appreciate it. >> And thank you for watching the CUBE. This is Dave Vellante, and we are the leader in enterprise technology coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Oh, well, the back to the cubes coverage of ADA bus reinvent, 2021 executive seminar, I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. We've got a great segment here on the modernization. We were ringing in the success with Amazon web services, Vodafone digital in the UK, an example of modern engineering examples using Amazon, the cloud, looking at where we're cloud native is actually changing the game two great guests, Ben Collie, head, head of digital engineering, Vodafone UK, and Maynard Williams, managing director of center. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on the cube and sharing the story. >>Thanks, John. Appreciate it. So >>I gotta, I gotta ask you guys one of the main themes that we've been covering all year and even even pre pandemic, we, we saw the cloud native wave coming pretty hard containers. Great for modernization sets the table. You seeing things like Kubernetes and now serverless changing the game on all aspects of how modernization is happening. And everyone's talking about application modernization shift left all great for business, but you have to, you have to kind of take care of things under the, under the covers a little bit, the infrastructure, making sure the engineering teams are all set. So this has been a top topic. This is kind of what you guys are doing. Can you guys explain to me the needs that Vodafone has, um, that brought about this transformation? >>Yeah, sure. Um, so we we've been on this transformation for around four years, but you're absolutely right. The, uh, the pandemic has been a real catalyst for, for all kinds of organizations like ours around the world. Uh, so we were really driving a digital first agenda for quite a long time. Uh, and that, that came as, as you just said, John, it, it really did start with the, uh, the cloud hosted, uh, and then, uh, and then moving and realizing the difference between that and become native to the, to the cloud and really leveraging the services, uh, like AWS, um, in order to really drive pace, uh, and, and the outcomes that we needed for the business. Uh, we've seen a huge change over the last, uh, purely over the last 18 months, really. Um, our daily traffic, uh, these days is as it was on our highest ever, uh, uh, like an iPhone launch day, for example, um, before the pandemic, is I a daily traffic these days. And so that scalability and flexibility and that leveraging those services has been absolutely fundamental to supporting the, the changing needs and expectations of our customers. >>You know, back in the old days, uh, Maynard, you know, it's oh yeah, black Friday surge, you need the cloud to scale up and be flexible. Agile elastic, you know, scale is definitely now table stakes. And if you're not dealing with scale and some sort of either SRE fashion or whatever, you, you really ain't going to be behind the curve, but the next level that's being discussed is how do you leverage the scale for not just customer experience and business value, but we're talking about system architecture, kind of thinking there's kind of, this is our system design is now a big part of it. Can you talk about how this kind of threads together? Because we always talk about consumer experience, customer experience CX, but now there's a new system was mindset out there. Can you kind of share your vision on that >>Thing that stands out for me is if I look at digital, we've designed it to a point where the scale is just as you say, it's the table stakes, and only for launch with something that two years ago needed to be planned and thought about. And it's now absolutely routine. We think about the business side of it, but a big increase in scale really is seamless. But if I look at the full stack, we're still connected into some of the older backend systems, um, where any production, uh, they were on prime actually tasks. This is on AWS now, which is a big step forward, but when you've got to manage scaling in a way that translates from backend systems that are on premises on prime, and therefore we can't lastingly scale through to the front tab where we have to be able to scale up very seamlessly and balancing that across with, uh, an architecture that supports that level of scale and makes it so seamless on something like, as you say, iPhone launches or back Friday, any product coming out is actually key to the way we've architected that. >>So you're saying that essentially AWS combined with Vodafone worked on this solution that was more of a cloud native solutions that the innovation here, can you just summarize and unpack a little bit of what is the innovation, what problems did you solve together with essentially those and Vodafone? What was the core challenge? Yes. >>I think that the core is actually, how do you get to the point where, um, at the scaling is seamless, where you can move from being on the cloud to cloud native has been, just touched on what the same time you're actually connected into an enterprise state where the production systems are all on prem and don't have that ability to scale in the same fraction. So you can't, for example, push you to load into, uh, an on-prem backend system and, and simply expected to scale in the same fashion. So between our three organizations architecting something that is robust scales, we usable and takes away a load of pieces that actually were quite complex two years ago. And turns them into just routine has been a big step forward. >>And I want to get your reaction to this because, you know, you're, you're the you're on the, on the front line saying, Hey, be more agile at Basel saying, be agile, do different left, take that hill. Um, it's, it's easier said than done. Talk about what goes on when you have to implement and the stakes involved. Again, there's always the old way, new way. Can you just kind of give some color on what's going on? What's your perspective showing? >>And as I just said, that the real benefits and the story behind this was the ability to launch an iPhone. For example, as a event for Vodafone previously was weeks and months of preparation and design and testing and confidence building. And now it really is, it just happens. Uh, and we watched things scale and, and, and then down again, gracefully, um, and really do celebrate the, the another level up, if you like the leveling up of us as an organization, allowing our commercial colleagues to, to launch propositions or to launch campaigns without needing us to be involved anymore, because they're confident, we're all that things will, will flex like that. But you're absolutely right, that, that the changes and the demands of us as a, as a team, but also the, the expectations of our stakeholders, uh, have been changing for quite a long time now. Uh, and we're really excited now to be able to meet them by leveraging the services that we're discussing. >>Yeah. So the guys say said launched the iPhone, no big deal routine, hit the pub. Everyone's happy having a good day. >>Uh, >>Let's get into the solution, how it works. Talk about what's going on with the covers. How does this all work? Can you take us through, what's the state of the art of the, of the solution? Sure. >>Well, uh, as you mentioned earlier, we were very much inclined to serverless these days. So we rolled out fire gate, um, a few, uh, uh, started about 18 months ago. Um, and that really has, um, freed us up in, into all kinds of, um, uh, scalability, uh, measures, but also really about, about reusing and applying this across much more than just the, the engineering or the digital part of Vodafone, where we, where we began. So that's been a really big part of our agenda, uh, and that's, that's informed all kinds of things, the ability to scale and flex like that, and the architecture beneath us, um, and the containerization and orchestration that that goes along with that has really enabled us to, um, to flex that, uh, ability to, to reuse it across other areas. And because of that, now it's driven our hiring policy or tooling and, uh, technical, uh, our procedural approaches, uh, it all now leverages that ability to move a patient, to be able to scale, uh, not just in, um, uh, infrastructure or ability to serve customers, but in ability to deliver for the business commercially as well. Uh, and this is all now informed on our direction. I think, as an organization, >>It's interesting, you mentioned far you far gate than a trigger of events happens. People get excited, opens up new doors of opportunities as a chain reaction from that. Um, talk about the impact to the staff and the operations, because you almost, it's motivating at some level you get new things happening, but you're actually making things go better and faster, cheaper. >>Yeah. Uh, well, the, the impact is one, uh, because we're on a journey at Vodafone of this transformation, really becoming a technology business first and foremost, rather than a telco classically like our competitors, uh, we're able to really drive cultural change as well. So the impact on our people is a really, it's been particularly engaging. One with, we've also been part of, uh, a real recruitment drive. We've just announced 7,000 new, uh, roles, uh, joining our team across Europe and that these are engineering roles, um, driving more of the same, uh, behaviors and principles of a modern software engineering business like ours. Uh, and that really is fueled by our, our ability to experiment and try, but become cloud native and, and, uh, employ these services in the way that they're designed to be >>Maynard. I'd like to get your take on this and, and, and shift to a topic around how, what this all means. Um, if you zoom out and you say, okay, with the pandemic, it's become a mobile virtual hybrid. Now world around work play, all those lines are kind of blurring. It's not as clean as it used to be. Oh, the network segmented over here. This is over here. These legacy systems were built around the notion of things when nicely segmented. Um, now you have this whole kind of mashup, if you will, of how you just want to work, right. There's mobilization is a huge thing. So access identity, these are things that we're all kind of set up nicely before the pandemic, or at least, you know, not as, uh, stable, maybe not scalable, but what's your take on this? What's the big picture what's all happening. >>I think, I mean, the pandemic has accelerated a set of changes that were already happening anyway. And I'd say the other particles is under the covers. A lot of the work's been done has been to create the microservices that stitch together to produce those journeys, but, you know, running the containers. And so that, that opens up an omni-channel future that starts to move away from saying actually businesses are organized around the environment in which they're serving. Is it a retail store? Is it, is it online that additional and so on, and actually into much more of a space where you're building the best journeys and those journeys come and are served through digital or through a call center or through a store and so on. And that makes a huge difference because the focus on improving the customer's experience has been enormous. And I think that's one of the other parts that come out of the whole cloud native setup. >>And the ability to experiment has been iteratively and endlessly improving the experience for the customer. And that's, that's a, that's a massive step forward. So we can talk about the fact that we deploy a huge number of times more frequently than we did even a year ago, uh, or the, you know, our quality has improved by a massive percentage and so on. And I think the thing that's really interesting is the improvement in the experience and the endless improvement and iteration of that, because we can make lots and lots of small changes and do every day. That's a big one, >>You know, what's interesting Ben, and let's get your reaction on this. And if you don't mind to just add a little color to this, this is just another example of reports that we've been talking with folks on where it's not about just replatforming to the cloud. It's refactoring the business, uh, with, with the engineering, the modernization. And so there's two things that go on one, you see the efficiencies and new doors open up new things are happening. People are getting excited, good, some good Mo morale boosting things are becoming clear, but then there's actually new business, new business value being created or new propositions engineering propositions. Can you share from a digital standpoint, because this seems to be the new role of the digital person, whether it's engineering or on the business side, make things run faster, cheaper, and better, and then create new opportunities, new propositions, what's your >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's fundamentally around pace of delivery. Uh, being able to, as, as may not says, uh, moving from a world, uh, two or three years ago where we were deploying once every two or three months, uh, this is a website once every two or three months where we were, uh, to now it's happening all the time every day. Uh, it's, it's, it's a skill that we've given us as an organization that we couldn't have leveraged before. And what we're able to do with that now is experiment our way and iterate our way to new value streams, as you say, but also trial and error. What we already know, uh, or expects to be true with our customers much, much more easily and much, much more frequently, very little a barrier to production or friction between us and the customer these days, and the almost instant response and feedback we get from customers. Um, we, we learn constantly about because of that. And it's, uh, it's become much less of a stab in the dark with large business cases where they work well, they worked and are much more experimental initiative. Uh, we, most of the propositions we know about, but also to the experiments, um, and unknowns in our future. Um, that also now unlocked, >>That's a great point. You mentioned about the whole timing of, you know, the old way, months, weeks, just for website stuff, uh, Maynard. And if you guys can share this new world order is actually pretty exciting, but also daunting if you're not like in the water, so to speak, right? So, you know, some people are actually, you know, putting their toe in the water, they're experimenting, but it's a game changer. I mean, a significant step up of value. What's your advice about solutions and they're not easy. I mean, you just got to get your hands around the sensor. You guys have been doing a lot more of these projects is seeing more and more of these, these kinds of partnerships, uh, and the value is there. Can you guys share your, your, uh, opinion and advice to folks out there watching saying, how do I do this and is it going to be worth it? Is that bridge to the future there? >>I mean, I think there's a mechanical piece. How do I enable this? And we can talk about dev ops and moving to cloud native, and actually some of the, some of the process side of as an organization, how do I get really comfortable with deploying very frequently and it being low risk and routine. And so the other part for me, which we sort of haven't touched on is as much as we talk about experimentation, it's about the data and the analytics and the knowledge that we create of that. So the, the, the small changes we're making are highly scientific. And when we think about actually understanding how we're optimizing experiences, that's all about the whole set of data points that I'm pinning up. And so I'll take two parts is know the, the journey we've been on here is, is about enablement. It's about moving the architecture. It's about moving the ways of working so that a lot of things that were hard or required thinking about two years ago on that quality team. But the other part of it is understanding the data and having the analytics capability and being able to make a very scientific experiment where you can see the result in the day-to-day >>Ben, what's your reaction advice to folks watching as they modernize exciting, challenging. It's a lot of hard work, but what's it look, it's the end game, >>All of those things, yes. I'd say it's, um, more than anything, it's a necessity these days we have to embark on this journey. It is, it is daunting. And, and of course, a lot of large organizations like ours, we were successful for doing things in a particular way, uh, have built up a lot of, uh, protection mechanisms for doing, for making sure we protect that. And so to come at it from a new angle is, is obviously daunting. And it's very challenging as well. There is an immune system in all of our organizations that is real, but I'll deal with it. Um, but the, the real, um, success behind, uh, the real, I think the reasons behind a lot of our success has been beat by being able to quickly prove value to quickly prove that outcomes are deliverable and achievable. Um, and then to build on those and iterate on it. And as, as I said, it's, it's about being able to move at pace for us in Vodafone. It's about leveraging our scale. We're a huge organization. Um, and we're, we're now coming together as one to really make sure that we do just lean on that scale more than we have them. Yeah, that's really about iterating, as I said, and, and, um, finding things that work, keep doing it, finding things that hold you back and get rid of them as quickly as you can, uh, is what I would say for us. >>It's interesting. You mentioned the scale. The thing about the cloud is when I hear the common pattern is it takes advantage of the strengths of your environment. You know, so every environment is a bit different, but you guys have the scale. I have to ask you while you're here. What are some of the anecdotal comments that kind of, you hear from folks that make you happy? When about the results? I think saying, Hey man, I'm not even seeing this anymore, or, wow. This is faster. What's some of the sound bites that you guys take as proof points of the success of this project. >>Yeah. It's, uh, I'd say it's mainly an R there's two things I would say, uh, the ability to rely less on it delivery if you like. So empowering our commercial business to make changes for themselves in a safe and secure manner. So providing these self-service capabilities, we've started to see a real pace about our commercial business, as well as our technology business. Uh, but also the, the time it takes to get things out is probably one of the biggest, uh, really tangible results and outcomes for us at the moment. Um, just the sheer amount of things we can release to production, uh, in, in sorts of short space, space of time really does bring to life, our ability to now trial and error, to AB test a Canary deploy. Things like that is really, um, it's been a real superpower for our, um, transformation, I think yes. >>Kind of kidding about can't make time to go to the pub, but in reality, it's free time freeing up people from doing those tasks that were slower shifting that value. >>Yeah. Whereas as you mentioned, Johnny, it really is much more than a technical journey. This is a cultural one as well for a lot of organizations and, um, by being more connected, by being more connected to the outcomes or the value that you add into production, uh, it really does drive a new culture and engagement across our teams. You know, if it's six months between writing a line of code and seeing it in production by up no sense of ownership or pride in what I've done there, but if I can deploy code immediately see an impact good or bad, um, then, uh, I really do feel connected to the outcomes and the value that I'm driving to, to the business and to our customers. So there really is a great cultural, >>Yeah. I remember Andy Jassy last year when he was a sea of AWS on stage and talked about that dynamic of the teamwork, people rowing in the right direction. Um, feeling part of it may know this is a cultural shift on how companies do business. I know center I've covered probably a dozen or so killer projects that have just been awesomely new and kind of different, but successful built on the cloud. So a lot of replatforming refactoring you're in the front lines, working with, uh, companies that essentially what's the pattern that you see that's that's happening right now. What's the, what's your view of the current market? >>Um, I mean, I think there's a huge shift to this, that this journey too has been part of the move from being on the cloud to being proud nature. I'm really getting that value because there's a, um, a kind of, almost a example. I see there's a light bulb moment where ownership of what you put in production means that you move away from a model of we change code because either the business tell us too, because they have a functional requirement or because something's broken. When we get into the model of that, I want to improve the thing that I feel ownership of. That's not leave. And you suddenly see how much difference that makes to the experience of it, the quality of it, the stability, all of those things improving. And so if, if I look more generally that cultural shift is it is an evolution that organizations go through and it starts with actually delivering it in a more agile way. At some large scale, you see agility moving up into kind of business agility and starting to affect things like budgeting cycles and the kind of corporate functions. If you like that tend to sit around, uh, you know, supporting Pete pieces of delivery. And there's a lot more of that happening at the moment, a load with more organizations pushing into being properly cloud native and transforming rather than the kind of first wave, which was the shift onto the cloud. Now it's actually, that's really leveraged what we've got with the, >>Yeah. And you guys essentially have been riding on the wave of AWS and the cloud for many, many years. We've been covering it. Ben great success story. Thanks for coming on the cube, a head of digital engineering, Vodafone UK, great example of modern engineering at work using AWS in Europe. Uh, thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing your story. Maynor thank you for also coming on and the work you're doing at Accenture and AWS. Thank you. Thanks John. The cube coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 executive summit. I'm John furry, your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021 Executive Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment here on the modernization, where we're ringing in the success with Amazon Web Services and Vodafone Digital in the UK. An example of modern engineering, examples using Amazon, the cloud. Looking at where cloud-native is actually changing the game. We got two great guests, Ben Connolly, Head of Digital Engineering at Vodafone UK, and Maynard Williams, Managing Director of Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing the story. >> Thanks John, appreciate the invite. >> So I got to ask you guys, one of the main themes that we've been covering all year, and even pre-pandemic, we saw the cloud-native wave coming pretty hard. Containers, great for modernization, sets the table. You seeing things like Kubernetes, and now Serverless changing the game on all aspects of how modernization is happening. And everyone's talking about application modernization, shift left, all great for business, but you have to kind of take care of things under the covers a little bit. The infrastructure, making sure the engineering teams are all set. So this has been a top topic. This is kind of what you guys are doing. Can you guys explain to me the needs that Vodafone has that brought about this transformation? >> Yeah, sure. So we we've been on this transformation program for years, but you're absolutely right. The pandemic has been a real catalyst for all kinds of organizations like ours around the world. So we were really driving digital first agenda for quite a long time. And that that came as you just said John, it really did start with the cloud hosted and then moving and realizing the difference between that and become native to the cloud and really leveraging the services like AWS in order to really drive pace and the outcomes that we needed for the business. We've seen a huge change purely over the last 18 months really. Our daily traffic these days is as it was on our highest ever like an iPhone launch day, for example, before the pandemic is daily traffic these days. And so that scalability and flexibility and that leveraging those services has been absolutely fundamental to supporting the changing needs and expectations of our customers. >> You know, back in the old days, Maynard oh yeah, Black Friday surge, you need the cloud to scale up and be flexible, agile, elastic. The scale is definitely now table stakes. And if you're not dealing with scale and some sort of either SRE fashion or whatever, you're really going to be behind the curve. But the next level that's being discussed is how do you leverage the scale for not just customer experience and business value but we're talking about system architecture, kind of thinking there's going to, this is our system design is now a big part of it. Can you talk about how this kind of threads together? Because we always talk about consumer experience, customer experience CX, but now there's a new systems mindset out there. Can you kind of share your vision on that. >> Yeah, I think the thing that stands out for me is if I look at digital, we've designed it to a point where the scale is just as you say, it's the table stakes. And iPhone launch was something that two years ago needed to be planned and thought about. And it's now absolutely routine. We think about the business side of it but a big increase in scale really is seamless. But if I look at the full stack, we're still connected into some of the older backend systems where we're in production they're on prime actually tests is on AWS now, which is a big step forward, but when you've got to manage scaling in a way that translates from backend systems that are on-premises or on-prem, and therefore we can't elastically scale through to the front tab where we have to be able to scale up very seamlessly and balancing that across with an architecture that supports that level of scale and makes it so seamless on something like, as you say, iPhone launches or Black Friday or any product coming out is actually key to the way we've architected that. >> So you saying that essentially AWS combined with Vodafone worked on this solution that was more of a cloud native solutions. Is that the innovation? Can you just summarize and unpack a little bit, what is the innovation? What problems did you solve together with Accenture and Vodafone? What was the core challenge? >> Yes well, I think that the core is actually, how do you get to the point where the scaling is seamless, where you can move from being on the cloud to cloud native, as Ben just touched on, when at the same time you're actually connected into an enterprise state where the production systems are all on-prem and don't have that ability to scale in the same fashion. So you can't, for example, push you to load into an on-prem backend system and simply expected to scale in the same fashion. So between our three organizations, architecting something that is robust scales, reusable and takes away a load of pieces that actually were quite complex two years ago and turns them into just routine has been a big step forward. >> And I want to get your reaction to this because you're on the front line saying, hey, be more agile, the boss that says, be agile, do different left, take that hill. It's easier said than done. Talk about what goes on when you have to implement and the stakes involved. Again, there's always the old way, new way. Could you just kind of give some color on what's going on? What's your perspective? >> Sure, and Maynard just said that the real benefits and the story behind this was the ability to launch an iPhone For example, as a non event for Vodafone previously was weeks and months of preparation and design and testing and confidence building. And now it really is, it just happens. And we watched things scale and then down again gracefully and really do celebrate the level up if you like, the leveling up of us as an organization, allowing our commercial colleagues to launch propositions or to launch campaigns without needing us to be involved anymore, because they're confident, we're all confident that things will flex like that. But you're absolutely right that the changes and the demands of us as a team, but also the expectations of our stakeholders have been changing for quite a long time now. And we're really excited now to be able to meet them by leveraging the services that we're discussing it. >> Yeah, so the guy said launched the iPhone, no big deal routine, hit the pub, everyone's happy. Having a good day. Let's get into the solution, how it works. Talk about what's going on under the covers. How does this all work? Can you take us through what's the state of the art of the of the solution? >> Sure. Well as you mentioned earlier, we were very much inclined to Serverless these days. So we rolled out fire gate a few, it started about 18 months ago and that really has freed us up into all kinds of scalability measures but also really about reusing and applying this across much more than just the engineering or the digital part of Vodafone where we began. So that's been a really big part of our agenda and that's informed all kinds of things. The ability to scale and flex like that and the architecture beneath us and the containerization and orchestration that goes along with that has really enabled us to flex that ability to reuse it across other areas. And because of that now it's driven our hiring policy, our tooling and technical, our procedural approaches, and it all now leverages that ability to move a pace and to be able to scale, not just in infrastructure or ability to serve customers, but in ability to deliver for the business commercially as well. And this is all now informed on our direction I think, as an organization. >> It's interesting, you mentioned you far gate then a trigger of events happens. People get excited, opens up new doors of opportunities, there's a chain reaction from that. Talk about the impact to the staff in the operations because you almost it's motivating. At some level, you got new things happening but you're actually making things go better and faster, cheaper. >> Yeah, well, the impact is one because we're on a journey at Vodafone of this transformation really becoming a technology business first and foremost, rather than a telco classically like our competitors. We're able to really drive cultural change as well. So the impact on our people is a really, it's been a particularly engaging one, we've also been part of a real recruitment drive. We've just announced 7,000 new roles joining our team across Europe. And these are engineering roles driving more of the same behaviors and principles of a modern software engineering business like ours. And that really is fueled by our ability to experiment and try but become cloud native and employ these services in the way that they're designed to be. >> Maynard, I'd like to get your take on this and shift to a topic around what this all means. You zoom out and you say, okay, with the pandemic, it's become a mobile virtual hybrid now world around work play, all those lines are kind of blurring. It's not as clean as it used to be. Oh, the network segmented over here, this is over here, these legacy systems were built around the notion of things were nicely segmented. Now you have this whole kind of mashup if you will, of how you just want to work, right? There's mobilization is a huge thing. So access, identity, these are things that we're all kind of set up nicely before the pandemic, or at least not as a stable maybe not scalable. But what's your take on this? What's the big picture? What's all happening? >> I think, I mean, the pandemic has accelerated a set of changes that were already happening anyway. And I'd say the other part of this is under the covers. A lot of the work has been to create the microservices that stitch together to produce those journeys that run in the containers and so that opens up an Omni-channel feature that starts to move away from saying actually, businesses are organized around the environment in which they're serving. Is it a retail store? Is it online, additional and so on? And actually into much more of a space where you're building the best journeys and those journeys can and are served through digital or through a call center or through a store and so on. And that makes a huge difference because the focus on improving the customer's experience has been enormous. And I think that's one of the other parts that come out of the whole cloud native setup and the ability to experiment has been intuitively and endlessly improving the experience for the customer. And that's a massive step forward. So we can talk about the fact that we deploy a huge number of times more frequently than we did even a year ago or that our quality is improved by a massive percentage and so on. And I think the thing that's really interesting is the improvement in the experience and the endless improvement and iteration of that because we can make lots and lots of small changes and do every day. That's a big step forward. >> You know, what's interesting, Ben and let's get your reaction on this and if you don't mind to just add a little color to this. This is just another example of reports that we've been talking with folks on where it's not about just re-platforming to the cloud. It's refactoring the business with the engineering, the modernization. And so there's two things that go on. One, you see the efficiencies, new doors open up, new things are happening, people are getting excited, get some good morale boost, things are becoming clear, but then this actually new business value being created or new propositions, engineering propositions. Can you share from a digital standpoint because this seems to be the new role of the digital person, whether it's engineering or on the business side, make things run faster, cheaper and better and then create new opportunities, new propositions. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, it's fundamentally around pace of delivery. Being able to, as Maynard says, moving from a world two or three years ago where we were deploying once every two or three months. This is a website once every two or three months, it's where we were. And so now it's happening all the time every day. It's a skill that we've given us as an organization that we couldn't have leveraged before. And what we're able to do with that now is experiment our way and iterate our way to new value streams, as you say, but also to trial and error what we already know or expect to be true with our customers much, much more easily and much, much more frequently. Very little a barrier to production or friction between us and the customer these days and the almost instant response and feedback we get from customers, we learn constantly because of that and it's become much less of a stab in the dark with large business cases where they work well, they work to now much more experimental initiative. That way both to the propositions we know about but also to the experiments and unknowns in our future that also now unlocked for us. >> That's a great point you mentioned about the whole timing of, the old way, months, weeks, just for website stuff. Maynard, if you guys can share this new world order is actually pretty exciting but also daunting if you're not like in the water, so to speak. So some people are actually putting their toe in the water, they're experimenting but it's a game changer. I mean, a significant step up of value. What's your advice about solutions? And they're not easy. I mean, you just got to get your hands around Accenture. You guys have been doing a lot more of these projects and seeing more and more of these kinds of partnerships and the value is there. Can you guys share your opinion and advice to folks out there watching saying, how do I do this and is it going to be worth it? Is that bridge to the future there? >> I mean, I think there's a mechanical piece. How do I enable this? We could talk about DevOps and moving to cloud native and actually some of the process side of as an organization, how do I get really comfortable with deploying very frequently and it being low risk and routine and so on. The other part for me, which we sort of haven't touched on is as much as we talk about experimentation, it's about the data and the analytics and the knowledge that we create out of that. So the small changes we're making are highly scientific. And when we think about actually understanding how we're optimizing experiences, that's all about a whole set of data points that underpin it. And so I'd say two parts. It's the journey we've been on here is about enablement. It's about moving the architecture. It's about moving the ways of working so that a lot of things that were hard or required thinking about two years ago on that are routine but the other part of it is understanding the data and having the analytics capability and being able to make a very scientific experiment where you can see the result in the day to day. >> Ben, what's your reaction advice to folks watching as they modernize exciting, challenging. It's a lot of hard work, but what is its the end game? >> All of those things, yes. I'd say it's more than anything, it's a necessity these days we have to embark on this journey and it is daunting. And of course, a lot of large organizations like ours, we were successful for doing things in a particular way and built up a lot of protection mechanisms for making sure we protect that. And so to come at it from a new angle is obviously daunting. And it's very challenging as well. There is an immune system in all of our organizations it is real and we will all deal with it. But the success behind, I think the real reasons behind a lot of our success has been by being able to quickly prove value, to quickly prove that outcomes are deliverable and achievable. And then to build on those and iterate on it. And as I said, it's about being able to move at pace. For us in Vodafone it's about leveraging our scale. We're a huge organization, and we're now coming together as one to really make sure that we do lean on that scale more than we have them. We're really about iterating, as I said and finding things that work, keep doing it, finding things that hold you back and get rid of them as quickly as you can is what I would say for us. >> It's interesting you mentioned the scale. The thing about the cloud is when I hear the common pattern is it takes advantage of the strengths of your environment. So every environment's a bit different but you guys have the scale. I have to ask you while you're here. What are some of the anecdotal comments that kind of you hear from folks that make you happy, what about the results? I think saying, hey man, I'm not even seeing this anymore or wow this is faster. What's some of the sound bites that you guys take as proof points of the success of this project. >> Yeah, I'd say it's mainly there's two things I would say, the ability to rely less on IT delivery if you like. So empowering our commercial business to make changes for themselves in a safe and secure manner. So providing these self-service capabilities, we've started to see a real pace about our commercial business, as well as our technology business. But also the time it takes to get things out is probably one of the biggest, really tangible results and outcomes for us at the moment. Just the sheer amount of things we can release to production in sorts of short space of time really does bring to life our ability to now trial and error, to AB test Canary deploy, things like that is really, it's been a real superpower for our transformation. >> Yeah, kind of kidding about having time to go to the pub but in reality, it's free time freeing up people from doing those tasks that were slower and shifting that value. >> Yeah, as you mentioned John, it really is much more than a technical journey. This is a cultural one as well for a lot of organizations. And by being more connected to the outcomes or the value that you add into production, it really does drive a new culture and engagement across our teams. If it's six months between rising line of code and seeing it in production, I have no sense of ownership or pride in what I've done there, but if I can deploy code immediately see an impact good or bad, then I really do feel connected to the outcomes and the value that I'm driving to the business and to our customers. So there really is a great cultural journey as well. >> Yeah, I remember Andy Jassy last year when he was the CEO of AWS on the stage and talked about that dynamic of the team where people run in the right direction, feeling part of it. Maynard, this is a cultural shift on how companies do business. I know Accenture have covered probably a dozen or so killer projects that have just been awesomely new and kind of different but a successful built on the cloud. So a lot of re-platforming refactoring. You're in the front lines working with companies at Accenture. What's the pattern that you see that's happening right now? What's your view of the current market? >> I mean, I think there's a huge shift in this journey too has bankrupted the move from being on the cloud to being cloud native. I'm really getting that value because there's a kind of almost example I see, there's a light bulb moment where ownership of what you put in production means that you move away from a model of we change code because either the business tell us to cause they have a functional requirement or because something's broken when we get into the model of but I want to improve the thing that I feel ownership of that's not alive. And you suddenly see how much difference that makes to the experience of it, the quality of it, the stability, all of those things improving. And so if I look more generally that cultural shift is an evolution that organizations go through and it starts with actually delivering it in a more agile way. At some large scale, you see agility moving up into that kind of business agility and starting to affect things like budgeting cycles and the kind of corporate functions if you like, that tend to sit around supporting peak pieces of delivery. And there's a lot more of that happening at the moment, aligned with more organizations pushing into being properly cloud native and transforming rather than the kind of first wave which was the shift onto the cloud. Now it's actually, that's really leveraged what we've got with the cloud. >> Yeah and you guys essentially have been riding on the wave of AWS and the Cloud for many, many years we've been covering it. Ben great success story. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, a head of Digital Engineering, Vodafone UK. Great example of modern engineering at work using AWS in Europe. Thanks for coming on theCUBE sharing your story. Maynard, thank you for also coming on and the work you're doing at Accenture and AWS, thank you. >> Thanks John, great to be here. >> It's theCUBE coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021 Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

welcome back to los angeles lisa martin here with dave nicholson day three of the cube's coverage of kubecon cloud native con north america 2020 we've been having some great comp live conversations in the last three days with actual guests on set we're very pleased to welcome to for the first time to our program shimon ben david the cto of weka welcome hey nice to be here nice to be here great to be at an in-person event isn't it no it's awesome they've done a great job i think you're green you're green like we're green fully green which is fantastic actually purple and hearts wake up yeah good to know green means you're shaking hands and maybe the occasional hug so talk to us about weka what's going on we'll kind of dig into what you guys are doing with kubernetes but give us that overview of what's going on at weka io okay so weka has been around for several years already uh we actually jade our product of 2016 so it's been out there uh actually eight of the fortune 50 are using weka um for those of you that don't know weka by the way we're a fully software defined parallel file system cloud native i know it's a mouthful and it's buzzword compliant but we actually baked all of that into the product from day one because we did other storage companies in the past and we actually wanted to take the best of all worlds and put that into one storage that is is not another me too it's not another compromise so we built the the environment we built weka to actually accommodate for upcoming technologies so we identified also that cloud technology is upcoming network actually exploded in a good way one gig 10 gig 100 gig 200 gig came out so we knew that that's going to be a trend and also cloud we saw cloud being utilized more and more and we kind of like bet that being able to be a parallel file system for the cloud would be amazing and it does how are you not on me too tell me tell us that when you're talking with customers what are the like the top three things that really differentiate weka speed scale and simplicity speed skills i like how fast you said that like quicker so speed sorry you see a lot of file system a lot of storage environments that are very um throughput oriented so speed how many gigabytes can you do to be honest a lot of storage environments are saying we can do that in that many gigabytes when we designed weka actually we wanted to provide an environment that would actually be faster than your local nvme on your local server because that's what we see are actually customers using for performance they're copying the data for their local to their local nvmes and process it we created an environment that is actually throughput oriented iops oriented latency sensitive and metadata performance so it's kind of like the best of all worlds and it's just not just a claim we actually showed it in many benchmarks uh top 500s supercomputing centers can talk for hours about performance but that's performance um scalability we actually are able to scale uh and we did show that we scaled to multiple petabytes we actually uh took some projects from scale-out nas appliances that actually got to their limit of their scale out and we we just continued from there double digit triple digits petabytes upcoming um and also scale is also how many clients can you service at once so it's not only how much capacity but also how many clients can you can you work with concurrently and simplicity all of that we from the initial design points were let's make something that is usable by users and not like so my mother can really use it right and so we have a very simple intuitive user interface but it's also api driven so you can automate around it so simplicity speed and scale love it so shimon it's interesting you said that your company was founded in 2016 in that in that time period because uh before jade ga ga 2016. um but but in those in in those surrounding years uh there were a lot of companies that were coming out at sort of the tail end of the legacy storage world yeah trying to just cannibalize that business you came out looking into the future where are we in that future now because you could argue that you guys maybe started a little early you could have taken a couple of years off and waited for uh for for the wave in the world of containerization as an example to come through but this is really this is like your time to shine isn't it exactly and being fully software defined we can always um adapt and we're always adapting so we bet on new technologies networking flash environments and these keep just keep on going and improving right when we went out we were like in 10 gig environments with ssds but we already knew that we're going to go to 100 and we also designed already for nvmes so kind like hardware constantly improved uh cpus for example the new intel cpus the new amd cpus we just accommodated for them because being software defined means that we actually bypass most of their inner workings and do things ourselves so that's awesome and then the cloud environment is growing massively and containers we see containers now in everyday uh use cases where initially it was maybe vms maybe bare metal but now everything is containerized and we're actually starting to see more and more kubernetes orchestrated environment uh coming out as well i still have a feeling that this is still a bit of dev property hey i'm a developer i'm a devops engineer i'm going to do it uh and it's there is i actually saw a lot of exciting things here um taking it to the next level to the it environment so um that's where we will show benefit as well so talk about how kubernetes users are are working with weka what is what superpower does that give them so um i think if you look at the current storage solutions that you have for kubernetes um they're interesting but they're more of like the let's take what we have today and plug it in right um so what kind of has a csi uh plug-in so it's easy to integrate and work with but also when you look at it um block is still being used in in kubernetes environments that i'm familiar with block was still being used for high performance so i i used uh pvs and pvcs to manage my pods uh claims and then but then i mounted them as read write once right because i couldn't share them then if a pod failed i had to reclaim the pvc and connect it to multiple environments because i wanted block storage because it's fast and then nfs environments was were used as read write many uh to be a shared environment but low performance so by being able to say hey we now have an environment that is fully covered kubernetes integrated and it provides all the performance aspects that you need you don't need to choose just run your fleet of pods your cluster of pods read write many you don't need to to manage old reclamations just to create new pods you get the best of all words ease of use and also uh the performance additionally because there's always more right we now see more and more uh cloud environments right so weka also has the ability and i didn't focus on that but it's it's really uh amazing it has the ability to move data around between different environments so imagine and we see that imagine on-prem environments that are now using weka you're in the terabytes or petabyte scale obviously you can copy and rsync and rclone right but nobody really does it because it doesn't work for these capacities so weka has the ability to say hey i can move data around between different environments so create more copies or simply burst so we see customers that are working on-prem throwing data to the cloud we see customers working on the cloud and and then we actually now see customers starting to bridge the gap because cloud bursting is again is a very nice buzzword we see some customers exploring it we don't really see customers doing it at the moment but the customers that are exploring it are exploring uh throwing the compute out to the cloud using the kubernetes cluster and throwing the data to the cloud using the weka cluster so there's and and one last thing because that's another interesting use case weka can be run converged on the same kubernetes cluster so there is no need to have even it's so in essence it's a zero footprint storage you don't need to even add more servers so i don't need to buy a box and connect my cluster to that box i just run it on the same servers and if i want more compute nodes i add more nodes and i'll add more storage by doing that so it's that simple so i was just looking at the website and see that waka was just this was just announced last week a visionary in the gartner mq for what's the mq4 distributed file systems and object storage talk to me talk talk to us about that what does that distinction mean for the company and how does the voice of the customer validate that great so actually this is interesting this is a culmination of a lot of hard work that all of the team did writing the product and all of the customers by adopting the product because it was in order to get to that i know we don't know if anybody is familiar with the criteria but you need to have a large footprint a distinguished footprint worldwide so we worked hard on getting that and we see that and we see that in multiple markets by the way financials we see a massive amounts of aiml projects containerized kubernetes orchestrated so getting to that was a huge achievement you could see other storage devices not being there because not not every storage appliance is is a parallel file system usually i think uh when you look at parallel file systems you you you attribute complexity and i need an army of people to manage it and to tweak it so that's again one of the things that we did and that's why we really think that we're a cool vendor in that magikarp magic quarter right because you it's that simple to manage uh you don't have any uh find you you cannot you don't need to find unity in like a bazillion different ways just install it we work it works you map it to your containers simple so we're here at kubecon a lot of talk about cloud native a lot of projects a lot of integration a lot of community development you've described installing weka into a kubernetes cluster where you know are there are there integrations that are being worked on what are the is there connective tissue between essentially this parallel file system that's spanning you say you have five nodes you have weka running on those five nodes you have a kubernetes cluster spanning those five nodes um what kinds of things are happening in the community maybe that you're supporting or that you're participating in to connect those together so right now you you don't uh we only have the csi plugin we didn't invest in in anything more actually one of the reasons that i'm here is to get to know the community a bit more and to get more involved and we're definitely looking into how more can we help customers utilize kubernetes and and enjoy the worker storage uh do we need to do some sort of integration i'm actually exploring that and i think you'll see some well so we got interesting so we got you at a good time now exactly yeah because you can say with with it with an api approach um you have the you have the connectivity and you're providing this storage layer that provides all the attributes that you described but you are here live living proof green wristband and all showing that the future will be even more interesting voting on the future yeah and and seeing how we can help the community and what can we do together and actually i'm really impressed by the the conference it's been amazing we've been talking about that all week being impressed with the fact that there's we've been hearing between 2 700 and 3 100 people here which is amazing in person of course there's many more that are participating virtually but they've done a great job of these green wristbands by the way we've talked about these a minute ago um this you have a red yellow or green option to to tell others are you comfortable with contact handshakes hugs etc i love that the fact that i am i'm sandwiched by two grains but they've done a great job of making this safe and i hope that this is a message this is a big community um the cncf has 138 000 contributors i hope this is a message that shows that you can do these events we can get together in person again because there's nothing like the hallway track you can't replicate that on video exactly grabbing people in the hallway in the hotel in the lobby talking about their problems seeing what they need what we do it's amazing right so so give us a little bit in our last few minutes here about the go to market what is the the gtm strategy for weka so that's an interesting question so being fully software defined when we started we we thought do we do another me too another storage appliance even though we're storage defined could we just go to market with our own boxes and we actually uh decided to go differently because our market was actually the storage vendors sorry the server vendors we actually decided to go and enable other bare metal environments manufacturers to now create storage solutions so we now have a great partnership with hpe with supermicro with hitachi uh and and more as well with aws because again being software defined we we can run on the cloud we do have massive projects on the clouds some of the we're all familiar with some but i can't mention um so and we we chose that as our go to market because we we are fully software defined we don't need any specific hardware for we just need a server with nvmes or an instance with nvmes and that's it there's no usually when i talk about what we need is as a product i also talk about the list of what we don't need is longer we don't need j bar j buffs servers ups we don't need all of that raid arrays we just need the servers so a lot of the server vendors actually identify that and then when we approach them and say hey this is what we can do on your bare metal on your environment is that valuable of course so so that's mostly our go to market another thing is that we chose to to focus on the markets that we're going after we're not another me too we're not another storage for your home directories even though obviously we are in some cases uh by customers but we're the storage where if you could shrink your wall clock time of your pipeline from two weeks to four hours and we did that's like 84 times faster if you could do that how valuable is that that's what we do that we see that more and more in modern enterprises so when we started doing that people were saying hey so your go to market is only hpc uh no all if you look at ai email life science um financials and the list goes on right modern environments are now being what hpc was a few years ago so there's massive amounts of data so our go to market is to be very targeted toward uh these markets and then we can say that they also uh push us to to other sides of the hey i have a worker so i might put my vmware on it i might put my i'll do my distributed compilation on this it's it's growing organically so that's fun to see awesome tremendous amount of growth i love that you talked about it very clearly simplicity speed and scale i think you did a great job of articulating why waka is not a me too last question are there any upcoming webinars or events or announcements that that folks can go to learn more about weka uh great question um i didn't come with my marketing hat but we we constantly have events and uh we usually what we usually do we we talk about the markets that we go after so for example a while ago we were in bioit so we published some uh life science articles um i need to see what's in the pipeline and definitely share it with you well i know you guys are going to be at re invent we do so hopefully we'll see you re-invent we're very in super computing as well if you'll be there fantastic i see that on your website there um i don't think we're there but we will see you we're a strong believer of of these conferences of these communities of being on the ground talking with people obviously if you can do it we'll do it with zoom but this is prices yeah it is there's nothing like it shimon it's been great to have you on the program thank you so much for giving us an update on weka sharing what you guys are doing how you're helping kubernetes users and what differentiates the technology we appreciate all your insights and your energy too no it's not me it's the product ah i love it for dave nicholson i'm lisa martin coming to you live from los angeles this is kubecon cloudnativecon north america 21 coverage on the cube wrapping up three days of wall-to-wall coverage we thank you for watching we hope you stay well

>>Mhm Hello and welcome to the cubes coverage of AWS amazon web services, Global public Sector partner awards program. I'm john for your host of the cube here we're gonna talk about the best covid solution to great guests. Benham or with healthcare and life sciences lead at palantir Ben welcome to the cube SAm Michaels, Director of automation and compound management and Cats. National Center for advancing translational sciences and Cats. Part of the NIH National sort of health Gentlemen, thank you for coming on and and congratulations on the best covid solution. >>Thank you so much john >>so I gotta, I gotta ask you the best solution is when can I get the vaccine? How fast how long it's gonna last but I really appreciate you guys coming on. I >>hope you're vaccinated. I would say john that's outside of our hands. I would say if you've not got vaccinated, go get vaccinated right now, have someone stab you in the arm, you know, do not wait and and go for it. That's not on us. But you got that >>opportunity that we have that done. I got to get on a plane and all kinds of hoops to jump through. We need a better solution anyway. You guys have a great technical so I wanna I wanna dig in all seriousness aside getting inside. Um you guys have put together a killer solution that really requires a lot of data can let's step back and and talk about first. What was the solution that won the award? You guys have a quick second set the table for what we're talking about. Then we'll start with you. >>So the national covered cohort collaborative is a secure data enclave putting together the HR records from more than 60 different academic medical centers across the country and they're making it available to researchers to, you know, ask many and varied questions to try and understand this disease better. >>See and take us through the challenges here. What was going on? What was the hard problem? I'll see everyone had a situation with Covid where people broke through and cloud as he drove it amazon is part of the awards, but you guys are solving something. What was the problem statement that you guys are going after? What happened? >>I I think the problem statement is essentially that, you know, the nation has the electronic health records, but it's very fragmented, right. You know, it's been is highlighted is there's there's multiple systems around the country, you know, thousands of folks that have E H. R. S. But there is no way from a research perspective to actually have access in any unified location. And so really what we were looking for is how can we essentially provide a centralized location to study electronic health records. But in a Federated sense because we recognize that the data exist in other locations and so we had to figure out for a vast quantity of data, how can we get data from those 60 sites, 60 plus that Ben is referencing from their respective locations and then into one central repository, but also in a common format. Because that's another huge aspect of the technical challenge was there's multiple formats for electronic health records, there's different standards, there's different versions. And how do you actually have all of this data harmonised into something which is usable again for research? >>Just so many things that are jumping in my head right now, I want to unpack one at the time Covid hit the scramble and the imperative for getting answers quickly was huge. So it's a data problem at a massive scale public health impact. Again, we were talking before we came on camera, public health records are dirty, they're not clean. A lot of things are weird. I mean, just just massive amount of weird problems. How did you guys pull together take me through how this gets done? What what happened? Take us through the the steps He just got together and said, let's do this. How does it all happen? >>Yeah, it's a great and so john, I would say so. Part of this started actually several years ago. I explain this when people talk about in three C is that and Cats has actually established what we like to call, We support a program which is called the Clinical translation Science Award program is the largest single grant program in all of NIH. And it constitutes the bulk of the Cats budget. So this is extra metal grants which goes all over the country. And we wanted this group to essentially have a common research environment. So we try to create what we call the secure scientific collaborative platforms. Another example of this is when we call the rare disease clinical research network, which again is a consortium of 20 different sites around the nation. And so really we started working this several years ago that if we want to Build an environment that's collaborative for researchers around the country around the world, the natural place to do that is really with a cloud first strategy and we recognize this as and cats were about 600 people now. But if you look at the size of our actual research community with our grantees were in the thousands. And so from the perspective that we took several years ago was we have to really take a step back. And if we want to have a comprehensive and cohesive package or solution to treat this is really a mid sized business, you know, and so that means we have to treat this as a cloud based enterprise. And so in cats several years ago had really gone on this strategy to bring in different commercial partners, of which one of them is Palin tear. It actually started with our intramural research program and obviously very heavy cloud use with AWS. We use your we use google workspace, essentially use different cloud tools to enable our collaborative researchers. The next step is we also had a project. If we want to have an environment, we have to have access. And this is something that we took early steps on years prior that there is no good building environment if people can't get in the front door. So we invested heavily and create an application which we call our Federated authentication system. We call it unified and cats off. So we call it, you know, for short and and this is the open source in house project that we built it and cats. And we wanted to actually use this for all sorts of implementation, acting as the front door to this collaborative environment being one of them. And then also by by really this this this interest in electronic health records that had existed prior to the Covid pandemic. And so we've done some prior work via mixture of internal investments in grants with collaborative partners to really look at what it would take to harmonize this data at scale. And so like you mentioned, Covid hit it. Hit really hard. Everyone was scrambling for answers. And I think we had a bit of these pieces um, in play. And then that's I think when we turned to ban and the team at volunteer and we said we have these components, we have these pieces what we really need. Something independent that we can stand up quickly to really address some of these problems. One of the biggest one being that data ingestion and the harmonization step. And so I can let Ben really speak to that one. >>Yeah. Ben Library because you're solving a lot of collaboration problems, not just the technical problem but ingestion and harmonization ingestion. Most people can understand is that the data warehousing or in the database know that what that means? Take us through harmonization because not to put a little bit of shade on this, but most people think about, you know, these kinds of research or non profits as a slow moving, you know, standing stuff up sandwich saying it takes time you break it down. By the time you you didn't think things are over. This was agile. So take us through what made it an agile because that's not normal. I mean that's not what you see normally. It's like, hey we'll see you next year. We stand that up. Yeah. At the data center. >>Yeah, I mean so as as Sam described this sort of the question of data on interoperability is a really essential problem for working with this kind of data. And I think, you know, we have data coming from more than 60 different sites and one of the reasons were able to move quickly was because rather than saying oh well you have to provide the data in a certain format, a certain standard. Um and three C. was able to say actually just give us the data how you have it in whatever format is easiest for you and we will take care of that process of actually transforming it into a single standard data model, converting all of the medical vocabularies, doing all of the data quality assessment that's needed to ensure that data is actually ready for research and that was very much a collaborative endeavor. It was run out of a team based at johns Hopkins University, but in collaboration with a broad range of researchers who are all adding their expertise and what we were able to do was to provide the sort of the technical infrastructure for taking the transformation pipelines that are being developed, that the actual logic and the code and developing these very robust kind of centralist templates for that. Um, that could be deployed just like software is deployed, have changed management, have upgrades and downgrades and version control and change logs so that we can roll that out across a large number of sites in a very robust way very quickly. So that's sort of that, that that's one aspect of it. And then there was a bunch of really interesting challenges along the way that again, a very broad collaborative team of researchers worked on and an example of that would be unit harmonization and inference. So really simple things like when a lab result arrives, we talked about data quality, um, you were expected to have a unit right? Like if you're reporting somebody's weight, you probably want to know if it's in kilograms or pounds, but we found that a very significant proportion of the time the unit was actually missing in the HR record. And so unless you can actually get that back, that becomes useless. And so an approach was developed because we had data across 60 or more different sites, you have a large number of lab tests that do have the correct units and you can look at the data distributions and decide how likely is it that this missing unit is actually kilograms or pounds and save a huge portion of these labs. So that's just an example of something that has enabled research to happen that would not otherwise have been able >>just not to dig in and rat hole on that one point. But what time saving do you think that saves? I mean, I can imagine it's on the data cleaning side. That's just a massive time savings just in for Okay. Based on the data sampling, this is kilograms or pounds. >>Exactly. So we're talking there's more than 3.5 billion lab records in this data base now. So if you were trying to do this manually, I mean, it would take, it would take to thousands of years, you know, it just wouldn't be a black, it would >>be a black hole in the dataset, essentially because there's no way it would get done. Ok. Ok. Sam take me through like from a research standpoint, this normalization, harmonization the process. What does that enable for the, for the research and who decides what's the standard format? So, because again, I'm just in my mind thinking how hard this is. And then what was the, what was decided? Was it just on the base records what standards were happening? What's the impact of researchers >>now? It's a great quite well, a couple things I'll say. And Ben has touched on this is the other real core piece of N three C is the community, right? You know, And so I think there's a couple of things you mentioned with this, johN is the way we execute this is, it was very nimble, it was very agile and there's something to be said on that piece from a procurement perspective, the government had many covid authorities that were granted to make very fast decisions to get things procured quickly. And we were able to turn this around with our acquisition shop, which we would otherwise, you know, be dead in the water like you said, wait a year ago through a normal acquisition process, which can take time, but that's only one half the other half. And really, you're touching on this and Ben is touching on this is when he mentions the research as we have this entire courts entire, you know, research community numbering in the thousands from a volunteer perspective. I think it's really fascinating. This is a really a great example to me of this public private partnership between the companies we use, but also the academic participants that are actually make up the community. Um again, who the amount of time they have dedicated on this is just incredible. So, so really, what's also been established with this is core governance. And so, you know, you think from assistance perspective is, you know, the Palin tear this environment, the N three C environment belongs to the government, but the N 33 the entire actually, you know, program, I would say, belongs to the community. We have co governance on this. So who decides really is just a mixture between the folks on End Cats, but not just end cast as folks at End Cats, folks that, you know, and I proper, but also folks and other government agencies, but also the, the academic communities and entire these mixed governance teams that actually set the stage for all of this. And again, you know, who's gonna decide the standard, We decide we're gonna do this in Oman 5.3 point one um is the standard we're going to utilize. And then once the data is there, this is what gets exciting is then they have the different domain teams where they can ask different research questions depending upon what has interest scientifically to them. Um and so really, you know, we viewed this from the government's perspective is how do we build again the secure platform where we can enable the research, but we don't really want to dictate the research. I mean, the one criteria we did put your research has to be covid focused because very clearly in response to covid, so you have to have a Covid focus and then we have data use agreements, data use request. You know, we have entire governance committees that decide is this research in scope, but we don't want to dictate the research types that the domain teams are bringing to the table. >>And I think the National Institutes of Health, you think about just that their mission is to serve the public health. And I think this is a great example of when you enable data to be surfaced and available that you can really allow people to be empowered and not to use the cliche citizen analysts. But in a way this is what the community is doing. You're doing research and allowing people from volunteers to academics to students to just be part of it. That is citizen analysis that you got citizen journalism. You've got citizen and uh, research, you've got a lot of democratization happening here. Is that part of it was a result of >>this? Uh, it's both. It's a great question. I think it's both. And it's it's really by design because again, we want to enable and there's a couple of things that I really, you know, we we clamor with at end cats. I think NIH is going with this direction to is we believe firmly in open science, we believe firmly in open standards and how we can actually enable these standards to promote this open science because it's actually nontrivial. We've had, you know, the citizen scientists actually on the tricky problem from a governance perspective or we have the case where we actually had to have students that wanted access to the environment. Well, we actually had to have someone because, you know, they have to have an institution that they come in with, but we've actually across some of those bridges to actually get students and researchers into this environment very much by design, but also the spirit which was held enabled by the community, which, again, so I think they go they go hand in hand. I planned for >>open science as a huge wave, I'm a big fan, I think that's got a lot of headroom because open source, what that's done to software, the software industry, it's amazing. And I think your Federated idea comes in here and Ben if you guys can just talk through the Federated, because I think that might enable and remove some of the structural blockers that might be out there in terms of, oh, you gotta be affiliate with this or that our friends got to invite you, but then you got privacy access and this Federated ID not an easy thing, it's easy to say. But how do you tie that together? Because you want to enable frictionless ability to come in and contribute same time you want to have some policies around who's in and who's not. >>Yes, totally, I mean so Sam sort of already described the the UNa system which is the authentication system that encounters has developed. And obviously you know from our perspective, you know we integrate with that is using all of the standard kind of authentication protocols and it's very easy to integrate that into the family platform um and make it so that we can authenticate people correctly. But then if you go beyond authentication you also then to actually you need to have the access controls in place to say yes I know who this person is, but now what should they actually be able to see? Um And I think one of the really great things in Free C has done is to be very rigorous about that. They have their governance rules that says you should be using the data for a certain purpose. You must go through a procedure so that the access committee approves that purpose. And then we need to make sure that you're actually doing the work that you said you were going to. And so before you can get your data back out of the system where your results out, you actually have to prove that those results are in line with the original stated purpose and the infrastructure around that and having the access controls and the governance processes, all working together in a seamless way so that it doesn't, as you say, increase the friction on the researcher and they can get access to the data for that appropriate purpose. That was a big component of what we've been building out with them three C. Absolutely. >>And really in line john with what NIH is doing with the research, all service, they call this raz. And I think things that we believe in their standards that were starting to follow and work with them closely. Multifactor authentication because of the point Ben is making and you raised as well, you know, one you need to authenticate, okay. This you are who you say you are. And and we're recognizing that and you're, you know, the author and peace within the authors. E what do you authorized to see? What do you have authorization to? And they go hand in hand and again, non trivial problems. And especially, you know, when we basis typically a lot of what we're using is is we'll do direct integrations with our package. We using commons for Federated access were also even using login dot gov. Um, you know, again because we need to make sure that people had a means, you know, and login dot gov is essentially a runoff right? If they don't have, you know an organization which we have in common or a Federated access to generate a login dot gov account but they still are whole, you know beholden to the multi factor authentication step and then they still have to get the same authorizations because we really do believe access to these environment seamlessly is absolutely critical, you know, who are users are but again not make it restrictive and not make it this this friction filled process. That's very that's very >>different. I mean you think about nontrivial, totally agree with you and if you think about like if you were in a classic enterprise, I thought about an I. T. Problem like bring your own device to work and that's basically what the whole world does these days. So like you're thinking about access, you don't know who's coming in, you don't know where they're coming in from, um when the churn is so high, you don't know, I mean all this is happening, right? So you have to be prepared two Provisions and provide resource to a very lightweight access edge. >>That's right. And that's why it gets back to what we mentioned is we were taking a step back and thinking about this problem, you know, an M three C became the use case was this is an enterprise I. T. Problem. Right. You know, we have users from around the world that want to access this environment and again we try to hit a really difficult mark, which is secure but collaborative, Right? That's that's not easy, you know? But but again, the only place this environment could take place isn't a cloud based environment, right? Let's be real. You know, 10 years ago. Forget it. You know, Again, maybe it would have been difficult, but now it's just incredible how much they advanced that these real virtual research organizations can start to exist and they become the real partnerships. >>Well, I want to Well, that's a great point. I want to highlight and call out because I've done a lot of these interviews with awards programs over the years and certainly in public sector and open source over many, many years. One of the things open source allows us the code re use and also when you start getting in these situations where, okay, you have a crisis covid other things happen, nonprofits go, that's the same thing. They, they lose their funding and all the code disappears. Saying with these covid when it becomes over, you don't want to lose the momentum. So this whole idea of re use this platform is aged deplatforming of and re factoring if you will, these are two concepts with a cloud enables SAM, I'd love to get your thoughts on this because it doesn't go away when Covid's >>over, research still >>continues. So this whole idea of re platform NG and then re factoring is very much a new concept versus the old days of okay, projects over, move on to the next one. >>No, you're absolutely right. And I think what first drove us is we're taking a step back and and cats, you know, how do we ensure that sustainability? Right, Because my background is actually engineering. So I think about, you know, you want to build things to last and what you just described, johN is that, you know, that, that funding, it peaks, it goes up and then it wanes away and it goes and what you're left with essentially is nothing, you know, it's okay you did this investment in a body of work and it goes away. And really, I think what we're really building are these sustainable platforms that we will actually grow and evolve based upon the research needs over time. And I think that was really a huge investment that both, you know, again and and Cats is made. But NIH is going in a very similar direction. There's a substantial investment, um, you know, made in these, these these these really impressive environments. How do we make sure the sustainable for the long term? You know, again, we just went through this with Covid, but what's gonna come next? You know, one of the research questions that we need to answer, but also open source is an incredibly important piece of this. I think Ben can speak this in a second, all the harmonization work, all that effort, you know, essentially this massive, complex GTL process Is in the N three Seagate hub. So we believe, you know, completely and the open source model a little bit of a flavor on it too though, because, you know, again, back to the sustainability, john, I believe, you know, there's a room for this, this marriage between commercial platforms and open source software and we need both. You know, as we're strong proponents of N cats are both, but especially with sustainability, especially I think Enterprise I. T. You know, you have to have professional grade products that was part of, I would say an experiment we ran out and cast our thought was we can fund academic groups and we can have them do open source projects and you'll get some decent results. But I think the nature of it and the nature of these environments become so complex. The experiment we're taking is we're going to provide commercial grade tools For the academic community and the researchers and let them use them and see how they can be enabled and actually focus on research questions. And I think, you know, N3C, which we've been very successful with that model while still really adhering to the open source spirit and >>principles as an amazing story, congratulated, you know what? That's so awesome because that's the future. And I think you're onto something huge. Great point, Ben, you want to chime in on this whole sustainability because the public private partnership idea is the now the new model innovation formula is about open and collaborative. What's your thoughts? >>Absolutely. And I mean, we uh, volunteer have been huge proponents of reproducibility and openness, um in analyses and in science. And so everything done within the family platform is done in open source languages like python and R. And sequel, um and is exposed via open A. P. I. S and through get repository. So that as SaM says, we've we've pushed all of that E. T. L. Code that was developed within the platform out to the cats get hub. Um and the analysis code itself being written in those various different languages can also sort of easily be pulled out um and made available for other researchers in the future. And I think what we've also seen is that within the data enclave there's been an enormous amount of re use across the different research projects. And so actually having that security in place and making it secure so that people can actually start to share with each other securely as well. And and and be very clear that although I'm sharing this, it's still within the range of the government's requirements has meant that the, the research has really been accelerated because people have been able to build and stand on the shoulders of what earlier projects have done. >>Okay. Ben. Great stuff. 1000 researchers. Open source code and get a job. Where do I sign up? I want to get involved. This is amazing. Like it sounds like a great party. >>We'll send you a link if you do a search on on N three C, you know, do do a search on that and you'll actually will come up with a website hosted by the academic side and I'll show you all the information of how you can actually connect and john you're welcome to come in. Billion by all means >>billions of rows of data being solved. Great tech he's working on again. This is a great example of large scale the modern era of solving problems is here. It's out in the open, Open Science. Sam. Congratulations on your great success. Ben Award winners. You guys doing a great job. Great story. Thanks for sharing here with us in the queue. Appreciate it. >>Thank you, john. >>Thanks for having us. >>Okay. It is. Global public sector partner rewards best Covid solution palantir and and cats. Great solution. Great story. I'm john Kerry with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mm mm. >>Mhm

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to this cube conversation, on cube on cloud startups. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're wrapping up the closing keynote fireside chat of the AWS showcase, the hottest startups in data and cloud. We've got some great guests here to eluminate what's happened and why it's important. And Michael Skok who's the founding partner, Michael Skok founding partner of Underscore VC, Mike Feinstein, principal business development manager, and the best Ben Haynes CIO advisor Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this closing keynote for the AWS showcase. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, first of all-- >> Happy to be here >> Guys, do you guys have a unique background from startup funding, growing companies, managing these partners at AWS and being a practitioner with Ben here. The first question I have is, what is the real market opportunity? We've heard from McKinsey that there's a trillion dollars of unlocked value in cloud and that really is going to come from all enterprises big and small. So the question is that that's what every wants to know. What's the secret answer key to the to the test if you are a business. 'Cause you don't want to be on the wrong side of cloud history here. There is a playbook, there's some formation of patterns and there's some playbook things happening out there. How do you guys see this? >> Well, I can try to take a crack at that. First of all I think, there's not only one playbook, you know, only one recipe. If it's a trillion dollar opportunity, that's in the aggregate. There's many different types of opportunities. I think you could have existing companies that are maybe older line companies that need to change the way they're doing things. You can have the younger companies that are trying to take advantage of all the data they've already collected and try to get more value out of it. There could be some radically different types of opportunities with newer technology. I think, you know, for each company just like each of the companies here at the showcase today, they are targeting some, you know, segment of this. Each of those segments is already large. And I think you're going to see a wide range of solutions taking hold here. >> Yeah, cloud drives a lot of value. Michael, I want to get your thoughts. You know, you've seen the software revolution you know, over the years. This time it seems to be accelerated, the time to value, if you're a startup. I mean, you couldn't ask for the perfect storm for our innovation if you're coming out of MIT, Stanford, any college. If you're not even going to school you can get in cloud, do anything. Starting software now is not as hard as it was or its different. What's your perspective because you know, these companies are adding treated value and they're going into an enterprise market that wants scale, they want the reliability. How do you see this evolving? >> You know, the very first time I saw Bezos get on stage and pitch AWS he said one thing which is, "We take away all the hard stuff about starting a software business and let you focus on the innovation." And I think that's still applies. So you're dead right John. And honestly, most founders don't want to spend any time on anything other than unique piece of innovation that they're going to deliver for their customers. So, I think that is fabulous news. I'm going to joke for a second, so I think we're all under shooting on this number. I mean, the reality is that every part of compute infrastructure that we talk about today was built from an infrastructure that's you know, decades old. By which I mean 30 to 50 decades in some 30 to 50 years in some cases. And we look forward in 30 to 50 years, we won't be talking about cloud or everything else. We'll be just talking about computing or whatever it is that we want to talk about at the edge. Or the application of data that you know, in a car and an ARVR heads up display that's helping surgeons work across the world. The fact is the only way this is really going to work is on the cloud. So I think it's a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, we're just taking a snapshot of it right now. And we're in an interesting point because of course digital transformation has been rapidly accelerated. I mean, there's all these jokes about you know, we've had five years of transformation in five months. I don't really care what the number is but what is obvious is that we couldn't have gone off to work and to play and to teach and all these other things without the cloud. And we just took it for granted but a year ago, that's what we all did and look, they're thriving. This whole thing is that, you know, a live broadcast that we're doing on the cloud. So yeah, I think it's a very big opportunity and whatever sector I think to Mike's point, that you look at and all the companies that you've seen this morning prove that, if you want to innovate today, you start on the cloud. Your cloud native as I would say. And as you grow, you will be a cloud assumed. It will be the basis on which everybody wants to access your products and services. So I'm excited about the future if you can't tell. >> I totally subscribe to that. Ben, I want to get your take as the CIO, now advisor to companies. If you're going to look at what Michael's laying out, which is born in the cloud native, they have an advantage, an inherent advantage right out of the gate. They have speed agility and scale. If you're an existing business you say, "Wait a minute I'm going to be competed against these hot startups." There's some serious fear of missing out and fear of getting screwed, right? I mean, you might go out of business. So this is the real threat. This is not just talked about, there's real examples now playing out. So as a practitioner, thinking about re-architecting or rejuvenating or pivoting or just being competitive. It's really the pressure's there. How do you see this? >> Yeah I know it really is. And every enterprise company and through every decade is it's a buyer versus build conversation. And with the cloud opportunities, you can actually build a lot quicker or you can leverage companies that can even go quicker than you that have a focus on innovation. 'Cause sometimes enterprise companies, it's hard to focus on the really cool stuff and that's going to bring value but maybe it won't. So if you can partner with someone and some of these companies that you just showcase, start doing some amazing things. That can actually help accelerate your own internal innovation a lot quicker than trying to spool up your own team. >> We heard some companies talking about day two operations lift and shift, not a layup either. I mean, lift and shift if not done properly as it's well discussed. And McKinsey actually puts that in their report as there's other point outs. It's not a no brainer. I mean, it's a no brainer to go to the cloud but if you lift and shift without really thinking it through or remediating anything, it could be, it could cost more. And you got the CAPEX and OPEX dynamics. So, certainly cloud is happening and this kind of gives a great segue into our next topic that I'd love to get you guys to weigh in on. And that is the business model, the business structure, business organization. Michael you brought up some interesting topics around, some of the new ideas that could be, you know, decentralized or just different consumption capabilities on both sides of the equation. So, the market's there, trillions and trillions of dollars are shifting and the spoils will go to the ones who are smart and agile and fast. But the business model, you could have it, you could be in the right market, but the wrong business model. Who wants to take the first cut at that? >> Mike do you want to go? >> Sure, I'd be happy to. I think that, you know, I mean again, there's not there only going to be one answer but I think one of the things that really make sense is that the business models can be much more consumption-based. You're certainly not going to see annual software licenses that you saw in the old world. Things are going to be much more consumption-based obviously software is a service type of models. And you're going to see, I think lots of different innovations. I've also seen a lot of companies that are starting up kind of based on open source as like a first foray. So there's an open source project that really catches hold. And then a company comes up behind it to both enhance it and to also provide support and to make it a real enterprise offering. But they get there early quick adoption of the frontline engineers by starting off with an open source project. And that's a model that I've seen work quite well. And I think it's a very interesting one. So, you know, the most important thing is that the business model has to be one that's as flexible as what the solutions are that you're trying to get the customers to adopt. The old way of everything being kind of locked in and rigid isn't going to work in this world 'cause you have to just really be agile. >> I want to come back to you Mike in a second on this 'cause I know Amazon's got some innovative go to market stuff. Michael you've written about this, I've read many blog posts on your side about SaaS piece. What's your take on business structure. I mean, obviously with remote, it's clear people are recognizing virtual companies are available. You mentioned you know, edge and compute, and these new app, these emerging technologies. Does the business structure and models shift? Do you have to be on certain side of this business model innovation? How do you view? 'Cause you're seeing the startups who are usually crazy at first, but then they become correct at the end of the day. What's your take? >> Well first of all, I love this debate because it's over. We used to have things that were not successful that would become shelfware. And that just doesn't work in the cloud. There is no shelfware. You're either live and being used or you're dead. So the great news about this is, it's very visible. You know, you can measure every person's connection to you for how long and what they're doing. And so the people that are smart, don't start with this question, the business model. They start with what am I actually doing for my user that's in value them? So I'll give you some examples like build on Mike's team. So, you know, I backed a company called Acquia. But it was based on an open source project called Drupal. Which was initially used for content management. Great, but people started building on it and over time, it became used for everything from the Olympics and hosting, you know, theirs to the Grammy's, to you know, pick your favorite consumer brand that was using it to host all of their different brands and being very particular about giving people the experiences. So, it's now a digital experience platform. But the reason that it grew successfully as a company is because on top of the open source project, we could see what people were doing. And so we built what in effect was the basis for them to get comfortable. By the way, Amazon is very fundamental partner in this was, became an investor extremely helpful. And again, took away all the heavy lifting so we could focus on the innovation. And so that's an example of what's going on. And the model there is very simple. People are paying for what they use to put that digital experience of that, to create a great customer journey. And for people to have the experience that obviously you know, makes the brand look good or makes the audience feel great if it's the Grammy's or whatever it is. So I think that's one example, but I'll give you two others because they are totally different. And one of the most recent investments we made is in a company called Coder. Which is a doc spelled backwards. and it's a new kind of doc that enables people to collaborate and to bring data and graphics and workflow and everything else, all into the simplicity of what's like opening up a doc. And they don't actually charge anybody who uses their docs. They just charge for people who make their docs. So its a make a best pricing, which is very interesting. They've got phenomenal metrics. I mean they're like over 140% net dollar retention, which is astoundingly good. And they grew over three and a half times last year. So that's another model, but it's consumer and it's, you know, as I said, make a price. And then, you know, another company we've been involved with if I look at it way back was Demand Web. It was the first e-commerce on demand company. We didn't charge for the software at all. We didn't charge for anything in fact. what we did was to take a percentage of the sales that went through the platform. And of course everybody loved that because, you know, if we were selling more or getting better uplift then everybody started to do very well. So, you know, the world's biggest brands moved online and started using our platform because they didn't want to create all that infrastructure. Another totally different model. And I could go on but the point is, if you start from the customer viewpoint like what are you doing for the customer? Are you helping them sell more? Or are you helping them build more effective business processes or better experiences? I think you've got a fantastic opportunity to build a great model in the cloud. >> Yeah, it's a great point. I think that's a great highlight also call out for expectations become the experience, as the old saying goes. If a customer sees value in something, you don't have to be tied to old ways of selling or pricing. And this brings up, Ben, I want to tie in you in here and maybe bring Mike back in. As an enterprise, it used to be the old adage of, well startups are unreliable, blah, blah, blah, you know, they got to get certified and enterprise usually do things more complicated than say consumer businesses. But now Amazon has all kinds of go to market. They have the marketplace, they have all kinds of the partner networks. This certification integration is a huge part of this. So back to, you know, Michael's point of, if you're dead you're dead or knows it, but if you're alive you usually have some momentum it's usually well understood, but then you have to integrate. So it has to be consumable for the enterprise. So Ben, how do you see that? Because at the end of the day, there's this desire for the better product and the better use case. That can, how do I procure it? Integration? These used to be really hard problems. Seems to be getting easier or are they? What's your take? >> Not 100%. I mean, even five years ago you would have to ask a lot of startups for a single sign on and as table stakes now. So the smart ones are understanding the enterprise principles that we need and a lot of it is around security. And then, they're building that from the start, from the start of their products. And so if you get out of that security hurdle, the stability so far is a lot more improved because they are, you know, a lot more focused and moving in a really, really quick way which can help companies, you know, move quickly. So definitely seen an improvement and there's still, the major entry point is credit card, small user base, small pricing, so you're not dealing with procurement. And building your way up into the big purchase model, right? And that model hasn't changed except the start is a lot lot quicker and a lot easier to get going. >> You know, I remember the story of the Amazon web stores, how they won the CIA contract is someone put a test on a credit card and IBM had the deal in their back pocket. They had the Ivory Tower sales call, Michael, you know the playbook on enterprise sales, you know, you got the oracles and you guys call it the top golf tournament smoothing and then you got the middle and then you got the bottoms up you got the, you know, the data dogs of the world who can just come in with freemium. So there's different approaches. How do you guys see that? Michael and Mike, I'd love for you to weigh in on this because this is really where there's no one answer, but depending upon the use case, there's certain motions that work better. Can you elaborate on which companies should pay attention to what and how customers should understand how they're buying? >> Yeah, I can go first on that. I think that first of all, with every customer it's going to be a little different situation, depends on the scale of the solution. But I find that, these very large kind of, you know, make a huge decision and buy some really big thing all at once. That's not happening very much anymore. As you said John, people are kind of building up it's either a grassroots adoption that then becomes an enterprise sale, or there is some trials or smaller deployments that then build up at enterprise sales. Companies can't make those huge mistake. So if they're going to make a big commitment it's based on confidence, that's come from earlier success. And one of the things that we do at AWS in addition to kind of helping enterprises choose the right technology partners, such as many of the companies here today. We also have solutions partners that can help them analyze the market and make the choice and help them implement it. So depending on the level of help that they need, there's lots of different resources that are going to be available to help them make the right choice the first time. >> Michael, your thoughts on this, because ecosystems are a part of the entire thing and partnering with Amazon or any cloud player, you need to be secure. You need to have all the certifications. But the end of the day, if it works, it works. And you can consume it whatever way you can. I mean, you can buy download through the marketplace. You can go direct, it's free. What do you see as the best mix of go to market from a cloud standpoint? Given that there's a variety of different use cases. >> Well, I'm going to play off Ben and Mike on this one and say, you know, there's a perfect example of what Ben brought up, which is single sign on. For some companies, if you don't have that you just can't get in the door. And at the other extreme to what Mike is saying, you know, there are reasons why people want to try stuff before they buy it. And so, you've got to find some way in between these two things to either partner with the right people that have the whole product solution to work with you. So, you know, if you don't have single sign on, you know, go work with Okta. And if you don't have all the certification that's needed well, work with AWS and you know, take it on that side of cash and have better security than anybody. So there's all sorts of ways to do this. But the bottom line is I think you got to be able to share value before you charge. And I'll give you two examples that are extreme in our portfolio, because I think it will show the sort of the edge with these two things. You know, the first one is a company called Popcart. It's been featured a lot in the press because when COVID hit, nobody could find whatever it was, that TP or you know, the latest supplies that they wanted. And so Popcart basically made it possible for people to say, "Okay, go track all the favorite suppliers." Whether it's your Walmarts or your Targets or your Amazons, et cetera. And they would come back and show you the best price and (indistinct) it cost you nothing. Once you started buying of course they were getting (indistinct) fees and they're transferring obviously values so everybody's doing well. It's a win-win, doesn't cost the consumer anything. So we love those strategies because, you know, whenever you can make value for people without costing them anything, that is great. The second one is the complete opposite. And again, it's an interesting example, you know, to Ben's point about how you have to work with existing solutions in some cases, or in some cases across more things to the cloud. So it's a company called Cloud Serum. It's also one we've partnered with AWS on. They basically help you save money as you use AWS. And it turns out that's important on the way in because you need to know how much it's going to cost to run what you're already doing off premises, sorry off the cloud, into the cloud. And secondly, when you move it there to optimize that spend so you don't suddenly find yourself in a situation where you can't afford to run the product or service. So simply put, you know, this is the future. We have to find ways to specifically make it easy again from the customer standpoint. The get value as quickly as possible and not to push them into anything that feels like, Oh my God, that's a big elephant of a risk that I don't obviously want to take on. >> Well, I'd like to ask the next question to Michael and Ben. This is about risk management from an enterprise perspective. And the reason Michael we just want to get you in here 'cause you do risk for living. You take risks, you venture out and put bets on horses if you will. You bet on the startups and the growing companies. So if I'm a customer and this is a thing that I'm seeing both in the public and private sector where partnerships are super critical. Especially in public right now. Public private partnerships, cybersecurity and data, huge initiatives. I saw General Keith Alexander talking about this, about his company and a variety of reliance on the private problem. No one winning formula anymore. Now as an enterprise, how do they up level their skill? How do you speak to enterprises who are watching and learning as they're taking the steps to be cloud native. They're training their people, they're trying to get their IT staff to be superpowers. They got to do all these. They got to rejuvenate, they got to innovate. So one of the things that they got to take in is new partnerships. How can an enterprise look at these 10 companies and others as partners? And how should the startups that are growing, become partners for the enterprise? Because if they can crack that code, some say that's the magical formula. Can you guys weigh in on that? (overlapping chatter) >> Look, the unfortunate starting point is that they need to have a serious commitment to wanting to change. And you're seeing a lot of that 'cause it is popping up now and they're all nodding their heads. But this needs people, it needs investment, and it needs to be super important, not just to prior, right? And some urgency. And with that behind you, you can find the right companies and start partnering to move things forward. A lot of companies don't understand their risk profile and we're still stuck in this you know, the old days of global network yet infiltrated, right? And that's sort of that its like, "Oh my God, we're done." And it's a lot more complicated now. And there needs to be a lot of education about the value of privacy and trust to our consumers. And once the executive team understands that then the investments follow. The challenge there is everyone's waiting, hoping that nothing goes wrong. When something goes wrong, oh, we better address that, right? And so how do we get ahead of that? And you need a very proactive CSO and CIO and CTO and all three if you have them really pushing this agenda and explaining what these risks are. >> Michael, your thoughts. Startups can be a great enabler for companies to change. They have their, you know, they're faster. They bring in new tech to the scenario scene. What's your analysis? >> Again, I'll use an example to speak to some of the things that Ben's talking about. Which is, let's say you decide you want to have all of your data analysis in the cloud. It turns out Amazon's got a phenomenal set of services that you can use. Do everything from ingest and then wrangle your data and get it cleaned up, and then build one of the apps to gain insight on it and use AI and ML to make that whole thing work. But even Amazon will be the first to tell you that if you have all their services, you need a team understand the development, the operations and the security, DevSecOps, it's typically what it's referred to. And most people don't have that. If you're sure and then say you're fortune 1000, you'll build that team. You'll have, you know, a hundred people doing that. But once you get below that, even in the mid tier, even in a few billion dollar companies, it's actually very hard to have those skills and keep them up to date. So companies are actually getting built that do all of that for you, that effectively, you know, make your services into a product that can be run end to end. And we've invested in one and again we partnered with Amazon on gold Kazina. They effectively make the data lake as a service. And they're effectively building on top of all the Amazon services in orchestrating and managing all that DevSecOps for you. So you don't need that team. And they do it in, you know, days or weeks, not months or years. And so I think that the point that Ben made is a really good one. Which is, you know, you've got to make it a priority and invest in it. And it doesn't just happen. It's a new set of skills, they're different. They require obviously everything from the very earliest stage of development in the cloud, all the way through to the sort of managing and running a bit. And of course maintaining it all securely and unscalable, et cetera. (overlapping chatter) >> It's interesting you bring up that Amazon's got great security. You mentioned that earlier. Mike, I wanted to bring you in because you guys it's graduating a lot of startups, graduating, it's not like they're in school or anything, but they're really, you're building on top of AWS which is already, you know, all the SOC report, all the infrastructure's there. You guys have a high bar on security. So coming out of the AWS ecosystem is not for the faint of heart. I mean, you got to kind of go through and I've heard from many startups that you know, that's a grueling process. And this is, should be good news for the enterprise. How are you guys seeing that partnership? What's the pattern recognition that we can share with enterprises adopting startups coming on the cloud? What can they expect? What are some best practices? What are the things to look for in adopting startup technologies? >> Yeah, so as you know we have a shared security model where we do the security for the physical infrastructure that we're operating, and then we try to share best practices to our partners who really own the security for their applications. Well, one of the benefits we have particularly with the AWS partner network is that, we will help vet these companies, we will review their security architecture, we'll make recommendations. We have a lot of great building blocks of services they can use to build their applications, so that they have a much better chance of really delivering a more secure total application to the enterprise customer. Now of course the enterprise customers still should be checking this and making sure that all of these products meet their needs because that is their ultimate responsibility. But by leveraging the ecosystem we have, the infrastructure we have and the strength of our partners, they can start off with a much more secure application or use case than they would if they were trying to build it from scratch. >> All right. Also, I want to get these guys out of the way in on this last question, before we jump into the wrap up. products and technologies, what is the most important thing enterprises should be focused on? It could be a list of three or four or five that they should be focused on from emerging technologies or a technology secret sauce perspective. Meaning, I'm going to leverage some new things we're going to build and do or buy from cloud scale. What are the most important product technology issues they need to be paying attention to? >> I think I'll run with that first. There's a major, major opportunity with data. We've gone through this whole cycle of creating data lakes that tended to data's forms and big data was going to solve everything. Enterprises are sitting on an amazing amount of information. And anything that can be done to, I actually get insights out of that, and I don't mean dashboards, PI tools, they're like a dime a dozen. How can we leverage AI and ML to really start getting some insights a lot quicker and a lot more value to the company from the data they owns. Anything around that, to me is a major opportunity. >> Now I'm going to go just a little bit deeper on that 'cause I would agree with all those points that Ben made. I think one of the real key points is to make sure that they're really leveraging the data that they have in kind of in place. Pulling in data from all their disparate apps, not trying to generate some new set of data, but really trying to leverage what they have so they can get live information from the disparate apps. Whether it's Salesforce or other systems they might have. I also think it's important to give users the tools to do a lot of their own analytics. So I think definitely, you know, kind of dashboards are a dime a dozen as Ben said, but the more you can do to make it really easy for users to do their own thing, so they're not relying on some central department to create some kind of report for them, but they can innovate on their own and do their own analytics of the data. I think its really critical to help companies move faster. >> Michael? >> I'll just build on that with an example because I think Ben and Mike gave two very good things, you know, data and making it self service to the users et cetera So, an example is one of our companies called Salsify, which is B2B commerce. So they're enabling brands to get their products out into the various different channels the day that people buy them on. Which by the way, an incredible number of channels have been created, whether it's, you know, Instagram at one extreme or of course you know, traditional commerce sites is another. And it's actually impossible to get all of the different capabilities of your product fully explained in the right format in each of those channels humanly. You actually have to use a computer. So that highlights the first thing I was thinking is very important is, what could you not do before that you can now do in the cloud? And you know, do in a distributed fashion. So that's a good example. The second thing is, and Mike said it very well, you know, if you can give people the data that Ben was referring to in a way that they line a business user, in this case, a brand manager, or for example the merchandiser can actually use, they'll quickly tell you, "Oh, these three channels are really not worth us spending a lot of money on. We need waste promotion on them. But look at this one, this one's really taking up. This TikTok thing is actually worth paying attention to. Why don't we enable people to buy, you know, products there?" And then focus in on it. And Salsify, by the way, is you know, I can give you stats with every different customer they've got, but they've got huge brands. The sort of Nestlés, the L'Oreals et cetera. Where they're measuring in terms of hundreds of percent of sales increase, because of using the data of Ben's point and making itself service to Mike's point. >> Awesome. Thought exercise for this little toss up question, for anyone who wants to grab it. If you had unlimited budget for R&D, and you wanted to play the long game and you wanted to take some territory down in the future. What technology and what area would you start carving out and protecting and owning or thinking about or digging into. There's a variety of great stuff out there and you know, being prepared for potentially any wildcards, what would it be? >> Well, I don't mind jumping in. That's a tough question. Whatever I did, I would start with machine learning. I think we're still just starting to see the benefits of what this can do across all of different applications. You know, if you look at what AWS has been doing, we, you know, we recently, many of our new service offerings are integrating machine learning in order to optimize automatically, to find the right solution automatically, to find errors in code automatically. And I think you're going to see more and more machine learning built into all types of line of business applications. Sales, marketing, finance, customer service. You know, you already see some of it but I think it's going to happen more and more. So if I was going to bet on one core thing, it would be that. >> I'll jump on that just because I-- >> You're VC, do you think about this as an easy one for you. >> Well, yes or no (indistinct) that I've been a VC now for too long. I was you know (indistinct) for 21 years. I could have answered that question pretty well but in the last 19 of becoming a VC, I've become ruined by just capital being put behind things. But in all seriousness, I think Mike is right. I think every single application is going to get not just reinvented completely reimagined by ML. Because there's so much of what we do that there is indeed managing the data to try to understand how to improve the business process. And when you can do that in an automated fashion and with a continuous close loop that improves it, it takes away all the drudgery and things like humans or the other extreme, you know, manufacturing. And in-between anything that goes from border to cash faster is going to be good for business. And that's going to require ML. So it's an exciting time ahead. That's where we're putting our money. >> Ben, are you going to go off the board here or you're going to stay with machine learning and dating, go wild card here. Blockchain? AR? VR? (overlapping chatter) >> Well I'd have to say ML and AI applying to privacy and trust. Privacy and trust is going to be a currency that a lot of companies need to deal with for a long time coming. And anything you can do to speed that up and honestly remove the human element, and like Michael said, there's a lot of, before there's a lot of services on AWS that are very creative. There's a lot of security built-in But it's that one S3 bucket that someone left open on the internet, that causes the breach. So how are we automating that? Like how do we take the humans out of this process? So we don't make human errors to really get some security happening. >> I think trust is an interesting one. Trust is kind of data as well. I mean, communities are, misinformation, we saw that with elections, huge. Again, that's back to data. We're back to data again. >> You know, John if I may, I'd like to add to that though. It's a good example of something that none of us can predict. Which is, what will be a fundamentally new way of doing this that we haven't really thought of? And, you know, the blockchain is effectively created a means for people to do distributed computing and also, you know, sharing of data, et cetera. Without the human being in the middle and getting rid of many of the intermediaries that we thought were necessary. So, I don't know whether it's the next blockchain or there's blockchain itself, but I have a feeling that this whole issue of trust will become very different when we have new infrastructure. >> I think I agree with everyone here. The data's key. I come back down to data whether you're telling the sovereignty misinformation, the data is there. Okay. Final, final question before we wrap up. This has been amazing on a more serious note for the enterprise folks out there and people in general and around the world. If you guys could give a color commentary answer to, what the post COVID world will look like. With respect to technology adoption, societal impact and technology for potentially good and aura for business. Now that we're coming closer to vaccines and real life again, what is the post COVID world going to look like? What do we learn from it? And how does that translate into everyday in real life benefits? >> Well, I think one of the things that we've seen is that people have realized you can do a lot of work without being in the office. You could be anywhere as long as you can access the data and make the insights from it that you need to. And so I think there's going to be an expectation on the part of users, that there'll be able to do that all the time. They'll be able to do analytics on their phone. They'll be able to do it from wherever they are. They'll be able to do it quickly and they'll be able to get access to the information that they need. And that's going to force companies to continue to be responsive to the expectations and the needs of their users, so that they can keep people productive and have happy employees. Otherwise they're going to go work somewhere else. >> Michael, any thoughts? Post COVID, what do we learn? What happens next? >> You said one key thing Mike, expectations. And I think we're going to live in a very difficult world because expectations are completely unclear. And you might think it's based on age, or you might think it's based on industry or geography, etc. The reality is people have such wildly different expectations and you know, we've tried to do surveys and to try and understand, you know, whether there are some patterns here. I think it's going to be one word, hybrid. And how we deal with hybrid is going to be a major leadership challenge. Because it's impossible to predict what people will do and how they will behave and how they want to for example, go to school or to you know, go to work or play, et cetera. And so I think the third word that I would use is flexibility. You know, we just have to be agile and flexible until we figure out, you know, how this is going to settle out, to get the best of both worlds, because there's so much that we've learned that has been to your point, really beneficial. The more productivity taking out the community. But there's also a lot of things that people really want to get back to such as social interaction, you know, connecting with their friends and living their lives. >> Ben, final word. >> So I'll just drill in on that a little bit deeper. The war on talent, if we talk about tech, if we talk a lot about data, AI, ML. That it's going to be a big differentiator for the companies that are willing to maintain a work from home and your top level resources are going to be dictating where they're working from. And they've seen our work now. And you know, if you're not flexible with how you're running your organization, you will start to lose talent. And companies are going to have to get their head around that as we move forward. >> Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time. That's a great wrap up to this cube on cloud, the AWS startup showcase. Thank you very much on behalf of Dave Vellante, myself, the entire cube team and Amazon web services. Thank you very much for closing out the keynote. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you John and thanks Amazon for a great day. >> Yeah, thank you John. >> Okay, that's a wrap for today. Amazing event. Great keynote, great commentary, 10 amazing companies out there growing, great traction. Cloud startup, cloud scale, cloud value for the enterprise. I'm John Furrier on behalf of theCUBE and Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel AWS and our community partners >>Telephone. Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. We got the cube virtual because we're not in person. Got a great remote interview. Slummy Mannheim. Who's the CEO? Co founder, uh, exciting company. Drake J Frog. We went public this year. Congratulations, Cube alumni. Really a successor of White. The cloud exists in all the greatness and goodness of technology. It's not great to see you. Thanks for coming off of the special reinvent segment. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me, John. Great to see you again. >>So you guys have your mission continues. You're growing. We're here at reinvent. What's the story? Give us the quick news. Visa vee. Reinvent N A W s. >>Well, we had Ah, wonderful, uh, wonderful. Two months. Uh, since we went public on September 16, um, the company actually going past and they have UPS. Industry is going along us along. Excite us. So we're very excited about it. Um, great. Here. Great journey. You guys met us two years ago. So So you know the swamp. Well, then we're very excited being reinvent again, although virtually defined. >>You know, when you get a tailwind and you have a trend that your friend you guys had certainly had that with the developer first. That's the mantra. Everyone's talking about that now. You guys saw it early. The future of binary lifecycle management Dev Ops was the lifeblood of Dev ops. Now more is happening. You got automation. You got everything as a service which makes the developer equation even more powerful. Abstracting away complexities is even more needed. What's your vision on this? How do you guys continue the momentum in this now Highly accelerated cove it and soon to be post covert environment. >>Yeah. You know, John co vid actually accelerated what we already so years ago. And, uh, what we've seen is that the war demands a better way to update software. Look at us. Even this interview is being powered by software, right? I'm staring at the camera. I e used to sit in your studio and everything we do we all the food by by software. Our kids are at home learning with software. So obviously the demand for most software and most software updates is there, and Dev Ops is just the vehicle now. Once you understand that, you have to ask yourself, what is the primary asset that we really need to automate in order to become faster and secure and to provide a seamless software really slow? And what we identify 12 years ago is that it's the software packages, the binaries azi. We were named by the community, the binary people. >>Yeah, and and this is cool because not only it's just not a tool, it's a platform. You guys don't have a platform view. We talked about this in 2017. I remember The conversation like this is pretty compelling. This is Ah, go big or go home. You guys went big, for sure and successful. How do you take that platform approach to Dev Ops, where you have to enable success, you gotta have the enterprise features you got now hybrid multiple environment with the edge and other clouds air happening. How are you looking at this? >>Yes, So today it's it's quite clear in the in the enterprise falls zero. Everybody understand. Developers are the rainmakers. The communities is what powers innovation and what makes changes Look a talker. Look at problematic. Look at cloud native. It didn't started the enterprise. It starts with the developer. The developer mind this is, I think, the biggest democracy. And when we realized that 10 years ago, our philosophy was very, very clear, we would like the developers to have the freedom of choice. We want them to have ah, universal solution that supports all technologies, all software packages. Then we want them to have a hybrid solution. They prefer to one in the cloud also fostered. We will be, um, completely for it. And then not just in the cloud, but also multi cloud. So the full the full freedom of choice coined by the community, the Switzerland of develops. And, uh, starting as you mentioned, we started without a factory housing factories. The database of them are posting all of your software packages, all type of software packages. Then J. Fogg, X ray, our security vulnerability and license compliance tool that natively integrate without the factory. Then J Fogg distribution that push your software packages to the edge. We acquired two companies cloud much for the dashboard, did oversee all the pipeline and ship a bell, which is today, Jeff Pipelines, Our C I c d. And then we did you know, it was a long journey, but very food food for us, and we are very proud to build it together with the community. >>Well, not only did you guys succeed execution wise, the vision was phenomenal. The execution with the acquisitions, you really knocked down some great accomplishments. Eso Congratulations. You just laid that out, you know? Good call out there. I do want to ask you about this liquid software narrative. Can you take a minute toe? Unpack that a little bit? Because this is new. It seems to be something that is about the collective vision. How does this come together? Because you gotta do act to now. Act one is over. You went public. You did all the work. You built the company. You got a durable business. Got great customers. Happy community. What's this liquid software thing? >>Well, think about it. Liquid software might be our vision J. Fogg vision, but it's the world's mission. Now we want to have Netflix podcasting to our home without any software update disturbing us. We want to have our iPhone being updated automatically and seamlessly without a reboot. We want our Tesla, uh, to be updated without shutting down the model and schedule and update. And this is our mission. This is the big picture. How can we make sure that software is running smoothly from the developers Single tips all the way to the edge, no matter what the edges. Now, in order to achieve that, you have to be fast. You have to be automated, you have to be secure. And you have to be focused on the assets that moved from the developer, the hands off from the developers to the op that goes all the way to the devices, the machines or whatever edge. And these are the binaries. So the vision of flick with software is a software updates slowing, uh, into your pipe seamlessly all the way from from the creator to the consumer. >>You know, that's the Holy Grail. That's the Nirvana. That's the dream of edge. You know, if you think about the old days, I'm old enough to remember back in the eighties, when we used to build purpose, built everything full stack developer hardware, ground up everything supply chain hardware, software done. Now you got an edge that still needs to be purpose built at the same time, you have a half of a software operating model. This to me, seems to be a great liquid software moment where I need to have special is, um, at the device. But I need a root of trust. I need quality. I need to have software operations, but I can't go down, whether it's in space or in the data center. What's your reaction to that? >>I think that, you know, liquid software is already happening. Um, if I would ask you what's version off Facebook are using, I bet you don't know what both version of Zuma we currently using, uh, for this interview. We don't know because it's happening behind the scene. Liquid software is happening and and you're right. It was It was the one big back that we had to take care of everything. And now it's a different way. But still developers are taking care of all the gates, all the stages. Think about all the, um, all the gates that kind of shifted left like security. Now it's in the hands of the developers, test automation developers automation in order to be fast and to scale fast developers and the option the and the depth kind of come together. This is already a cliche, so I don't need to again talk about Deva. But if you do it right from the moment you build and secure your software, then you will be faster than your competitors and organization realized that if you are not fastened secure, you will fall behind and you will lose your competitive advantage. So what we see now is the liquid doctor already happened and there is much more responsibility and much more expectations from the development organization. >>Yeah, it's awesome. You want to security Big 10. By the way, I'm running 10 15.7 uh, Catalina And when you run your >>you have to go liquid. >>When you when you go liquid, can you just make sure that always lands on a odd number? We know the even numbers are unlucky, so don't give me the, you know, make it work for me. Keep it liquid. Um, you >>know, one. I'm sorry. One of the biggest campaign we ever had was a big sign that says, imagine there's no version. Imagine There's no version. Imagine that you don't care what the version is because actually the consumer. My mother, she doesn't want to know what zoom version she used when she picked with me. >>Hey, we got server list. I could go version list, too. I mean, who doesn't want a version of this system? Look, this is critical. I love the hands on Hands off mindset. This is about non disruptive operations. You're starting to get into that kind of liquidity. What's next? What do you guys hearing at reinvent this year? Obviously, is virtual. So there's a lot of different touch points of over this three weeks. We got a lot of cube coverage. We're hearing speed, agility, agility has been around for a while. We're hearing speed is critical right now. It's the number one thing we're hearing across environments. That's the number one feature that we're hearing. What are you hearing? >>Yeah, well, John first, you know, I'm grateful as the CEO to have ah team off almost 700 employees worldwide doing this with the community, by the community and for the community. And we are very, very honored to have, um, over 6000 customers the majority. The vast majority of the Fortune 100 already powered by J Foe, the biggest bank, the biggest retail, the biggest tech company and what we hear from them. And I think that you know, a mental that stay humbled and listen to the community learns a lot. And the wisdom of the community is telling us the following number one double down on security because we still in the process in the transition of moving the responsibility to the developers. Even the system off the organization is still freaking out from from releases seven times a day. The second thing that we hear is that if software packages are the primary asset, then we want to have the freedom of choice. We want to integrate with whatever ecosystems I want to use Docker and dotnet and Java and pipe I and N P m. At the same time in the same resource. So consolidate consolidate this all for me And the last thing we hear is we We are also best of breed, But some some packages must come together and this is where the end to end solution coming from J. Prague is vital for the organization. You get the repository, the security, the distribution and the C I c d from the same vandal. Now take this and push the pedal even more, Uh, toe to the end. And you will see that the deployment environment that also got a bit more complex requires hybrid solution and multi cloud solution. There is no Fortune 100 company. It will just go with one cloud or with one solution. And when you come with unauthentic hybrid solution, multi cloud, that's a real This is a fanatic freedom of choice and the fanatic democracy that we give to developers. >>That's a great mission. Freedom of choice. No lock in lock ins. The new the new lock in his choice. New lock in his performance and scale. Slow me. Thank you for coming on The Cube behind CEO and co founder of Jay Frog. Mad props and congratulations to you and your team and swamp for great success having the right product at the right time. Developer first. Great stuff. Congratulations. Thanks for coming. >>Thank you very much and made the frog be with us and made this pandemic Thanks. Thank you very >>much. I want to get back to real life. I miss life. Thank you for coming. I miss it. This is the Cube. Virtual. We are cute. Virtual. Thanks for watching reinvent coverage. 2020. I'm John for your host. Yeah.

(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 ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBEs coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon the Europe 2020 virtual edition. Of course, even before 2020 security was one of the top concerns out there, with everyone working from home, some of the ramifications what's happening. Security is even more heightened and something we've had great pleasure digging into in this cloud native ecosystem. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest and first time we've had CyberArmor on theCUBE, so welcome Ben Hirschberg who's the co-founder and vice president of R&D. Ben thank you so much for joining us. >> (mumbles) Thank you for having me Stu. Thank you. >> All right so you know Ben 10 years ago when I became an analyst, security was one of those things that if you look at security and management overall, it's uh, these are the things we need to fix in IT. Unfortunately a decade later, it's still something that I can say. So if you could just frame for us a little bit as one of the co-founders of the company, what was the why for CyberArmor, what did you see out in the marketplace, what was some of the core competencies that you and your team had that made you form the company? >> Yeah, so it's a really good question because three years ago when we started look around, in the cyber industry and we're really looking into what's happening today because CyberArmor was founded by veterans of the industry. And we were looking into what part of the chain was missing in the security field. And we saw one of the key components which is even today is missing and we're coming in to solve it, is the component of the software itself. I mean we're really looked for many many years as just you said, we looked into the field and we so firewalls and segments and perimeters, and we saw authentication of users, and this is the most important aspects of cybersecurity. And we saw that there is a big change in the field because today the systems are so elastic, so changing, so much many new components went into the field and so much is changing that we've seen it. We cannot still build our security upon the old infrastructure we had before. And we went into the most common denominator you have in the field and it's the software. Because if you're looking into what you're trying to protect today, obviously you try to protect your data and your data is sitting behind some kind of software. And usually the software is running some kind of an infrastructure which is in the old world it was a data center, today we're advancing things into the cloud. And between two steps came into the new kind of containerization and cloud native infrastructure. Which really changes the whole way we are looking into how to run our software today. And we still did the... Most common denominator is the software itself. So what we call workloads. And we said that well, if I need to protect something, I need to protect the workload. And I run to protecting the way that I don't really care who is running it and where it's being run. But I am in our case we are also SAS provider for security solution. When I'm running my workloads, I want to be in control, and this is the thing we are targeting. We are targeting giving the one who's writing the software, the one who is deploying the software, the owner of service, giving him let's say the keys and only to him and no one else. >> All right, so Ben if I hear you right, is that then the application developer is the one that's interacting with your software and using it, obviously the DevOps movement really rallied around telling people that security can't be an afterthought it needs to be something baked into the process. Recently DevSecOps is a term that we hear used quite a bit so who are the people that are involved will help us understand a little bit really the organizational impact of what you're doing. >> So today we see our world really gravitating towards development and DevOps. I mean I see DevOps as an integral part of the development because we don't want to create a different organization to handle these kind of deployment things. If I have a group who's in charge of all the service, I want this group to handle the service from A to Z. And we are targeting not really the developers in sense that we are not integrating the software with APIs, but we are integrating our solution through the deployment tools. So in order to use our solution which is actually a software identity based control plane. You don't need to integrate it with your software you're developing. We can take any kind of software anyone wrote. And we can integrate it with the system using a cloud native techniques like Kubernetes integration, so it's really who is going to interface with our solution is more DevOps and set DevOps as you mentioned. >> All right, Ben when I look at your website, you talked quite a bit about the integration, you mentioned Kubernetes of course we're here at the cloud native conference, so what integrations, how much work is there to do to integrate with the various Kubernetes platforms, how do you tie into things like service meshes, are there any other of the dozens and dozens of projects that the CNCF has out there that your team needs to be involved in integrating with? >> So we took a really... It's interesting phrase but we took an Orthodox approach here where we said that we want to integrate with the core features of Kubernetes only. Because from our perspective we don't want to bring in other solutions into the service-based what our customers are having. So therefore we are integrating ourselves only with the Kubernetes core components and literally installation of our system takes a second, and which is virtual because Kubernetes itself is such a good solution that such a good project that literally installations and all setups are taking no time. And we are bringing our own service to service authentication control plane. We're on an early stage startup, and we are looking into developing our solutions to integrate with the service mesh also at a later phase, bring our security on board. Also they're the missing chain in the security which the service mesh was missing. Because we simply see that there're really great products and really great solutions there so we want to enable our customers to enjoy all they can, but without compromising their security. >> All right, your product itself, what's the relationship with open source? Many of the companies we've seen doing security, have open source projects, you when the event is in person, you walk around the show floor, and open source is a big piece of this community here, so what's your relationship when it comes to open source? >> It's really interesting question because I actually also offer... Many of our founders came from the direction not from the open source but from classical closed source companies. And personally this is due to simply the sensitivity of security field and there're historical reasons for that but I myself and some of our key people have always gave into our open source and took part in many open source projects in the past. As a company CyberArmor looks into open source as something very very valuable. We are really looking into how we can interact and how we can open source parts of our solution, which can interest other companies and other people because everyone of us knows that there are two main reasons to open source. One is it shows some kind of transparency, and the other is to let others enjoy also your project and take part in it. So right now at this stage we have only a few open source parts of our system, which are more... We have open sourced them for transparency reasons. But we're really looking into that criteria we're looking into how we could take some parts of our system and make it generally available because we think it's a good idea. >> All right, Ben what can you tell me about your customers, oftentimes if you've got an example even if it's anonymized, helps explain the value proposition of what your company is offering. >> Okay. Where to start? One of our first customers is a big service provider, BTC service provider, which is a well known company and this company really had high security expectations from the cloud native systems. And they tried many solutions they wanted to protect their services and their internal service to service communication. And they simply after a few trials they tried our solution and understood that our solution has also big benefits from the security side and outside from the performance side, therefore they decided to go with CyberArmor in order to protect their... Ease fast communications within their systems. Another company which is a B2C company Simply it's deploying it's system in a cloud infrastructure which they're less rely on and less feel secure because of legal reasons, and therefore they decided to use CyberArmor to completely protect their services and not just the communication between the services, but also the intellectual property that they have within their services in order to protect themselves. This is a very interesting use case because they're simply, I think one of the biggest beyond Google and Facebook and the big companies we know, customers we know. They are one of the biggest cloud users I know. So they really have a very interesting scale of going from way from 3000 notes in Kubernetes spanning up to within a few hours to 200 thousands notes scale, which was very interesting experience for us because as a new startup this is how you are trying your system out and prove that your solution is indeed made for the clouds. And we're really happy to say that we passed this phase. >> All right. Well, Ben, since you have the R&D component in your role, give us a little bit of an insight as to the things you're working on, what you see as some of the big challenges that security in this space need to be addressing a little bit further down the road. >> So there're two big things which we are working on and I think that's two interesting parts of the security question cause one part is that no one of us really like to pay more for security. We don't like to pay for it. Once just we have it, it's something you want to be there, but you don't want to know about it. And when we are talking about even hearing (mumbles) we are talking about simple things like moving from clear communications to TLS and right away understand that it costs us money. And one of our biggest goals here is to add security without having excessive costs toward the service provider. And we really are trying to improve our system and make them more performing in the sense that they should take as less toll on services they can in order to provide the security. And the other big part is runtime security because our solution is making sure that your workload which you're running in your system is being the same workload throughout the whole runtime process just as you wanted to be. And in order to do that, we're taking what we call code DNA in the CI/CD of our customers. And we understand how these workload should work. And in runtime, make sure that this workload is not changing maliciously and the same behavior stays as it shouldn't be. And this is something we are really improving because we're looking into the newest texts coming from many many directions, and we want to incorporate that in our solutions and make sure that you can throughout the whole runtime process of your workloads, we can keep you secure and safe. And this you know this is very interesting work, and as someone who is a veteran of cybersecurity and a white hat hacker of myself in my previous jobs, I see this as something really interesting and really evolving today. >> All right, well Ben Hirschberg thanks so much for introducing our community to CyberArmor, great catching up with you. >> Yeah I was glad to be here, thank you very much. >> All right, and thank you. Stay tuned for more coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, I'm Stu Miniman thanks for watching. (soft music)

( bright upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we are still getting through COVID. It's a hot August day here in San Francisco Bay Area. It is 99, somebody said in the city that's hot, but we're still getting through it. We're still reaching out to the community, we're still talking to leaders in all the areas that we cover. And one of the really interesting areas is natural language processing. And it's a small kind of subset. We'll get into it a little bit more detail, we are very specific place within the applied AI world. And one of my very good friends and Cube alumni, who's really an expert in the space, he's coming back for his second startup in the space. And we're joined by Ben, he's Ben Chung, the Co-founder of Ogmagod. Did I get that right Ben, Ogmagod. >> That's correct. That's right. >> Great to see you again. >> Thank you for inviting to the show. >> Well, I love it. One of the topics that we've been covering a lot Ben is applied AI. 'Cause there's just so much kind of conversation about artificial intelligence, the machine learning is kind of this global big thing. And it kind of reminds me of kind of big data or cloud, in the generic it's interesting but it's really not that interesting, 'cause that's really not where it gets applied. Where I think what's much more interesting and why I wanted to have you back on is, where is it actually being applied in applications? And where are we seeing it in solutions? And where is it actually changing people's lives, changing people's days, changing people's behavior, and you seem to have a propensity for this stuff. It was five years ago, I looked July five years ago, we had you on and you had found Genie, which was a natural anti processing company focused on scheduling. Successful exit, sold that to Microsoft and they baked it into who knows, there probably baked in all over the place. Left there now you've done it again. So before we get into it. What so intriguing to you about natural language processing for all the different kind of opportunities that you might go after from an AI perspective? What's special about this realm that keeps drawing you back? >> Yeah, sure, I mean it, to be honest it was not anything premeditated, I kind of stumbled on it. I before this, I was more like an infrastructure guy spent a number of years at VMware and had a blast there and learned a lot. Then I kind of just stumble on it. Because when we started doing the startup, we didn't intend it to be a AI startup or anything like that. We just had a problem that my co-founder Charles Lee and I really wanted to solve, which is to help people, solve people's scheduling problem. But very shortly after getting into and start looking at some use cases, we thought that the easiest way is to communicate with people like humans do to help them do the scheduling. And that's kind of how I stumbled on it. And it wasn't until that I stumbled on it that I realized that it has a lot of attraction to me, because I throughout my whole life, I'm always very interested in the human emotions of it, how humans relate to each other. And that's always been the hidden side project thing, I do traveling to figure out stuff and get a little bit of that. But once I start getting into this field, I realized that there's a lot about it, about humanity and how humans communicate that it was kind of like a hidden interest for me. That now suddenly coming out and it kind of just got me hooked. >> Right, that's awesome. So one of the things and we'll just get into it is people are a little bit familiar with natural language processing, probably from Siri and from Google and from Alexa and increasingly some of these tools but I think, you kind of rapidly find out beyond what's the weather and play a song and tell me a joke that the functionality is relatively limited. So when people think about natural language and they have that as a reference point, how do you help them see that it's a lot more than, asking Siri for the weather. >> Yeah, there are a lot of capability but also hopefully not offensive to some of the tech visionaries. Just as a guy who is dealing with it every day, there are also lots of limitation is not nearly to the degree of refinements. Like what might being preach out there saying that the machines are going to take over everything in one day, we have a lot of struggles that are very basic stuff with machines. However, there has been definitely a lot of breakthroughs in the last few years and that's why I'm dedicating my life and my time into this area because I think that it just, there's going to be huge amount of innovation continuously going in this area. So that's at the high level, but if you talk about, in terms of artificial intelligence and in general, I think, I have my own understanding, I'm more like an apply guy, lot of academics so what I'm going to say might make some academics cringe because I'm more like a everyday practical guy and try to re conciliate these concepts myself. The way that I view is that artificial intelligence has really tried to help mimic some human capabilities that originally thought that is the domain of human, only humans are able to do it, but machines now try to demonstrate that machine can do it, like as though the humans could. So and then usually people get that mixed up with machine learning, to me is actually quite different thing. Artificial intelligence just like what I mentioned, machine learning is just a technique or a science or way of applying like to leverage this capability, machine learning capability in solving these artificial intelligent problems, to make it more achievable to raise the bar on it. So I don't think we should use them interchangeably, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Because today machine learning is the big deal that are making the progress wise, tomorrow might be something else to help improve artificial intelligence. And in the past, it was something else before machine learning. So it's a progression, the machine learning is the very powerful and popular technique right now to being used. Now within artificial intelligence, I think you mentioned that there are various different domains and topics, there is like object recognition deals with image processing, there's speech detection, there's a video and what I would call action or situation detection. And then there's natural language processing, which is the domain that I'm in that is really in that stage of where we seeing quite a bit of break through, but it's not quite there yet. Whereas versus speech detection and image processing actually has done a tremendous progress in the past. So and in you can say that like the innovation there is not as obvious or as leap frogging as the natural language processing. >> Right, so some of the other examples that we know about that are shared often for machine learning or say, the visual thing, can you identify a chihuahua from the blueberry muffin, which sounds kind of funny until you see the pictures, they actually look very, very similar. And the noise stated that Google and their Google Photos, right, has so many pictures such a huge and diverse data set in which to train the machines to identify a chihuahua versus a blueberry muffin. Or you take the case in Tesla, if you've watched any of their autonomous vehicle stuff and their computer vision process and they have the fleet, hundreds of thousands of cars that are recording across many, many cameras reporting back every night. With natural language processing you don't have that kind of a data set. So when you think about training the machine to the way that I speak, which is different than the way you speak and the little nuances, even if we're trying to say the same thing, I would imagine that the variety in the data set is so much higher and the quantity of the data set is so much lower that's got to be a kind of special machine learning challenge. >> Yes, it is. I think the people say that there is, we are at the cusp of, being able to understand language in general, I don't believe that we are very far away from that. And even if when you narrow scope to say, like focus on one single language like English, even within that, we still very far from it. So I think the reality, at least for me, speaking from the ground level, kind of person tried to make use of these capabilities is that you really have to narrow it to a very narrow domain to focus on and bound it. And my previous startup is really that our assistant to help you schedule meetings, that assistant doesn't understand anything else other than scheduling, we were only able to train it to really focus on doing scheduling, if you try to ask it about joke or ask anything else, it wouldn't be able to understand that. So, I think the reality on the ground at least from what I see of a practical application and being successful at it, you really need to like have a very narrow domain in which you apply these capabilities. And then in terms of technology being used broadly in natural language processing in my view there are two parts of it, one is the input, which is sometimes call natural language understanding. And then that part is actually very good progress. And then the other part is the natural language generation, meaning that the machine knows how to compose sentences and generate back to you, that is still very, very early days. So there is that break up and then if you go further, I don't want to bore you Jeff here with all these different nuances, but when you look at natural language understanding, there are a lot of areas like what we call topic extraction or entity extraction, event extraction. So that's to extract the right things and understand those things from the sentences, there is sentimental analysis knowing that where some a sentence expresses somebody angry or some different kinds of emotions, there is summarization, meaning that I can take sets of texts or paragraphs of text and summarize with fewer words for you. So and then there is like dialogue management, which manages the dialogue with the person. So they're like these various different fields within it. So the deeper you look, there's like the more stuff within it and there's more challenges. So it's not like a blanket statement, say like, "Hey, we could conquer on this." And if you digging deep there's some good progress in certain this area. But some areas like it's really just getting started. >> Right, well we talked about in getting ready for this call and kind of reviewing some of the high level concepts of and you brought up, what is the vocab? So first you have to just learn what is the vocabulary, which a lot of people probably think it stops there. But really then what is the meaning of the vocabulary, but even more important is the intent, right, which is all driven by context. And so the complexity, beyond vocabulary is super high and extremely nuanced. So how do you start to approach algorithmically, to start to call out these things like intent or I mean, people talk about sentiment all the time, that's kind of an old marketing thing, but when you're talking about specific details, to drive a conversation, and you're also oh, by the way, converting back and forth between voice and text to run the algorithms in a text based system, I assume inside the computer, not a voice system. How do you start to identify and programmatically define intent and context? >> Yeah, just to share a little anecdote, like one of the most interesting part of, since I started this journey six years ago and also interesting was a very frustrating part is that, especially when I was doing the scheduling system, is that how sloppy people are with their communication and how little that they say they communicate to you and expect you to understand. And when we were doing the scheduling assistant, we're constantly challenged by somebody telling us certain things and we look at it's like, well, what do they mean exactly? For example, like one of the simple thing that we used to talk a lot with new people coming on the team about is that when people say they want to schedule next week, they don't necessarily mean next week, what they mean is not this week. So it doesn't, if you like take it literally and you say, "Oh, sorry, Jeff, there is no time available next week." And actually Jeff probably not even remember that he told you to schedule next week, to what he remember, what he told you not to schedule it this week. So when you come back to them and say, "Jeff, you have nothing available this week or next week." And Jeff might say like, while your assistant is kind of dumb, like, why are you asking me this question? If there was nothing available next week, just scheduled the week after next week. But the problem is that you literally said next week, so if we took you literally, we would cause unhappiness for you. But we kind of have to guess like what exactly you mean. So don't like this a good example where they're like lot of sloppiness and lot of contextual things that we have to take into account when we communicate what humans, or when we try to understand what they say. So yeah, is exactly your point is not like mathematics is not simple logic. There are a lot of things to it. So the way that I look at it, there are really two parts of it. There's the science part and then there's art part to it. The science part is like what people normally talk about and I mentioned earlier, you have to narrow your domain to a very narrow domain. Because you cannot, you don't have the luxury of collecting infinite data set like Google does. You as a startup, or any team within a corporation, you cannot expect to have that kind of data set that Google or Microsoft or Facebook has. So without the data set, huge data set, so you want to deliver something with a smaller data set. So you have to narrow your domain. So that's one of the science part. The other part is I think people talk about all the time to be very disciplined about data collection and creating training data sets so that you have a very clean and good training data set. So these two are very important on the science part and that's expected. But I think a lot of people don't realize this, what I would call the art part of it, is really there are two parts to that. One is exactly like what you said Jeff is to narrow your domain or make some assumption within the domain, so that you can make some guesses about the context because the user is not giving it to you verbally or giving you to you into text. A lot of us we find out visually by looking at the person as we communicate with them. Or even harder we have some kind of empathetic understanding or situational understanding, meaning that there is some knowledge that we know that Jeff is in this situation, therefore, I understand what he's saying right now means this or that Jeff is a tech guy like me, therefore, he's saying certain thing, I have the empathetic understanding that he meant this as a tech guy. So that's a really hard kind of part of it to capture or make some good guesses about the context. So that's one part. The other part is that you can only guess so much. So you have to really design the user experience, you have to be very careful how you design the user experience to try what you don't know. So that it's not frustrating to the user or to put guardrails in place such that the user doesn't go out of balm and start going to the place where you are not trained for that you don't have to understand it. >> Right, because it's so interesting, 'cause we talked about that before that so much of communication, it's not hard to know that communication is really hard, emails are horrible. We have a hard time as humans, unless we're looking at each other and pick up all these nonverbal cues that add additional context and am I being heard, am I being understood? Does this person seem to understand what I'm trying to say? Is it not getting in? I mean, there's so many these kind of nonverbal cues as you've expressed, that really support the communication of ideas beyond simply the words in which we speak. So and then the other thing you got to worry about too, as you said, ultimately, it's user experience if the user experience sucks, for instance, if you're just super slow, 'cause you're not ready to make some guesses on context and it just takes for a long time, people are not going to to use the thing. So I'm curious on the presentation of the results, right? Lots of different ways that that can happen. Lots of different ways to screw it up. But how do you do it in such a way that it's actually adding value to some specific task or job and maybe this is a good segue to talk about what you're doing now at Ogmagod, I'm sorry I have to look again. I haven't memorized that yet. 'Cause what you're also doing if I recall is you're taking out an additional group of data and additional datasets in beyond simply this conversational flow. But ultimately, you've got to suck it in, as you said, you've got to do the analysis on it. But at the end of the day, it's really about effective presentation of that data in a way that people can do something with it. So tell us a little bit about what you're doing now beyond scheduling in the old days. >> Sure, yeah, I left Microsoft late last year and started a new startup. It's called Ogmagod. And what we do is to help salespeople to be more effective, understand the customer better so that they have higher probability of winning the deal or to be able to shorten the sales cycle. And oftentimes, a lot of the sales cycle got LinkedIn is because of the lack of understanding and there's also, I say, we focus on B2B sales. So for B2B salespeople, the world's really changed a lot since the internet came about. In the old days is really about, tell it to explain what your product is and so that your customer understand your product, but the new days is really about not explaining your product because the customer can find out everything about your product by looking at your website or maybe your marketing people did do such a good job, they already communicated to the customer exactly what your product does. But really to win out against other people you really like almost like a consultant to go to your customer and say, like, I have done your job, almost like I've done your job before I know about your company. And let me try to help you to fix this problem. And our product fit in as part of that, but our focus is let's fix this problem. So how would you be able to talk like that, like you've done this job before? Like you worked at this company before? How do you get at the level of information that you can present yourself that way to the customer and differentiate yourself against all the other people who try to get their attention, all the people sending them email every day automatically, how do you differentiate that? So we felt that the way that you do it is really have the depth of understanding where your customer that is unrivaled by anybody else. Now sure, you can do that, you can Google your customer all day, reorder news report, know all the leadership, could follow them on social media-- >> Right, they're supposed to be doing all this stuff, right Ben, they're supposed to be doing all this stuff and with Google and the internet there's no excuse anymore. It's like, how did you not do your homework? You just have to get the Yellow Pages. >> Yeah, why didn't you do your work? Yes, people get beat up by their management saying like, "Oh, how come you miss this? "It's right there go on Google." But the truth is that you have to be empathetic to a salesperson. A lot of people don't realize that for a salesperson, every salesperson, you might own 300 accounts in your territory. And a lot of times in terms of companies, there might be thousands of companies in your territory. Are you going to spend seven hours, follow all these 300 companies and read all tweet. Check out the thousands of employees in each of these company, their LinkedIn profiles, look at their job listings, look at all the news articles. It's impossible to do as a human, as a person. If you do that you'll be sitting in your computer all day and you never even get to the door to have a conversation with the customer. So that is the challenge so I felt like salespeople really put up impossible tasks, because all this information out there, you're expected it to know. And if you screwed up because you didn't check, then it's your fault. But then on the same time, how can they check all 300 accounts and be on top of everything? So, what we thought is that like, "Hey, we made a lot of progress "on natural language processing "and natural language understanding." And salespeople what they look for is a quite narrow domain. They are looking for some very specific thing related to what they selling, and very specific projects, pinpoints budget related to what they're selling. So it's a very narrow domain, we felt like it's not super narrow. It's a little bit broader than I would say scheduling. But it's still very narrow the kind of things that they're looking for. They're looking for those buying triggers. They're looking for problem statements within the customers that relate to what they selling. So we think that we can use, develop a bunch of machine learning models and use what's available in terms of the web. What's out there on the web, the type of information out there. And to be able to say, like, salesperson, you don't need to go and keep up and scan, all the tweets and all the news and everything else for these 300 companies that you cover, we'll scan all of them, we will put them into our machine learning pipeline and filter out all the junk, because there are lots of junk out there, like Nike, that's like, I don't know, hundreds of news release probably per week. And most of them are not relevant to you. It doesn't make sense for you to read all of those. So but how about we read all of them and we extract out, we it's difficult topic extraction, we extract out the topic that you're looking for and then we organize it and present to you. Not just we extracting out the topic. Once we get the topic how about we look up all the people that are related to that topic in the company for you so that you can call on them. So you know what you want to talk to them about, which is this topic or this pin point. And you know who to talk to, these are the people. So that's what we do. That's that's really interesting. It's been a tagline around here for a long time, right separating the signal from the noise. And I think what you have identified, right is, as you said, now we live in the age where all the information is out there. In fact, there's too much information. So you should be able to find what you're looking for. But to your point, there's too much. So how do you find the filter? How do you find the trusted kind of conduit for information so that you're not just simply overwhelmed that what you're talking about, if I hear you right, is you're actually querying publicly available data for particular types of I imagine phrases, keywords, sentences, digital transformation initiative, blah, blah, blah. And then basically then coalescing the ecosystem around that particular data point. And then how do you then present that back to the salesperson who's trying to figure out what he's going to work on today. >> B2B salespeople, they start with an opportunity. So opportunity is actually a very concrete word at least in the tech B2B sales-- >> We know, we see the 60 stories in downtown San Francisco will validate statement. (laughs) >> Yes, so yeah, so it starts with the word opportunity. So the output is a set of potential opportunity. So it speaks to the salespersons language and say, when you use us, we don't just say "Hey, Jeff, there's this news article about Twilio and you cover Twilio, that's interesting to you." "Oh, there's a guy at Twilio that matches the kind of persona that you sell into." We don't start with that, we start with, "Jeff, there are six Opportunities for you at Twilio. "Let's explain what those things are." And then explain the people behind these opportunities so that you can start qualify them. So get you started, right way in your vocabulary in a package that you understand. So that I think that's what differentiates us. >> Right, and at some point in time, would you potentially just thinking logically down the road, you have some type of Salesforce API. So it just pumps into whatever their existing system is. That they're working every day. And then it describes based on the algorithm, why the system identified this opportunity, what the attributes are that flagged it, who are the right people, et cetera. Awesome, so what kind of data are you requiring-- >> Yes, you are designing our product wise. >> (laughs) Since Dave and John, watch this. They're going to want to talk to you, I'm sure. But what type of data sets are you querying? >> There are lots of them. We learned most of it by through the process working for salespeople, meaning that we work for salespeople, we may be quote, unquote, stand behind their back and see what they're searching. They're searching LinkedIn. They're searching jobs. They're searching endless court transcripts, they're looking at 10K 10Q's, they dig up various, some people are very, very creative, digging out various parts of the web and find really good information. The challenge is that they can't do this to scale. They can't do it for 300 accounts, 'cause we're doing for one accounts very is laborious. So there are various different places that we can find information. And in terms of the pattern that we're looking for. It's not just keyword, it's really concepts. We call it a topic. We really looking for very specific topics that the salesperson looks for. And that's not just a word, because sometimes words is very misleading. For example, I tell you one of the common words in tech is called Jenkins. Jenkins is a very popular technologies, continuous delivery technologies step but Jenkins is also happens to be a very common last name for people. >> (laughs) Well, I'm always reminded of our Intel days with all the acronyms, but my favorite is ASP 'Cause you could use ASP twice in the same sentence and mean two different things, right? Average selling price or application service provider back in the days before we call them clouds, but yeah, so the nuances is so tricky. So within kind of what you're doing then and as you described working within defined data sets and keeping the UX and user experience pretty dialed in and within the rails, are there particular types of opportunities in terms of B2B types of opportunities that fit better that have kind of a richer data set, a higher efficacy in the returns what do you kind of seeing in terms of great opportunities for you guys. >> We're still early, so I can't tell you that like from a global view because we are like less than one year old experience, quite honestly. But so far we are being led by the customer. So meaning that there is an interesting customer, they ask us to look for certain topics or certain things. And we always find it to my surprise, because and that really is, like, I'm constantly surprised by how much is there out in the web, like what you were saying, like customer ask us to look for something. And I thought for sure, this thing we couldn't do it, we can find it. And we gave it a try and low and behold, there it is. It's out there. So, to be honest, I can't tell you at this point, because I have not run into any limits. But that is because we are still a very young startup. And we are not like Google. We're not trying to be all encompassing looking for everything and looking over everything. We're just looking over everything that a salesperson wants, that's it. >> So I'm going to make you jump up a couple levels. Since you've been thinking about this and working on this for a long time, there's a lot of conversation about machines taking everybody's jobs, then there's the whole kind of sidetrack launch to that, which is no, it's all about helping people do better jobs and helping people do more higher value work and less drudgery. I mean, that sounds so consistent with what you're talking about, I wonder as somebody down in the weeds of artificial intelligence, if you can kind of tell us your vision of how this is going to unfold over the next several years, is it just going to be many, many, many little applications that slowly before we know it are going to have moved, along many fronts very far, or do you still see it's such a fundamental human thing in terms of the communication that the these machines will get better at learning, but ultimately, they can kind of fulfill this promise of taking care of the drudgery and freeing up the people to make what are actually much harder decisions from a computer's point of view than maybe the things that we think about that a three year old could ascertain with very little extra effort. >> Yeah, if you take a look at what we do and hopefully it didn't sound like we're underselling our startup but a lot of it really is we taking away to time consumer and also grunt work process of the data collection and cleaning up the data. The humans, the real human intelligence should be focused on data analysis to be able to derive lots of insights of the data. So and to be able to formulate a strategy, how to win the account, how to win the deal. That's what's the human intelligence should be focused on. The other part by struggling with doing the Google search and in return 300 entries, in 30 different pages and you have to click through each one and then give up the first week, that kind of data collection data hunting work, we are really, it should not, I don't think it's worthy, quite honestly, for a very educated person to deal with. And we can invest it back in helping the human to do what the humans are really good at is that, how do I talk to Jeff? And I'm going to get a deal out to Jeff, how can I help and through helping him solving his problem, how can I take the burden of solving the problem from Jeff's head and solve the problem for him? That's what human intelligence for me as a salesperson, I would prefer to do that instead of sitting in front of my desk and doing googling, so net net what I'm trying to say using ourselves as an example is that we're not taking over the job of a salesperson, there was no way that we can close a deal for you. But what we're doing is that we're empowering you so that you look like you're on top of 300 accounts and you talk to any of those accounts, you'll be able to talk to the people, your customer, their particular customer, like you know them inside out. And without you being the superhuman to be able to do all this stuff, but as far as that customer is concerned, sounds like you were on top of all this stuff all day and that's all you do, you have no other customers, they're the only customer. In fact, you on top of 300 customers. So that's kind of the value that we see, to provide to the human is to allow you to scale by removing these grunt work that are preventing you from scaling or living up to your potential how you wanted to present yourself, how you want to deliver yourself. There's no way that we can be smarter than human, no way. I just don't see it not in my lifetime. >> I just love, we've had a lot of conversations over the years and you talking about the difficulty in training the computers on some really nuanced kind of human things versus the things that they're very very good at and keeping the AI in the right guard wheel is probably just as important as keeping the user interface in the right lane as well to make sure that it's a mutually beneficial exchange and one doesn't go off and completely miss the benefit to the other. Well, Ben, it's a great story. Really exciting place to dedicate yourself and we are just digging watching the story and we're going to enjoy watching this one unfold. So thanks for taking a few minutes in sharing your insight on natural language processing and this applied machine learning techniques. >> Thank you, Jeff. It's always a pleasure. >> Yep, all right. He's Ben, am Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

>> From the Cube studios in Palo, Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube conversation. >> Welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm Paul Gillin, Enterprise Editor at SiliconAngle. We've been talking a lot about cloud native on SiliconAngle lately, and my guest is someone who had a seminal role in defining the the principal architecture, some of the foundational technologies for cloud native applications. Ben Golub is the CEO of Storj, a company that has a really interesting new approach to storage management that we'll talk about in just a bit. Ben is probably best known to many people as the former CEO of Docker, which pioneered software containers and was one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley, he's great. Ben, thanks for joining us, feel appreciated you being here today. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> So, let's get into the question of cloud native is a theme that we're focusing on right now. How important is it for organizations you believe that are moving to the cloud to choose to re architect around cloud native principles? >> Well, I think it's, I mean, two points. First of all, I think that the cloud native is sort of a spectrum. And for many people, there is a point along the spectrum that makes sense. At the far end of the spectrum is applications that are deployed on a massive scale. They're components to thousands of microservices, heavily orchestrated with things like Kubernetes, scaling up scaling down, and for many organizations, they don't need to go all the way there to get real benefits. And maybe the related thing is that I think, for organizations, there's absolutely, for most organizations, there's value in moving along that spectrum, but they should be thoughtful about where it is that they're going, and why they're going there. >> Either or thing and they applications can live along the spectrum. you submitted some comments recently for an article we did on this topic and among them you said that some applications may make sense being containerized or Dockerized but not being orchestrator with Kubernetes. Can you give an example of something that meets that criteria? >> Sure, well, I can I think that almost all applications can benefit from running on more cloud like infrastructure. There's certainly value in having infrastructure that that scales up, or that scales out there, where people are able to sort of dynamically use resources and not have it have to rely on big iron. But in terms of the applications themselves traditional applications can run well in cloud environments provided that some steps are taken. And often for many organizations, the first step with a traditional application is simply to containerize your Docker engine. That gives a lot of benefits including, ease of migration, greater ease of adopting things like CICD, and you don't necessarily have to take all of your traditional applications, break them into lots of micro services, start orchestrating them with Kubernetes on day one, for some reasons, case may never make sense because they're not going to be run at massive scale. >> Many people assume that containers and cloud native architecture are inextricably linked. Is that your opinion? >> Well, so I think that cloudy infrastructure tends to benefit from from containerization. But really, it's more of an application question. If you are breaking your application or you're writing applications that are composed of lots of different services, almost inevitably, you want to have those services in containers so that they have clean interfaces between them. And so, that you can do the things people want to do with cloud native, which is, make changes to your microservice A with a small team and do so rapidly without unintentionally screwing up microservice, B, C, D, et cetera. And Dockers in a containerization, among other things, provides that nice clean interface. >> All right, how have you seen I mean, since you left Docker three years ago, how have you seen the container technology evolve? What do you think are some of the most important evolutions we've seen in container technology since then? >> Yeah, so I think, what has been really important for us to see that the community continues to grow. So, once the Docker community continues to grow, there are now lots of other communities around it the cloud native computing Foundation, Kubernetes. And I think what you're seeing is really the maturing of this technology. So that applications can be written in a cloud native way much more more easily. The barriers to making an application cloud native really come down, but also the potential for running applications and really massive scale have have have increased and there are certainly a number of interesting things that have happened in the storage space in terms of persistent volumes. things that have happened in terms of service technology service measures, like STO these are all really great examples of how the community is filling in around containers. >> We've heard a lot about the benefits of portability that come from using containers. But being portable can involve some trade offs, because you have to give up some of the native functionality of branded cloud platforms. Do you think the goal of multi cloud is overblown? >> I think there is real value in being multi cloud. And I think that while you know, the larger stock traders have provided great services, it is in their names, of course, we're trying to get have all of the workloads run within their four walls. And I think for most organizations, locking is a bad idea, regardless, right? We're in a distributed world, most people want to be able to run their applications at scale in a distributed way and they want to be able to take advantage of spare cycles and the most efficient way and concise way of doing so. And so, having locking, I think is a bad idea. And for most organizations, the investment to become portable, while not trivial pays off in the long run. >> How about of the cultural issues is something that you also mentioned in the comments you contributed to us earlier, we hear often that the biggest impediments are not technical or even skills but actually changing the culture to adapt to a cloud native way of building applications. How should organizations prepare for that shift? >> Well, I mean, I think they should recognize what those differences are going to be. And if you're writing, the traditional method was you write a large monolithic application, because it's so big and complicated. Generally speaking, people follow sort of a waterfall procedure. They have large teams working on it, and you update the application once or twice a year. The cloud native approach is let's write applications that are composed of lots of smaller services produced by smaller teams that move very rapidly. And a lot of the testing and the deployment happens in a very automated way. And the cultural barriers are pretty large. I think most people are happy at the end of the journey. But there's a period in between where things are difficult that you're, you're breaking glass as it were. So, I think for a lot of large organizations, the approach that often works best is to have a few sort of isolated, Greenfield application approaches, where you have a small team that is sort of proving out and becoming good ambassadors for doing things in cloud native way. But there's also a an evolutionary way to bring the older applications along there for many organizations is really helpful. That doesn't have any running head on it. Other cultural issues with the traditional application. >> So, break them up into teams and have different teams at different stages of evolution. >> Right, and so, I think you can have a small advanced team that is working on new applications at Greenfield, cloud native way. But then the transition path for the teams that are working on the older application, traditional applications that were not initially architected in a cloud native way is to break them down in an evolutionary way, first dockerize, containerize, the traditional applications, then maybe break them down from a monolith into, say, three tiers, each of those tiers being containerized. And then potentially pull out one of those services if it's a common service across all the applications and start using that and the process. I think we find organizations get the sort of muscle memory around doing things in a more continuous way in a more agile way. And they get experienced with tools like CICD, Docker, Kubernetes te cetera in a more organic way. >> Do you find that people who come from the traditional waterfall development background eventually can't make that shift? >> I think some can, there are pluses and minuses. But I think that most organizations find that as they get more agile things that used to be very difficult become a lot easier, right? So, rather than having big masses of code that needs to be rewritten and changed, you change something in one area and it breaks things and unexpected way in another area. Right, then you're trying to get large teams of people to sort of agree on things which we know is not the way the world works. When you get to smaller teams working on more atomic pieces of the code with clean interfaces between them, and can iterate more rapidly without having unintended consequences. For most organizations that not only makes them faster, but it gives higher quote, quality, safer et cetera. >> Another topic we hear a lot about today is application modernization, what does that mean to you? >> So, I think for me application modernization means that you're re architect, you're making the application itself more cloud like, which doesn't mean that you made it full scale cloud native on day one, right? But that you, for example, taking a traditional application and Docker rising, or containerizing it, just containers in the monolith actually gives some real advantages. And that then sets people off to say, let's not only take the advantages that we now have in terms of portability, but let's start exploring the advantages that we can get from having more frequent deployments or more automated testing. And so, really it's modernizing the application but also modernizing the environment around it and in the culture for how you build and deploy applications. >> Let's turn to your current venture Storj. You've been CEO there for about two and a half years now. Very interesting decentralized approach to storj using blockchain. Just tell us quickly how you're re imagining Storj? >> Sure, sure, well I mean for, for of course, most of computing history storage was done, like people buying their own disk drives and then storing data on it. And if they failed or got lost as a problem, or if they had to buy too much, I was expensive. Then we move to centralized clouds where you were storing data on drives that one organization was running, we started taking it a step further, where we built a storage service. But we don't run your own any disk drives. We're sort of like ABNB, for restaurants, right? But we've gotten 10s of thousand people around the globe. Generally, data centers who have spare capacity enabled them to rent out that spare capacity. And we're offering our customers a way to do storage that is much safer, much more private, faster and far less expensive, than with the traditional cloud. >> Certainly intuitively, it would be less expensive. How is it faster? Well, it's faster for a lot of the same reason the the internet, if you will is faster than the traditional approach was landlines, right? We were able to take advantage of parallelism, right? So, we break every file up into a large number of pieces, which are then distributed across the network. And so, first of all, we don't get slowed down. If some of the drives are slow, or they happen to be in an area where there's network congestion. It doesn't slow down. We also end up having, generally speaking, have our data much closer to the edge. So, if you're in Kenya, and you're viewing a video that sort of serve from our network, chances are the data is getting served from graduate cluster view rather than driving or in Kansas. >> It sounds like there are some sort of cloud native aspects to what you're doing. In fact, are you adopting some cloud native principle on-- >> Well, so kind of we put our service in the cloud native way. But it really takes the cloud native notion of distribution and takes it even a step further, which is that things are highly decentralized. And so, we built our service in a very particular way because we are not directly controlling the disk drives, so, we basically use algorithms and math to make sure that we're resilient against any failure. and things are done in a highly automated and scalable way so that there's really no single points of failure. And there's infinite scalability, which is which is really the goal of cloud native, but we take it a step further. >> And blockchain is what knits us all together, right? Well, it tracks the location of all the all the data. >> I don't know, cause actually none of us 'cause we use blockchain for certain purposes, namely, compensating the people who are running the drives. So, they do cryptographic proofs to prove that the data they have, they shouldn't have to get compensated for running it. But then we've tried to use a large range of different kinds of peer to peer technologies. And even frankly, some very cool very old technology like racial coding which is on the on the Voyager spacecraft to make sure that it all fits together in a way that's safe, secure, private and super fast. >> All right, there other applications of this technology have developed be on Storj? >> Well, so we are working on decentralized storage. Other people are out there working on decentralized computing, where the application can be written and run on. Sorry, can be run on using CPUs that are all around the globe, we happen to think storage is probably the most important problem to solve first. Because, death, taxes and data are things that never go away. And the world's creating more and more every year, it would actually, the data created this year would have filled a stack of CD ROMs to orbit of Mars and back. It's going to grow from there. >> I love those analogies. >> Yeah, some of that's cat videos, but a lot of it is really super critical data on finding, therapeutics for COVID are the cure for cancer or new forms of energy. And so, find a way to use to give people the ability to store their data in a highly secure, highly efficient and very cost effective way we think is really important. >> And what should we be looking for from Storj for the next year, >> Let's say Storj is in production. We are adding end users. We're starting to see some larger users, which is a very 10 for us, today, we're used primarily for sort of second tier storage, but we expect to be moving into sort of primary storage and even CDN down the road. It turns out that what we built is a really great way to distribute large files, including video and photos and x-rays and satellite images and things like that. >> Well, Ben, thanks for joining us today. I know you're a Cube alum you've been many times on the Cube. I think this is the first time we've done it virtually though. >> I know, I do miss being in the same room as you and you're colleagues but this is a very nice thing too. >> So, do we believe me? Ben Golub, CEO of Storj. Thanks for taking time for being with us today. This has been a Cube conversation. I'm Paul Gillin. Thank you for joining us, be well. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Dockercon live 2020. Brought to you by, Docker, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone to the DockerCon 2020, #DockerCon20. This is The Cube virtual coverage with Docker on their event here. And we're in the studio in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE, we're here with a great guest to talk about Docker Desktop, the Microsoft relationship, and the key news that's coming out. Ben De St Paer-Gotch is the product manager for Docker Desktop. Ben, great for coming on, thanks for spending the time with me. >> Thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. >> So obviously, this is a virtual conference, we wish we could be in person, but given the state of affairs we're going to do remotely, but the momentum Docker has is phenomenal, it's always been great with containers. It's the number one downloaded app around for developers. Microsoft just had their Build conference, which was again virtual as well, or digital, as they say, it's interchangeable. But clear momentum now with Docker as containers actually is the standard, you guys are doing great. What's the key news out of the Microsoft world for people who missed it last week with MS Build? >> Yeah, so last year at Build, Microsoft announced WSO2 to the Windows subsystem with Linux two. (mumbles) The mapping between the windows (mumbles) Which, went really well but it just didn't provide the same centered needed Linux experience. Last year, they announced Windows subsystem Linux two, (Provides an actual Linux one on windows machine, and we've been working hard with Microsoft over the last year to integrate proper desktop as a main desktop application for working with containers with WSO2. A build this year, Microsoft has gone on and announced that WSO2 is going to have a few new features, and it's going to have new features. (mumbles) Mention Linux graphical, Linux applications, you can access the file system, the installation is going to become a slicker which I guess I'm the most excited about that pitch. But the most exciting announcement is, they will be bringing GPU support to WSO2 which means that we will be able to provide and give you support through Docker desktop or container workloads that peoples are working on. And now we're launching Gray and Agua through containers and docks and desktops and Windows which is really cool because we haven't been able to do that before. >> So is this the first GPU support on Microsoft Windows for Docker, with Docker? >> It's, yeah, it's the first GPU Support for Docker Desktop or Mac or Windows. So, previously the hypervisor hasn't passed through the GPU, pretty much, which meant that we couldn't access it from Docker desktop. So Docker desktop isn't about a lightweight VM we sorts of plumb all that in for you. But we're limited about what we could get access to from the hypervisor, Microsoft putting this through and giving us access for the first time, we can actually, we can go. >> Not to go on a side tangent here, but you know, all these virtual events, and I was watching some of the build stuff as well, as well as us immediate streamers and doing stuff, you can see people's home rigs. And you talk to any Developer, video streamer, or anyone who is working remotely, if you don't have the best GPU's in there, I mean, this has just become, I mean, quite frankly, you need the GPU's. So this is important, it's not only from a vanity standpoint performance. Having that support, I'm going to want the best GPU's, I'm always going to be upgrading my machine for that extra power. What's the impact? What does it mean for me as a Developer? Does it increase stuff? What's the bottom line? >> As a Developer, it means you actually have access to it. So, especially when you're doing workloads on the CPU, you've got minimum amounts of power utilization you can do. When you're running workloads for an L Development, you have a lot of power up process you've got to log, to do your mobile training. So, in an element cycle, you're likely to have your application which you're going to use to produce a modeling, you're going to have training data. Taking that training data and producing a model requires lots of panel processing which is an enormous calculations in producing with finer waitings. Doing that on a CPU has to be done on a serial fashion rather than parallel, which is huge and intensive and takes a really long time. Whereas on a GPU, you can do all of that in parallel which massively reduces the amount of time it will take to run those training functions. Either just straight up in Linux or running them in a container, which as the more of people are looking at running container with workloads, it's how I first, the first team that I was on actually used Docker. I was working in Amazon Alexa, and my team picked up the opportunity to run our workload in container. And that was my first experience, so even though my team backed down, so I could see the system. >> Yeah, ML workloads automations could be critical of that performance. Okay, let's get into some of the momentum with Microsoft, you guys have obviously, builds over, we're here now at DockerCon, there's news. Could you share some of the tidbits for what's being talked about now with Docker and DockerCon. >> Yeah, absolutely, so, along with everything else we've been doing, we've been partnering with Microsoft trying to make the best experience generally with Docker desktop, and with WSO2 and with the VSCO. I've been working closely with Microsoft guys to actually try and improve our experience in Windows as it is today, and to improve some of those integrations with VSCO, and also working with the VSCO team on the Docker plugin for VSCO to give our feedback, and to hear feedback from those guys on the errors and issues they're seeing with Docker desktop and to really try to produce the best experience we can on Windows. End to end, from very front end running all the way through that first push, that first run on the cloud using Docker. >> So what is some of the new product management processes and customer support things that you guys are doing? This comes up a lot, obviously, we had a great conversation around shift left with security. That's great news there. You start to see a lot of this added value for Developers, wanted their support right? So how do I get things I need, and from a customer standpoint? It's kind of a moving train this world and it's only getting better and better from a Developer standpoint. But there's more complexity, it's got to be abstract the way you've got, you know, this new abstraction layers developing. You've got a lot of automation. How does the customer get the support they need in the same agile way that Developers are cranking out code? >> It's a really good question, it's something I think we're still working on as well. So, we're trying to working out and one of the big things I'm trying to work out is, how to make it easier for people to get started with Docker, and how do we also make sure with the things we build, we don't leave a cliff edge instead of a lining path. You don't get to a certain point in an easy process, and then the next step, takes you straight off a cliff, so that's not useful for anyone. So, producing those parts and those ways for people to learn and actually progress is something we're really trying to work out. How to make it natural from the first experience all the way through. From an actual support perspective, the other thing we're looking at, is we're trying to do more things in the open. We're really trying at Docker to bring as many of the new features and pieces we're developing which we have to do that in the open with community visibility, so that if people really want it fixed, they can open the PR and they can help us out. And then the last thing that my team really stood out was our Docker of having actions. As creators, someone already finished, could you do this? Someone else had a PR and emerged it. So, to a certain extent, you've got your one side which had you on board and this ever growth spiral and you keep learning. The other side is how'd you fix the board when you find an issue? In that one, we're really trying to work with the community, a lot more than we have in the last couple of years. >> Awesome, some folks watching, hit him up on Twitter, he's the Product Manager for Docker Desktop among other things. You guys are very transparent, you've got your Twitter handle on the lower third. People can chime in or just jump on the chat, we'll follow up and get you the info. Final question for you Ben, as you look at this reality we're in, there's kind of a holistic kind of moment now where people kind of realizing the new realities here. You're looking at the.. you get the keys to the kingdom with Docker Desktop, okay. You got some momentum with Microsoft, the developer role is moving fast and fast as the head room increases for capabilities with automation. And I know you mentioned a few of those things. GPU is now available. What's the future look like for these Developers? The next short, medium and long term? What's your view as you look out over the landscape because you've got to look at the product roadmap, your engagement with the community. Can you share some insight into how you're thinking about Docker Desktop going forward? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I think what really interesting point as you say, which is that, if you look at sort of a lot of the Developer side of things that have sort of come out in the last like six months, six to eighteen months. The things I see, I see daily like you mention, things like orchestrating for containers gaining momentum. If you think about crossing the Kaizen model, we're just passed the early Dockers now. We're kind of into the early majority, but we're going to start to move over the next few years into the late majority. What that really means is that people here have been using one of two of these technologies. Maybe you've been using cloud, maybe you've been using Edge, maybe you've been using containers, maybe you've been using CICD, maybe you are using Expiration, maybe you're not. Maybe you've got a Microservice application, maybe it's a little bit of a mole rat. What we're really going to see is, you're going to start to see, all of these changes intersecting and overlapping. And people who have started to pick up model two of these will start to pick up all of them. And that's probably going to happen as we move into the majority of users. So from a what's coming instead of a lot of those thing that you see in best practice in the ideal Developer setup, so a beautiful CICD, a more of an orchestrated environment, Microservice architecture, we're going to see a lot more of that becoming the norm. But I think along with that, we'll also see a level of recognition coming along that a single Microservice alone doesn't provide value. And that's it's going to be some of those groups of services that will provide the user outcome. And that's where my focus is at the end which is you know, an authentication service is great but it doesn't provide value unless you give access to something as authentic. >> It's been issued that the new Docker is all about Developer experience. This is really the core mission. I mean, since the sale of the piece of morantis, Docker has retrenched and reinvented, but stayed core to its principles. Just share with the Developers who've been watching that are coming back into the ecosystem, what is this new Docker vibe? Share your thoughts. >> The new Docker vibe is about working in the open, and it's about solving problems for Developments. The original goal of Docker was to make it easy to pack and ship. It was to reduce Developer friction. As we move more into, sort of, the enterprise space, we worry more about Ops and DevOps. We're not trying to re-focus on Developer and if you sort of think there's two parts to the Developer life cycle, where you've got your work, where you're doing your creative work, where you're writing code. And then you've sort of got your part of the inner loop. And then you've got your part where you're trying to get that code out to production, you're trying to get your value to someone else. Instead of your outer loop, we're really trying to focus on the inner loop And sort of our mantra is that any bit for a Developer should spend as much as their time as possible creating new and exciting things and we're onto those holes that reduce those boring, Monday, repetitive tasks, that we're really trying to work out how we take those boring repetitive pieces and how do we make them just vanish like magic from new users or how do we reduce the friction for the experience from users? From both desktop and hub, we're really trying to bring those two together to achieve that. >> You know what's great about folks who have been in the class since day one. All of us have scar tissue experiences, you know the one thing that's constant is constant change. And one of the things that you guys have done at Docker, and hats off to the whole, you know, original team, is that brand of Docker has symbolized quality openness, and set the standard, I mean, if you look back and containers were really coming around, it's not a new concept. But Docker really set the industry on this path and it's been great to follow every DockerCon at TheCube coverage, but more importantly, as the demand for Developers to build these next wave of Cambrian explosion of applications. It's going to be more important than ever to have more of these abstractions, more of these tools in this real time, more Developers experience because there's more building going on. And it's not just one cloud, it's all clouds, it's all things. >> Yeah, I think it was like when IDC analyzed the future report a couple years ago, I think it was maybe the 2018 one. They said that maybe 2017. They said to date, we've built 500 millions applications worldwide and by 2023, we'll build another 500 million. The rate of creation is just insane, it's exponential growth of us producing more and more applications and connecting more and more devices to do them. The sheer volume of creation and the rate of new technology supporting, even with the rate of companies adopting, I guess more of a warm cloud. I think it's like 60 percent of companies are now more than one cloud provider. Maybe even more, maybe it's like 80 percent. It's ridiculous. >> I was just having this debate on Twitter about this multi-cloud. Someone tried to call us out saying, "Oh you guys were pooing on multi-cloud in 2016 and 18." I go "Look at, no one was Pooping on multi-cloud, it didn't exist." I had multiple clouds but there was no real use case. Now you're starting to see the use cases, where yeah, I had multiple clouds and I got Azure here, I got this over here. But no one wakes up and spreads their workloads wrong. This is going back a few years. Certainly the hybrid was developing, but I think now you're starting to see with networking and some of these inter-operable dynamics, you start to see innovation pockets in wide spaces in large market opportunities for start-ups and companies to thread the clouds together at the right place. So I think multi-cloud is becoming apparent from a use case stand point. Still a ton of work to do, I mean direct connects, got SLA's, I mean all kinds of stuff at the networking level but it is real. It's going to be one of those realities that everyone has, at least one or two, if not three. It could be optimization, this is what Developers do right? Solve problems. >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean if nothing else, I've encounter a couple of companies even just where redundancy is handled by multi-cloud strategy. If you want to achieve more nines and you're just balancing workloads between two clouds. >> I mean, the Zoom news was really a testament to that because everyone got into a twist over that. Oh Zoom moves off Amazon, no they didn't move off Amazon, they went to Oracle, they got Adge, they're everywhere. Why wouldn't they be? They need to pass it, they fail over, they need fall tolerance, I mean, these are basic distributing computing concepts that is one on one. You've got to have these co-locations. And optimization for those clouds and the apps on Microsoft as well, so why wouldn't you do it? >> Exactly. And that's that hybrid, that multi-cloud, compounding that some of which you said earlier, that over changes when you're looking at how you go to CICD, how you're bundling these applications, creating more applications than ever. Coming back, sort of, with more AI workloads, much like GPU and you combine that with, sort of, last in the growth of age devices as well. It sort of makes for a really interesting future. And Docker is sort of, that summation SOV, what we're using to frame how we're thinking about our product and what we should be building. >> Great, for the audience out there, hit him up on Twitter, Ben's available, they're out in the open, if you're interested in how Docker makes life easier on the Windows platform, with the GPU support, they've got security now built in, shifting left. Give these guys a call and of course, we love the mission, out in the open. It's theCUBE's mission as well and great to chat with you. Ben, thanks for spending the time with me today. >> Been an absolute pleasure, thank you for having me. >> Okay, just TheCube's coverage, the virtual Cube with DockerCon co-creating together out in the open. DockerCon20, #Docker20, I'm John Fer with TheCube, stay tuned for our next segment, and thanks for watching. (ambient music)