(uplifting music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. Really excited to have a start up in the serverless space here in our studios in Palo Alto. Welcome to the program, first-time guest, we have Nate Taggart, who's the CEO, and Farrah Campbell, who's the Ecosystem Manager, both with Stackery. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Stu, thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Farrah, I know you're just in from Vegas and from the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Why don't we start there a little bit? DevOps, this big wave, a lot of changes, what's the energy you're hearing, what are people talking about what's exciting them these days? >> A lot of things are exciting them. I think that the whole ecosystem is changing. There's so much happening it's almost like the 80s and 90s, you know what I mean, where there's like the dot-commer I guess. There's so much new technology that's out there and it's available. I think that people are really trying to understand where they should go. Maybe I've already started with containers, now people are talking about serverless. What do I do? >> It's a great point. These waves of technology come so fast. When people write their strategy, you might now even want to write it in ink. (Nate and Farrah laughs) They may be drawing because Clay Christensen always says it's something you should revisit. You should go at least once a quarter. It's directionally where I need to go, but things change. All right, Nate, Stackery. Bring us back. First, give us a little bit about the team's background, yourself and what led to the formation of the company. >> Yeah, thanks, Stu. My founding team actually comes out in New Relic. We were early employees there, stayed 'til the IPO. We've worked building, DevTooling for a long time, hand-managing at scale infrastructure. One of the things that we found was, I mean, New Relic was a high-velocity engineering team and the bottleneck, in many cases, was infrastructure. After New Relic, I worked with the data science group at GitHub, again, building massive data infrastructure and the bottleneck was not figuring out what to do. It wasn't the work in front of us. It was the underlying, un-differentiate heavy-lifting of infrastructure. Chase Douglas, my co-founder, and I, when we saw AWS Lambda come out us, it's the first example of a wave of serverless services, we got really excited and realized this took away a lot of the barriers and a lot of the burden of building new applications, started playing with it. This was three years ago. Over the next few years, we've been working with all the serverless pioneers figuring out what are the changes that they're experiencing from their operations cycle from managing the life cycle of an application, how are their teams in the dynamics changing the workflow. We took those best practices and built it into Stackery, which is now a software product to accelerate serverless operations. >> We've been watching this for a while. Give us a little bit of a perspective first. There's some things different about this serverless wave or functions as a service. I'm an infrastructure guy by background and we've always wanted to not have the boat anchors of network and storage slow us down, but I lived through the virtualization wave. (Nate laughs) I've got the scars of over a decade. >> Sure. >> Working in the ecosystem of trying to fix that. Everybody got super excited when containers in a Docker helped bring that to the mainstream, but it was tools helping us move up the stack a little. Serverless, to me, when I look at it, it really starts from the application level down and there's still lots of infrastructure stuff. It's not like it disappears. I've got the great T-shirt from the cloud guru people. (Nate laughs) It's like there is no cloud of someone else's computer, they have the longer version of that for serverless. I love your viewpoint 'cause, New Relic, they'd seen, they track, they monitor that, you had a great way to look at it, GitHub of course, but what's the same, what's different about what's so important about serverless and what it does for companies? >> Fundamentally, we're looking at just two different patterns and neither one of them is right or wrong, but they have different use cases, different applications, areas where they excel. New Relic was a big champion in early pioneer of Docker. We used a lot of containers, a lot of orchestration technology, so I'm still a big proponent of that. I think when I look at the serverless marker today, it's tempting to look at it as an abstraction layer, disfunction as a service, there's maybe micro-container type view. It's not really the pattern we're seeing in industry. What we're actually seeing is people are saying it's a manage service and it's not just Lambda, it's not just compute as a manage service. It's me stringing together the manage components I need to develop quickly and deliver business value to focus on business logic instead of the plumbing. I think API Gateway is manage service, I think there's manage databases in their manage service, there's event streams. You pull all the pieces together and Lambda may be a component of that. In that way, it actually fits in and compliments a container program. >> Absolutely. What I was trying to say is containers kill VMs and serverless kills this. It's kind of like cloud is more of an operation model. >> Sure. >> Serverless is more of how I build my applications and services that I can use, not the unit of how I build something. Farrah, when I look at it, the conversations I've had with users, it's not the okay, let me take the person that did some silo and teach them to code or put that together. I've talked to marketing people that are like, "I got involved and I can do this." What are you seeing from the personnel and who's using it, how is it very different from what we've seen in the past? >> I think it opens up a lot of doors. I think it makes the unattainable attainable. You see people that go from front end to full stack. It takes you to the tip of technology. I'm mentoring a woman that is using serverless as a way to get app out. She doesn't understand infrastructure, she doesn't understand all the ops and how to set all those things up and it would take a long time to figure all those things out. Those are harder doors to open. Everything's been done the same for a very long time. There's like this free knowledge is shared here. Serverless has an ecosystem. It's kind of like a community where everybody is working together, sharing knowledge and trying to actually build something bigger and better, something that feels good to be a part of. We have a lady that's working at our office coming out of code school and she is a killer engineer. You can talk more about what Anna's doing for us at Stackery, but she's coming out of a code school and is operating as if she's a full-stack engineer >> I think that's really the compelling story behind serverless, is focus on business value. >> Yeah. >> And that's the mission of every software engineer. It's the reason most of us got into software engineering was 'cause we wanted to solve puzzles, we wanted to work with logic and idea, we wanted to build. We didn't want to sit and configure infrastructure as code templates in order to stand up some basic EC2 server, so that we can run our application, right? >> Nate, maybe you troned a little bit for us. What does Stackery do in this ecosystem? What are you helping customers? If you've got any customer examples, we'd love to hear that. >> Absolutely. First off, the development model is changing. If you want to do serverless, serverless, again, is a manage service. I can't replicate all of AWS on my laptop. In order to work with these manage services, in the development cycle, I'm shipping code to the cloud. I'm provisioning resources in the cloud. Maybe in my own account or a developer account, but I have to know how to provision those resources and then configure those resources. If I'm doing this in a professional environment, then it means I need to do this in a way that's automated, scalable, I can hand off to someone else, they can replicate and this is the workflow to tooling, the guardrails that Stackery brings to your serverless program. We make it so that a developer can take a branch out of version control and deploy their own instance of it in their sand-boxed environment within their AWS account. This was kind of automation workflows, handling of configuration templating, being able to pull a resource off the shelf, I need to put my database in a VPC (Nate snaps fingers) and boom, it's pre-configured and ready for you to go. >> Okay. >> Stackery also enables you to work on your core problems. I'm not busy trying to research how the 1400 services are going to interact with each other. I don't have time to do that. I'm trying to focus on one of my projects. I'm focused on a deadline. I'm trying to get a specific task done. I don't have time to research for a week to try to get that, to figure that out. Not only that, it's not a language, so focusing time and trying to figure out and formulate cloud formation, it seems like a waste of time. >> The flip side of this is that that is some of the most important mission critical work that teams are doing. You can't provision into your production AWS account if you have misconfigured IM roles. You don't want to open access to that account to every single person in the organization. You don't want misconfigured resources. This new model, this new development change, where the application is at the heart of the life cycle, if we're not helping people to quickly stand up correctly configured resources then we're putting more load on the ITT, more load on the operational team and actually slowing down development. >> Bring us inside. When do you usually get engaged, who's driving those engagements, when you talk about write, what were they doing before and what does this enable them to do once they're engaged? >> Even though serverless feels like an infrastructure solution, it's actually the application development side of the house that tends to be the leading adopter. A lot of cases, they're trying to un-bottleneck their operations team or not send them low-criticality work loads. A typical entry point might be something like a cron job. We have this little function that just needs to run once a day. Do I really need to have a capacity-planning meeting with the ops team to get this out in production? They go, "Okay, we'll write the code, we'll ship it as a serverless function and we'll get it out the door." That works really well when you're a single-principle engineer with maybe elevated privileges in your cloud accounts. It doesn't work so well as a replicable process that you can then scale across the org. I don't think ops leaders want just like let's open the gates to our kingdom. Instead, what we see is that four companies to go through a maturing curve of embracing this technology where they go from background tasks, data pipelines, cron jobs, low-visibility work to maybe more core services that can extend their product or deliver more customer-facing value. They have to answer a lot of questions in terms of how do we change our process and our culture in order to embrace the velocity of serverless without losing the control that our ops team's been providing for us. >> Also, setting your team up for success. Anybody knows that if I'm working on a specific task or we get a project I'm working on, if I don't understand it and can't figure it out, I'm going to get frustrated, I'm not liking my job anymore, I hate this problem that we're working on, this initiative is dumb, I don't want to be a part of this, but Stackery allows somebody, it made me feel good about it, all the things that you can accomplish. We have a customer that's using this right now that they are moving faster than they ever thought that was possible and it's been so much fun to see their excitement and more things that they learn about that they're using it like, "Look what we just did!" They were going to pull out the whiteboard. He was like, "Let's not pull out the whiteboard, Let's just pull out Stackery." That's awesome. >> It's really fun. We opened Slack channels for some of our customers and it's so exciting to watch them get so fired up about being able to self-serve, being able to actually deliver value and hit their milestones very quickly and successfully. You were talking about what segments are driving this. One of the interesting patterns that we've seen is that it's not like the cutting-edge infrastructure team. In a lot of cases, it might be the under-served software teams in an organization. One of our first customers was an enterprise company doing retail and it was their marketing enablement team, a business enablement team that says, "Hey, our work is important. It drives revenue," is critical to our business, but it feels like a busy workload to the ops team and it's hard to get priority on this. For them to be able to self-serve to relieve some of that back pressure, but then deliver the business value, it was like an immediate measurable win for 'em. >> We often talk about the future of jobs so often, it's like oh, well. Really, you need to be a data scientist. You could go get all this training, you need to get there. It sounds like the bar is kind of low to be able to jump in here and don't necessarily need to go through certifications to start getting real results. >> I think maybe instead of saying, "The bar is low," we're opening the doors wider. We're saying that you can be successful by being able to write software and deliver business value and that you don't need to learn, also, how to configure cloud resources or write infrastructure as code templates or manage an operations lifecycle, personally, to be able to ramp up and add value to your organization. >> All right. Nate, how many people in the company, tell us what you can about funding and which expect to see from you and the team throughout the next six to 12 months. >> Absolutely. Officially, our company is now two years old, we're a team of 15 and we've raised seven and a half million dollars led by Voyager Capital and Hummer Winblad. >> Okay. >> I want to add that I had been involved in a number of startups. This team is different. We have five women on our team. >> Yeah. >> When I joined 10, there was four. We have one in ops and three women engineers >> We're up to six now. >> I know, but that's what I'm saying. I'm talking 'about when I started and that is like you don't see that. >> I wonder. There's certain shows I go to when I go to the Cloud Foundry show, when I go to Kubernetes show, when I go to, more of, the developer-centered shows, I do tend to find a higher percentage women. Are we seeing it or is that really? >> Oh, for sure. My first conference, when I started Stackery, was Serverlessconf. It was awesome. I walked into this hackathon actually scared to death because I've been to them before and was basically laughed out of there like, "What are you doing here?" I asked to be a part of a team that had to build a product and we to demo it and I went up to 'em and told 'em that I knew nothing about. I'm not an engineer, I can't write code at all, but I did understand business problems and I was trying to understand where serverless could be useful or what service would be useful. They were like, "Let's find you a team," and they had me working on the business plan while they were doing all the coding and I was like, "Let's do check-ins every single hour." Just that feeling like a welcome. You felt welcomed there and, as a women working in tech, I haven't felt welcomed at a number of conferences or a lot of hackathons, but I definitely felt welcomed there. >> It's great to hear. I saw on Twitter the other day and it was like, "Could you just imagine if for the last thousand years, we'd actually use the brainpower of the entire human race, (Nate laughs) not having kept 50% of the population from contributing." Nate, want to give you the final word. Serverless, it's growing fast, there's a lot of excitement, but what do you see as the biggest challenges. What does the industry need to work on? What's exciting you that, when we come and sit down in 2019, you're hoping we've moved the ball more? >> I think that one take-away that I want to make sure your audience has is that if you're sitting here saying, "We're not doing serverless," you're wrong. Someone in your organization is doing it. If you have this self-served model where pockets of the organization, this is the old shadow IT, where they are self-serving their configuring resources, their provisioning and it's outside of your peri-view, you're going to want to start putting practice steps in place to make sure that they're able to be successful with that mission. If they're not successful with that mission, they increase risk on your cloud strategy as a whole. They put more workload back on the operations team if that team ends up being a bottleneck for these needs. I hear a lot of IT leaders going, "I don't know if we're doing serverless today." It's like, "No, you are. I've talked to two of your engineers. I know you are." (Nate chuckles) >> Absolutely, right there. When I interviewed Andy Jassy, we had him on theCUBE last year, it was serverless becomes the underlying foundation for everything that AWS is doing. It is going to leave the audience with it is not a single product, or unnecessarily a single tool, but this is what all the cloud is doing and it's moving there pretty fast. It's something that the users can get involved with even more. All right. >> Absolutely. >> Nate and Farrah, thank you so much for joining us. Look forward to watching Stackery and seeing the updates. Make sure to check out thecube.net for all of our coverage. We'll have a big coverage of course from AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. Lots of other shows. I'm personally always excited about what's having in the serverless and emerging trends. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. >> Thanks.