from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante at our inaugural super cloud 22 event we further refined the concept of a super cloud iterating on the definition the salient attributes and some examples of what is and what is not a super cloud welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr you know snowflake has always been what we feel is one of the strongest examples of a super cloud and in this breaking analysis from our studios in palo alto we unpack our interview with benoit de javille co-founder and president of products at snowflake and we test our super cloud definition on the company's data cloud platform and we're really looking forward to your feedback first let's examine how we defl find super cloudant very importantly one of the goals of super cloud 22 was to get the community's input on the definition and iterate on previous work super cloud is an emerging computing architecture that comprises a set of services which are abstracted from the underlying primitives of hyperscale clouds we're talking about services such as compute storage networking security and other native tooling like machine learning and developer tools to create a global system that spans more than one cloud super cloud as shown on this slide has five essential properties x number of deployment models and y number of service models we're looking for community input on x and y and on the first point as well so please weigh in and contribute now we've identified these five essential elements of a super cloud let's talk about these first the super cloud has to run its services on more than one cloud leveraging the cloud native tools offered by each of the cloud providers the builder of the super cloud platform is responsible for optimizing the underlying primitives of each cloud and optimizing for the specific needs be it cost or performance or latency or governance data sharing security etc but those primitives must be abstracted such that a common experience is delivered across the clouds for both users and developers the super cloud has a metadata intelligence layer that can maximize efficiency for the specific purpose of the super cloud i.e the purpose that the super cloud is intended for and it does so in a federated model and it includes what we call a super pass this is a prerequisite that is a purpose-built component and enables ecosystem partners to customize and monetize incremental services while at the same time ensuring that the common experiences exist across clouds now in terms of deployment models we'd really like to get more feedback on this piece but here's where we are so far based on the feedback we got at super cloud 22. we see three deployment models the first is one where a control plane may run on one cloud but supports data plane interactions with more than one other cloud the second model instantiates the super cloud services on each individual cloud and within regions and can support interactions across more than one cloud with a unified interface connecting those instantiations those instances to create a common experience and the third model superimposes its services as a layer or in the case of snowflake they call it a mesh on top of the cloud on top of the cloud providers region or regions with a single global instantiation a single global instantiation of those services which spans multiple cloud providers this is our understanding from a comfort the conversation with benoit dejaville as to how snowflake approaches its solutions and for now we're going to park the service models we need to more time to flesh that out and we'll propose something shortly for you to comment on now we peppered benoit dejaville at super cloud 22 to test how the snowflake data cloud aligns to our concepts and our definition let me also say that snowflake doesn't use the term data cloud they really want to respect and they want to denigrate the importance of their hyperscale partners nor do we but we do think the hyperscalers today anyway are building or not building what we call super clouds but they are but but people who bar are building super clouds are building on top of hyperscale clouds that is a prerequisite so here are the questions that we tested with snowflake first question how does snowflake architect its data cloud and what is its deployment model listen to deja ville talk about how snowflake has architected a single system play the clip there are several ways to do this you know uh super cloud as as you name them the way we we we picked is is to create you know one single system and that's very important right the the the um [Music] there are several ways right you can instantiate you know your solution uh in every region of a cloud and and you know potentially that region could be a ws that region could be gcp so you are indeed a multi-cloud solution but snowflake we did it differently we are really creating cloud regions which are superposed on top of the cloud provider you know region infrastructure region so we are building our regions but but where where it's very different is that each region of snowflake is not one in instantiation of our service our service is global by nature we can move data from one region to the other when you land in snowflake you land into one region but but you can grow from there and you can you know exist in multiple clouds at the same time and that's very important right it's not one single i mean different instantiation of a system is one single instantiation which covers many cloud regions and many cloud providers snowflake chose the most advanced level of our three deployment models dodgeville talked about too presumably so it could maintain maximum control and ensure that common experience like the iphone model next we probed about the technical enablers of the data cloud listen to deja ville talk about snow grid he uses the term mesh and then this can get confusing with the jamaicani's data mesh concept but listen to benoit's explanation well as i said you know first we start by building you know snowflake regions we have today furry region that spawn you know the world so it's a worldwide worldwide system with many regions but all these regions are connected together they are you know meshed together with our technology we name it snow grid and that makes it hard because you know regions you know azure region can talk to a ws region or gcp regions and and as a as a user of our cloud you you don't see really these regional differences that you know regions are in different you know potentially clown when you use snowflake you can exist your your presence as an organization can be in several regions several clouds if you want geographic and and and both geographic and cloud provider so i can share data irrespective of the the cloud and i'm in the snowflake data cloud is that correct i can do that today exactly and and that's very critical right what we wanted is to remove data silos and and when you instantiate a system in one single region and that system is locked in that region you cannot communicate with other parts of the world you are locking the data in one region right and we didn't want to do that we wanted you know data to be distributed the way customer wants it to be distributed across the world and potentially sharing data at world scale now maybe there are many ways to skin the other cat meaning perhaps if a platform does instantiate in multiple places there are ways to share data but this is how snowflake chose to approach the problem next question how do you deal with latency in this big global system this is really important to us because while snowflake has some really smart people working as engineers and and the like we don't think they've solved for the speed of light problem the best people working on it as we often joke listen to benoit deja ville's comments on this topic so yes and no the the way we do it it's very expensive to do that because generally if you want to join you know data which is in which are in different regions and different cloud it's going to be very expensive because you need to move you know data every time you join it so the way we do it is that you replicate the subset of data that you want to access from one region from other regions so you can create this data mesh but data is replicated to make it very cheap and very performant too and is the snow grid does that have the metadata intelligence yes to actually can you describe that a little bit yeah snow grid is both uh a way to to exchange you know metadata about so each region of snowflake knows about all the other regions of snowflake every time we create a new region diary you know the metadata is distributed over our data cloud not only you know region knows all the regions but knows you know every organization that exists in our clouds where this organization is where data can be replicated by this organization and then of course it's it's also used as a way to uh uh exchange data right so you can exchange you know beta by scale of data size and we just had i was just receiving an email from one of our customers who moved more than four petabytes of data cross-region cross you know cloud providers in you know few days and you know it's a lot of data so it takes you know some time to move but they were able to do that online completely online and and switch over you know to the diff to the other region which is failover is very important also so yes and no probably means typically no he says yes and no probably means no so it sounds like snowflake is selectively pulling small amounts of data and replicating it where necessary but you also heard him talk about the metadata layer which is one of the essential aspects of super cloud okay next we dug into security it's one of the most important issues and we think one of the hardest parts related to deploying super cloud so we've talked about how the cloud has become the first line of defense for the cso but now with multi-cloud you have multiple first lines of defense and that means multiple shared responsibility models and multiple tool sets from different cloud providers and an expanded threat surface so listen to benoit's explanation here please play the clip this is a great question uh security has always been the most important aspect of snowflake since day one right this is the question that every customer of ours has you know how you can you guarantee the security of my data and so we secure data really tightly in region we have several layers of security it starts by by encrypting it every data at rest and that's very important a lot of customers are not doing that right you hear these attacks for example on on cloud you know where someone left you know their buckets uh uh open and then you know you can access the data because it's a non-encrypted uh so we are encrypting everything at rest we are encrypting everything in transit so a region is very secure now you know you never from one region you never access data from another region in snowflake that's why also we replicate data now the replication of that data across region or the metadata for that matter is is really highly secure so snow grits ensure that everything is encrypted everything is you know we have multiple you know encryption keys and it's you know stored in hardware you know secure modules so we we we built you know snow grids such that it's secure and it allows very secure movement of data so when we heard this explanation we immediately went to the lowest common denominator question meaning when you think about how aws for instance deals with data in motion or data and rest it might be different from how another cloud provider deals with it so how does aws uh uh uh differences for example in the aws maturity model for various you know cloud capabilities you know let's say they've got a faster nitro or graviton does it do do you have to how does snowflake deal with that do they have to slow everything else down like imagine a caravan cruising you know across the desert so you know every truck can keep up let's listen it's a great question i mean of course our software is abstracting you know all the cloud providers you know infrastructure so that when you run in one region let's say aws or azure it doesn't make any difference as far as the applications are concerned and and this abstraction of course is a lot of work i mean really really a lot of work because it needs to be secure it needs to be performance and you know every cloud and it has you know to expose apis which are uniform and and you know cloud providers even though they have potentially the same concept let's say blob storage apis are completely different the way you know these systems are secure it's completely different the errors that you can get and and the retry you know mechanism is very different from one cloud to the other performance is also different we discovered that when we were starting to port our software and and and you know we had to completely rethink how to leverage blob storage in that cloud versus that cloud because just of performance too so we had you know for example to you know stripe data so all this work is work that's you know you don't need as an application because our vision really is that applications which are running in our data cloud can you know be abstracted of all this difference and and we provide all the services all the workload that this application need whether it's transactional access to data analytical access to data you know managing you know logs managing you know metrics all of these is abstracted too such that they are not you know tied to one you know particular service of one cloud and and distributing this application across you know many regions many cloud is very seamless so from that answer we know that snowflake takes care of everything but we really don't understand the performance implications in you know in that specific case but we feel pretty certain that the promises that snowflake makes around governance and security within their data sharing construct construct will be kept now another criterion that we've proposed for super cloud is a super pass layer to create a common developer experience and an enabler for ecosystem partners to monetize please play the clip let's listen we build it you know a custom build because because as you said you know what exists in one cloud might not exist in another cloud provider right so so we have to build you know on this all these this components that modern application mode and that application need and and and and that you know goes to machine learning as i say transactional uh analytical system and the entire thing so such that they can run in isolation basically and the objective is the developer experience will be identical across those clouds yes right the developers doesn't need to worry about cloud provider and actually our system we have we didn't talk about it but the marketplace that we have which allows actually to deliver we're getting there yeah okay now we're not going to go deep into ecosystem today we've talked about snowflakes strengths in this regard but snowflake they pretty much ticked all the boxes on our super cloud attributes and definition we asked benoit dejaville to confirm that this is all shipping and available today and he also gave us a glimpse of the future play the clip and we are still developing it you know the transactional you know unistore as we call it was announced in last summit so so they are still you know working properly but but but that's the vision right and and and that's important because we talk about the infrastructure right you mentioned a lot about storage and compute but it's not only that right when you think about application they need to use the transactional database they need to use an analytical system they need to use you know machine learning so you need to provide also all these services which are consistent across all the cloud providers so you can hear deja ville talking about expanding beyond taking advantage of the core infrastructure storage and networking et cetera and bringing intelligence to the data through machine learning and ai so of course there's more to come and there better be at this company's valuation despite the recent sharp pullback in a tightening fed environment okay so i know it's cliche but everyone's comparing snowflakes and data bricks databricks has been pretty vocal about its open source posture compared to snowflakes and it just so happens that we had aligotsy on at super cloud 22 as well he wasn't in studio he had to do remote because i guess he's presenting at an investor conference this week so we had to bring him in remotely now i didn't get to do this interview john furrier did but i listened to it and captured this clip about how data bricks sees super cloud and the importance of open source take a listen to goatzee yeah i mean let me start by saying we just we're big fans of open source we think that open source is a force in software that's going to continue for you know decades hundreds of years and it's going to slowly replace all proprietary code in its way we saw that you know it could do that with the most advanced technology windows you know proprietary operating system very complicated got replaced with linux so open source can pretty much do anything and what we're seeing with the data lake house is that slowly the open source community is building a replacement for the proprietary data warehouse you know data lake machine learning real-time stack in open source and we're excited to be part of it for us delta lake is a very important project that really helps you standardize how you lay out your data in the cloud and with it comes a really important protocol called delta sharing that enables you in an open way actually for the first time ever share large data sets between organizations but it uses an open protocol so the great thing about that is you don't need to be a database customer you don't even like databricks you just need to use this open source project and you can now securely share data sets between organizations across clouds and it actually does so really efficiently just one copy of the data so you don't have to copy it if you're within the same cloud so the implication of ellie gotzi's comments is that databricks with delta sharing as john implied is playing a long game now i don't know if enough about the databricks architecture to comment in detail i got to do more research there so i reached out to my two analyst friends tony bear and sanji mohan to see what they thought because they cover these companies pretty closely here's what tony bear said quote i've viewed the divergent lake house strategies of data bricks and snowflake in the context of their roots prior to delta lake databrick's prime focus was the compute not the storage layer and more specifically they were a compute engine not a database snowflake approached from the opposite end of the pool as they originally fit the mold of the classic database company rather than a specific compute engine per se the lake house pushes both companies outside of their original comfort zones data bricks to storage snowflake to compute engine so it makes perfect sense for databricks to embrace the open source narrative at the storage layer and for snowflake to continue its walled garden approach but in the long run their strategies are already overlapping databricks is not a 100 open source company its practitioner experience has always been proprietary and now so is its sql query engine likewise snowflake has had to open up with the support of iceberg for open data lake format the question really becomes how serious snowflake will be in making iceberg a first-class citizen in its environment that is not necessarily officially branding a lake house but effectively is and likewise can databricks deliver the service levels associated with walled gardens through a more brute force approach that relies heavily on the query engine at the end of the day those are the key requirements that will matter to data bricks and snowflake customers end quote that was some deep thought by by tony thank you for that sanjay mohan added the following quote open source is a slippery slope people buy mobile phones based on open source android but it's not fully open similarly databricks delta lake was not originally fully open source and even today its photon execution engine is not we are always going to live in a hybrid world snowflake and databricks will support whatever model works best for them and their customers the big question is do customers care as deeply about which vendor has a higher degree of openness as we technology people do i believe customers evaluation criteria is far more nuanced than just to decipher each vendor's open source claims end quote okay so i had to ask dodgeville about their so-called wall garden approach and what their strategy is with apache iceberg here's what he said iceberg is is very important so just to to give some context iceberg is an open you know table format right which was you know first you know developed by netflix and netflix you know put it open source in the apache community so we embrace that's that open source standard because because it's widely used by by many um many you know companies and also many companies have you know really invested a lot of effort in building you know big data hadoop solution or data like solution and they want to use snowflake and they couldn't really use snowflake because all their data were in open you know formats so we are embracing icebergs to help these companies move through the cloud but why we have been relentless with direct access to data direct access to data is a little bit of a problem for us and and the reason is when you direct access to data now you have direct access to storage now you have to understand for example the specificity of one cloud versus the other so as soon as you start to have direct access to data you lose your you know your cloud diagnostic layer you don't access data with api when you have direct access to data it's very hard to secure data because you need to grant access direct access to tools which are not you know protected and you see a lot of you know hacking of of data you know because of that so so that was not you know direct access to data is not serving well our customers and that's why we have been relented to do that because it's it's cr it's it's not cloud diagnostic it's it's you you have to code that you have to you you you need a lot of intelligence while apis access so we want open apis that's that's i guess the way we embrace you know openness is is by open api versus you know you access directly data here's my take snowflake is hedging its bets because enough people care about open source that they have to have some open data format options and it's good optics and you heard benoit deja ville talk about the risks of directly accessing the data and the complexities it brings now is that maybe a little fud against databricks maybe but same can be said for ollie's comments maybe flooding the proprietaryness of snowflake but as both analysts pointed out open is a spectrum hey i remember unix used to equal open systems okay let's end with some etr spending data and why not compare snowflake and data bricks spending profiles this is an xy graph with net score or spending momentum on the y-axis and pervasiveness or overlap in the data set on the x-axis this is data from the january survey when snowflake was holding above 80 percent net score off the charts databricks was also very strong in the upper 60s now let's fast forward to this next chart and show you the july etr survey data and you can see snowflake has come back down to earth now remember anything above 40 net score is highly elevated so both companies are doing well but snowflake is well off its highs and data bricks has come down somewhat as well databricks is inching to the right snowflake rocketed to the right post its ipo and as we know databricks wasn't able to get to ipo during the covet bubble ali gotzi is at the morgan stanley ceo conference this week they got plenty of cash to withstand a long-term recession i'm told and they've started the message that they're a billion dollars in annualized revenue i'm not sure exactly what that means i've seen some numbers on their gross margins i'm not sure what that means i've seen some numbers on their net retention revenue or net revenue retention again i'll reserve judgment until we see an s1 but it's clear both of these companies have momentum and they're out competing in the market well as always be the ultimate arbiter different philosophies perhaps is it like democrats and republicans well it could be but they're both going after a solving data problem both companies are trying to help customers get more value out of their data and both companies are highly valued so they have to perform for their investors to paraphrase ralph nader the similarities may be greater than the differences okay that's it for today thanks to the team from palo alto for this awesome super cloud studio build alex myerson and ken shiffman are on production in the palo alto studios today kristin martin and sheryl knight get the word out to our community rob hoff is our editor-in-chief over at siliconangle thanks to all please check out etr.ai for all the survey data remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen just search breaking analysis podcasts i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can email me at david.vellante at siliconangle.com or dm me at devellante or comment on my linkedin posts and please as i say etr has got some of the best survey data in the business we track it every quarter and really excited to be partners with them this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> Hey, guys and girls, welcome back to New York City. Lisa Martin and John Furrier are live with theCUBE at AWS Summit 22, here in The Big Apple. We're excited to be talking about security next. James Arlen joins us, the CISO at Aiven. James, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Absolutely, it's good to be here. >> Tell the audience a little bit about Aiven, what you guys do, what you deliver, and what some of those differentiators are. >> Oh, Aiven. Aiven is a fantastic organization. I'm actually really lucky to work there. It's a database as a service, managed databases, all open source. And we're capital S, serious about open source. So 10 different open source database products delivered as a platform, all managed services, and the game is really about being the most performant, secure, and compliant database as a service on the market, friction free for your developers. You don't need people worrying about how to run databases. You just want to be able to say, here, take care of my data for me. And that's what we do. And that's actually the differentiator. We just take care of it for you. >> Take care of it for you, I like that. >> So they download the open source. They could do it on their own. So all the different projects are out there. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What do you guys bringing to the table? You said the managed service, can you explain that. >> Yeah, the managed service aspect of it is, really, you could install the software yourself. You can use Postgres or Apache Kafka or any one of the products that we support. Absolutely you can do it yourself. But is that really what you do for a living, or do you develop software, or do you sell a product? So we take and do the hard work of running the systems, running the equipment. We take care of backups, high availability, all the security and compliance things around access and certifications, all of those things that are logging, all of that stuff that's actually difficult to do, well and consistently, that's all we do. >> Talk about the momentum, I see you guys were founded in what? 2016? >> Yes. >> Just in May of '22, raised $210 million in series D funding. >> Yes. >> Talk about the momentum and also from your perspective, all of the massive changes in security. >> It's very interesting to work for a company where you're building more than 100% growth year over year. It's a powers of two thing. Going from one to two, not so scary, two to four, not so scary. 512 to 1024, it's getting scary. (Lisa chuckles) 1024 to 2048, oh crap! I've been with Aiven for just almost two years now, and we are less than 70 when I started, and we're near 500 now. So, explosive growth is very interesting, but it's also that, you're growing within a reasonable burn rate boundary as well. And what that does from a security perspective, is it leaves you in the position that I had. I walked in and I was the first actual CISO. I had a team of four, I now have a team of 40. Because it turns out that like a lot of things in life, as you start unpacking problems, they're kind of fractal. You unpack the problem, you're like oh, well I did deal with that problem, but now I got another problem that I got to deal with. And so there's, it's not turtles all the way down. >> There's a lot of things going on and other authors, survive change. >> And there's fundamental problems that are still not fixed. And yet we treat them like they're fixed. And so we're doing a lot of hard work to make it so that we don't have to do hard work ongoing. >> And that's the value of the managed service. >> Yes. >> Okay, so talk about competition. Obviously, we had ETR on which is Enterprise Research Firm that we trust, we like. And we were looking at the data with the headwinds in the market, looking at the different players like got Amazon has Redshift, Snowflake, and you got Azure Sequence. I think it's called one of those products. The money that's being shifted from on premise data where the old school data warehouse like terra data and whatnot, is going first to Snowflake, then to Azure, then to AWS. Yes, so that points to snowflake being kind of like the bell of the ball if you will, in terms of from a data cloud. >> Absolutely. >> How do you compete with them? What's the pitch 'Cause that seemed to be a knee-jerk reaction from the industry. 'Cause snowflake is hot. They have a good value product. They have a smart team, Databrick is out there too. >> Yeah I mean... >> how do you guys compete against all that. >> So this is that point where you're balancing the value of a specific technology, or a specific technology vendor. And am I going to be stuck with them? So I'm tying my future to their future. With open source, I'm tying my future to the common good right. The internet runs on open source. It doesn't run on anything closed. And so I'm not hitching my wagon to something that I don't control. I'm hitching it to something where, any one of our customers could decide. I'm not getting the value I need from Aiven anymore. I need to go. And we provide you with the tools necessary, to move from our open source managed service to your own. Whether you go on-prem or you run it yourself, on a cloud service provider, move your data to you because it's your data. It's not ours. How can I hold your data? It's like weird extortion ransoming thing. >> Actually speaking, I mean enterprise, it's a big land grab 'cause with cloud you're horizontally scalable. It's a beautiful thing, open source is booming. It's going in Aiven, every day it's just escalating higher and higher. >> Absolutely. >> It is the software business. So open is open. Integration and scale seems to be the competitive advantage. >> Yeah. >> Right. So, how do you guys compete with that? Because now you got open source. How do you offer the same benefits without the lock in, or what's the switching costs? How do you guys maintain that position of not saying the same thing in Snowflake? >> Because all of the biggest data users and consumers tend to give away their data products. LinkedIn gave away their data product. Uber gave away their data product, Facebook gave away their data product. And we now use those as community solutions. So, if the product works for something the scale of LinkedIn, or something the scale of Uber. It will probably work for you too. And scale is just... >> Well Facebook and LinkedIn, they gave away the product to own the data to use against you. >> But it's the product that counts because you need to be able to manipulate data the way they manipulate data, but with yours. >> So low latency needs to work. So horizontally, scalable, fees, machine learning. That's what we're seeing. How do you make that available? Customers want on architecture? What do you recommend? Control plane, data plane, how do you think about that? >> It's interesting. There's architectural reasons to think about it in terms like that. And there's other good architectural reasons to not think about it. There's sort of this dividing line in the cloud, where your cloud service provider, takes over and provides you with the opportunity to say, I don't know. And I don't care >> As long as it's secure >> As long as it's secure absolutely. But there's sort of that water line idea, where if it's below the water line, let somebody else deal. >> What is in the table stakes? 'Cause I like that approach. I think that's a good value proposition. Store it, what boxes have to be checked? Compliance, secure, what are some of the boxes? >> You need to make sure that you've taken care of all of the same basics if you are still running it. Remember you can't absolve yourself of your duty to your customer. You're still on the hook. So, you have to have backups. You have to have access control. You have to understand who's administering it, and how and what they're doing. Good logging, good comprehension there. You have to have anomaly detection, secure operations. You have to have all those compliance check boxes. Especially if you're dealing with regulated data type like PCI data or HIPAA health data or you know what there's other countries besides the United States, there's other kinds of of compliance obligations there. So you have to make sure that you've got all that taken into account. And remember that, like I said, you can't absolve yourself with those things. You can share responsibilities. But you can't walk away from that responsibility. So you still have to make sure that you validate that your vendor knows what they're talking about. >> I wanted to ask you about the cybersecurity skills gap. So I'm kind of giving a little segue here, because you mentioned you've been with Aiven for about two years. >> Almost. >> Almost two years. You've started with a team of four. You've grown at 10X in less than two years. How have you accomplished that, considering we're seeing one of the biggest skills shortages in cyber in history. >> It's amazing, you see this show up in a lot of job Ads, where they ask for 10 years of experience in something that's existed for three years. (John Furrier laughs) And it's like okay, well if I just be logical about this I can hire somebody at less than the skill level that I need today, and bring them up to that skill level. Or I can spend the same amount of time, hoping that I'll find the magical person that has that set of skills that I need. So I can solve the problem of the skills gap by up-skilling the people that I hire. Which is strangely contrary to how this thing works. >> The other thing too, is the market's evolving so fast that, that carry up and pulling someone along, or building and growing your own so to speak is workable. >> It also really helps us with a bunch of sustainability goals. It really helps with anything that has to do with diversity and inclusion, because I can bring forward people who are never given a chance. And say, you know what? You don't have that magical ticket in life, but damn you know what you're talking about? >> It's a classic pedigree. I went to this school, I studied this degree. There's no degree if have to stop a hacker using state of the art malware. (John Furrier laughs) >> Exactly. What I do today as a job, didn't exist when I was in post-secondary at all. >> So when you hire, what do you look for? I mean obviously problem solving. What's your kind of algorithm for hiring? >> Oh, that's a really interesting question. The quickest sort of summary of it is, I'm looking for not a jerk. >> Not a jerk. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Because it turns out that the quality that I can't fix in a candidate, is I can't fix whether or not they're a jerk, but I can up-skill them, I can educate them. I can teach them of a part of the world that they've not had any interaction with. But if they're not going to work with the team, if they're going to be, look at me, look at me. If they're going to not have that moment of, I have this great job, and I get to work today. And that's awesome. (Lisa Martin laughs) That's what I'm trying to hire for. >> The essence of this teamwork is fundamental. >> Collaboration. >> Cooperation. >> Curiosity. >> That's the thing yeah, absolutely. >> And everybody? >> Those things, oh absolutely. Those things are really, really hard to interview for. And they're impossible to fix after the fact. So that's where you really want to put the effort. 'Cause I can teach you how to use a computer. I mean it's hard, but it's not that hard. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Well I love the current state of data management. Good overview, you guys are in the good position. We love open source. Been covering it for, since theCUBE started. It continues to redefine more and more the industry. It is the software industry. Now there's no debate about that. If people want to have that debate, that's kind of waste of time, but there are other ways that are happening. So I have to ask you. As things are going forward with innovation. Okay, if opensource is going to be the software industry. Where's the value? >> That's a fun question wow? >> Is it going to be in the community? Is it the integration? Is it the scale? If you're open and you have low switching costs... >> Yeah so, when you look at Aiven's commitment to open source, a huge part of that is our open source project office, where we contribute back to those core products, whether it's parts of the Apache Foundation, or Postgres, or whatever. We contribute to those, because we have staff who work on those products. They don't work on our stuff. They work on those. And it's like the opposite of a zero sum game. It's more like Nash equilibrium. If you ever watch that movie, "A beautiful mind." That great idea of, you don't have to have winners and losers. You can have everybody loses a little bit but everybody wins a little bit. >> Yeah and that's the open the ethos. >> And that's where it gets tied up. >> Another follow up on that. The other thing I want to get your reaction on is that, now in this modern era of open source, almost all corporations are part of projects. I mean if you're an entrepreneur and you want to get funding it's pretty simple. You start open source project. How many stars you get on GitHub guarantees it's a series C round, pretty much. So open source now has got this new thing going on, where it's not just open source folks who believe in it It's an operating model. What's the dynamic of corporations being part of the system. It used to be, oh what's the balance between corporate and influence, now it's standard. What's your reaction? >> They can do good and they can do harm. And it really comes down to why are you in it? So if you look at the example of open search, which is one of the data products that we operate in the Aiven system. That's a collaboration between Aiven. Hey we're an awesome company, but we're nowhere near the size of AWS. And AWS where we're working together on it. And I just had this conversation with one of the attendees here, where he said, "Well AWS is going to eat your story there. "You're contributing all of this "to the open search platform. "And then AWS is going to go and sell it "and they're going to make more money." And I'm like yep, they are. And I've got staff who work for the organization, who are more fulfilled because they got to deliver something that's used by millions of people. And you think about your jobs. That moment of, (sighs) I did a cool thing today. That's got a lot of value in it. >> And part of something. >> Exactly. >> As a group. >> 100%. >> Exactly. >> And we end up with a product that's used by millions. Some of it we'll capture, because we do a better job running than the AWS does, but everybody ends up winning out of the backend. Again, everybody lost a little, but everybody also won. And that's better than that whole, you have to lose so that I can win. At zero something, that doesn't work. >> I think the silo conversations are coming, what's the balance between siloing something and why that happens. And then what's going to be freely accessible for data. Because the real time information is based upon what you can access. "Hey Siri, what's the weather. "We had a guest on earlier." It says, oh that's a data query. Well, if the weather is, the data weathers stored in a database that's out here and it can't get to the response on the app. Yeah, that's not good, but the data is available. It just didn't get delivered. >> Yeah >> Exactly. >> This is an example of what people are realizing now the consequences of this data, collateral damage or economy value. >> Yeah, and it's understanding how data fits in your environment. And I don't want to get on the accountants too hard, but the accounting organizations, AICPA and ISAE and others, they haven't really done a good job of helping you understand data as an asset, or data as a liability. I hold a lot of customer data. That's a liability to me. It's going to blow up in my face. We don't talk about the income that we get from data, Google. We don't talk about the expense of regenerating that data. We talk about, well what happens if you lose it? I don't know. And we're circling the drain around fiduciary responsibility, and we know how to do this. If you own a manufacturing plant, or if you own a fleet of vehicles you understand the fiduciary duty of managing your asset. But because we can't touch it, we don't do a good job of it. >> How far do you think are people getting into the point where they actually see that asset? Because I think it's out of sight out of mind. Now there's consequences, there's now it's public companies might have to do filings. It's not like sustainability and data. Like, wait a minute, I got to deal with these things. >> It's interesting, we got this great benefit of the move to cloud computing, and the move to utility style computing. But we took away that. I got to walk around and pet my computers. Like oh! This is my good database. I'm very proud of you. Like we're missing that piece now. And when you think about the size of data centers, we become detached from that, you don't really think about, Aiven operates tens of thousands of machines. It would take entire buildings to hold them all. You don't think about it. So how do you recreate that visceral connection to your data? Well, you need to start actually thinking about it. And you need to do some of that tokenization. When was the last time you printed something out, like you get a report and happens to me all the time with security reports. Look at a security report and it's like 150 page PDF. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Print it out, stump it on the table in front of you. Oh, there's gravitas here. There's something here. Start thinking about those records, count them up, and then try to compare that to something in the real world. My wife is a school teacher, kindergarten to grade three, and tokenizing math is how they teach math to little kids. You want to count something? Here's 10 things, count them. Well, you've got 60,000 customer records, or you have 2 billion data points in your IOT database, tokenize that, what does 2 billion look like? What does $1 million look like in the form of $100 dollars bills on a pallet? >> Wow. >> Right. Tokenize that data, create that visceral connection with it, and then talk about it. >> So when you say tokenized, you mean like token as in decentralization token? >> No, I mean create like a totem or an icon of it. >> Okay, got it. >> A thing you can hold holy. If you're a token company. >> Not token as in Token economics and Crypto. >> If you're a mortgage company, take that customer record for one of your customers, print it out and hold the file. Like in a Manila folder, like it's 1963. Hold that file, and then say yes. And you're explaining to somebody and say yes, and we have 3 million of these. If we printed them all out, it would take up a room this size. >> It shows the scale. >> Right. >> Right. >> Exactly, create that connection back to the human level of interaction with data. How do you interact with a terabyte of data, but you do. >> Right. >> But once she hits upgrade from Google drive. (team laughs) >> What's a terabyte right? We don't hold that anymore. >> Right, right. >> Great conversation. >> Recreate that connection. Talk about data that way. >> The visceral connection with data. >> Follow up after this event. We'd love to dig more and love the approach. Love open source, love what you're doing there. That's a very unique approach. And it's also an alternative to some of the other vast growing plus your valuations are very high too. So you're not like a... You're not too far away from these big valuations. So congratulations. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah excellent, I'm sure there's lots of work to do, lots of strategic work to do with that round of funding. But also lots of opportunity, that it's going to open up, and we know you don't hire jerks. >> I don't >> You have a whole team of non jerks. That's pretty awesome. Especially 40 of 'em. That's impressive James.| >> It is. >> Congratulations to you on what you've accomplished in the course of the team. And thank you for sharing your insights with John and me today, we appreciate it. >> Awesome. >> Thanks very much, it's been great. >> Awesome, for John furrier, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCube, live in New York city at AWS Summit NYC 22, John and I will be right back with our next segment, stick around. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live on the floor in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here for the next two days getting all the action back in person. We're at AWS re:Invent, a few months ago. Now we're back, events are coming back and we're happy to be here with theCUBE. Bring all the action, also virtual, we have a hybrid cube. Check out theCUBE.net, siliconangle.com for all the coverage. After the event we've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, Director of Solutions Architecture with Innovation Solutions, the booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, I'm glad to be here. >> So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee, we were chatting before you came on camera. It's great that be back to events. >> It's amazing, this is the first summit I've been to in what two, three years. >> It's awesome, we'll be at the AWS Summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going, distributed computing you got on-premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything, Dev sec Ops, everyone kind of sees that, you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out, and the edge is with the action is. You guys are number one premier partner at SMB for edge. >> That's right. >> Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and what you do. >> That's right, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around especially the edge public cloud. For us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. We are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it-- >> Give an example. >> Example would be Panama. We have a customer there that needs to deploy some financial tech, data and compute is legally required to be in Panama but they love AWS, and they want to deploy AWS services in region. So they've taken EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and snowball in region, inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >> You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering AWS since 2013 with theCUBE about their events, and we watched the progression. Andy Jassy was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam Slepsky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't want to say trying to avoid. Of course Amazon listens to customers, they work backwards from the customers, we all know that. But the real issue is they're bread and butters, EC2 and S3. And then now they got tons of services, and the cloud is obviously successful, and we're seeing that. But the edge brings up a whole nother level. >> It does. >> Computing. >> It does. >> That's not set centralized in the public cloud. Now they got regions, so what is the issue with the edge? What's driving the behavior? Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, operational technologies and IT merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got 5G, so it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS? >> Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best Outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers, on location or in the field like with media companies. >> Outpost is interesting, we always used to rip on theCUBE 'cause it's basically Amazon in a box pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff. But now cloud native operations are becoming the standard. You're starting to see some standard, Deepak Singh's group is doing some amazing work with opensource, Raul's team on the AI side. Obviously you got Swam who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, Outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did Outpost do its job? 'Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say Outpost? >> Yeah, I think Outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at Outpost really consider, do I want to invest in this hardware? Do I want to have this Outpost in my data center? Do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were not a good fit for Outposts, they weren't a good fit in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're going to meet you where you are with 5G. We're going to meet you where you are with wavelength. We're going to meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about Outposts and it's really increased, we can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up Outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption for sure. >> All right so you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative as that, you have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and doing that outside of the availability zone and regions for AWS. Customers in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, they want to have modernization, modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI all part of that. What's the main product or gap that you're filling for AWS outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key? Is it they don't have a footprint? Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap, why are you so successful? >> So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They want to focus on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS you take the infrastructure you take some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware, that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >> So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges? >> Matthew: Correct. >> For companies. >> Matthew: Correct. >> Mainly because the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's low latency type requirements, and then they still work with the regions, it's all tied together, is that how it works? >> And our customers, even the ones in the edge they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone because we're always going to have a failback scenario. If we're going to deploy FinTech in the Caribbean we're going to talk about hurricanes. And we're going to talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >> All right so I got to ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, now, I won't say underserved but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that requirement. It makes total sense, we're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's an outlier, it's actually growing. >> Matthew: Yeah. >> There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama. And you mentioned FinTech in the islands, there are a lot of web three happening. What's your view on the web three world right now relative? >> We have some customers actually deploying crypto especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's top of my mind right now, we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. So it's up and coming. I have some personal views that crypto is still searching for a use case. And I think it's searching a lot and we're there to help customers search for that use case. But crypto as a to technology lives really well on the AWS edge. And we're having more and more people talk to us about that. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and putting them out there on-- >> It's interesting. I mean, first of all we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little projects going on. But if you go talk to all the crypto people they say, look we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's a lot of overhead. It's not really very technical already but it's a cultural shift but there's underserved use cases around use of money but they're all using the blockchain just for smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. They all, don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened if decentralized? >> Yeah, and that's a conversation. >> It's a performance issue. >> Yeah and it's a cost issue and it's a development issue. So I think more and more as some of these currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on AWS and what does it look like to build decentralized applications but with AWS hardware and services. >> All right so take me through a use case of a customer, Matthew, around the edge. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Hey, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my app. And I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I want to migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer? >> Yeah big thing is industrial manufacturing. That's one of the best use cases. Inside industrial manufacturing we can pull in many of the AWS edge services, we can bring in private 5G so that all the equipment inside that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5G. It's better than wifi for the industrial space. When we take computing down to that industrial area because we want to do pre-processing on the data. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with regular commercially available hardware, running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the robotics depending on what we're manufacturing, right? And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back to the AWS availability zone, the standard-- >> John: For data lake, or whatever. >> To the data lake, yeah data lake house, whatever it might be. And we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. But a lot of that just in time business decisions, just in time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's one of the best use cases that we're seeing. >> And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on theCUBE for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. But also compute, going to the data that saves that cost on the data transfer but also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching, don't move the data unless you have to, but there's new things are developing. So I want to ask you what new are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything, right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. But now what does that change in the core cloud? There's a system element here, what's the new pattern? >> There's actually an organizational element as well. Because once you have to start making the decision do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. So not only are you changing your architecture you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. So now you say, okay, this can take place here. And maybe this decision can wait. And then how do I visualize that? >> By the way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You got observability going right. But you got to change the database architecture in the backs. There's new things developing. You've got more benefit. >> There are, there are. And we have more and more people that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about, customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. For the past maybe decade, it's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. >> I mean, this is a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps. Actually is not the case. You look at Databrick, Snowflake and other successes out there. And even Time Series Data which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. >> Matthew: Yep. >> So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did, a whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training, things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business benefits. There's all kinds of new scale. >> There are. And we have many customers that are running petabyte level. They're essentially data factories on premises, right? They're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay we could analyze this in the cloud. We could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud or we can run computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data, transition those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS, run 'em through machine learning. And we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >> So I got to end the segment on a kind of a fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, AWS cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What does this mean? You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out? >> Kind of, so I was-- >> You jumped out? >> I was teaching skydiving before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a skydiving instructor. I was teaching skydiving. And I heard out of the corner of my ear a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, hey, this is what I went to school for. I'd love to, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So I started and the first day there we had a discussion, EC2 had just come out and-- >> This is amazing. >> Yeah and so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And that totally revolutionized that business, that led to, that guy actually still owns skydiving airport. But through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud. And now it feels like almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and apply those lessons in those services to on premises. >> It's such a great story, is going to, the whole growth mindset, pack your own parachute. >> Matthew: Exactly. >> The cloud in the early days was pretty much will the chute open? >> Matthew: Yeah. >> It was pretty much you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you jump out a plane you got to make sure that parachute is going to open. >> And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was still, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. But it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when-- >> It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. But a lot of this cutting edge stuff is like jumping out of an airplane. You got the right equipment. You got to do the right things. >> Exactly. >> John: Matthew, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. >> Thanks for having me, thank you. >> Okay theCUBE's here live in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We'll be at AWS Summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all theCUBE action at theCUBE.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. (upbeat music)