>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage here in Seattle, Washington for the Avis marketplace seller conference, part of the APN partner network merging with the marketplace to form the Amazon partner organization. I'm John furrier, host of the cube Walter Wall coverage today, Christian Gor cash, who is the VP of alliances at Kong Inc. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. Really glad to be here. Corke exactly. Yeah. It's awesome. >>So Kong we've been following you guys for while Docker Kong cube. You've been part of our cube conversation. Also part of our, our startup showcase fast growing startup, you know, working on stuff that everyone loves APIs. I mean, APIs are so popular now that they now a security concern, right? Yeah. So like it gets squat there everywhere. I won't say API sprawl, but APIs are the connections and that are, is the web. That is the cloud. Okay. Now with cloud native developers who are now in the front lines have taken over it, everyone knows DevOps dev SecOps is now the new it and it's the developers security and data they're below they're the new ops, right? So, so this is where microservices come in, open source service MES new automation is coming down the pike. That's super valuable to businesses as they look at cloud native architecture, what are you guys doing in there? Take a minute to explain Kong's value proposition, the hot products, and then why you're here. >>Yeah. So, you know, I joined Kong now or three years ago, you know, we were still just reaching our hundred employees, mark, which is very important, very startup, but even back then, you know, Kong was relatively well known in industry, you know, so we have one of the most, well the most popular open source project in API gateway area. So con API gateway, you know, we cross now 300 million downloads, even more important is just the scale it, which the product's been used. So between our open source community and enterprise customers, we are now crossing like 11 trillion transactions per month. Now just give you comparison. Like this is like 18, 19 times more than Netflix per month. You know? So for any company that has a technology that operates it at scale, you need to hit few things outta the park. You know, as he mentions cloud data developers, they want simplicity. You know, they want automation. They also want performance and scale and security, which are all critical, you know, to how Kong, you know, start as opensource project. Now, of course we have the whole suite of enterprise products. We also have our con service mesh offering as well as our cloud offerings. >>Yeah. And this is how open source is doing it now, obviously, you know, I, I still remember, I still tell the story to the young startups. Hey, I, there was proprietary software when I was in college. Open source is now everything. Now you've got, got cloud scale. So the dynamic between open source, which has become the software industry open source success doesn't mean it's it's game over. It's the beginning. The commercialization that you guys have gone through is super important. Trillions of transactions. Now you have enterprises working with you. What's the big advantage of the seller relationship that you have with Amazon? Why are customers using it? What are they buying it for? Give the pitch of con for the marketplace customer. >>Yeah, it's actually, we are relatively new in AWS marketplace. You know, so our first transaction that we ever done was actually in July and 2021. So we are just over a year, you know, that journey, you know, when I look what Chris gross talked today, he was talking about, you know, Hey, just publishing marketplace, not enough. You know, you need to understand what's your value proposition. You need to make sure your operations already, your sales is ready. Everything is, is set. And we kind of did this for the first year and a half is spend a lot of time improving our integration with AWS overall, all the first party services relevant to con we also understood, well, what does it take to kind of fine tune our value proposition? We have like three specific sales place. And you know, when we launch our flagship product con connect enterprise and got our first transaction, that was great milestone for, for star like Kong. But then what we've seen is just that work that we've done before really paid off. I mean right now, >>Like what we'll give example. >>Yeah. So, you know, we are focusing on as measure three sales place. Money is we are focused, specific on helping customers who are modernizing and, and their application going to the cloud. And you have a lot of these, you know, lifting shift and are rearchitect and modernized, but most of the attentions on the workloads, what about the connections? You know, so a monolith application had to authentic all the users understand wheres the network and so on. When you build those, when you now decouple this built like 1,000 thousand microservices, you don't want to repeat this for every microservice. So that's where K brings the whole suite from, you know, service match to the API gate to help manage the journey and really support this environment. And we spend a lot of time to just fine tune that message. So that customers understood where, you know, how can we help them on their journey beyond what, for instance, cloud native or AWS API gateway offers them. So we can really help them from day one on the journey and accelerate. And >>I think I it's a no, it's a no braining for a customer to buyer or to come into the marketplace and say, click, I'm gonna buy some data analytics services. I'm gonna buy gateway through Kong. But when they start getting into these microservices, this automation opportunity there, there's more behind the curtain for them with Kong. So I have to ask you with the keynote we heard from Chris, the leader of the marketplace. Now he said that he wants the ISVs to be more native in the cloud. That probably resonates with you. You, >>You guys well with con's relatively simple because we were built at cloud native, you know, so very briefly the whole story of Congo. This is before Ajo, our founders were actually running the, the very popular API exchange col mesh shape. And they had to build their own gateway just to handle the scale and was built on cloud native technologies. And then when everybody's calling you, what are you using to running? This are using PGS. And so else, no, we built ourselves, oh, how can we get our hands on? That's how con actually >>Came to. And that's how the big winners usually happen too. They start build their own, solve their own problem because it's a big scale problem. Exactly. No one's had that problem. >>Yeah. And what we have seen, especially what was very, you know, through, through the pandemic, what we have seen. And it's interesting, you know, being in a startup doing pandemic is like, whoa, will the life just shut down or what we're doing? You know? But actually what we have seen customers prioritize the new business capability. For instance, you have a large parental companies that overnight, they have to understand where the assets are. Yeah. Or banks who are like 45 days of, you know, approving process for the loans. They need to reduce it for a day or two. >>Yeah. And they're adding more developers, too, exactly. To build the modern application. So they need to have that infrastructure as code aspect. Correct. >>And they >>Need in place. >>Yeah. I need to like you have, you know, I don't think that many customers still have waterfall cycles, but they have, have pre pretty long developers development cycles. And now you need to, you know, do this multiple times a day. That's >>Interesting. We talked to a lot of cloud architects and C CIO C says, and you know, the executive just hire more developers take that hill, build. It just don't build a new app. It's not that easy boss. When, when the cloud architect says we have to be fully operationally ready with cloud native infrastructure's code. So with that, you're seeing a lot more enterprises come in now that are more savvy. They getting better. We're seeing Kubernetes more and more. You're seeing containerization. You're seeing that cloud native enterprise acceptance. What does that mean for you guys in the marketplace, as you look at the value proposition, how are you guys working with the marketplace today and where do you see customers buying in the future? >>Yeah, so we as mentioned, you know, we, we are now a year into that journey. We already seen tremendous benefits just in terms of reducing the friction. You know, the whole procurement, you know, you come as a startup with some, some of the largest companies in the world, they used to buy five, 10 billion in software and they have all these processes and you're like, well, but we only have like two people in finance. Sorry. How can you, and where marketplace can really, really helps us is, you know, improve this experience, both sides because they understand like we are fast moving company. They, they want us because of our speed and, and innovation that we, the product's strong. Yeah. They don't want us to get bogged down in all these pro procurement processes either. And so, so that's the first benefit. We also are working very hard to make sure that the customers can provision Kong in AWS and automate across the board. So essentially reducing their time to value dramatically. Yeah. And another thing that we found tremendously beneficial for us is a startup is the whole concept of a standard marketplace contract. Yeah. So instead of us coming with our little MSA or come like 50 page MSA from companies, we now have a middle ground. So we can just agree. You know, there's some differences, some specifics to qu software and it's tremendously reduced costs on both sides. >>Great. For you guys great for the buyers. Yeah. You get deployed services. They're not just buying, they're managing and deploying. Yeah, >>Exactly. Great. >>Quick, final question. Put a plugin for the company. What are you working on now? What's the big news. What's the con update? >>Well, that's an interesting part because I can't tell you because next week we have our con summit. Oh right. In San Francisco. The cubes not so 28, 20 ninth. Yeah. We, we we'll, I think we are gonna fix that in the future. But anyway, this is the first time after pandemic to do this in person, we have number of very exciting announcement, our Kong products, as well as you may hear some news about our AWS partnership, >>We like con we believe that DevOps has happened. Dev sec ops, whatever you gonna call it, dev is now the developers they're in the front lines. They're in the C I CD pipeline. They're shifting left. That's the new they took over it. That's what DevOps does. It's not a title. Now you have security and data ops behind the scenes. That's gonna be middleware. That's gonna have tons of microservices. So more, more, more action coming, all API based. >>Exactly. And the more, you know, the more complexity we can take away from that, the better we, you know, the >>Whole community. Thank you. Spending the time to come on the cube here at the, a us marketplace seller conference. What do you think about the APN merging with the marketplace formed the P the Amazon partner organization. Thumbs up, thumbs down. What's your heard? >>It's excellent. We have a great friend in AP, a great friend, us marketplace. Now both of them work together with huge. >>Fantastic. Yes. Thanks for okay. Cube coverage here in Seattle. I'm John furier APN marketplace together. APOs the new organization making it easier. Of course, we got all the coverage here. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back everyone to Supercloud 22. This is the Cube's live presentation streaming out virtually our inaugural event, kind of a pilot I'm John Furo of the cube with Dave ante. Got a great panel here to discuss the enablers and blockers question mark for superclouds. We got, we got kit Culbert, CTO of VMware basketball, Gor CEO platform nine, and has Pani who is the CEO of RA systems. We got a mix of the big leader, VMware and the upstart companies growing into the same space, all cloud native friends of the cube. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Thank >>You. >>Start. All right. So there's no debate cloud native is booming. We see that clearly Kubernetes became a unifying force. It's an ops layer kind of almost like a kind of a midline between dev and ops DevSecOps is happening at scale. What are the blockers and what are the enablers for super cloud? What do we need? Let's see what do get your take? >>Sure. So UN I spoke about this a little bit in, at New York summit, the big trend I'm seeing, and it's, it's a blocker that's being sort of taken care of by enterprises, which is, you know, until very recently, Kubernetes was effectively a project that NA would take on. They'd try things out, they'd go to the cloud, they'd spin things up. And then the next team would come and they'd do the same things. And there was no consistency. There was no ization, it's a mess, right? It's all over the place. Some things are moving fast. Some things are not going fast and this is not how enterprises do business, right? That's not how things work. Traditionally enterprises have had it organizations that create standards, right? So those it organizations now kind of are starting to think like a platform organization. So centrally come up with the right framework for all application teams to consume infrastructure, modern infrastructure. So I'm not using the word Kubernetes here because Kubernetes is an enabler. We are a Kubernetes company, obviously, but it's about modern applications, modern infrastructure. So stepping back and thinking about it as to how an enterprise will do this across the board is the right answer. And I'm seeing this happen in a pretty significant way across all the large enterprises I talked to. >>That's why you've had a great career. And we talked before you came on Opia you did a turnaround there, we, you even go back to the old days of the web web 1.0 and early software. You've seen the movie before. >>Yes. >>You know, complexity is not solved way more complexity. This is kind of the old enterprise way. And they don't want that. They've seen the benefits of self-service. They see architecture and standards as being an enabler. Where are we in here in the market? Is, are we positioned in your opinion for customers to get the value of a super cloud? >>Absolutely. So if you think about, first of all, I think the topic of cloud native developers and app developers picking containers and Kubernetes, that's a done deal, right? That has already happened. So every cloud native developer is already using these tools. Now, I think as has been discussed today in you, in the earlier sessions, is, are the operations and infrastructure catching up or they're lagging behind, right? As more and more developers are using multi-cloud technologies, enterprises are creating a choice, I think operations and what we also strongly believe that's actually part of the name of our company is, is a platform. The platform of which a company uses to transform itself to be cloud native is the big opportunity. I don't think it's a blocker, but it's a huge opportunity. And I think this is where, you know, as you can't stop developers from developing on different clouds, private, public, multi edge, that's gonna happen. Innovation is gonna continue. But then how does the infrastructure in the platform make it seamless? Right? And almost treat all these different clouds as a single pan super cloud platform. That's I think is the >>Opportunity. So we in a platform more than with other companies, or is there one unified platform called cloud native? We know customers been buying tools from security they're they got so many tools in, in their tools shed, so to speak. What is that platform? I mean, is it more unique, fragmentation? Is it unified? >>I mean, if you think about it, a couple of it's a combination of tools that are stitched together to reach a purpose, right? So if you think about, you know, APIs continued APIs that's been discussed earlier today, I think that's, that should be standardized. The other thing is always on monitoring because I think that's a very key aspect. Once you build it, then as the enterprises are using it, the always on monitoring becomes. So I think it's a combination of capabilities that are stitched together to enable the acceleration for companies to become cloud native. >>I, I have a thought on a blocker. None of you guys are gonna like it. Oh, maybe you can come. Maybe some of you guys probably won't but comment, but maybe John will. I think AWS is a blocker to Supercloud cuz they, they don't want those cross cloud service. It's like they, they, for years they wouldn't even say multicloud. The first time I heard it was in Boston three weeks ago, I actually heard it. So Hey, you see, >>You know, I'm gonna disagree with that. Okay. >>But, but okay, go ahead. All >>So we'll get their reaction. So my, we just heard from the last panel that the security should be leading the consortium. Yeah. Because they're, they're not the enemy they're actually, >>Maybe they should be >>Well back in the old web days, when standards were driving things, you had a common enemy, proprietary NASAs, proprietary networking stack. So the evil empire was at and T that's owned Unix. If you remember, they copyright that. >>So you think they're greasing the skids for, >>I think Supercloud, I think the hyperscalers could cuz they're driving the CapEx, they're providing the value. So in my opinion, Amazon and Azure, whoever does the right thing first can win every, maybe >>This is how Google could catch up >>It. It could be a, it could be a Slingshot move. It could, you know, boomerang, someone to the front of the line or extend. Amazon's already huge lead. So if I'm AWS, if I'm Adam Slosky and I'm talking to Andy Jassy, he says, how am I gonna differentiate myself? I'd say, I'm gonna come in and own multicloud. I'm gonna own Supercloud we are the Supercloud and you work with AWS's primitives in a way that makes services work. I would go for that. I'd be like, okay, show me more. What do you >>Think? I, I, I don't think think any one company is going to be a super cloud because I think yes, there is going to be a lot of workloads on public clouds, but there's a huge amount of workloads at the enterprise at the edge at the store. I think those will continue for various reasons, whether it's data, sovereignty regulations. So I think it's going to be a combination. Everybody's not gonna go to one, you know, cloud, it's going to be an amalgamation. >>Okay. But I I've argued that snowflake is a form of a super data cloud and a very specific use case, you know, Aviatrix is trying to be a network, you know, layer and you know, sneak in a security, let me on and on, on a lot of small you get, you get super cloud stove pipes, but, but nonetheless you're, you're still abstracting. I mean, we've this industry attractions, right? >>Well this, this concept I completely agree with, right? This idea that, so, so one of the, my is that right now enterprises buy 500 different technologies and they have to become PhDs in 500 different things. It's just never gonna happen skills issue, which is no way. Right. So what's gonna happen is all of these providers are gonna essentially become managed service providers. Cloud is in manifestation of that. Snowflake is a ation data breaks is a manifestation of that. Right? So in our general industry, there's gonna be a handful of platforms. Right. And they're gonna work across these clouds. Amazon may have one too. Right? Look, they, they, they, for the longest time sort of ignored OnPrem, but now they have something called SSA, which runs on Preem. Right. Why, why would they bother? Because, well, obviously there's a lot of money to be made in a data center as well. >>So I, my sense is they get it completely understand and appreciate that there's other things outside of Amazon. But in terms of what Bosco was talking about, my sense is, you know, these multiple platforms will come about. And to the point we were making earlier about standardization and I, I mean, is it gonna be one company or is it gonna be standards that everybody will else will adopt? There's a topic that the three of us have talked about before, which is this vCenter for Kubernetes. Right. And all due respect to kit. Right. My sense is that there there's gonna be multiple companies that are gonna start working towards a vCenter for Kubernetes. And it is right. I mean, that's how I've, I mean, I've been thinking about this before and a half years, including >>VMware. >>Yeah. And you know, and we, we should compare notes. Right. But what's gonna happen is there was a, there was a distinct advantage VMware had back in the day because ESX was their product. Right. And that was a standard right now. What's the ESX in the new it's sort of Kubernetes, right. I mean, it's on bare metal for the most part or whatever VMs. So that's a standard, that's got standardized APIs, the things around it are standardized APIs. So what is the unfair advantage that one company has other than execution? >>Nothing. Well also composability if you over rotate on Kubernetes, for example, and not take advantage of say C two, for instance. Totally, >>Totally. >>It's a mix and match. >>Yeah. But I think, I think if you get too focused on Kubernetes, it's a means to an end. Yeah. But at the end of the day, it it's a mean to end end. And I think all these tools, there's a lot of standardization happening that's gonna happen. Right. And no one vendor is gonna control that. Right. It's it's going to be, it's gonna continue. I think how you bring these together and orchestrate right. And manage the service. Because I think that if you think about the lack of skills to keep up with the operations and platforms is one of the largest inhibitors right now for enterprises to move as fast as they want to become cloud native. >>And you have the shiny new toy problem kit where people just go and grab it. You know, Keith Townsend has a, as a quote, he says, look, we essentially move at the speed of the CIO or else we're going too fast or too slow. So, so the, to, to the point about the new toy now I've got new skills. >>Yep. Well, so this has been a really good discussion. And I think so there's a couple of things, right. Going back to the, the paper that we wrote, right. How we have these different sort of layers of multi-cloud services or, or categories of multi-cloud services. And it's exactly to capture some of the ex different examples you just mentioned. And yeah, the challenge is that each of them by themselves are a little bit of an island today. Like you don't have that extra level of integration. And so what the platform teams typically do is try to add that extra glue to make the experience more seamless for the, the, the, you know, developers at that company. And so like, you know, for instance, things like identity. So the nice thing about going to a single public cloud is that there's one, usually one identity system for everything. And that's great. All the different services roles are, you know, are back all that. Stuff's all centralized, but you don't have that when you're going across many different multicloud services. So what does that look like? So I think there's some of these different crosscutting concerns that we need to look at how we standardize on as an industry. And that's, again, one of the things >>You felt that part. And I think, I think also the other key thing is yes, you can always say I'll put everything in one world, world garden and I'm done. Yeah. Okay. But that's not the reality because at some point you need, the flexibility and cost comes into play and flexibility to move comes into play. And I think that is a key factor. Yep. Right. >>Yeah. And so like, so then the question is, what degrees of freedom do you give yourself there? And I think that's the architectural question is how you, how do you design it? What sort of abstractions do you leverage? And I think that goes back to some of our discussion before, which is, do you directly go on top of a native cloud service or do you use a multi-cloud service? >>But I think it's a combination of, I don't think it's either or no, it's not, it's not an either or you have to have the ability to choose a public cloud or do it private. Yeah. At the same time you don't change. It's like a common dictionary, right. You're not gonna change every time the accent changes, you know? So that's, >>So here's a question for you guys. So what has to happen for super clouds, be existing assume that AWS and Azure and Google, aren't gonna sit still assume that maybe they normalize into some sort of swim lane or position that they have to rationalize. What, assuming they're not gonna sit still, what has to happen for super clouds to, to actually work >>Well? Well, I think, you know, really quick going back to the platform team point, I would say that the platform teams at various companies, and we got one at VMware two, they're creating a rudimentary form of a super cloud. Right. Cause they, you know, absolutely like if, if they are supporting multiple clouds, like all the things they're stitching together and all that work, that is a super cloud. The problem is that there's not really a standard approach or architecture or reusable things to enable that. I think that's really what's missing. >>Yeah. But I think the key here is standard us reusable. Because for example, we have customers who are in doesn't matter where they are, some of their loads are in public cloud. Some are in private, some are at the edge, but they're still using the same platform. Yeah. Right. So it is a standard open source based technology. So it is standard. There's no lock in for them from an infrastructure point of view. Yep. And it gives them the flexibility because certain apps, you wanna put it on the public cloud, certain apps, you do not, you need the, I mean, for example, some of the AI, I think earlier discussion that was going on about chips and AI and ML workloads. I mean, think about moving all of that to a public cloud, to, and I think a lot of machine learning and AI applications are going to happen where the data is getting created at the edge. Yeah. At the edge >>Public cloud. It's not gonna happen cloud. It's gonna be real time in, >>It's gonna the end time. And so therefore you have to decide based on your workload, what are you gonna move all the way to a public cloud? And what are you need to do to make business decisions at this spot where the data is created? >>That's a huge disruptor potentially to Supercloud. This is a whole new architecture that emerges at the edge with a whole new set of economics. I >>Think the edge is gonna be like massively disruptive. >>I think it's gonna think about, if you think about the edge, go beyond just the classic definition of edge. Think about branches in stores, retail stores. Yeah. Right. I mean, you cannot shut down retail store because you lost connectivity to the network or something you still have to serve your company >>Edge is a disruptive enabler. I think it's gonna change potentially change the position of the players in the business. Whoever embraces the edge. >>Yeah. Maybe going back to the question that you had asked before, which is what is, what is a framework for a super cloud? So you said something that is important, which is your team's burning one. Yeah. I met that team. Actually. They seem to be very sharp guys. >>They're they're mine. They're my are great. They're awesome. >>We got a deal going on here. Yeah. >>I tried. We have >>It. >>So this is the interesting part, right? So I will pause it that the super cloud of the future will be a company that owns zero servers and no network. >>Okay. >>That's gonna happen. Okay. So I just kind of it's >>Full point you >>Made before I made that point just about the public cloud, just so Mr. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that really interesting. Not >>We that, so I've thought about this a long time that in my opinion, and I've, I'm, I'm sure I've said this to you, John, that, you know, the one company that I've always believed has the best shot at doing this well is actually VMware because that's the one company that's, you know, that there's, there's no, you know, infrastructure back haul. Right. You know, that you're carrying, but, but in terms of thinking and getting there, you know, being, being a company that can do it is not the same as being the company who has done it. That's a, there's a distance, but >>I have to defend that now because hyperscalers are not gonna be able to super cloud. They're not now it's hype. See, agreed, great point. Public clouds will be part of the super cloud. Yeah, totally. But they will not, the hyperscalers are not building super clouds. Totally. They're blocking it. Right. Yeah. >>They're enabling it. >>We agree on >>No, they're enabling >>Because it's, it's not in there to their advantage. Right. Look, the, the snowflake example you gave is the pivotal example in this conversation. Yep. Right. Why does snowflake exist at all when Redshift exists and all these other things exist because they provide value that is beyond a single clouds purview. Right. And at that point, just step back from our platforms and what we sell. Forget about that for a minute. Right. It's it's about, look, I think, I think this, we are, this market is early, we're out early, right. 10 years from now, what will a company look like? That actually solves a superly problem they're gonna solve for yeah. Kubernetes, whatever. Right. But they're gonna solve for truly modern applications. >>Yeah. They're gonna refactor application that has new economics new value, right. >>At that point, this idea of edge and cloud, forget about it. Right. This is all distribution issues, right. It doesn't really matter. Is it retail or not? Yeah, absolutely. These are places, but, but the way, the right way to think about this is not about edge versus cloud, right? This is about an app. Sometimes it needs to run in one location and it's good enough. Sometimes it needs to run in 10,000 locations and, and it's a distribution issue. I've always believed there's this idea of edge versus cloud. This is BS, right? Because it, it is a cloud over a different size. Sure. But, but I'm making a slightly different point. Sure. Which is, it's a distribution problem. Right. If you step back and think about distribution, my app could run in Azure or AWS or in a retail store, in a branch or whatever. Right. >>And once that is done, the question is, how am I in, in making all this happen? There was a point made in the prior conversation, in the, in the session about a database kind of popping up in the place where I needed to run. Okay. Nobody does that today, by the way. Right. At least truly well right about that, sir, that will come. Right? Yeah. But when that comes, my application is a conglomerate of compute data. I don't know a, a service bus and network and all these things and they will all kind of pop together. That company does not exist >>Today. Well, we'll, we will be documenting which we have more time. We're gonna document it. We have to unfortunately stop this panel because it's awesome. We can go for another hour. Sure. Let's bring you guys back, but that's it. The super cloud of the future will look like something and we're gonna debate it. And speaking of snowflake, we have the co-founder here next to sit down with us to talk about what he thinks about this super cloud. He, he probably heard the comment, come back more coverage. This break with the co-founder of snowflake after the short break. >>Do thank you.