>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22 brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to Licia Spain in Coon cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townson, along with Paul Gillon senior editor, enterprise architecture for Silicon angle. Paul, we're gonna talk to some amazing people this week. Coon, what the energy here, what, what, what would you say about >>It? I'd say it's reminiscent of, of early year, early stage conferences I've seen with other technologies. There is a lot of startup activity. Here's a lot of money in the market, despite the selloff in the stock market lately, a lot of anticipation that there are, there could be big exits. There could be big things ahead for these companies. You don't see that when you go to the big established conferences, you see just anticipation here that I don't think you see you you'll see maybe in a couple of years. So it's fun to be here right now. I'm sure it'll be a very different experience in two or three years. >>So welcome to our guest Q alum. BAAM Tobar the founder and CEO of Upbound. Welcome back. >>Thank you. Yeah, pleasure to be on, on the show again. >>So Paul, tell us the we're in this phase of migrations and, and moving to cloud native stacks. Are we another re-platforming generation? I mean, we've done, the enterprise has done this, you know, time and time again, and whether it's from Java to.net or net to Java or from bare metal to VMs, but are we in another age of replatforming? >>You know, it's interesting. Every company has now become a tech company and every tech company needs to build a very model, you know, modern digital platform for them to actually run their business. And if they don't do that, then they'll probably be out of business. And it is interesting to think about how companies are platforming and replatforming. Like, you know, as you said, just a, a few years back, you know, we were on people using cloud Foundry or using Heroku, you hear Heroku a lot, or, you know, now it's cloud native and Kubernetes and, and it, it begs the question, you know, is this the end that the tr point is this, you know, do we have a, you know, what, what makes us sure that this is the, you know, the last platform or the future proof platform that, that people are building, >>There's never a last platform, right? There's always something around the core. The question is, is Kubernetes Linux, or is it windows? >>That, that's a good question. It's more like more like Linux. I think, you know, the, you know, you've heard this before, but people talk about Kubernetes as a platform off platforms, you can use it to build other platforms. And if you know what you're doing, you can probably put, assemble a set of pieces around it and arrive at something that looks and can work for your business. But it requires a ton of talent. It requires a lot of people that actually can act, you know, know how to put the stick together to, to work for your business. It is, there's not a lot of guidance. I, we were, I think we were chatting earlier about the CSCF landscape and, and how there all these different projects and companies around it. But, but they don't come together in meaningful ways that you have, they act the enterprise itself has to figure out how to bring them together. Right. And that's the combination of what they do there organically or not is their platform. Right. And that changes. It can change over time. >>Do you think they really do. They really want to put these things together? I mean, there's, that's not what enterprise is like to do. They want to find someone who's gonna come in and turnkey do it all for >>Them. Yeah. And, and if there were, this is the, this is the things like EV every week now you hear about another platform that says, this is the new Heroku. This is the new cloud Foundry. This replaces every, you know, some vendor has, and you can see them all around here. You know, companies that are basically selling platform solutions that do put 'em together. And the problem with it is that you typically outgrow these, like you are, it might solve 80% of the use cases you care about, but the other 20% are not represented. And so you end up outgrowing the platform itself, right? And the, the choice has been mostly around, you know, do you buy something off the shelf that solves 80% of your use cases? Or do you build something on your own? And then you have to spend all your resources actually going through and building all of it. And that's been the dilemma, you know, people who talk about this as a platform dilemma, but it's been, it's been the way for a long time. Like you, every, we go through this cycle every few years and, you know, people end up essentially oscillating between buying something off the, you know, that's off the shelf or building it, building it themselves. >>So what's the payoff. If I'm a CIO and I'm looking at the landscape, I don't need to understand, you know, I don't know what a pod is to know that looking at 200 plus projects in co and at, in cloud native foundation and the bevy of, of co-located projects and, and conferences before the, even the start of this, what's the payoff >>Increasing the pace of innovation. I mean, that literally is when we talk to customers, they all say roughly the same thing. They want something that works for their business. They want something that helps them take their, you know, line of business applications to production in a much quicker way, lets them innovate, lets them create higher engineers that can, don't have to understand everything about every system, but can actually specialize and focus on the, the parts that they sh they care about. But it's all in the context of, you know, people want to be able to innovate at a very high pace. Otherwise they get disrupted. >>So I was at the, you know, my favorite part of coan in general is the hallway track and talking to people on the ground, doing cool things. I was talking to a engineer who was able to take their Java, stack their, their.net stack and start to create APIs between and break 'em into microservices. Now teams are working across from one another realizing that, that, that promise of innovation, but that was the end point. They they're there. Yeah. As companies are thinking about replatforming where like, where do we start? I mean, I'm looking at the, the C CNCF, the, the map and it's 200 plus projects. Where, where do I start? >>You typically today start with Kubernetes. And, and a lot of companies have now deployed Kubernetes to production as a container orchestrator, whether they're going through a vendor or not. But now you're seeing all the things around it, whether it's C I C D or GI ops that they're looking at, you know, or they're starting to build consoles around, you know, their, their platforms or looking at managing more than just containers. And that's a theme that, you know, we're seeing a lot now, people want, people want to actually bring this modern stack to manage, not just container workloads, but start looking at databases and cloud workloads and everything else that they're doing around it. Honestly, everybody's trying to do the same thing. They're trying to arrive at a single point of control, a single, you know, a platform that can do it all that they can centralize policies, centralized controls to compliance governance, cost controls, and then expose a self-service experience to the developers. Like they're all trying to build what we probably call an internal cloud platform. They don't know, they talk about it in different ways, but almost everyone is trying to build some internal platform that sits on top of, on premises. And on top of cloud, depending on their scenarios, >>You make an interesting point, which is that everyone here is to some extent trying to do the same thing. And there's fine points of granularity between now they're approaching it as you walk around this floor. Do you understand what all of these companies are doing? >>I'm not sure I understand all of them, but I, I do. I do recognize a lot of them. Yes. >>And in terms of your approach, you, you use the term control plane. What is distinctive about your approach? >>Very good question. So, you know, we, we end, Upbound take a, we we're trying to solve this problem as well. We're trying to help people build their own platforms, but let me, let me, you know, there's a lot to it. So let me actually step back and, and talk about the architecture of this. But if you were to look at any cloud platform, let's take the largest one. AWS, if you peek behind the scenes at AWS, you know, it's basically a set of independent services, EC two S three databases, et cetera, that are, you know, essentially working on different parts of, you know, like offer completely different pricing, different services, et cetera. They come together because they all integrate into a control plan. >>It's the thing that serves an API. It's the thing that gives it all a common feel. It's where you do access control. It's where you do billing metering, cost control policy, et cetera. Right? And so our realization was if the enterprises are platforming and replatforming, why shouldn't they build their platform in the same way that the cloud vendors build theirs? And so we started this project almost four years ago, now three and a half years called cross plain, which is a, essentially an open source control plane that can become the integration point for all services. And essentially gives you a universal control plane for cloud. >>So you mentioned the idea of if orchestrating or managing stuff other than containers, as I think about companies that built amazing platforms, enterprise companies, building amazing applications on AWS 10 years ago, and they're adopting the AWS control plane. And now I'm looking at Kubernetes is Kubernetes the way to multi-cloud to be able to control those discrete services in a AWS or Google cloud Azure or Oracle cloud, is that true? >>We kind have the tease it, the parts. So there are really two parts to Kubernetes and everybody thinks of Kubernetes as a container orchestration platform. Right? And you know, there is a sense that people say, if I was to run Kubernetes on everywhere and can build everything on top of containers, that I get some kind of portability across clouds, right. That I can put things in containers. And then they magically run, you know, in different environments. In reality, what we've seen is not everything fits in containers. It's not gonna be the world is not gonna look like containers on the bottom. Everything else is on top. Instead, what we're gonna see is essentially a set of services that people are using across the different vendors. So if you look at like, you could be at AWS shop primarily, but I bet you're using confluent or elastic or data breaks or snowflake or Mongo or other services. >>I bet you're using things that are on premises, right? And so when you look at that and you say to build my platform as an enterprise, I have to consume services from multiple vendors. Even if it's just one major cloud vendor, but I'm consuming services from others. How do I bring them together in meaningful ways so that I can, you know, build my platform on top of the collection of them and offer something that my developers can consume. And self-service on. That's not a, that's not just containers. What's interesting though, is if you look at Kubernetes and, you know, look inside it, Kubernetes built a control plane. That's actually quite useful and applicable outside of container scenarios. So this whole notion of CRDs and controllers, if you've heard that term, the ability, you know, like there are two parts to Kubernetes, there is a control plane, and then there's the container container workloads. >>And the control plane is generic. It could be used literally across, you know, you can use it to manage things that are completely outside of container workloads. And that's what we did with cross mind. We took the control plane of Kubernetes and then built bindings providers that connected to AWS, to Google, to Azure, to digital ocean, to all these different environments. So you can bring the way of managing, you know, the style of managing that Kubernetes invented to more than just containers. You can now manage cloud services, using the same approach that you are now using with Kubernetes and using the entire ecosystem of tooling around it. >>Enterprise has been under pressure to replatform for a long time. It was first go to Unix then to Linux and virtualize then to move to the cloud. Now, Kubernetes, do you think that this is the stack that enterprises can finally commit to? >>I think if you take the orientation of your deploying a control plane within your enterprise, that is extensible, that enables you to actually connect it to all the things that are under your domain, that that actually can be a Futureproof way of doing a platform. And, you know, if you look at the largest cloud platforms, AWS has been around for at least 15 years now, and they really haven't changed the architecture of AWS significantly. It's still a control plane, a set of control planes that are managing services. >>It's a legacy >>They've added a lot of services. They've have a ton of diversity. They've added so many different things, but the architecture is still a hub and spoke that they've built, right? And if the enterprise can take the same orientation, put a control plane, let it manage all the things that are, you know, about today, arrive at a single point of control, have a single point where you can enforce policy compliance, cost controls, et cetera, and then expose a self-service experience to your developers that actually can become future proof. >>So we've heard this promise before the cloud of clouds, basically, yes, the, the, to be able to manage everything, what we find is the devils in the details. The being able to say, you know, a load balancer issuing a, a command to, to deploy a load balancer in AWS is different than it is in Azure, which is different than it is in GCP. How do, how do enterprises know that we can talk to a single control plane to do that? I mean, that just seems extremely difficult to manage. >>Oh yeah. That the approach is not, you're not trying to create a lowest common denominator between clouds. That's a really, really hard problem. And in fact, you get relegated to just using this, you know, really shallow features of each, if you're, if you're gonna do that, like your, your example of load balancers, load balances look completely different between between cloud vendors, the approach that we kind of advocate for is that you shouldn't think of them as you shouldn't try to unify them in a way that makes them, you know, there's a, there's a global abstraction that says, oh, there's a load balancer. And it somehow magically works across the different cloud vendors. I think that's a really, really hard thing to say, to do as you pointed out. However, if you bring them all under a same control plane, as different as they are, you're able to now apply policies. You're able to set cost controls. You're able to expose a self-service experience on top of them, even, even if they are very different. And that's, that's something that I think is, you know, been hard to do in the past. >>So BAAM, we'll love to dig deeper into this in future segments. And I'm gonna take a look at the, the, the product and project and see where you folks land in this conversation from Valencia Spain, I'm Keith towns, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching the leader in high tech coverage.