>> Live, from San Francisco, it's theCube covering DockerCon 18, brought to you by Docker, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube, we are live at DockerCon 2018, in San Francisco, on a beautiful day. Lisa Martin with John Troyer. We're very pleased to welcome back to theCube distinguished alumni Avinash Lakshman, the CEO and founder of Hedvig. Welcome back. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So, talk to us about Hedvig, what's new, what are you guys doing, what's exciting? >> Oh, a lot of things, I mean, since the last time we spoke here, I think, some of the improvements have been made in the platform as been pretty significant, in fact we are executing on the vision we had from day one, which is to be the infrastructure for both primary and secondary storage, and I think we are delivering on that promise. And doing so pretty efficiently. >> Talk to us about the case for consolidating primary and secondary workloads on one platform. >> So, everybody understands how capics can be reduced, right, but I think the key to understanding how one can reduce their operation overhead, is going to become very important, and the key to that is to, if you look at how enterprises have evolved, there's always been a vendor they talk to for their SAM needs, a different kind of vendor for their NAS, they're all trying to figure out what their object strategy ought to be, and now there's a lot of disruption happening in the secondary market, we always felt like, what if you go to one platform, on which you can consolidate block, file, and object, and also be the backup target in most of the secondary use cases. Then, all you got to do is to train your folks, on one platform, and just use it for different workloads by changing either policy or adverse queue. Makes your operational overhead very streamlined and very efficient. >> Avinash, sometimes the infrastructure people joke about containers, and they say, well, you know the developers here, they just go, well the storage just exists, doesn't it, I just call, I do a mount point, and it just works, in the cloud, right? And so, but Hedvig is here at DockerCon. Can you talk a little bit about some of the relationship there, and some of the how you work with folks, these folks here at DockerCon, working in containers? >> See, anytime anything is simple to use, they always joke about it, but there's a lot of work that goes behind driving that simplicity. Like they say, you wanna keep things simple, because any fool can complicate things, you know? So, but I think you, people are looking to bring that cloud-like mentality into On Prem data centers, and I think, we are also delivering on that promise. >> To clarify, I was kind of making a joke. The infrastructure people always kind of, they roll their eyes, they say we do all this work, and the developers think it's so easy one it gets to them. >> No, I know, because all hard work is done for them. >> I mean, there's also a joke among the infrastructural community that, eh, it's just an app, that's how they flippantly brush off applications, so, it goes both ways, I suppose. >> Indeed. >> So, I always look at messaging on websites of guests and companies, and I liked what I saw. Finally, a cloud agnostic storage solution. What does that mean from Hedvig's perspective, and how does that give you that differentiation that you want? >> Good question, because, for that one needs to define what multi-cloud is. Everyone has their own definition for multi-cloud. Just the way of, a few years ago, everybody had their own definition of distributed systems, right, I mean, there was a large populace that believed that if a program runs on multiple computers, it's a distributed system. Not the way, we, I, would define it. It has to be multiple machines working together to make believe that there's only one machine behind the scenes, right? And similarly, one may want to set the stage for what multi-cloud is all about. Again, running, there is a popular school of thought, if I can run on Cloud A, and then run on Cloud B, I am multi-cloud, that's not my definition. The way I would like to define it is one fabric that can span multiple clouds, and give you the illusion that that's where there's a whole location transparency thing comes in. You believe everything is local, but it could be anywhere, you know, and that's where infrastructure becomes kind of invisible, and it's a single fabric that spans multiple cloud environments. >> So, that transparency, is that something that really kind of helps Hedvig define some of your key differentiation? >> In the cloud environment, definitely, yes, and here's why: When people typically build applications, if you program to services that are available in one particular cloud environment, tomorrow, you wanna run it on a different cloud environment, there is no API compatibility between different clouds. So you will have to rebuild your applications to a total different set of services, that another cloud vendor provides. At least, what we bring to the table is from a data management infrastructure layer, you could have one fabric, you can run your, you can now move your applications willy-nilly, because you will be programming against an API that we provide, and you don't have to worry about where you are running them. And that's what we enable. And that's done seamlessly today. >> Can you talk about how some of your customers are using Hedvig, and some of the customer use cases, in production? >> Yeah, I mean, there's quite a a few use cases, I think the popular ones are, for those who are in the primary kind of workload space, which are typically used when you to run, when you need fault tolerance across multiple sites. One of the more interesting use cases that we are now deploying in the UK is across multiple clouds and on premise, so it's kind of hybrid and multi-cloud built inside one fabric. And the reason they do it, is basically, not only consolidate their existing On Prem data centers, but also to get, to satisfy data governance laws for certain applications. This leads to a tone that I'm trying to drive and make popular, which is a declarative data sovereignty, which basic means, if you look at things in Europe, for different applications, there are different laws, and that's now becoming kind of common place. We live in a global economy, but the data governance laws are all local. So, people want certain applications and its data not to span certain geographic regions, right? How do you make that happen in a declarative way? And, you should be able to do that by just saying for this app, this volume, and there are some policies you assign to it, and that policy basically dictates what regions that data will live in, and we make it as simple as it possibly can get. >> Nice. So, the policies then drives where the data lives, and on Hedvig, if it needs to stay in Germany, that volume will stay there, and will never be anywhere else. >> Exactly, exactly, and you can even control that across different cloud windows, if you're running, say, for example, this particular customer, I'm not sure if I can mention the name, but so I'm going to err on the side of caution, they run across AWS, Azure, and On Premise. And for certain apps, they want the data to be spread across AWS and Azure, and for certain apps, they wanted data to be stored across On Prem and AWS. You wanna make it as simple as possible, make it declarative, and for those who are more systems savvy, if you look at how computer science has evolved over time, if you look at the late 90s, transactions were a big deal, everyone were trying to figure out how to program transactions into their system. But, over time, people designed run-times, where you can declaratively annotate section of your modules, to say whether it should be part of a transaction or not. And they made it that simple, and the run-time kind of takes care of that delivering those annotations that you declare. We wanna bring the same simplicity for data sovereignty. >> So we're at the fifth DockerCon, and this morning, Steve Singh said it was around 5,000, we've heard upwards of 6,000 attendees here, and I think you said at the first DockerCon, there was only about 300 people. I noticed when I walked out of the general session this morning, and I turned back around the room, it was packed, it was standing room only. I'm curious what your thoughts are about some of the things that Docker has announced, you know, they really talked about what they're enabling with enhancements to enterprise edition, with federated application management, what they're doing with Docker desktop, as really enabling three things: and I heard you kind of talk about one of them for sure, which was agility, choice, and security. From a security perspective, what are some of the things that Hedvig can enable your customers to achieve, because we hear that security is a huge issue. >> Security typically manifests itself in two ways: one is in today's systems, you have data spreading all over the place, so when the data's on the wire, you need to encrypt things on the wire so that nobody can sniff and steal data. There is also an aspect of security where data, which goes onto the sides on any media, needs to be secured, meaning it needs to be encrypted. Now, there's a whole school of people who believe that they've solved that problem by sticking in what is called self-encrypting drives, but that solves only part of the problem, and it's a hacky solution because we live in a world where, you know, BYOD was a big thing, and it's kind of BYOK, right? Bring your own keys, so we can encrypt using the keys that you bring to the table and get out of the way, right? So, if you want to achieve that, then you cannot just SCD's, you have to drive the encryption onto the media on which the data is going to reside, but that's part of the problem. The other part of the problem is: what happens to data when it's on the wire? So you want to be able to encrypt data on the wire, and at rest, so that takes care of one part of security. The other big issue is ransomware, right, and there are also application developers when they want to shown through their features, and they want to build fast and develop features very fast, they could end up corrupting data underneath. How do you protect against, you want to have a feature that even let's you protect your data from yourself, and those are all capabilities that one needs to think through. The way you typically would do that is have the capability of providing managed snapshots, where you can periodically keep taking snapshots of your data, so you can revert to any, it's kinda like Github for data, that's how we look at it. You know, when you look at Github, you put your source code in there, but nobody is working on the same source tree, you create different trees, and then you merge them in when you think the time is right. So, you wanna have different copies of your data, without having copies, and then be able to revert back to any pristine version you deem fit, if you make any mistakes at the application level, or if there are ransomware kind of issues. So, it's a multi-fold problem. So, you've got to look at things holistically and make sure that everything is kind of delivered natively through any infrastructure platform one is building. >> So, Avinash, you are, frankly, you've had a big impact, on cloud computing, you were one of the co-inventors of DynamoDB, at Amazon. >> Dynamo. >> Dynamo, and you were then at Facebook Cassandra, and you actually said the 10th anniversary of Cassandra. >> This is, I didn't even realize, I think it's either this month or next month. >> Nice, nice. Huge impact, right? Whole ecosystems have been built up. So, you have a sense of where the problems are. Now, Hedvig, a few years old now, you know, what are trying to do now with Hedvig, and where would you like to take it? You're in the middle of a very hot market, the data services market, this kind of secondary storage market, is super hot. So, I would just love to hear what your dreams are, where you're trying to take Hedvig, and how did you see that this was a hot place, and where are you going with it? >> Dreams are a difficult question to answer, but at least we know one thing: what we do know, is that we are onto something big, and this a problem that needs solving, and it needs solving from the ground up, and it needs solving in a very different way. I always believed that true innovation comes from people from the outside. I'm not a storage guy, I never was. But, I believe that makes me better suited to go after this problem because I don't have any of the baggage that people typically tend to have. You can't disrupt yourself, right? We believe we are onto something big, and so we are just heads down trying to deliver on that. I don't know where it could go, I'll leave it to destiny, but I think we're onto something big, and hopefully we will reap the benefits of what we are doing. >> Well, Avinash, thanks so much for coming by theCube again and sharing with us what's going on at Hedvig. It sounds like some exciting times ahead, and we wish you the best of luck. >> Thank you, really appreciate it. >> We want to thank you for watching theCube. For John Troyer, I'm Lisa Martin, and we are live from DockerCon 2018 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching, guys. (electronic music hit)