(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent. Friends, it's good to see you. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is our fourth day of CUBE wall-to-wall coverage, Dave. I can't believe it. And the expo hall is still going incredibly strong. >> Yeah, it is. It feels like the biggest re:Invent ever. I'm told it's almost as big as 2019. I don't know, maybe I was half asleep at 2019. That's very possible. But I'm excited because in 2017 Andy Jassy came on theCUBE and he said if Amazon had to do it all over again, if it knew then what it had now, we would've done the whole thing in containers or using Lambda, using serverless and using containers. Didn't have that opportunity back then. And I'm excited 'cause Rafay Systems is someone we've worked with a lot as an innovator in this space. >> Yep, and we're going to be talking with Rafay again. I think it's your 10th time Haseeb on the show >> Like once or twice. >> And a great customer who's going to talk about their serverless journey. Haseeb Budhani joins us once again, the CEO of Rafay. Great to see you. Rakesh Singh is here as well, the Head of Cloud and DevOps at Regeneron. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. How you feeling on day four of re:Invent? >> Excitement is as high as ever basically. >> Isn't it amazing? >> Rakesh: That's true. >> Haseeb: I just need some sleep. >> I'm with you on that. Caffeine and sleep. >> So many parties. So many meetings, oh my God. >> But the great thing is, Haseeb, that people want to engage with you. They're loving what Rafay is doing. You guys are a great testament to that, which we're going to uncover on the show. What are some of the things that you're hearing in the booth from customers? What's been some of the feedback? >> So firstly, as I said, it feels like the biggest one ever. I've been coming to re:Invent a long time and I mean, I know the numbers say it's not, but oh my God, this is a lot of people. Every time we've spoken over the last year and the point I always make to you, and we've spoken enough time about this is that enterprises are truly adopting this idea of Kubernetes containers, serverless, et cetera. And they're all trying to figure out what is the enterprise strategy for these things? They're thinking beyond technology and thinking operationalization of these technologies. And that's not the same thing. There's a toy and then there's the real thing. And that's not the same thing. And that's the gap that every enterprise customer I talked to and the booth traffic has been just amazing. I mean, but coming here I was thinking, my God, this is really expensive. And I'm thinking, wow, this is a great investment. Because we met such amazing companies who all essentially are saying exactly the same thing, which is as we go and productize and bring our high value applications to the modern infrastructure space, like Kubernetes, Lambda, et cetera, solving for the automation governance is really, really hard because, well, at one point, I guess when the economy was doing crazy well, I could keep hiring people, but I can't do that anymore either. So they're out looking for automation strategies that allow them to do more with the teams they have. And that's exactly what Rafay is here for. >> Yeah. Lisa, Adam Selipsky in his keynote, I love the, he said, "If you want to save money, the cloud is the place to do it." >> Exactly. Yep. Let's talk about Regeneron. Everyone knows it's a household word especially over the last couple of years, but talk about, Rakesh, Regeneron as a technology company that delivers life-saving pharmaceuticals. And where does cloud and Rafay fit into your strategy? >> So cloud has been a backbone of our compute strategy within Regeneron for a very long time now. The evolution from a traditional compute structure to more serverless compute has been growing at a rapid pace. And I would say like we are seeing exponential growth within the adaption of the compute within containers and Kubernetes world. So we've been on this journey for a long time and I think it's not stopping anytime soon. So we have more and more workload, which is running on Kubernetes containers and we are looking forward to our partnership with Rafay to further enhance it, as Haseeb mentioned, the efficiency is the key. We need to do more with less. Resourcing is critical and cloud is evolved from that journey that do more things in a more efficient manner. >> That was the original catalyst as we got to help our development team, be more productive. >> That's correct. >> Eliminate the heavy lifting. And then you started presumably doing some of the less heavy, but still heavy lifting and we talked off camera and then you're increasingly moving toward serverless. >> Rakesh: That's correct. >> Can you describe that journey? What that's like? >> So I think like with the whole adoption that things are taking a much faster pace. Basically we are putting more compute onto containers and the DevOps journey is increasingly getting more, more faster. >> Go ahead. 'Cause I want to understand where Rafay sits in this whole equation. I was talking about, I'm not a developer, but I was talking to developer yesterday trying to really understand the benefits of containers and serverless and I said, take me through what you have to do when you're using containers. He said, I got to build the container image then I got to deploy an EC2 instance where I got to choose and I got to allocate memory of the fence the app in a VM then I got to run the computing instance against the app. And then, oh by the way, I got to pay 'cause all that EC2 that whole time. Depending on how you approach serverless you're going to eliminate a lot of those steps. >> That is correct. So what we do is basically like in a traditional sense, the computer is sitting idle at quite a lot basically. >> But you're paying. >> And you're still paying for that. Serverless technologies allows us to use the compute as needed basis. So whenever you need it, it is available. You run your workload on that and after that it shuts down or goes to minimal state and you don't need to pay as much as your paying. >> And then where do you guys fit in that whole equation? >> Look, serverless has a paradigm. If you step back from the idea of containers versus Lambda or whatever functions. The idea should be that the list you just read out of what developers have to do. Here's what they really should do. They should write their code, they should check it in, and they never have to think about it again. That should be the case. If they want to debug their application, there should be a nice front end where they go and they interact with their application and that's it. What is Kubernetes? I don't care. That's the right answer. And we did not start this journey as an industry there because usually the initial adopters are developers who do the heavy lifting. Developers want to learn, they want to solve these problems. But then eventually the expectation is that the platform organization and an enterprise is going to own this platform for me so I can go back to doing my job, which is writing code. And that's where Rakesh's team comes in. So Rakesh team is building the standard at Regeneron. Whether you're writing a long-lasting app, which is going to run in a container or you're going to write an event-driven application, which is going to be a function, whatever. You write your app, we will give you the necessary tooling and plumbing to take care of all these things. And this is my problem. My being Rakesh. Rakesh is my customer. He has his customers. We as Rafay, A, we have to make Rakesh's system successful because we have to give them right automation to do all these things so that he can service hundred, or in his case, thousands and thousands of different individuals. But then collectively, we have to make sure that the developer experience is optimal so that truly they just write their code and EC2, they don't want to deal with this. In fact, on Monday evening, in the Kubernetes keynote by Barry Cooks, one of the things he said was that in a CIO sort of survey they did, CIO said, 80% of the time of developers is wasted on infrastructure stuff and not on innovation. We need to bring that 80% back so that a hundred percent of the work is on innovation and today it's not. >> And that's what you do. >> That's what we do. >> In your world as a developer, I only have to worry about my writing my code and what functions I'm going to call. >> That is correct. And it is important because the efficiencies of a developer need to be focused on doing the things which business is asking for. The 80% of the work like to make sure the things are secure, they're done the right way, the standards are followed, scanning part of it, that work if we can offload to a platform, for example, Rafay, saves a lot of works, a lot of work cycles from the developers perspective. >> Thank you for that. It was nice little tutorial on the benefits. >> Absolutely. So you transform the developer experience. >> That's correct. >> How does that impact Regeneron overall business? We uplevel that. Give me that view. >> So with that, like what happens, the key thing is the developers productivity increases. We are able to do more with less. And that is the key thing to our strategy that like with the increase in business demand, with the increase in lot of compute things, which we are doing, we need to do and hiring resources is getting more difficult than ever. And we need to make sure that we are leveraging platforms and tools basically to do, enable our developers to focus on key business activity rather than doing redundant things and things which we can leverage some other tooling and platform for that business. >> Is this something in terms of improving the developer experience and their productivity faster time to market? Is this accelerating? >> That's correct. >> Is this even like accelerating drug discovery in some cases? >> So COVID is like a great example for that. Like we were able to fast track our drug discovery and like we were able to turn it into an experience where we were able to discover new drugs and get it to the market in a much faster pace. That whole process was expedited using these tools and processes basically. So we are very proud of that. >> So my understanding is you're running Rafay with EKS. A lot of choices out there. Why? Why did you choose to go in that direction? >> So Regeneron has heavily invested in cloud recently, over the years basically. And then we are focusing on hybrid cloud now that we we are like, again, these multiple cloud providers of platforms which are coming in are strategies to focus on hybrid cloud and Rafay is big leader in that particular space where we felt that we need to engage or partner with Rafay to enable those capabilities, not just on AWS, but across the board. One single tool, one single process, one single knowledge base helps us achieve more efficiencies. >> Less chaos, less complexity. >> That's correct. Let's say when you're in customer conversations, which I know you've had many this week, but you probably do that all the time. Regeneron is a great use case for Rafay. It's so tangible, life sciences. We all get that, especially coming out of the pandemic. What do you say to customers are the top three differentiators of Rafay and why they should go Rafay on top of EKS? >> What's really interesting about these conversations is that, look, we have some pretty cool features in our product. Obviously we must have something interesting otherwise nobody would buy our product. And we have access management and zero trust models and cluster provisioning, all these very nice things. But it always comes down to exactly the same thing, which is every large enterprise that started a journey, independent or Rafay because they didn't know who we were, it's fine. Last year we were a young company, now we are a larger company and they all are basically building towards a roadmap which Rafay truly understands. And in my opinion, and I'm confident when I say this, we understand their life, their journey better than any other company in the market. The reason why we have the flurry of customers we have, the reason why the product has the capacity that it does is because for whatever reason, look, it's scale lock. That's for the history books. But we have complete clarity on what a pharmaceutical company or financial customers company or a high tech company the journey they will take to the cloud and automation for modern infrastructure, we get it. And what I'm selling them is the is the why, not the what. There's a lot of great answers for the what? What do we do? Rakesh doesn't care. I mean, he's trying to solve a bigger problem. He's trying to get his researchers to go faster. So then when they want to run a model, they should be able to do it right now. That's what he cares about. Then he looks for a tool to solve the business problem. And we figured out how to have that conversation and explain why Rafay helps him, essentially multiply the bandwidth that he has in his organization. And of course to that end we have some great technology/ But that's a secondary issue, the first, to me the why is more important than the what. And then we talk about how, which he has to pay us money. That's the how. But yeah, we get there too. But look, this is the important thing. Every enterprise is on exactly the same journey, Lisa. And that if you think about it from just purely economic efficiencies perspective that is not a good investment for our industry. If everybody's solving the same problem that's a waste of resources. Let's find a way to do, what is the point of the cloud? We used to all build data centers. That was not efficient. We all went to the cloud because it's more efficient to have somebody else, AWS, solve this problem for us so we can now focus on the next level problem. And then Rafay solving that problem so that he can focus on his drug discovery, not on Kubernetes. >> That's correct. It's all about efficiencies. Like doing things, learn from each other's experience and build upon it. So the things have been solved. One way you need to leverage that, reuse it. So the principles are the same. >> So then what's next? You had done an amazing job transforming the company. You're facilitating drug discovery faster than ever before. From an infrastructure perspective, what's next on your journey? >> So right now the roadmap what we have is basically talking about making sure that the workload are running more efficient, they're more secure. As we go into these expandable serverless technology, there are more challenging opportunities for us to solve. Those challenges are coming up. We need to make sure that with the new, the world we are living in, we are more securely doing stuff what we were doing previously. More efficiencies is also the key and more distributed. Like if we can leverage the power of cloud in doing more things on demand is on our roadmap. And I think that is where we are all driving. >> And when you said hybrid, you're talking about connecting to your on-prem tools and data? How about cross cloud? >> We are invested in multiple cloud platform itself and we are looking forward to leveraging a technology, which is truly cloud native and we can leverage things together on that. >> And I presume you're helping with that, obviously. >> Last question for both of you. We're making an Instagram reel. Think of this as a sizzle reel, like a 32nd elevator pitch. Question, first one goes to you, Rakesh. If you had a bumper sticker, you put it on, I don't know, say a DeLorean, I hear those are coming back. What would it say about Regeneron as a technology company that's delivering therapeutics? >> It's a tough question, but I would try my best. The bumper sticker would say, discover drug more faster, more efficient. >> Perfect. Haseeb, question about Rafay. What's the bumper sticker? If you had a billboard in on Highway 101 in Redwood City about Rafay and what it's enabling organizations enterprises across the globe to achieve, what would it say? >> I'll tell you what our customers say. So our customers call us the vCenter for Kubernetes and we all know what a vCenter is. We all know why vCenter's so amazingly successful because it takes IT engineers and gives them superpowers. You can run a data center. What is the vCenter for this new world? It us. So vCenter is obviously a trademark with our friends at VMware, so that's why I'm, but our customers truly call us the vCenter for Kubernetes. And I think that's an incredible moniker because that truly codifies our roadmap. It codifies what we are selling today. >> There's nothing more powerful and potent in the voice of the customer. Thank you both for coming on. Thank you for sharing the Regeneron story. Great to have you back on, Haseeb. You need a pin for the number of times you've been on theCUBE. >> At least a gold star. >> We'll work on that. Guys, thank you. We appreciate your time. >> Haseeb: Thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Well, welcome back here to the Venetian. We're in Las Vegas. It is Wednesday, Day 2 of our coverage here of AWS re:Invent, 22. I'm your host, John Walls on theCUBE and it's a pleasure to welcome in two more guests as part of our AWS startup showcase, which is again part of the startup program globally at AWS. I've got Anant Verma, who is the Vice President of Engineering at Elation. Anant, good to see you, sir. >> Good to see you too. >> Good to be with us. And Haseeb Budhani, who is the CEO and co-founder of Rafay Systems. Good to see you, sir. >> Good to see you again. >> Thanks for having, yeah. A cuber, right? You've been on theCUBE? >> Once or twice. >> Many occasions. But a first timer here, as a matter of fact, glad to have you aboard. All right, tell us about Elation. First for those whom who might not be familiar with what you're up to these days, just give it a little 30,000 foot level. >> Sure, sure. So, yeah, Elation is a startup and a leader in the enterprise data intelligence space. That really includes a lot of different things including data search, data discovery, metadata management, data cataloging, data governance, data policy management, a lot of different things that companies want to do with the hoards of data that they have and Elation, our product is the answer to solve some of those problems. We've been doing pretty good. Elation is in running for about 10 years now. We are a series A startup now, we just raised around a few, a couple of months ago. We are already a hundred million plus in revenue. So. >> John: Not shabby. >> Yeah, it's a big benchmark for companies to, startup companies, to cross that milestone. So, yeah. >> And what's the relationship? I know Rafay and you have worked together, in fact, the two of you have, which I find interesting, you have a chance, you've been meeting on Zoom for a number of months, as many of us have it meeting here for the first time. But talk about that relationship with Rafay. >> Yeah, so I actually joined Elation in January and this is part of the move of Elation to a more cloud native solution. So, we have been running on AWS since last year and as part of making our solution more cloud native, we have been looking to containerize our services and run them on Kubernetes. So, that's the reason why I joined Elation in the first place to kind of make sure that this migration or move to a cloud native actually works out really well for us. This is a big move for the companies. A lot of companies that have done in the past, including, you know, Confluent or MongoDB, when they did that, they actually really reap great benefits out of that. So to do that, of course, you know, as we were looking at Kubernetes as a solution, I was personally more looking for a way to speed up things and get things out in production as fast as possible. And that's where I think, Janeb introduced us... >> That's right. >> Two of us. I think we share the same investor actually, so that's how we found each other. And yeah, it was a pretty simple decision in terms of, you know, getting the solution, figuring it out if it's useful for us and then of course, putting it out there. >> So you've hit the keyword, Kubernetes, right? And, so if you would to honestly jump in here, there are challenges, right? That you're trying to help them solve and you're working on the Kubernetes platform. So, you know, just talk about that and how that's influenced the work that the two of you are doing together. >> Absolutely. So, the business we're in is to help companies who adopt Kubernetes as an orchestration platform do it easier, faster. It's a simple story, right? Everybody is using Kubernetes, but it turns out that Kubernetes is actually not that easy to to operationalize, playing in a sandbox is one thing. Operationalizing this at a certain level of scale is not easy. Now, we have a lot of enterprise customers who are deploying their own applications on Kubernetes, and we've had many, many of them. But when it comes to a company like Elation, it's a more complicated problem set because they're taking a very complex application, their application, but then they're providing that as a service to their customers. So then we have a chain of customers we have to make happy. Anant's team, the platform organization, his internal customers who are the developers who are deploying applications, and then, the company has customers, we have to make sure that they get a good experience as they consume this application that happens to be running on Kubernetes. So that presented a really interesting challenge, right? How do we make this partnership successful? So I will say that, we've learned a lot from each other, right? And, end of the day, the goal is, my customer, Anant's specifically, right? He has to feel that, this investment, 'cause he has to pay us money, we would like to get paid. >> John: Sure. (John laughs) >> It reduces his internal expenditure because otherwise he'd have to do it himself. And most importantly, it's not the money part, it's that he can get to a certain goalpost significantly faster because the invention time for Kubernetes management, the platform that you have to build to run Kubernetes is a very complex exercise. It took us four and a half years to get here. You want to do that again, as a company, right? Why? Why do you want to do that? We, as Rafay, the way I think about what we deliver, yes, we sell a product, but to what end? The product is the what, the why, is that every enterprise, every ISV is building a Kubernetes platform in house. They shouldn't, they shouldn't need to. They should be able to consume that as a service. They consume the Kubernetes engine the EKS is Amazon's Kubernetes, they consume that as an engine. But the management layer was a gap in the market. How do I operationalize Kubernetes? And what we are doing is we're going to, you know, the Anant said. So the warden saying, "Hey you, your team is technical, you understand the problem set. Would you like to build it or would you rather consume this as a service so you can go faster?" And, resoundingly the answer is, I don't want to do this anymore. I wouldn't allow to buy. >> Well, you know, as Haseeb is saying, speed is again, when we started talking, it only took us like a couple of months to figure out if Rafay is the right solution for us. And so we ended up purchasing Rafay in April. We launched our product based on Rafay in Kubernetes, in EKS in August. >> August. >> So that's about four months. I've done some things like this before. It takes a couple of years just to sort of figure out, how do you really work with Kubernetes, right? In a production at a large scale. Right now, we are running about a 600 node cluster on Rafay and that's serving our customers. Like, one of the biggest thing that's actually happening on December 8th is we are running what we call a virtual hands on lab. >> A virtual? >> Hands on lab. >> Okay. >> For Elation. And they're probably going to be about 500 people is going to be attending it. It's like a webinar style. But what we do in that hands on lab is we will spin up an Elation instance for each attendee, right on the spot. Okay? Now, think about this enterprise software running and people just sign up for it and it's there for you, right on the spot. And that's the beauty of the software that we have been building. There's the beauty of the work that Rafay has helped us to do over the last few months. >> Okay. >> I think we need to charge them more money, I'm getting from this congregation. I'm going to go work on that. >> I'm going to let the two of you work that out later. All right. I don't want to get in the way of a big deal. But you mentioned that, we heard about it earlier that, it's you that would offer to your cert, to your clients, these services. I assume they have their different levels of tolerance and their different challenges, right? They've got their own complexities and their own organizational barriers. So how are you juggling that end of it? Because you're kind of learning as, well, not learning, but you're experiencing some of the thing. >> Right. Same things. And yet you've got this other client base that has a multitude of experiences that they're going through. >> Right. So I think, you know a lot of our customers, they are large enterprise companies. They got a whole bunch of data that they want work with us. So one of the thing that we have learned over the past few years is that we used to actually ship our software to the customers and then they would manage it for their privacy security reasons. But now, since we're running in the cloud, they're really happy about that because they don't need to juggle with the infrastructure and the software management and upgrades and things like that, we do it for them, right? And, that's the speed for them because now they are only interested in solving the problems with the data that they're working with. They don't need to deal with all these software management issues, right? So that frees our customers up to do the thing that they want to do. Of course it makes our job harder and I'm sure in turn it makes his job harder. >> We get a short end of the stick, for sure. >> That's why he is going to get more money. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, this is a great conversation. >> No, no, no. We'll talk about that. >> So, let's talk about the cloud then. How, in terms of being the platform where all this is happening and AWS, about your relationship with them as part of the startup program and what kind of value that brings to you, what does that do for you when you go out and are looking for work and what kind of cache that brings to you >> Talk about the AWS? >> Yes, sir. >> Okay. Well, so, the thing is really like of course AWS, a lot of programs in terms of making sure that as we move our customers into AWS, they can give us some, I wouldn't call it discount, but there's some credits that you can get as you move your workloads onto AWS. So that's a really great program. Our customers love it. They want us to do more things with AWS. It's a pretty seamless way for us to, as we were talking about or thinking about moving into the cloud, AWS was our number one choice and that's the only cloud that we are in, today. We're not going to go to any other place. >> That's it. >> Yeah. >> How would you characterize? I mean, we've already heard, from one side of the fence here, but. >> Absolutely. So for us, AWS is a make or break partner, frankly. As the EKS team knows very well, we support Azure's Kubernetes and Google's Kubernetes and the community Kubernetes as well. But the number of customers on our platform who are AWS native, either a hundred percent or a large percentage is, you know, that's the majority of our customer base. >> John: Yeah. >> And AWS has made it very easy for us in a variety of ways to make us successful and our customers successful. So Anant mentioned the credit program they have which is very useful 'cause we can, you know, readily kind of bring a customer to try things out and they can do that at no cost, right? So they can spin up infrastructure, play with things and AWS will cover the cost, as one example. So that's a really good thing. Beyond that, there are multiple programs at AWS, ISV accelerate, et cetera. That, you know, you got to over time, you kind of keep getting taller and taller. And you keep getting on bigger and bigger. And as you make progress, what I'm finding is that there's a great ecosystem of support that they provide us. They introduce us to customers, they help us, you know, think through architecture issues. We get access to their roadmap. We work very, very closely with the guest team, for example. Like the, the GM for Kubernetes at AWS is a gentleman named Barry Cooks who was my sponsor, right? So, we spend a lot of time together. In fact, right after this, I'm going to be spending time with him because look, they take us seriously as a partner. They spend time with us because end of the day, they understand that if they make their partners, in this case, Rafay successful, at the end of the day helps the customer, right? Anant's customer, my customer, their AWS customers, also. So they benefit because we are collectively helping them solve a problem faster. The goal of the cloud is to help people modernize, right? Reduce operational costs because data centers are expensive, right? But then if these complex solutions this is an enterprise product, Kubernetes, at the enterprise level is a complex problem. If we don't collectively work together to save the customer effort, essentially, right? Reduce their TCO for whatever it is they're doing, right? Then the cost of the cloud is too high. And AWS clearly understands and appreciates that and that's why they are going out of their air, frankly, to make us successful and make other companies successful in the startup program. >> Well. >> I would just add a couple of things there. Yeah, so, you know, cloud is not new. It's been there for a while. You know, people used to build things on their own. And so what AWS has really done is they have advanced technology enough where everything is really simple as just turning on a switch and using it, right? So, just a recent example, and I, by the way, I love managed services, right? So the reason is really because I don't need to put my own people to build and manage those things, right? So, if you want to use a search, they got the open search, if you want to use caching, they got elastic caching and stuff like that. So it's really simple and easy to just pick and choose which services you want to use and they're ready to be consumed right away. And that's the beautiful, and that that's how we can move really fast and get things done. >> Ease of use, right? Efficiency, saving money. It's a winning combination. Thanks for sharing this story, appreciate. Anant, Haseeb thanks for being with us. >> Yeah, thank you so much having us. >> We appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. >> You have been a part of the global startup program at AWS and startup showcase. Proud to feature this great collaboration. I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE, which is of course the leader in high tech coverage.

>>Hey guys. Welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here live with the cube at Coan Cloud Native Con North America. John, it's been a great day. This is day one of our coverage of three days of coverage. Kubernetes is growing up. Yeah, it's maturing. >>Yeah. We got three days of wall to wall coverage, all about Kubernetes. We about security, large scale, cloud native at scale. That's the big focus. This next segment's gonna be really awesome. You have a fast growing private company and a practitioner, big name, blue chip practitioner, building out next NextGen Cloud first, transforming, then building out the next level. This is classic of what we call super cloud-like, like interview. It's gonna be great. I'm looking forward >>To this anytime we can talk about Super Cloud. All right, please welcome back. One of our alumni, Bani is here, the CEO of Rafe. Great to see you Santos. Ula also joins us, the global head of Cloud SRE at Mass Mutual. Ge. Great to have you on the program. Thanks >>For having us. Thank you for having me. >>So Steve, you've been on the queue many times. You were on just recently with the momentum that that's around us today with the maturation of Kubernetes, the collaboration of the community, the recognition of the community. What are some of the things that you're excited about with on, on day one of the show? >>Wow, so many new companies. I mean, there are companies that I don't know who are here. And I, I, I live in this industry and I'm seeing companies that I don't know, which is a good thing. I mean, it means that the, the community's growing. But at the same time, I'm also seeing another thing, which is I have met more enterprise representatives at this show than other coupons. Like when we hung out at, you know, in Valencia for example, or even, you know, other places. It hasn't been this many people, which means, and this is, this is a good thing that enterprises are now taking Kubernetes seriously. It's not a toy. It's not just for developers. It's enterprises who are now investing in Kubernetes as a foundational component, right. For their applications going forward. And that to me is very, very good. >>Definitely becoming foundational. >>Yep. Well, you guys got a great traction. We had many interviews at the Cube and you got a practitioner here with you. You guys are both pioneering kind of what I call the next gen cloud. First you gotta get through gen one, which you guys done at Mass Mutual, extremely well, take us through the story of your transformation. Cause you're on the, at the front end now of that next inflection point. But take us through how you got here. You had a lot of transformation success at Mass Mutual. >>So I was actually talking about this topic few, few minutes back, right? And, and the whole cloud journey in big companies, large financial institutions, healthcare industry or, or our insurance sector. It takes generations of leadership to get, to get to that perfection level. And, and ideally the, the, the cloud for strategy starts in, and then, and then how do you, how do you standardize and optimize cloud, right? You know, that that's, that's the second gen altogether. And then operationalization of the cloud. And especially if, you know, if you're talking about Kubernetes, you know, in the traditional world, you know, almost every company is running middleware and their applications in middleware. And then containerization is a topic that come, that came in. And docker is, is you know, basically the runtime containerization. So that came in first and from Docker, you know, eventually when companies started adopting Docker, Docker Swarm is one of the technologies that they adopted. And eventually when, when, when we were taking it to a more complicated application implementations or modernization efforts, that's when Kubernetes played a key role. And, and Hasi was pointing out, you know, like you never saw so many companies working on Kubernetes. So that should tell you one story, right? How fast Kubernetes is growing and how important it is for your cloud strategy. So, >>And your success now, and what are you thinking about now? What's on your agenda now as you look forward? What's on your plate? What are you guys doing right now? >>So we are, we are past the stage of, you know, proof of concepts, proof of technologies, pilot implementations. We are actually playing it, you know, the real game now. So in the past I used the quote, you know, like, hello world to real world. So we are actually playing in the real world, not, not in the hello world anymore. Now, now this is where the real time challenges will, will pop up, right? So if you're talking about standardizing it and then optimizing the cloud and how do you put your governance structure in place? How do you make sure your regulations are met? You know, the, the, the demands that come out of regulations are met and, and how, how are you going to scale it and, and, and while scaling, however you wanna to keep up with all the governance and regulations that come with it. So we are in that stage today. >>Has Steve talked about, you talked about the great evolution of what's going on at Mass Mutual has talked a little bit about who, you mentioned one of the things that's surprising you about this Coan and Detroit is that you're seeing a lot more enterprise folks here who, who's deciding in the organization and your customer conversations, Who are the deci decision makers in terms of adoption of Kubernetes these days? Is that elevating? >>Hmm. Well this guy, >>It's usually, you know, one of the things I'm seeing here, and John and I have talked about this in the past, this idea of a platform organization and enterprises. So consistently what I'm seeing is, you know, somebody, a cto, CIO level, you know, individual is making a determin decision. I have multiple internal buss who are now modernizing applications. They're individually investing in DevOps. And this is not a good investment for my business. I'm going to centralize some of this capability so that we can all benefit together. And that team is essentially a platform organization and they're making Kubernetes a shared services platform so that everybody else can come and, and, and sort of, you know, consume it. So what that means to us is our customer is a platform organization and their customer is a developer. So we have to make two constituencies successful. Our customer who's providing a multi-tenant platform, and then their customer who's a developer, both have to be happy. If you don't solve for both, you know, constituencies, you're not gonna be >>Successful. You're targeting the builder of the infrastructure and the consumer of that infrastructure. >>Yes sir. It has to be both. Exactly. Right. Right. So, so that look, honestly, that it, it, you know, it takes iterations to figure these things out, right? But this is a consistent theme that I am seeing. In fact, what I would argue now is that every enterprise should be really stepping back and thinking about what is my platform strategy. Cuz if you don't have a platform strategy, you're gonna have a bunch of different teams who are doing different things and some will be successful and look, some will not be. And that is not good for business. >>Yeah. And, and stage, I wanna get to you, you mentioned that your transformation was what you look forward and your title, global head of cloud sre. Okay, so sre, we all know came from Google, right? Everyone wants to be like Google, but no one wants to be like Google, right? And no one is Google, Google's a unique thing. It's only one Google. But they had the dynamic and the power dynamic of one person to large scale set of servers or infrastructure. But concept is, is, is can be portable, but, but the situation isn't. So board became Kubernetes, that's inside baseball. So you're doing essentially what Google did at their scale you're doing for Mass Mutual. That's kind of what's happening. Is that kind of how I see it? And you guys are playing in there partnering. >>So I I totally agree. Google introduce, sorry, Ty engineering. And, and if you take, you know, the traditional transformation of the roles, right? In the past it was called operations and then DevOps ops came in and then SRE is is the new buzzword. And the future could be something like product engineering, right? And, and, and in this journey, you know, here is what I tell, you know, folks on my side like what worked for Google might not work for a financial company, might not work for an insurance company. So, so, so it's, it's okay to use the word sre, but but the end of the day that SRE has to be tailored down to, to your requirements and and, and the customers that you serve and the technology that you serve. Yep. >>And this is, this is why I'm coming back, this platform engineering. At the end of the day, I think SRE just translates to, you're gonna have a platform engineering team cuz you gotta enable developers to be producing more code faster, better, cheaper guardrails policy. So this, it's kind of becoming the, you serve the business, which is now the developers it used to serve the business Yep. Back in the old days. Hey, the, it serves the business. Yep. Which is a terminal, >>Which is actually true >>Now it the new, it serves the developers, which is the business. Which is the business. Because if digital transformation goes to completion, the company is the app. Yep. >>And the, you know, the, the hard line between development and operations, right? So, so that's thining down over the time, you know, like that that line might disappear. And, and, and that's where asari is fitting in. >>Yeah. And they're building platforms to scale the enablement up that what is, so what is the key challenges you guys are, are both building out together this new transformational direction? What's new and what's the same, The same is probably the business results, but what's the new dynamic involved in rolling it out and making people successful? You got the two constituents, the builders of the infrastructures and the consumers of the services on the other side. What's the new thing? >>So the new thing if, if I may go fast these, so the faster market to, you know, value, right? That we are bringing to the table. That's, that's very important. You know, business has an idea. How do you get that idea implemented in terms of technology and, and take it into real time. So that journey we have cut down, right? Technology is like Kubernetes. It makes, it makes, you know, an IT person's life so easy that, that they can, they can speed up the process in, in, in a traditional way. What used to take like an year or six months can be done in a month today or or less than that, right? So, so there's definitely the losses, speed, velocity, agility in general, and then flexibility. And then the automation that we put in, especially if you have to maintain like thousands of clusters, you know, these, these are today like, you know, it is possible to, to make that happen with a click off a button. In the past it used to take like, you know, probably, you know, a hundred, a hundred percent team and operational team to do it. And a lot of time. But, but, but that automation is happening. You know, and we can get into the technology as much as possible. But, but, you know, blueprinting and all that stuff made >>It possible. Well say that for another interview, we'll do it take time. >>But the, the end user on the other end, the consumer doesn't have the patience that they once had. Right? Right. It's, I want this in my lab now. Now, how does the culture of Mass Mutual, how is it evolv to be able to deliver the velocity that your customers are demanding? >>So if once in a while, you know, it's important to step yourself into the customer's shoes and think it from their, from their, from their perspective, business does not care how you're running your IT shop. What they care about is your stability of the product and the efficiencies of the product and, and, and how, how, how easy it is to reach out to the customers and how well we are serving the customers, right? So whether I'm implementing Docker in the background, Dr. Swam or es you know, business doesn't even care about it. What they really care about it is if your environment goes down, it's a problem. And, and, and if you, if your environment or if your solution is not as efficient as the business needs, that's the problem, right? So, so at that point, the business will step in. So our job is to make sure, you know, from an, from a technology perspective, how fast you can make implement it and how efficiently you can implement it. And at the same time, how do you play within the guardrails of security and compliance. >>So I was gonna ask you if you have VMware in your environment, cause a lot of clients compare what vCenter does for Kubernetes is really needed. And I think that's what you guys got going on. I I can say that you're the v center of Kubernetes. I mean, as a, as an as an metaphor, a place to manage it all is all 1, 1 1 paint of glass, so to speak. Is that how you see success in your environment? >>So virtualization has gone a long way, you know where we started, what we call bare metal servers, and then we virtualized operating systems. Now we are virtualizing applications and, and we are virtualizing platforms as well, right? So that's where Kubernetes basically got. >>So you see the need for a vCenter like thing for Uber, >>Definitely a need in the market in the way you need to think is like, you know, let's say there is, there is an insurance company who actually mented it and, and they gain the market advantage. Right? Now the, the the competition wants to do it as well, right? So, so, so there's definitely a virtualization of application layer that, that, that's very critical and it's, it's a critical component of cloud strategy as >>A whole. See, you're too humble to say it. I'll say you like the V center of Kubernetes, Explain what that means and your turn. If I said that to you, what would you react? How would you react to that? Would say bs or would you say on point, >>Maybe we should think about what does vCenter do today? Right? It's, it's so in my opinion, by the way, well vCenter in my opinion is one of the best platforms ever built. Like ha it's the best platform in my opinion ever built. It's, VMware did an amazing job because they took an IT engineer and they made him now be able to do storage management, networking management, VMs, multitenancy, access management audit, everything that you need to run a data center, you can do from a single, essentially single >>Platform, from a utility standpoint home >>Run. It's amazing, right? Yeah, it is because you are now able to empower people to do way more. Well why are we not doing that for Kubernetes? So the, the premise man Rafa was, well, oh, bless, I should have IT engineers, same engineers now they should be able to run fleets of clusters. That's what people that mass major are able to do now, right? So to that end, now you need cluster management, you need access management, you need blueprinting, you need policy management, you need ac, you know, all of these things that have happened before chargebacks, they used to have it in, in V center. Now they need to happen in other platforms. But for es so should do we do many of the things that vCenter does? Yes. >>Kind >>Of. Yeah. Are we a vCenter for es? Yeah, that is a John Forer question. >>All right, well, I, I'll, the speculation really goes back down to the earlier speed question. If you can take away the, the complexity and not make it more steps or change a tool chain or do something, then the devs move faster and the service layer that serves the business, the new organization has to enable speed. So this, this is becoming a, a real discussion point in the industry is that, oh yeah, we've got new tool, look at the shiny new toy. But if it doesn't move the needle, does it help productivity for developers? And does it actually scale up the enablement? That's the question. So I'm sure you guys are thinking about this a lot, what's your reaction? >>Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that just, you know, hit my mind is think about, you know, the hoteling industry before Airbnb and after Airbnb, right? Or, or, or the taxi industry, you know, before Uber and after Uber, right? So if I'm providing a platform, a Kubernetes platform for my application folks or for my application partners, they have everything ready. All they need to do is like, you know, build their application and deployed and running, right? They, they, they don't have to worry about provisioning of the servers and then building the middleware on top of it and then, you know, do a bunch of testing to make sure, you know, they, they, they iron out all the, all the compatible issues and whatnot. Yeah. Now, now, today, all I, all I say is like, hey, you have, we have a platform built for you. You just build your application and then deploy it in a development environment. That's where you put all the pieces of puzzle together, make sure you see your application working, and then the next thing that, that you do is like, you know, you know, build >>Production, chip, build production, go and chip release it. Yeah, that's the nirvana. But then we're there. I mean, we're there now we're there. So we see the future. Because if you, if that's the case, then the developers are the business. They have to be coding more features, they have to react to customers. They might see new business opportunities from a revenue standpoint that could be creatively built, got low code, no code, headless systems. These things are happening where this I call the architectural list environment where it's like, you don't need architecture, it's already happening. >>Yeah. And, and on top of it, you know, if, if someone has an idea, they want to implement an idea real quick, right? So how do you do it? Right? And, and, and you don't have to struggle building an environment to implement your idea and testers in real time, right? So, so from an innovation perspective, you know, agility plays a key role. And, and that, that's where the Kubernetes platforms or platforms like Kubernetes >>Plays. You know, Lisa, when we talked to Andy Chasy, when he was the CEO of aws, either one on one or on the cube, he always said, and this is kind of happening, companies are gonna be builders where it's not just utility. You need that table stakes to enable that new business idea. And so he, this last keynote, he did this big thing like, you know, think like your developers are the next entrepreneurial revenue generators. And I think that, I think starting to see that, what do you think about that? You see that coming sooner than later? Or is that in, in sight or is that still ways away? >>I, I think it's already happening at a level, at a certain level now. Now the question comes back to, you know, taking it to the reality, right? Yeah. I mean, you can, you can do your proof of concept, proof of technologies, and then, and then prove it out. Like, Hey, I got a new idea. This idea is great. Yeah. And, and it's to the business advantage, right? But we really want to see it in production live where your customers are actually >>Using it and the board meetings, Hey, we got a new idea that came in, generating more revenue, where'd that come from? Agile developer. Again, this is real. Yeah, >>Yeah. >>Absolutely agree. Yeah. I think, think both of you gentlemen said a word in, in your, as you were talking, you used the word guardrails, right? I think, you know, we're talking about rigidity, but you know, the really important thing is, look, these are enterprises, right? They have certain expectations. Guardrails is key, right? So it's automation with the guardrails. Yeah. Guardrails are like children, you know, you know, shouldn't be hurt. You know, they're seen but not hurt. Developers don't care about guard rails. They just wanna go fast. They also bounce >>Around a little bit. Yeah. Off the guardrails. >>One thing we know that's not gonna slow down is, is the expectations, right? Of all the consumers of this, the Ds the business, the, the business top line, and of course the customers. So the ability to, to really, as your website says, let's see, make life easy for platform teams is not trivial. And clearly what you guys are talking about here is you're, you're really an enabler of those platform teams, it sounds like to me. Yep. So, great work, guys. Thank you so much for both coming on the program, talking about what you're doing together, how you're seeing the, the evolution of Kubernetes, why, and really what the focus should be on those platform games. We appreciate all your time and your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us. Thanks >>For our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live, Cobe Con, Cloud Native con from Detroit. We've out with our next guest in just a minute, so stick around.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, guys. Welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin and John Furrier here live with "theCUBE" at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, North America. John, it's been a great day. This is day one of our coverage of three days of coverage. Kubernetes is growing up. It's maturing. >> Yeah, we got three days of wall-to-wall coverage, all about Kubernetes. We heard about Security, Large scale, Cloud native at scale. That's the big focus. This next segment's going to be really awesome. You have a fast growing private company and a practitioner, big name, blue chip practitioner, building out next-gen cloud. First transforming, then building out the next level. This is classic, what we call Super Cloud-Like interview. It's going to be great. I'm looking forward to this. >> Anytime we can talk about Super Cloud, right? Please welcome back, one of our alumni, Haseeb Budhani is here, the CEO of Rafay. Great to see you. Santhosh Pasula, also joins us, the global head of Cloud SRE at Mass Mutual. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, Haseeb, you've been on "theCUBE" many times. You were on just recently, with the momentum that's around us today with the maturation of Kubernetes, the collaboration of the community, the recognition of the community. What are some of the things that you're excited about with on day one of the show? >> Wow, so many new companies. I mean, there are companies that I don't know who are here. And I live in this industry, and I'm seeing companies that I don't know, which is a good thing. It means that the community's growing. But at the same time, I'm also seeing another thing, which is, I have met more enterprise representatives at this show than other KubeCons. Like when we hung out at in Valencia, for example, or even other places, it hasn't been this many people. Which means, and this is a good thing that enterprises are now taking Kubernetes seriously. It's not a toy. It's not just for developers. It's enterprises who are now investing in Kubernetes as a foundational component for their applications going forward. And that to me is very, very good. >> Definitely, becoming foundational. >> Haseeb: Yeah. >> Well, you guys got a great traction. We had many interviews at "theCUBE," and you got a practitioner here with you guys, are both pioneering, kind of what I call the next-gen cloud. First you got to get through Gen-One, which you guys done at Mass Mutual extremely well. Take us through the story of your transformation? 'Cause you're on at the front end now of that next inflection point. But take us through how you got here? You had a lot of transformation success at Mass Mutual? >> So, I was actually talking about this topic few minutes back. And the whole cloud journey in big companies, large financial institutions, healthcare industry or insurance sector, it takes generations of leadership to get to that perfection level. And ideally, the cloud for strategy starts in, and then how do you standardize and optimize cloud, right? That's the second-gen altogether, and then operationalization of the cloud. And especially if you're talking about Kubernetes, in the traditional world, almost every company is running middleware and their applications in middleware. And their containerization is a topic that came in. And Docker is basically the runtime containerization. So, that came in first, and from Docker, eventually when companies started adopting Docker, Docker Swarm is one of the technologies that they adopted. And eventually, when we were taking it to a more complicated application implementations or modernization efforts, that's when Kubernetes played a key role. And as Haseeb was pointing out, you never saw so many companies working on Kubernetes. So, that should tell you one story, right? How fast Kubernetes is growing, and how important it is for your cloud strategy. >> And your success now, and what are you thinking about now? What's on your agenda now? As you look forward, what's on your plate? What are you guys doing right now? >> So we are past the stage of proof of concepts, proof of technologies, pilot implementations. We are actually playing it, the real game now. In the past, I used the quote, like "Hello world to real world." So, we are actually playing in the real world, not in the hello world anymore. Now, this is where the real time challenges will pop up. So, if you're talking about standardizing it, and then optimizing the cloud, and how do you put your governance structure in place? How do you make sure your regulations are met? The demands that come out of regulations are met? And how are you going to scale it? And while scaling, how are you going to keep up with all the governance and regulations that come with it? So we are in that stage today. >> Haseeb talked about, you talked about the great evolution of what's going on at Mass Mutual. Haseeb talk a little bit about who? You mentioned one of the things that's surprising you about this KubeCon in Detroit, is that you're seeing a lot more enterprise folks here? Who's deciding in the organization and your customer conversations? Who are the decision makers in terms of adoption of Kubernetes these days? Is that elevating? >> Hmm. Well, this guy. (Lisa laughing) One of the things I'm seeing here, and John and I have talked about this in the past, this idea of a platform organization and enterprises. So, consistently what I'm seeing, is somebody, a CTO, CIO level, an individual is making a decision. I have multiple internal Bus who are now modernizing applications. They're individually investing in DevOps, and this is not a good investment for my business. I'm going to centralize some of this capability so that we can all benefit together. And that team is essentially a platform organization. And they're making Kubernetes a shared services platform so that everybody else can come and sort of consume it. So, what that means to us, is our customer is a platform organization, and their customer is a developer. So we have to make two constituencies successful. Our customer who's providing a multi-tenant platform, and then their customer, who's your developer, both have to be happy. If you don't solve for both, you know, constituencies, you're not going to be successful. >> So, you're targeting the builder of the infrastructure and the consumer of that infrastructure? >> Yes, sir. It has to be both. >> On the other side? >> Exactly, right. So that look, honestly, it takes iteration to figure these things out. But this is a consistent theme that I am seeing. In fact, what I would argue now, is that every enterprise should be really stepping back and thinking about what is my platform strategy? Because if you don't have a platform strategy, you're going to have a bunch of different teams who are doing different things, and some will be successful, and look, some will not be. And that is not good for business. >> Yeah, and Santhosh, I want to get to you. You mentioned your transformations, what you look forward, and your title, Global Head of Cloud, SRE. Okay, so SRE, we all know came from Google, right? Everyone wants to be like Google, but no one wants to be like Google, right? And no one is Google. Google's a unique thing. >> Haseeb: Only one Google. >> But they had the dynamic and the power dynamic of one person to large scale set of servers or infrastructure. But concept can be portable, but the situation isn't. So, Borg became Kubernetes, that's inside baseball. So, you're doing essentially what Google did at their scale, you're doing for Mass Mutual. That's kind of what's happening, is that kind of how I see it? And you guys are playing in there partnering? >> So, I totally agree. Google introduce SRE, Site Reliability Engineering. And if you take the traditional transformation of the roles, in the past, it was called operations, and then DevOps ops came in, and then SRE is the new buzzword. And the future could be something like Product Engineering. And in this journey, here is what I tell folks on my side, like what worked for Google might not work for a financial company. It might not work for an insurance company. It's okay to use the word, SRE, but end of the day, that SRE has to be tailored down to your requirements. And the customers that you serve, and the technology that you serve. >> This is why I'm coming back, this platform engineering. At the end of the day, I think SRE just translates to, you're going to have a platform engineering team? 'Cause you got to enable developers to be producing more code faster, better, cheaper, guardrails, policies. It's kind of becoming the, these serve the business, which is now the developers. IT used to serve the business back in the old days, "Hey, the IT serves the business." >> Yup. >> Which is a term now. >> Which is actually true now. >> The new IT serves the developers, which is the business. >> Which is the business. >> Because if digital transformation goes to completion, the company is the app. >> The hard line between development and operations, so that's thinning down. Over the time, that line might disappear. And that's where SRE is fitting in. >> Yeah, and then building platform to scale the enablement up. So, what is the key challenges? You guys are both building out together this new transformational direction. What's new and what's the same? The same is probably the business results, but what's the new dynamic involved in rolling it out and making people successful? You got the two constituents, the builders of the infrastructures and the consumers of the services on the other side. What's the new thing? >> So, the new thing, if I may go first. The faster market to value that we are bringing to the table, that's very important. Business has an idea. How do you get that idea implemented in terms of technology and take it into real time? So, that journey we have cut down. Technology is like Kubernetes. It makes an IT person's life so easy that they can speed up the process. In a traditional way, what used to take like an year, or six months, can be done in a month today, or less than that. So, there's definitely speed velocity, agility in general, and then flexibility. And then the automation that we put in, especially if you have to maintain like thousands of clusters. These are today, it is possible to make that happen with a click off a button. In the past, it used to take, probably, 100-person team, and operational team to do it, and a lot of time. But that automation is happening. And we can get into the technology as much as possible, but blueprinting and all that stuff made it possible. >> We'll save that for another interview. We'll do it deep time. (panel laughing) >> But the end user on the other end, the consumer doesn't have the patience that they once had, right? It's, "I want this in my lab now." How does the culture of Mass Mutual? How is it evolve to be able to deliver the velocity that your customers are demanding? >> Once in a while, it's important to step yourself into the customer's shoes and think it from their perspective. Business does not care how you're running your IT shop. What they care about is your stability of the product and the efficiencies of the product, and how easy it is to reach out to the customers. And how well we are serving the customers, right? So, whether I'm implementing Docker in the background, Docker Swam or Kubernetes, business doesn't even care about it. What they really care about, it is, if your environment goes down, it's a problem. And if your environment or if your solution is not as efficient as the business needs, that's the problem, right? So, at that point, the business will step in. So, our job is to make sure, from a technology perspective, how fast you can make implement it? And how efficiently you can implement it? And at the same time, how do you play within the guardrails of security and compliance? >> So, I was going to ask you, if you have VMware in your environment? 'Cause a lot of clients compare what vCenter does for Kubernetes is really needed. And I think that's what you guys got going on. I can say that, you're the vCenter of Kubernetes. I mean, as as metaphor, a place to manage it all, is all one paint of glass, so to speak. Is that how you see success in your environment? >> So, virtualization has gone a long way. Where we started, what we call bare metal servers, and then we virtualized operating systems. Now, we are virtualizing applications, and we are virtualizing platforms as well, right? So that's where Kubernetes plays a role. >> So, you see the need for a vCenter like thing for Kubernetes? >> There's definitely a need in the market. The way you need to think is like, let's say there is an insurance company who actually implement it today, and they gain the market advantage. Now, the the competition wants to do it as well, right? So, there's definitely a virtualization of application layer that's very critical, and it's a critical component of cloud strategy as a whole. >> See, you're too humble to say it. I'll say, you're like the vCenter of Kubernetes. Explain what that means in your term? If I said that to you, what would you react? How would you react to that? Would you say, BS, or would you say on point? >> Maybe we should think about what does vCenter do today? So, in my opinion, by the way, vCenter in my opinion, is one of the best platforms ever built. Like it's the best platform in my opinion ever built. VMware did an amazing job, because they took an IT engineer, and they made him now be able to do storage management, networking management, VM's multitenancy, access management, audit. Everything that you need to run a data center, you can do from essentially single platform. >> John: From a utility standpoint, home-run? >> It's amazing. >> Yeah. >> Because you are now able to empower people to do way more. Well, why are we not doing that for Kubernetes? So, the premise man Rafay was, well, I should have IT engineers, same engineers. Now, they should be able to run fleets of clusters. That's what people that Mass Mutual are able to do now. So, to that end, now you need cluster management, you need access management, you need blueprinting, you need policy management. All of these things that have happened before, chargebacks, they used to have it in vCenter, now they need to happen in other platforms but for Kubernetes. So, should we do many of the things that vCenter does? Yes. >> John: Kind of, yeah. >> Are we a vCenter for Kubernetes? >> No. >> That is a John Furrier question. >> All right, well, the speculation really goes back down to the earlier speed question. If you can take away the complexity and not make it more steps, or change a tool chain, or do something, then the Devs move faster. And the service layer that serves the business, the new organization, has to enable speed. This is becoming a real discussion point in the industry, is that, "Yeah, we got new tool. Look at the shiny new toy." But if it move the needle, does it help productivity for developers? And does it actually scale up the enablement? That's the question. So, I'm sure you guys are thinking about this a lot. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that just hit my mind, is think about the hoteling industry before Airbnb and after Airbnb. Or the taxi industry before Uber and after Uber. So, if I'm providing a platform, a Kubernetes platform for my application folks, or for my application partners, they have everything ready. All they need to do is build their application and deploy it, and run it. They don't have to worry about provisioning of the servers, and then building the Middleware on top of it, and then, do a bunch of testing to make sure they iron out all the compatible issues and whatnot. Now, today, all I say is like, "Hey, we have a platform built for you. You just build your application, and then deploy it in a development environment, that's where you put all the pieces of puzzle together. Make sure you see your application working, and then the next thing that you do is like, do the correction. >> John: Shipping. >> Shipping. You build the production. >> John: Press. Go. Release it. (laughs) That when you move on, but they were there. I mean, we're there now. We're there. So, we need to see the future, because that's the case, then the developers are the business. They have to be coding more features, they have to react to customers. They might see new business opportunities from a revenue standpoint that could be creatively built, got low code, no code, headless systems. These things are happening where there's, I call the Architectural List Environment where it's like, you don't need architecture, it's already happening. >> Yeah, and on top of it, if someone has an idea, they want to implement an idea real quick. So, how do you do it? And you don't have to struggle building an environment to implement your idea and test it in real time. So, from an innovation perspective, agility plays a key role. And that's where the Kubernetes platforms, or platforms like Kubernetes plays. >> You know, Lisa, when we talked to Andy Jassy, when he was the CEO of AWS, either one-on-one or on "theCUBE," he always said, and this is kind of happening, "Companies are going to be builders, where it's not just utility, you need that table stakes to enable that new business idea." And so, in this last keynote, he did this big thing like, "Think like your developers are the next entrepreneurial revenue generators." I think I'm starting to see that. What do you think about that? You see that coming sooner than later? Or is that an insight, or is that still ways away? >> I think it's already happening at a level, at a certain level. Now ,the question comes back to, you know, taking it to the reality. I mean, you can do your proof of concept, proof of technologies, and then prove it out like, "Hey, I got a new idea. This idea is great." And it's to the business advantage. But we really want to see it in production live where your customers are actually using it. >> In the board meetings, "Hey, we got a new idea that came in, generating more revenue, where'd that come from?" Agile Developer. Again, this is real. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Absolutely agree. Yeah, I think both of you gentlemen said a word as you were talking, you used the word, Guardrails. We're talking about agility, but the really important thing is, look, these are enterprises, right? They have certain expectations. Guardrails is key, right? So, it's automation with the guardrails. Guardrails are like children, you know, shouldn't be heard. They're seen but not heard. Developers don't care about guardrails, they just want to go fast. >> They also bounce around a little bit, (laughs) off the guardrails. >> Haseeb: Yeah. >> One thing we know that's not going to slow down, is the expectations, right? Of all the consumers of this, the Devs, the business, the business top line, and, of course, the customers. So, the ability to really, as your website says, let's say, "Make Life Easy for Platform Teams" is not trivial. And clearly what you guys are talking about here, is you're really an enabler of those platform teams, it sounds like to me. >> Yup. >> So, great work, guys. Thank you so much for both coming on the program, talking about what you're doing together, how you're seeing the evolution of Kubernetes, why? And really, what the focus should be on those platform teams. We appreciate all your time and your insights. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" Live, KubeCon CloudNativeCon from Detroit. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute, so stick around. (bright upbeat music)

(gentle music) (upbeat music) (crowd chattering) >> Welcome back to The City That Never Sleeps. Lisa Martin and John Furrier in New York City for AWS Summit '22 with about 10 to 12,000 of our friends. And we've got two more friends joining us here today. We're going to be talking with Haseeb Budhani, one of our alumni, co-founder and CEO of Rafay Systems, and Kevin Coleman, senior manager for Go-to Market for EKS at AWS. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you very much for having us. Excited to be here. >> Isn't it great to be back at an in-person event with 10, 12,000 people? >> Yes. There are a lot of people here. This is packed. >> A lot of energy here. So, Haseeb, we've got to start with you. Your T-shirt says it all. Don't hate k8s. (Kevin giggles) Talk to us about some of the trends, from a Kubernetes perspective, that you're seeing, and then Kevin will give your follow-up. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I think the biggest trend I'm seeing on the enterprise side is that enterprises are forming platform organizations to make Kubernetes a practice across the enterprise. So it used to be that a BU would say, "I need Kubernetes. I have some DevOps engineers, let me just do this myself." And the next one would do the same, and then next one would do the same. And that's not practical, long term, for an enterprise. And this is now becoming a consolidated effort, which is, I think it's great. It speaks to the power of Kubernetes, because it's becoming so important to the enterprise. But that also puts a pressure because what the platform team has to solve for now is they have to find this fine line between automation and governance, right? I mean, the developers, you know, they don't really care about governance. Just give me stuff, I need to compute, I'm going to go. But then the platform organization has to think about, how is this going to play for the enterprise across the board? So that combination of automation and governance is where we are finding, frankly, a lot of success in making enterprise platform team successful. I think, that's a really new thing to me. It's something that's changed in the last six months, I would say, in the industry. I don't know if, Kevin, if you agree with that or not, but that's what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, definitely agree with that. We see a ton of customers in EKS who are building these new platforms using Kubernetes. The term that we hear a lot of customers use is standardization. So they've got various ways that they're deploying applications, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud and region. And they're really trying to standardize the way they deploy applications. And Kubernetes is really that compute substrate that they're standardizing on. >> Kevin, talk about the relationship with Rafay Systems that you have and why you're here together. And two, second part of that question, why is EKS kicking ass so much? (Haseeb and Kevin laughing) All right, go ahead. First one, your relationship. Second one, EKS is doing pretty well. >> Yep, yep, yep. (Lisa laughing) So yeah, we work closely with Rafay, Rafay, excuse me. A lot of joint customer wins with Haseeb and Co, so they're doing great work with EKS customers and, yeah, love the partnership there. In terms of why EKS is doing so well, a number of reasons, I think. Number one, EKS is vanilla, upstream, open-source Kubernetes. So customers want to use that open-source technology, that open-source Kubernetes, and they come to AWS to get it in a managed offering, right? Kubernetes isn't the easiest thing to self-manage. And so customers, you know, back before EKS launched, they were banging down the door at AWS for us to have a managed Kubernetes offering. And, you know, we launched EKS and there's been a ton of customer adoption since then. >> You know, Lisa, when we, theCUBE 12 years, now everyone knows we started in 2010, we used to cover a show called OpenStack. >> I remember that. >> OpenStack Summit. >> What's that now? >> And at the time, at that time, Kubernetes wasn't there. So theCUBE was present at creation. We've been to every KubeCon ever, CNCF then took it over. So we've been watching it from the beginning. >> Right. And it reminds me of the same trend we saw with MapReduce and Hadoop. Very big promise, everyone loved it, but it was hard, very difficult. And Hadoop's case, big data, it ended up becoming a data lake. Now you got Spark, or Snowflake, and Databricks, and Redshift. Here, Kubernetes has not yet been taken over. But, instead, it's being abstracted away and or managed services are emerging. 'Cause general enterprises can't hire enough Kubernetes people. >> Yep. >> They're not that many out there yet. So there's the training issue. But there's been the rise of managed services. >> Yep. >> Can you guys comment on what your thoughts are relative to that trend of hard to use, abstracting away the complexity, and, specifically, the managed services? >> Yeah, absolutely. You want to go? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, look, it's important to not kid ourselves. It is hard. (Johns laughs) But that doesn't mean it's not practical, right. When Kubernetes is done well, it's a thing of beauty. I mean, we have enough customer to scale, like, you know, it's like a, forget a hockey stick, it's a straight line up, because they just are moving so fast when they have the right platform in place. I think that the mistake that many of us make, and I've made this mistake when we started this company, was trivializing the platform aspect of Kubernetes, right. And a lot of my customers, you know, when they start, they kind of feel like, well, this is not that hard. I can bring this up and running. I just need two people. It'll be fine. And it's hard to hire, but then, I need two, then I need two more, then I need two, it's a lot, right. I think, the one thing I keep telling, like, when I talk to analysts, I say, "Look, somebody needs to write a book that says, 'Yes, it's hard, but, yes, it can be done, and here's how.'" Let's just be open about what it takes to get there, right. And, I mean, you mentioned OpenStack. I think the beauty of Kubernetes is that because it's such an open system, right, even with the managed offering, companies like Rafay can build really productive businesses on top of this Kubernetes platform because it's an open system. I think that is something that was not true with OpenStack. I've spent time with OpenStack also, I remember how it is. >> Well, Amazon had a lot to do with stalling the momentum of OpenStack, but your point about difficulty. Hadoop was always difficult to maintain and hiring against. There were no managed services and no one yet saw that value of big data yet. Here at Kubernetes, people are living a problem called, I'm scaling up. >> Yep. And so it sounds like it's a foundational challenge. The ongoing stuff sounds easier or manageable. >> Once you have the right tooling. >> Is that true? >> Yeah, no, I mean, once you have the right tooling, it's great. I think, look, I mean, you and I have talked about this before, I mean, the thesis behind Rafay is that, you know, there's like 8, 12 things that need to be done right for Kubernetes to work well, right. And my whole thesis was, I don't want my customer to buy 10, 12, 15 products. I want them to buy one platform, right. And I truly believe that, in our market, similar to what vCenter, like what VMware's vCenter did for VMs, I want to do that for Kubernetes, right. And that the reason why I say that is because, see, vCenter is not about hypervisors, right? vCenter is about hypervisor, access, networking, storage, all of the things, like multitenancy, all the things that you need to run an enterprise-grade VM environment. What is that equivalent for the Kubernetes world, right? So what we are doing at Rafay is truly building a vCenter, but for Kubernetes, like a kCenter. I've tried getting the domain. I couldn't get it. (Kevin laughs) >> Well, after the Broadcom view, you don't know what's going to happen. >> Ehh. (John laughs) >> I won't go there! >> Yeah. Yeah, let's not go there today. >> Kevin, EKS, I've heard people say to me, "Love EKS. Just add serverless, that's a home run." There's been a relationship with EKS and some of the other Amazon tools. Can you comment on what you're seeing as the most popular interactions among the services at AWS? >> Yeah, and was your comment there, add serverless? >> Add serverless with AKS at the edge- >> Yeah. >> and things are kind of interesting. >> I mean, so, one of the serverless offerings we have today is actually Fargate. So you can use Fargate, which is our serverless compute offering, or one of our serverless compute offerings with EKS. And so customers love that. Effectively, they get the beauty of EKS and the Kubernetes API but they don't have to manage nodes. So that's, you know, a good amount of adoption with Fargate as well. But then, we also have other ways that they can manage their nodes. We have managed node groups as well, in addition to self-managed nodes also. So there's a variety of options that customers can use from a compute perspective with EKS. And you'll continue to see us evolve the portfolio as well. >> Can you share, Haseeb, can you share a customer example, a joint customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Rafay and AWS are doing together? >> Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we announced a customer very recently on this very show, which is MoneyGram, which is a joint AWS and Rafay customer. Look, we have enough, you know, the thing about these massive customers is that, you know, not everybody's going to give us their logo to use. >> Right. >> But MoneyGram has been a Rafay plus EKS customer for a very, very long time. You know, at this point, I think we've earned their trust, and they've allowed us to, kind of say this publicly. But there's enough of these financial services companies who have, you know, standardized on EKS. So it's EKS first, Rafay second, right. They standardized on EKS. And then they looked around and said, "Who can help me platform EKS across my enterprise?" And we've been very lucky. We have some very large financial services, some very large healthcare companies now, who, A, EKS, B, Rafay. I'm not just saying that because my friend Kevin's here, (Lisa laughs) it's actually true. Look, EKS is a brilliant platform. It scales so well, right. I mean, people try it out, relative to other platforms, and it's just a no-brainer, it just scales. You want to build a big enterprise on the backs of a Kubernetes platform. And I'm not saying that's because I'm biased. Like EKS is really, really good. There's a reason why so many companies are choosing it over many other options in the market. >> You're doing a great job of articulating why the theme (Kevin laughs) of the New York City Summit is scale anything. >> Oh, yeah. >> There you go. >> Oh, yeah. >> I did not even know that but I'm speaking the language, right? >> You are. (John laughs) >> Yeah, absolutely. >> One of the things that we're seeing, also, I want to get your thoughts on, guys, is the app modernization trend, right? >> Yep. >> Because unlike other standards that were hard, that didn't have any benefit downstream 'cause they were too hard to get to, here, Kubernetes is feeding into real app for app developer pressure. They got to get cloud-native apps out. It's fairly new in the mainstream enterprise and a lot of hyperscalers have experience. So I'm going to ask you guys, what is the key thing that you're enabling with Kubernetes in the cloud-native apps? What is the key value? >> Yeah. >> I think, there's a bifurcation happening in the market. One is the Kubernetes Engine market, which is like EKS, AKS, GKE, right. And then there's the, you know, what, back in the day, we used to call operations and management, right. So the OAM layer for Kubernetes is where there's need, right. People are learning, right. Because, as you said before, the skill isn't there, you know, there's not enough talent available to the market. And that's the opportunity we're seeing. Because to solve for the standardization, the governance, and automation that we talked about earlier, you know, you have to solve for, okay, how do I manage my network? How do I manage my service mesh? How do I do chargebacks? What's my, you know, policy around actual Kubernetes policies? What's my blueprinting strategy? How do I do add-on management? How do I do pipelines for updates of add-ons? How do I upgrade my clusters? And we're not done yet, there's a longer list, right? This is a lot, right? >> Yeah. >> And this is what happens, right. It's just a lot. And really, the companies who understand that plethora of problems that need to be solved and build easy-to-use solutions that enterprises can consume with the right governance automation, I think they're going to be very, very successful here. >> Yeah. >> Because this is a train, right? I mean, this is happening whether, it's not us, it's happening, right? Enterprises are going to keep doing this. >> And open-source is a big driver in all of this. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> And I'll tag onto that. I mean, you talked about platform engineering earlier. Part of the point of building these platforms on top of Kubernetes is giving developers an easier way to get applications into the cloud. So building unique developer experiences that really make it easy for you, as a software developer, to take the code from your laptop, get it out of production as quickly as possible. The question is- >> So is that what you mean, does that tie your point earlier about that vertical, straight-up value once you've set up it, right? >> Yep. >> Because it's taking the burden off the developers for stopping their productivity. >> Absolutely. >> To go check in, is it configured properly? Is the supply chain software going to be there? Who's managing the services? Who's orchestrating the nodes? >> Yep. >> Is that automated, is that where you guys see the value? >> That's a lot of what we see, yeah. In terms of how these companies are building these platforms, is taking all the component pieces that Haseeb was talking about and really putting it into a cohesive whole. And then, you, as a software developer, you don't have to worry about configuring all of those things. You don't have to worry about security policy, governance, how your app is going to be exposed to the internet. >> It sounds like infrastructure is code. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> Come on, like. >> (laughs) Infrastructure's code is a big piece of it, for sure, for sure. >> Yeah, look, infrastructure's code actually- >> Infrastructure's sec is code too, the security. >> Yeah. >> Huge. >> Well, it all goes together. Like, we talk about developer self-service, right? The way we enable developer self-service is by teaching developers, here's a snippet of code that you write and you check it in and your infrastructure will just magically be created. >> Yep. >> But not automatically. It's going to go through a check, like a check through the platform team. These are the workflows that if you get them right, developers don't care, right. All developers want is I want to compute. But then all these 20 things need to happen in the back. That's what, if you nail it, right, I mean, I keep trying to kind of pitch the company, I don't want to do that today. But if you nail that, >> I'll give you a plug at the end. >> you have a good story. >> But I got to, I just have a tangent question 'cause you reminded me. There's two types of developers that have emerged, right. You have the software developer that wants infrastructures code. I just want to write my code, I don't want to stop. I want to build in shift-left for security, shift-right for data. All that's in there. >> Right. >> I'm coding away, I love coding. Then you've got the under-the-hood person. >> Yes. >> I've been to the engines. >> Certainly. >> So that's more of an SRE, data engineer, I'm wiring services together. >> Yeah. >> A lot of people are like, they don't know who they are yet. They're in college or they're transforming from an IT job. They're trying to figure out who they are. So question is, how do you tell a person that's watching, like, who am I? Like, should I be just coding? But I love the tech. Would you guys have any advice there? >> You know, I don't know if I have any guidance in terms of telling people who they are. (all laughing) I mean, I think about it in terms of a spectrum and this is what we hear from customers, is some customers want to shift as much responsibility onto the software teams to manage their infrastructure as well. And then some want to shift it all the way over to the very centralized model. And, you know, we see everything in between as well with our EKS customer base. But, yeah, I'm not sure if I have any direct guidance for people. >> Let's see, any wisdom? >> Aside from experiment. >> If you're coding more, you're a coder. If you like to play with the hardware, >> Yeah. >> or the gears. >> Look, I think it's really important for managers to understand that developers, yes, they have a job, you have to write code, right. But they also want to learn new things. It's only fair, right. >> Oh, yeah. >> So what we see is, developers want to learn. And we enable for them to understand Kubernetes in small pieces, like small steps, right. And that is really, really important because if we completely abstract things away, like Kubernetes, from them, it's not good for them, right. It's good for their careers also, right. It's good for them to learn these things. This is going to be with us for the next 15, 20 years. Everybody should learn it. But I want to learn it because I want to learn, not because this is part of my job, and that's the distinction, right. I don't want this to become my job because I want, I want to write my code. >> Do what you love. If you're more attracted to understanding how automation works, and robotics, or making things scale, you might be under-the-hood. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, look under the hood all day long. But then, in terms of, like, who keeps the lights on for the cluster, for example. >> All right, see- >> That's the job. >> He makes a lot of value. Now you know who you are. Ask these guys. (Lisa laughing) Congratulations on your success on EKS 2. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Quick, give a plug for the company. I know you guys are growing. I want to give you a minute to share to the audience a plug that's going to be, what are you guys doing? You're hiring? How many employees? Funding? Customer new wins? Take a minute to give a plug. >> Absolutely. And look, I come see, John, I think, every show you guys are doing a summit or a KubeCon, I'm here. (John laughing) And every time we come, we talk about new customers. Look, platform teams at enterprises seem to love Rafay because it helps them build that, well, Kubernetes platform that we've talked about on the show today. I think, many large enterprises on the financial service side, healthcare side, digital native side seem to have recognized that running Kubernetes at scale, or even starting with Kubernetes in the early days, getting it right with the right standards, that takes time, that takes effort. And that's where Rafay is a great partner. We provide a great SaaS offering, which you can have up and running very, very quickly. Of course, we love EKS. We work with our friends at AWS. But also works with Azure, we have enough customers in Azure. It also runs in Google. We have enough customers at Google. And it runs on-premises with OpenShift or with EKS A, right, whichever option you want to take. But in terms of that standardization and governance and automation for your developers to move fast, there's no better product in the market right now when it comes to Kubernetes platforms than Rafay. >> Kevin, while we're here, why don't you plug EKS too, come on. >> Yeah, absolutely, why not? (group laughing) So yes, of course. EKS is AWS's managed Kubernetes offering. It's the largest managed Kubernetes service in the world. We help customers who want to adopt Kubernetes and adopt it wherever they want to run Kubernetes, whether it's in region or whether it's on the edge with EKS A or running Kubernetes on Outposts and the evolving portfolio of EKS services as well. We see customers running extremely high-scale Kubernetes clusters, excuse me, and we're here to support them as well. So yeah, that's the managed Kubernetes offering. >> And I'll give the plug for theCUBE, we'll be at KubeCon in Detroit this year. (Lisa laughing) Lisa, look, we're giving a plug to everybody. Come on. >> We're plugging everybody. Well, as we get to plugs, I think, Haseeb, you have a book to write, I think, on Kubernetes. And I think you're wearing the title. >> Well, I do have a book to write, but I'm one of those people who does everything at the very end, so I will never get it right. (group laughing) So if you want to work on it with me, I have some great ideas. >> Ghostwriter. >> Sure! >> But I'm lazy. (Kevin chuckles) >> Ooh. >> So we got to figure something out. >> Somehow I doubt you're lazy. (group laughs) >> No entrepreneur's lazy, I know that. >> Right? >> You're being humble. >> He is. So Haseeb, Kevin, thank you so much for joining John and me today, >> Thank you. >> talking about what you guys are doing at Rafay with EKS, the power, why you shouldn't hate k8s. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you as well. >> Yeah, thank you very much for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate it. With John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from New York City at the AWS NYC Summit. John and I will be right back with our next guest, so stick around. (upbeat music) (gentle music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents "Kubecon and Cloudnativecon Europe 2022" brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE coverage of Kubecon 2022, E.U. I'm here with my cohost, Paul Gillin. >> Pleased to work with you, Keith. >> Nice to work with you, Paul. And we have our first two guests. "theCUBE" is hot. I'm telling you we are having interviews before the start of even the show floor. I have with me, we got to start with the customers first. Enterprise Architect Adnan Khan, welcome to the show. >> Thank you so much. >> Keith: CUBE time first, now you're at CUBE-alumni. >> Yup. >> And Haseeb Budhani, CEO Arathi, welcome back. >> Nice to talk to you again today. >> So, we're talking all things Kubernetes and we're super excited to talk to MoneyGram about their journey to Kubernetes. First question I have for Adnan. Talk to us about what your pre-Kubernetes landscape looked like? >> Yeah. Certainly, Keith. So, we had a traditional mix of legacy applications and modern applications. A few years ago we made the decision to move to a microservices architecture, and this was all happening while we were still on-prem. So, your traditional VMs. And we started 20, 30 microservices but with the microservices packing. You quickly expand to hundreds of microservices. And we started getting to that stage where managing them without sort of an orchestration platform, and just as traditional VMs, was getting to be really challenging, especially from a day two operational. You can manage 10, 15 microservices, but when you start having 50, and so forth, all those concerns around high availability, operational performance. So, we started looking at some open-source projects. Spring cloud, we are predominantly a Java shop. So, we looked at the spring cloud projects. They give you a number of initiatives for doing some of those management. And what we realized again, to manage those components without sort of a platform, was really challenging. So, that kind of led us to sort of Kubernetes where along with our journey new cloud, it was the platform that could help us with a lot of those management operational concerns. >> So, as you talk about some of those challenges, pre-Kubernetes, what were some of the operational issues that you folks experienced? >> Yeah, certain things like auto scaling is number one. I mean, that's a fundamental concept of cloud native, right? Is how do you auto scale VMs, right? You can put in some old methods and stuff, but it was really hard to do that automatically. So, Kubernetes with like HPA gives you those out of the box. Provided you set the right policies, you can have auto scaling where it can scale up and scale back, so we were doing that manually. So, before, you know, MoneyGram, obviously, holiday season, people are sending more money, Mother's Day. Our Ops team would go and basically manually scale VMs. So, we'd go from four instances to maybe eight instances, but that entailed outages. And just to plan around doing that manually, and then sort of scale them back was a lot of overhead, a lot of administration overhead. So, we wanted something that could help us do that automatically in an efficient and intrusive way. That was one of the things, monitoring and and management operations, just kind of visibility into how those applications were during what were the status of your workloads, was also a challenge to do that. >> So, Haseeb, I got to ask the question. If someone would've came to me with that problem, I'd just say, "You know what? Go to the plug to cloud." How does your group help solve some of these challenges? What do you guys do? >> Yeah. What do we do? Here's my perspective on the market as it's playing out. So, I see a bifurcation happening in the Kubernetes space. But there's the Kubernetes run time, so Amazon has EKS, Azure as AKS. There's enough of these available, they're not managed services, they're actually really good, frankly. In fact, retail customers, if you're an Amazon why would you spin up your own? Just use EKS, it's awesome. But then, there's an operational layer that is needed to run Kubernetes. My perspective is that, 50,000 enterprises are adopting Kubernetes over the next 5 to 10 years. And they're all going to go through the same exact journey, and they're all going to end up potentially making the same mistake, which is, they're going to assume that Kubernetes is easy. They're going to say, "Well, this is not hard. I got this up and running on my laptop. This is so easy, no worries. I can do EKS." But then, okay, can you consistently spin up these things? Can you scale them consistently? Do you have the right blueprints in place? Do you have the right access management in place? Do you have the right policies in place? Can you deploy applications consistently? Do you have monitoring and visibility into those things? Do your developers have access when they need it? Do you have the right networking layer in place? Do you have the right chargebacks in place? Remember you have multiple teams. And by the way, nobody has a single cluster, so you got to do this across multiple clusters. And some of them have multiple clouds. Not because they want to be multiple clouds, because, but sometimes you buy a company, and they happen to be in Azure. How many dashboards do you have now across all the open-source technologies that you have identified to solve these problems? This is where pain lies. So, I think that Kubernetes is fundamentally a solve problem. Like our friends at AWS and Azure, they've solved this problem. It's like a AKS, EKS, et cetera, EGK for that matter. They're great, and you should use them, and don't even think about spinning up QB best clusters. Don't do it, use the platforms that exist. And commensurately on-premises, OpenShift is pretty awesome. If you like it, use it. But then when it comes to the operations layer, that's where today, we end up investing in a DevOps team, and then an SRE organization that need to become experts in Kubernetes, and that is not tenable. Can you, let's say unlimited capital, unlimited budgets. Can you hire 20 people to do Kubernetes today? >> If you could find them. >> If you can find 'em, right? So, even if you could, the point is that, see five years ago when your competitors were not doing Kubernetes, it was a competitive advantage to go build a team to do Kubernetes so you could move faster. Today, you know, there's a high chance that your competitors are already buying from a Rafay or somebody like Rafay. So, now, it's better to take these really, really sharp engineers and have them work on things that make the company money. Writing operations for Kubernetes, this is a commodity now. >> How confident are you that the cloud providers won't get in and do what you do and put you out of business? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. In fact, I had a conversation with somebody from HBS this morning and I was telling them, I don't think you have a choice, you have to do this. Competition is not a bad thing. If we are the only company in a space, this is not a space, right? The bet we are making is that every enterprise, they have an on-prem strategy, they have at least a handful of, everybody's got at least two clouds that they're thinking about. Everybody starts with one cloud, and then they have some other cloud that they're also thinking about. For them to only rely on one cloud's tools to solve for on-prem, plus that second cloud, they potentially they may have, that's a tough thing to do. And at the same time, we as a vendor, I mean, the only real reason why startups survive, is because you have technology that is truly differentiator. Otherwise, I mean, you got to build something that is materially interesting, right? We seem to have- >> Keith: Now. Sorry, go ahead. >> No, I was going to, you actually have me thinking about something. Adnan? >> Yes. >> MoneyGram, big, well known company. a startup, adding, working in a space with Google, VMware, all the biggest names. What brought you to Rafay to solve this operational challenge? >> Yeah. A good question. So, when we started out sort of in our Kubernetes, we had heard about EKS and we are an AWS shop, so that was the most natural path. And we looked at EKS and used that to create our clusters. But then we realized very quickly, that, yes, to Haseeb's point, AWS manages the control plane for you, it gives you the high availability. So, you're not managing those components which is some really heavy lifting. But then what about all the other things like centralized dashboard? What about, we need to provision Kubernetes clusters on multicloud, right? We have other clouds that we use, or also on-prem, right? How do you do some of that stuff? We also, at that time were looking at other tools also. And I had, I remember come up with an MVP list that we needed to have in place for day one or day two operations before we even launch any single applications into production. And my Ops team looked at that list and literally, there was only one or two items that they could check off with EKS. They've got the control plane, they've got the cluster provision, but what about all those other components? And some of that kind of led us down the path of, you know, looking at, "Hey, what's out there in this space?" And we realized pretty quickly that there weren't too many. There were some large providers and capabilities like Antos, but we felt that it was a little too much for what we were trying to do at that point in time. We wanted to scale slowly. We wanted to minimize our footprint, and Rafay seemed to sort of, was a nice mix from all those different angles. >> How was the situation affecting your developer experience? >> So, that's a really good question also. So, operations was one aspect to it. The other part is the application development. We've got MoneyGram is when a lot of organizations have a plethora of technologies from Java, to .net, to node.js, what have you, right? Now, as you start saying, okay, now we're going cloud native and we're going to start deploying to Kubernetes. There's a fair amount of overhead because a tech stack, all of a sudden goes from, just being Java or just being .net, to things like Docker. All these container orchestration and deployment concerns, Kubernetes deployment artifacts, (chuckles) I got to write all this YAML as my developer say, "YAML hell." (panel laughing) I got to learn Docker files. I need to figure out a package manager like HELM on top of learning all the Kubernetes artifacts. So, initially, we went with sort of, okay, you know, we can just train our developers. And that was wrong. I mean, you can't assume that everyone is going to sort of learn all these deployment concerns and we'll adopt them. There's a lot of stuff that's outside of their sort of core dev domain, that you're putting all this burden on them. So, we could not rely on them in to be sort of CUBE cuddle experts, right? That's a fair amount overhead learning curve there. So, Rafay again, from their dashboard perspective, saw the managed CUBE cuddle, gives you that easy access for devs, where they can go and monitor the status of their workloads. They don't have to figure out, configuring all these tools locally, just to get it to work. We did some things from a DevOps perspective to basically streamline and automate that process. But then, also Rafay came in and helped us out on kind of that providing that dashboard. They don't have to break, they can basically get on through single sign on and have visibility into the status of their deployment. They can do troubleshooting diagnostics all through a single pane of glass, which was a key key item. Initially, before Rafay, we were doing that command line. And again, just getting some of the tools configured was huge, it took us days just to get that. And then the learning curve for development teams "Oh, now you got the tools, now you got to figure out how to use it." >> So, Haseeb talk to me about the cloud native infrastructure. When I look at that entire landscape number, I'm just overwhelmed by it. As a customer, I look at it, I'm like, "I don't know where to start." I'm sure, Adnan, you folks looked at it and said, "Wow, there's so many solutions." How do you engage with the ecosystem? You have to be at some level opinionated but flexible enough to meet every customer's needs. How do you approach that? >> So, it's a really tough problem to solve because... So, the thing about abstraction layers, we all know how that plays out, right? So, abstraction layers are fundamentally never the right answer because they will never catch up, because you're trying to write a layer on top. So, then we had to solve the problem, which was, well, we can't be an abstraction layer, but then at the same time, we need to provide some, sort of like centralization standardization. So, we sort of have this the following dissonance in our platform, which is actually really important to solve the problem. So, we think of a stack as floor things. There's the Kubernetes layer, infrastructure layer, and EKS is different from AKS, and it's okay. If we try to now bring them all together and make them behave as one, our customers are going to suffer. Because there are features in EKS that I really want, but then if you write an abstraction then I'm not going to get 'em so not okay. So, treat them as individual things that we logic that we now curate. So, every time EKS, for example, goes from 1.22 to 1.23, we write a new product, just so my customer can press a button and upgrade these clusters. Similarly, we do this for AKS, we do this for GK. It's a really, really hard job, but that's the job, we got to do it. On top of that, you have these things called add-ons, like my network policy, my access management policy, my et cetera. These things are all actually the same. So, whether I'm EKS or AKS, I want the same access for Keith versus Adnan, right? So, then those components are sort of the same across, doesn't matter how many clusters, doesn't matter how many clouds. On top of that, you have applications. And when it comes to the developer, in fact I do the following demo a lot of times. Because people ask the question. People say things like, "I want to run the same Kubernetes distribution everywhere because this is like Linux." Actually, it's not. So, I do a demo where I spin up access to an OpenShift cluster, and an EKS cluster, and then AKS cluster. And I say, "Log in, show me which one is which?" They're all the same. >> So, Adnan, make that real for me. I'm sure after this amount of time, developers groups have come to you with things that are snowflakes. And as a enterprise architect, you have to make it work within your framework. How has working with Rafay made that possible? >> Yeah, so I think one of the very common concerns is the whole deployment to Haseeb's point, is you are from a deployment perspective, it's still using HELM, it's still using some of the same tooling. How do you? Rafay gives us some tools. You know, they have a command line Add Cuddle API that essentially we use. We wanted parity across all our different environments, different clusters, it doesn't matter where you're running. So, that gives us basically a consistent API for deployment. We've also had challenges with just some of the tooling in general that we worked with Rafay actually, to actually extend their, Add Cuddle API for us so that we have a better deployment experience for our developers. >> Haseeb, how long does this opportunity exist for you? At some point, do the cloud providers figure this out, or does the open-source community figure out how to do what you've done and this opportunity is gone? >> So, I think back to a platform that I think very highly of, which has been around a long time and continues to live, vCenter. I think vCenter is awesome. And it's beautiful, VMware did an incredible job. What is the job? It's job is to manage VMs, right? But then it's for access, it's also storage. It's also networking in a sec, right? All these things got done because to solve a real problem, you have to think about all the things that come together to help you solve that problem from an operations perspective. My view is that this market needs essentially a vCenter, but for Kubernetes, right? And that is a very broad problem. And it's going to spend, it's not about a cloud. I mean, every cloud should build this. I mean, why would they not? It makes sense. Anto exist, right? Everybody should have one. But then, the clarity in thinking that the Rafay team seems to have exhibited, till date, seems to merit an independent company, in my opinion, I think like, I mean, from a technical perspective, this product's awesome, right? I mean, we seem to have no real competition when it comes to this broad breadth of capabilities. Will it last? We'll see, right? I mean, I keep doing "CUBE" shows, right? So, every year you can ask me that question again, and we'll see. >> You make a good point though. I mean, you're up against VMware, You're up against Google. They're both trying to do sort of the same thing you're doing. Why are you succeeding? >> Maybe it's focused. Maybe it's because of the right experience. I think startups, only in hindsight, can one tell why a startup was successful. In all honesty, I've been in a one or two startups in the past, and there's a lot of luck to this, there's a lot of timing to this. I think this timing for a product like this is perfect. Like three, four years ago, nobody would've cared. Like honesty, nobody would've cared. This is the right time to have a product like this in the market because so many enterprises are now thinking of modernization. And because everybody's doing this, this is like the boots strong problem in HCI. Everybody's doing it, but there's only so many people in the industry who actually understand this problem, so they can't even hire the people. And the CTO said, "I got to go. I don't have the people, I can't fill the seats." And then they look for solutions, and via that solution, that we're going to get embedded. And when you have infrastructure software like this embedded in your solution, we're going to be around with the... Assuming, obviously, we don't score up, right? We're going to be around with these companies for some time. We're going to have strong partners for the long term. >> Well, vCenter for Kubernetes I love to end on that note. Intriguing conversation, we could go on forever on this topic, 'cause there's a lot of work to do. I don't think this will over be a solved problem for the Kubernetes as cloud native solutions, so I think there's a lot of opportunities in that space. Haseeb Budhani, thank you for rejoining "theCUBE." Adnan Khan, welcome becoming a CUBE-alum. >> (laughs) Awesome. Thank you so much. >> Check your own profile on the sound's website, it's really cool. From Valencia, Spain, I'm Keith Townsend, along with my Host Paul Gillin . And you're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech coverage. (bright upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22, brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to the cube coverage of CubeCon 2022 EU. I'm here with my cohost Paul Gill. Please work with you, Keith. Nice to work with you, Paul. And we have our first two guests. The cube is hot. I'm telling you we are having interviews before the start of even the show floor I have with me. We gotta start with the customers first enterprise architect, a non-con Aon con. Welcome to the show. >>Thank you so >>Much. Cube time cube time. First now you're at cube alumni. Yep. <laugh> and, and, uh, has Havani CEO. Arai welcome back. Nice to, >>Uh, >>Talk to you again today. So we're talking all things Kubernetes and we're super excited to talk to MoneyGram about their journey to Kubernetes. First question I have for Anon. Talk to us about what your pre Kubernetes landscape looked like. >>Yeah, certainly. Uh, Keith, so, um, we had a, uh, you know, a traditional mix of legacy applications and modern applications. Uh, you know, a few years ago we made the decision to move to a microservices architecture. Um, and this was all happening while we were still on prem. Right? So your traditional VMs, um, and you know, we started 20, 30 microservices, but with the microservices packing, you know, you quickly expand to hundreds of microservices. Um, and we started getting to that stage where managing them without sort of an orchestration platform, uh, and just as traditional VMs was getting to be really challenging, right. Uh, especially from a day two operational, uh, you know, you can manage 10, 15 microservices, but when you start having 50 and so forth, um, all those concerns around, uh, you know, high availability, operational performance. Um, so we started looking at some open source projects, you know, spring cloud. Uh, we are predominantly a Java, um, shop. So we looked at the spring cloud projects. Uh, they give you a number, uh, you know, of initiatives, um, for doing some of those, um, management and what we realized again, to manage those components, um, without sort of a platform was really challenging. So that, that kind of led us to sort of Kubernetes where, um, along with our journey cloud, uh, it was the platform that could help us with a lot of those management operational concerns. >>So as you talk about some of those challenges, pre Kubernetes, what were some of the operational issues that you folks experienced? >>Yeah. You know, uh, certain things like auto scaling is, is number one, right? I mean, that's a fundamental concept of cloud native, right. Is, um, how do you auto scale VMs? Right. Uh, you can put in some old methods and stuff, but, uh, it was really hard to do that automatically. Right. So, uh, Kubernetes with like HPA gives you those out of the box, right? Provided you set the right policies. Uh, you can have auto scaling, uh, where it can scale up and scale back. So we were doing that manually. Right. So before, uh, you know, MoneyGram, obviously, you know, holiday season, people are sending more money mother's day. Um, our ops team would go in basically manually scale, uh, VMs. Right. So we'd go from four instances to maybe eight instances. Right. Uh, but, but that entailed outages. Right. Um, and just to plan around doing that manually and then sort of scale them back was a lot of overhead, a lot of administration overhead. Right. So, uh, we wanted something that could help us do that automatically right. In a, in an efficient, uh, unintrusive way. So, so, you know, that was one of the things, uh, monitoring, um, and, and management, uh, operations, you know, just kind of visibility into how those applications were during, what were the status of your, um, workloads was also a challenge, right. Uh, to do that. >>So, cause see, I gotta ask the question. If someone would've came to me with that problem, I'd just say, you know, what, go to the plug, the cloud, what, how does, uh, your group help solve some of these challenges? What do you guys do? >>Yeah. What, what do we do? So here's my perspective on the market as it's playing out. So I see a bifurcation happening in the Kubernetes space, but there's the Kubernetes run time. So Amazon is EKS Azure as EKS, you know, there's enough of these available. They're not managed services. They're actually really good, frankly. Right? In fact, retail customers, if you're an Amazon, why would you spin up your own? Just use EK. It's awesome. But then there's an operational layer that is needed to run Kubernetes. Uh, my perspective is that, you know, 50,000 enterprises are adopting Kubernetes over the next five to 10 years. And they're all gonna go through the same exact journey and they're all gonna end up, you know, potentially making the same mistake, which is, they're gonna assume that Kubernetes is easy. <laugh> they're gonna say, well, this is not hard. I got this up and running on my laptop. >>This is so easy. No worries. Right. I can do key gas, but then, okay. Can you consistently spin up these things? Can you scale them consistently? Do you have the right blueprints in place? Do you have the right access management in place? Do you have the right policies in place? Can you deploy applications consistently? Do you have monitoring and visibility into those things? Do your developers have access to when they need it? Do you have the right networking layer in place? Do you have the right chargebacks in place? Remember you have multiple teams and by the way, nobody has a single cluster. So you gotta do this across multiple clusters. And some of them have multiple clouds, not because they wanna be multiple clouds because, but sometimes you buy a company and they happen to be in Azure. How many dashboards do you have now across all the open source technologies that you have identified to solve these problems? >>This is where pain lies. So I think that Kubernetes is fundamentally a solve problem. Like our friends at AWS and Azure they've solved this problem. It's like a KSKS et cetera, GK for that matter. They're they're great. And you should use them and don't even think about spinning up Q B and a best clusters. Don't do it. Use the platforms that exist and commensurately on premises. OpenShift is pretty awesome, right? If you like it, use it. But then when it comes to the operations layer, right, that's where today we end up investing in a DevOps team and then an SRE organization that need to become experts in Kubernetes. And that is not tenable, right? Can you let's say unlimited capital unlimited budgets. Can you hire 20 people to do Kubernetes today? >>If you could find them, if >>You can find 'em right. So even if you could, the point is that see, five years ago, when your competitors were not doing Kubernetes, it was a competitive advantage to go build a team to do Kubernetes. So you could move faster today. You know, there's a high chance that your competitors are already buying from a Rafa or somebody like Rafa. So now it's better to take these really, really sharp engineers and have them work on things that make the company money, writing operations for Kubernetes. This is a commodity. Now >>How confident are you that the cloud providers won't get in and do what you do and put you out of business? >>Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think, I mean, in fact, I, I had a conversation with somebody from HBS this morning and I was telling them, I don't think you have a choice. You have to do this right. Competition is not a bad thing. Right? This, the, >>If we are the only company in a space, this is not a space, right. The bet we are making is that every enterprise has, you know, they have an on-prem strategy. They have at least a handful of, everybody's got at least two clouds that they're thinking about. Everybody starts with one cloud and then they have some other cloud that they're also thinking about, um, for them to only rely on one cloud's tools to solve for on-prem plus that second cloud, they potentially, they may have, that's a tough thing to do. Um, and at the same time we as a vendor, I mean the only real reason why startups survive is because you have technology that is truly differentiated, right. Otherwise, right. I mean, you gotta build something that is materially. Interesting. Right. We seem to have, sorry, go ahead. >>No, I was gonna ask you, you actually had me thinking about something, a non yes. MoneyGram big, well known company, a startup, adding, working in a space with Google, VMware, all the biggest names. What brought you to Rafi to solve this operational challenge? >>Yeah. Good question. So when we started out sort of in our Kubernetes, um, you know, we had heard about EKS, uh, and, and we are an AWS shop. So, uh, that was the most natural path. And, and we looked at, um, EKS and, and used that to, you know, create our clusters. Um, but then we realized very quickly that yes, toe's point AWS manages the control plane for you. It gives you the high availability. So you're not managing those components, which is some really heavy lifting. Right. Uh, but then what about all the other things like, you know, centralized dashboard, what about, we need to provision, uh, Kubernetes clusters on multi-cloud right. We have other clouds that we use, uh, or also on prem. Right. Um, how do you do some of that stuff? Right. Um, we, we also, at that time were looking at, uh, other, uh, tools also. >>And I had, I remember come up with an MVP list that we needed to have in place for day one or day two, uh, operations, right. To before we even launch any single applications into production. Um, and my ops team looked at that list. Um, and literally there was only one or two items that they could check, check off with S you know, they they've got the control plane, they've got the cluster provision, but what about all those other components? Uh, and some of that kind of led us down the path of, uh, you know, looking at, Hey, what's out there in this space. And, and we realized pretty quickly that there weren't too many, there were some large providers and capabilities like Antos, but we felt that it was, uh, a little too much for what we were trying to do. You know, at that point in time, we wanted to scale slowly. We wanted to minimize our footprint. Um, and, and Rafa seemed to sort of, uh, was, was a nice mix, uh, you know, uh, from all those different angles, how >>Was, how was the situation affecting your developer experience? >>So, um, so that's a really good question also. So operations was one aspect of, to it, right? The other part is the application development, right? We've got, uh, you know, Moneygrams when a lot of organizations have a plethora of technologies, right? From, from Java to.net to no GS, what have you, right. Um, now as you start saying, okay, now we're going cloud native, and we're gonna start deploying to Kubernetes. Um, there's a fair amount of overhead because a tech stack, all of a sudden goes from, you know, just being Java or just being.net to things like Docker, right? All these container orchestration and deployment concerns, Kubernetes, uh, deployment artifacts, right. I gotta write all this YAML, uh, as my developer say, YAML, hell right. <laugh>, uh, I gotta learn Docker files. I need to figure out, um, a package manager like helm, uh, on top of learning all the Kubernetes artifacts. >>Right. So, um, initially we went with sort of, okay, you know, we can just train our developers. Right. Um, and that was wrong. Right. I mean, you can't assume that everyone is gonna sort of learn all these deployment concerns, uh, and we'll adopt them. Right. Um, uh, there's a lot of stuff that's outside of their sort of core dev domain, uh, that you're putting all this burden on them. Right. So, um, we could not rely on them and to be sort of cube cuddle experts, right. That that's a fair amount, overhead learning curve there. Um, so Rafa again, from their dashboard perspective, right? So the managed cube cuddle gives you that easy access for devs, right. Where they can go and monitor the status of their workloads. Um, they can, they don't have to figure out, you know, configuring all these tools locally just to get it to work. >>Uh, we did some things from a DevOps perspective to basically streamline and automate that process. But then also office order came in and helped us out, uh, on kind of that providing that dashboard. They don't have to worry. They can basically get on through single sign on and have visibility into the status of their deployment. Uh, they can do troubleshooting diagnostics all through a single pane of glass. Right. Which was a key key item. Uh, initially before Rafa, we were doing that command line. Right. And again, just getting some of the tools configured was, was huge. Right. Took us days just to get that. And then the learning curve for development teams, right? Oh, now you gotta, you got the tools now you gotta figure out how to use it. Right. Um, so >>See, talk to me about the, the cloud native infrastructure. When I look at that entire landscaping number, I'm just overwhelmed by it. As a customer, I look at it, I'm like, I, I don't know where to start I'm sure. Or not, you, you folks looked at it and said, wow, there's so many solutions. How do you engage with the ecosystem? You have to be at some level opinionated, but flexible enough to, uh, meet every customer's needs. How, how do you approach that? >>Yeah. So it's a, it's a really tough problem to solve because, so, so the thing about abstraction layers, you know, we all know how that plays out, right? So abstraction layers are fundamentally never the right answer because they will never catch up. Right. Because you're trying to write and layer on top. So then we had to solve the problem, which was, well, we can't be an abstraction layer, but then at the same time, we need to provide some sort of, sort of like centralization standardization. Right. So, so we sort of have this, the following dissonance in our platform, which is actually really important to solve the problem. So we think of a, of a stack as sort of four things. There's the, there's the Kubernetes layer infrastructure layer, um, and EKS is different from ES and it's okay. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, if we try to now bring them all together and make them behave as one, our customers are gonna suffer because there are features in ESS that I really want. >>But then if you write an AB obsession layer, I'm not gonna get 'em so not. Okay. So treat them as individual things. And we logic that we now curate. So every time S for example, goes from 1 22 to 1 23, rewrite a new product, just so my customer can press a button and upgrade these clusters. Similarly, we do this fors, we do this for GK. We it's a really, really hard job, but that's the job. We gotta do it on top of that, you have these things called. Add-ons like my network policy, my access management policy, my et cetera. Right. These things are all actually the same. So whether I'm Anek or a Ks, I want the same access for Keith versus a none. Right. So then those components are sort of the same across doesn't matter how many clusters does money clouds on top of that? You have applications. And when it comes to the developer, in fact, I do the following demo a lot of times because people ask the question, right? Mean, I, I, I, people say things like, I wanna run the same Kubernetes distribution everywhere, because this is like Linux, actually, it's not. So I, I do a demo where I spin up a access to an OpenShift cluster and an EKS cluster and an AKs cluster. And I say, log in, show me which one is, which they're all the same. >>So Anan get, put, make that real for me, I'm sure after this amount of time, developers groups have come to you with things that are snowflakes and you, and as a enterprise architect, you have to make it work within your framework. How has working with RAI made that possible? >>Yeah. So, um, you know, I think one of the very common concerns is right. The whole deployment, right. Uh, toe's point, right. Is you are from an, from a deployment perspective. Uh, it's still using helm. It's still using some of the same tooling, um, right. But, um, how do you Rafa gives us, uh, some tools, you know, they have a, a command line, art cuddle API that essentially we use. Um, we wanted parody, um, across all our different environments, different clusters, you know, it doesn't matter where you're running. Um, so that gives us basically a consistent API for deployment. Um, we've also had, um, challenges, uh, with just some of the tooling in general, that we worked with RA actually to actually extend their, our cuddle API for us, so that we have a better deployment experience for our developers. So, >>Uh Huie how long does this opportunity exist for you? At some point, do the cloud providers figure this out or does the open source community figure out how to do what you've done and, and this opportunity is gone. >>So, so I think back to a platform that I, I think very highly of, which is a highly off, which has been around a long time and continues to live vCenter, I think vCenter is awesome. And it's, it's beautiful. VMware did an incredible job. Uh, what is the job? Its job is to manage VMs, right? But then it's for access. It's also storage. It's also networking and a sex, right? All these things got done because to solve a real problem, you have to think about all the things that come together to solve, help you solve that problem from an operations perspective. Right? My view is that this market needs essentially a vCenter, but for Kubernetes, right. Um, and that is a very broad problem, right. And it's gonna spend, it's not about a cloud, right? I mean, every cloud should build this. I mean, why would they not? It makes sense, Anto success, right. Everybody should have one. But then, you know, the clarity in thinking that the Rafa team seems to have exhibited till date seems to merit an independent company. In my opinion, I think like, I mean, from a technical perspective, this products awesome. Right? I mean, you know, we seem to have, you know, no real competition when it comes to this broad breadth of capabilities, will it last, we'll see, right. I mean, I keep doing Q shows, right? So every year you can ask me that question again. Well, you're >>You make a good point though. I mean, you're up against VMware, you're up against Google. They're both trying to do sort of the same thing you're doing. What's why are you succeeding? >>Maybe it's focus. Maybe it's because of the right experience. I think startups only in hindsight, can one tell why a startup was successful? In all honesty. I, I, I've been in a one or two service in the past. Um, and there's a lot of luck to this. There's a lot of timing to this. I think this timing for a com product like this is perfect. Like three, four years ago, nobody would've cared. Like honestly, nobody would've cared. This is the right time to have a product like this in the market because so many enterprises are now thinking of modernization. And because everybody's doing this, this is like the boots storm problem in HCI. Everybody's doing it. But there's only so many people in the industry who actually understand this problem. So they can't even hire the people. And the CTO said, I gotta go. I don't have the people. I can't fill the, the seats. And then they look for solutions and we are that solution that we're gonna get embedded. And when you have infrastructure software like this embedded in your solution, we're gonna be around with the assuming, obviously we don't score up, right. We're gonna be around with these companies for some time. We're gonna have strong partners for the long term. >>Well, vCenter for Kubernetes, I love to end on that note, intriguing conversation. We could go on forever on this topic, cuz there's a lot of work to do. I think, uh, I don't think this will over be a solve problem for the Kubernetes of cloud native solution. So I think there's a lot of opportunity in that space. Hi, thank you for rejoining the cube. I non con welcome becoming a cube alum. <laugh> I awesome. Thank you. Get your much your profile on the, on the Ken's. Website's really cool from Valencia Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my whole Paul Gillon and you're watching the cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>Hey, welcome back to live coverage in San Francisco, California, the cubes coverage of 80 west summit, 2022 here in SF and NYC New York city. Summit's coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. Check it out. Okay. We've got a great guest here. C Bhan co and CEO RAI systems. Welcome to the cube, hot startup and growing company. And Kubernetes is great to see you. >>Yeah, John, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Great to have you on. So Cubans coming up, you got cloud native here at AWS. You guys in the middle of it, take a minute to explain what your company does. Sure. >>So 50,000 enterprises are going to modernize in the next five to 10 years. They're all going to run into the exact same problem, which is they're gonna choose Kubernetes as the orchestra platform. And then they're gonna invest in building a platform essentially on top of Kubernetes so that their internal consumers, that developers can consume it. That requires a lot, a lot of effort. We, lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of effort, what we did was we thought about entire journey for Kubernetes operations that a team would go through and we package that as an offering. It's a SaaS product that you can consume. You can make it work with Amazon's Kubernetes, Azures Kubernetes, Googles, Kubernetes, upstream, Kubernetes, but then you can move significantly faster so that the goal of modernization can be achieved now versus two years more. >>What's the big, uh, opportunity that Kubernetes brings. And what are some of the pain points that are being removed or solved or blockers being removed and pain being reduced? Is it standing up Kubernetes? Is it running it in production? Is it the new revisions? I mean, honestly, it's huge. Yeah. What's the pain point. The customers that you guys solve. >>Yeah. Look, the, the paradox with Kubernetes is when it's working. It's awesome. It's great. And we can move it fast, but to get there, it's hard. Yeah. So simple things as a starting point, how do I provision my infrastructure repeatedly in the same way with the right blueprints? How do I make sure they all look the same? How do I make sure John can access certain things? And he cannot, how do I make sure the right policies are set up? How do I make sure consistent deployment is happening? Can I watch every we think, and I measure everything and we are not beyond basic things, right? Yeah. I need to back this up, you know, on and on. I need to do cost management. I need to network policy management. I need service management. You already built the team now. Right? Each of these is, is, is multiple people's jobs sometimes. Right? So it's really complicated. But again, everybody is investing. This is complexity. It's complexity. Yes. But people are investing in this because everybody understands now that once this is all working, the beauty, the, the P the pace at which you can run is exactly what we were promised five, six years ago when we were all told about modernization. Yeah. So the, when you get there, it's awesome. And we are helping companies get there significantly faster. Then they would've had, were they not working with a company? >>It's it really is a holy grail kind of orchestration layer if it works. And a lot of people, even myself, which a big fan of Kubernetes, caution, cautions over the oo problem, which is the clusters are up. I can't find talent to run them. They're too hard. Um, that's kind of in the back of people's minds and there's a lot of scar tissue around that. Uh, and then a little bit of open stack, you know, is it too hard, too hard? So the question is, is that what needs to happen to be successful with Kubernetes to make that go faster? So that's easy to deploy. Exactly. Yeah. And what what's your product do? Is it software open source? Yeah. What's, what's your product? >>The, the key here is repeatably usable automation. It's automation that it can use again and again, and it's flexible enough that it solves for many companies problem. You know, the funny thing is, and this is something that took me a while to figure out whether we have a financial services customer or an insurance company, or a healthcare company, or a high tech company, you know, what their problems are exactly the same. <laugh> when it comes to Kubernetes, it's all the same, right? So we figured out what it takes to build that automation in a repeatable fashion so that we could essentially sell it as a product. Our product is a SaaS product. Um, and once you have the right automation in place that you can ideally consume as a service, then now the beauty is that the people who are using it on a day to day basis, they don't need to be as expert at Kubernetes as today. Yeah. And that's the issue today? The issue is, you know, people, I've seen ads now where people say, you know, looking for Kubernetes expertise, 10 years, minimum experience, okay, that's ridiculous. Right. But you see these ads out there, right? Because people are rude about it, a tool like this makes it easy for you to take your existing skillset, existing resources and allow them to become Kubernetes. >>That's the key. I think that's the key in my mind is like hiring talent for these, I call DevOps glass eating projects, cuz it's hard. Yep. Some of this stuff's hard when you get down to the early stuff. And even in the hyperscalers, you look at the early hyperscalers, they were rolling their own and they were rock stars. And they were like the 1% of top developers. Right? Yep. And now you have general audiences who just want to code. Yep. They want abstractions. They want Kubernetes as a service. Uh, and they want all the benefits. And even if they could hire the Oddsly hiring the low level core people yeah. Is hard. Yeah. >>It takes time. Yeah. >>Absolutely. That's a core problem you guys solve. >>Absolutely. I think look, the, the one thing that every enterprise you think about is when the, the big companies, the hyperscale is that you mentioned that build this themselves when they us out 5, 6, 7, whatever years ago, when, you know, even some, some of them pre Kubernetes, it was a competitive advantage to roll this out because nobody else was doing it now as, as an enterprise who is trying to use software to move faster. Yeah. It's actually a competitive disadvantage because now you're building your own product. And now you're building this thing called Kubernetes that doesn't make any sense, focus your application, focus on your products, roll them out faster, and then essentially reuse the learnings from the market. Right. That's what we are doing. Really? What, what are we doing? We're taking the best practices of this industry and packaging that up into an easy to consume platform. That's awesome. That's it? >>Well, we'll see you in Cooper, Cuban, not Kubernetes contest in Valencia. Yep. Uh, and thanks for coming on. I know we didn't have a lot of time to drill into it, um, here, but great to meet you and the company. Final question as a co-founder what's your north star, you got, you got a company to run in. Bill got employees, you're managing and hiring inspiring. What's the north star for the company. >>So I'd say, I mean, the phrase that I, that, that I think about when, when you say north star is, is loyalty with urgency. >>So loyalty to whom? Yeah. It's to my team, right? My team comes first beyond before anything else. Right? And then my customers, right? My customers, many, many of our, our customers even now, right? We a four old company, they have my cell phone number and people call me at odd hours and I will show up. I will get people on a call. I will show up. Right. That's critical. But with urgency now my customer needs help. It needs to happen now. Not tomorrow, not next week. My team has heard me say this a thousand times, by the way, not tomorrow, not next week now. And this, if you do this in a startup, you will be successful. >>Yeah. I mean, you gotta make the market as the founder, inspiring people, product market fits huge. Yep. Getting that scale point. Yep. Where you're got the value proposition in position you're in mode to scale, you got visibility on unit economics. It's hard. Yep. It's super hard look. Good news is you get in a good area. Cloud native Kubernetes, automation, cloud, native modernization of apps. Super hot right now. Yeah. Big >>Time. Yeah. Look, I mean, you know, of course you, you want your teams to be topnotch. Right. But I gotta tell you there's a lot of luck and timing to everything. >>Exactly. >>Timing is in hindsight, nobody times anything. Right. So we have, time is perfect, but it's luck. Yeah. Right. We're very lucky. We're we have the right team. We're doing a great job. I think our customers are very happy. What we've rebuilt and uh, you know, look forward >>To Steve. You're humble. And you're a humble person. I can tell. I don't believe in luck. I think you make luck. I think luck is just part of the hustle, making those phone calls, doing those calls, doing the right things, grinding. And then when you get the shot, you're ready. Yeah. Yeah. So congratulations. Thanks for coming the queue. Appreciate it. Appreciate your time, sir. Nice to meet you coverage here in San Francisco, back with more day, two coverage. After this short break, stay with us.

(light music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a special CUBE Conversation here in SiliconANGLE Media's, Palo Alto Studio. Happy to bring back to the program Haseeb Budhani who, last time I talked to Haseeb, Haseeb worked at a number of interesting startups, been a Chief Product Officer, had many various roles, and today, is a founder and CEO. So, we always love to have back CUBE alums, especially doing interesting things, getting out there with that entrepreneurial spirit, so, Haseeb, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to see you and the first time you and I met, the stage was not as nice as this. That was many, many, many years ago. >> You know, we've been growing up a bit, just like the ecosystems around us. You and I talked about things like replication, changing with data and storage and everything else in various roles so, Rafay Systems, tell us a little bit. What was the inspiration? Tell us a little bit about the founding team, the why the company first. >> Sure. As you know, right before Rafay Systems, I started a company called Soha. Soha was acquired by Akamai 18 odd months ago. I think we all, we learn by failing. There was one specific thing we did very poorly at Soha, which was how we ran operations, how we thought about getting closer to our users and so on, that once we left Akamai, so my co-founder from Soha and I are doing this company again together, he was our VP of Attorney there, he's our VP of Attorney here. When we left Akamai after our stint there, we spent time thinking about what kind of applications have, when you kind of think in terms of an application stack, some microservices in an application stack are always going to need to be as close to the end point as possible. So we were trying to figure out who has that problem and how do they solve it. So, here's what we found. Many, many applications have this problem, nobody knows how to solve it well. I mean, if you think Siri, there's an edge that Apple is running for that. If you think eBay, there's transactions happening in region and so on. Or when you think IoT, there are edges being created in the IoT world, and we wanted to come up with a framework or a platform to solve these problems well for all these different application developers. So we came up with the concept that we call the Programmable Edge. The idea is that we want to help our customers run certain microservices, the ones that are latency sensitive, as close to their end points as possible. And an end point could be a car, it could be a phone, it could be a sensor, doesn't matter what it is, but we want to help them get their applications out as quickly as possible. >> Yeah. Before we get into some of the technology, Rafay Systems, Soha Systems, where did the names for these come from? >> Soha is my daughter's name. Rafay is my son's name. We have two kids. I don't know what I'm going to do after this. I need a job. I don't know what I'm going to do after this company. But, actually, our VP Marketing at Soha, he was the one who wanted to use his name. So when we started the previous company, I called it Bubble Wrap, because I thought we were wrapping apps in a bubble, I thought that was really cool. Everybody hated it. (laughs) >> Yeah, there are too many puns on popping the bubble or things like that, it would be challenging. >> I thought it was, I still think it's awesome, but nobody liked it. So, he was looking for a name and we had hired a new agency, they were ready to roll out a new website, we didn't have a name. So, in, like, a four hour window, we had to come up with something. He says, "That's a short enough name "and looks like you own the domain anyway, "let's just use that." Of course, my kids love it. Then once we started the second company, it had to be named after my son. >> Your daughter wasn't a little upset that you sold off the company and now have nothing to do with it? >> It was a pretty healthy outcome so I think she's fine. (both laughing) >> Excellent. Talking about microservices applications around the globe. I was at the Adobe Summit recently and, you're right, it's a very different conversation than, say, ZDNs in the past. But it's, "How many instances do I have? "How do I manage that? "What's their concern?" Networking's always been one of those underlying challenges. Think back to the failed XSPs in the 90s, (Haseeb laughs) and when Cloud started 10 plus years ago, it was like, "Oh, are we going to be able to handle that today?" Think back to Citrix and their NetScaler product is one of those secret sauce things in there that those of us in the networking space really understand it but most people, "Oh, SAS is going to be great "and things will just work anywhere on any device anywhere." But there's some real challenges there. >> Haseeb: Absolutely. >> What's that big gap in the market and are there other companies that are trying to help solve this? >> I used to work in NetScaler a long time ago. I don't know if you brought it up because of that, but I think it's an incredibly amazing product that became the foundation of many things. I think two things are happening in our industry that allow companies like ours to exist, at least from an applications perspective. One is containers, the fact that we are now able to package things not as big, fat VMs, but smaller, essentially, process level things. And then microservices, the fact that we have this notion of loose coupling between services and you can have certain APIs that expose things to each other. And if you at least thematically think about it, if there's a loose coupling it can extend them out so long as I get more value out of doing so. And that, fundamentally, is what we think is an interesting thing happening out there. The fact that there are loose couplings, the fact that applications are no longer monolithic allows us to make better decisions about what needs to run where. The challenge is how do you make that happen? The example I always share with people is, let's say, let's imagine for a second that you have access to 100,000 regions all around the world. You have edges everywhere, 100,000 locations where you can run your code. What do you do next? How do you decide which ones you need? Do you need 5,000? Do you need 80,000? That needs to be solved by the platform. We are at a point now, particularly when it comes to locations, that these are no longer decisions that an Ops Team can make. That has to be driven by the platform and the platform that we are envisioning is going to help our customers, basically, in terms of where the code goes, how they think about performance, et cetera. These are things that will be expressed as a policy to our platform and we help them determine where the location should be and so on. >> Alright. Haseeb, I think many of us lost too many hours fighting in the industry of, what was cloud, What wasn't cloud, various definitions, those ontological discussions, academically they make sense. Heck, when I talk to customers today it's not like, "Well, I'm figuring out my public cloud strategy," or this and that. They have a cloud strategy because there's various pieces in there to connect. Edge is one of those. I haven't heard that people don't like the term, but if I'll talk to seven different companies, Edge means a very different thing to all of them. You and I reconnected actually when we'd both written similar articles that said, "Well, Edge does not kill the public cloud." Peter Levine wrote a very interesting piece with that eye-catching title that was like, "Well, Edge is going to have trillions of devices "and there'll be more data at the Edge than anywhere else." And it's like, okay, yes, yes, yes, but that does not mean that public cloud evaporates tomorrow, right? Nice try, Amazon, good luck on your next business. (laughs) Maybe give us a little bit your definition of Edge, but, more importantly, who are the type of customers that you're talking to and what is the opportunity and challenges of that Edge environment? >> Sure. So let's talk about what Edge means. I think we both agree that the word edge is a misnomer and depends. There are many kinds of edges, if you will. A car for a Tesla, that's an edge, right? Because they are running compute jobs on the car. I use the phrase device edge to describe that thing, the car is a device edge. You're also going to have the car talking to things out there somewhere. If two cars are interacting with each other, you don't want that interaction or the rendezvous point for that interaction being very, very far away, you want to be somewhere close by. I call that the infrastructure edge. Now, infrastructure edge, since you asked, I'm going to go down that rabbit hole, you could be running at the edge of the internet. So think Equanex or Digital or anybody who's got massive pairing presence and so on. So that's the internet edge, as far as infrastructure is concerned. But if you talk to an AT&T, because you said depending on who you talk to their idea is different, in AT&T's mind or Verizon's mind, maybe the base station is the edge, so I call that the wireless edge. Again, infrastructure. So, at a very high level, there is the device edge, there is the infrastructure edge, and then there's a cloud. Applications will span all of these things. It's not one or the other, that doesn't make any sense. Any application will have workloads that are best run in Amazon or, of course, now I think we use Amazon like TiVo, Amazon means public cloud. >> Stu: Like Kleenex. (laughs) >> Like Kleenex. >> Exactly. >> Some things will run in the core, and some things will run in the middle, and then some things will run at the edge. Now in this kind of discussion, I didn't describe another kind of edge which is the IoT edge. Within a factory, or some gas location or some oil and gas facility out there where maybe you don't even have good connectivity back to the internet. They're going to probably have an edge on prem at the factory edge. That too is a necessity. So you have lots of data being generated, they're going to put it in that location. So we should maybe stop thinking in terms of an edge, it just depending on the application that you're targeting, that application's sub-components may need to run in different places, but that makes it so much harder. We couldn't even figure out how to run things in a single region in Amazon, or two, people still have trouble running across availability zones in Amazon. Now we're saying, "Hey, you're going to have four edges, "or five edges, and you're going to have 100 locations," how is this going to work? And that is the challenge. That's, of course, the opportunity as well, because there are applications out there, I talked about the car use case, which seems to be a real use case for many car companies, particularly the ones who are going autonomous with their fleets. They have this challenge. Lots of data being generated and they need to process it as quickly as possible because there's lots of noise on the wire. This data problem, data is gravity, you want to, instead of moving data to a location where there is compute, you want to move compute as close to the data as possible. That's the trend I look for when we're looking for customers. Who has lots of data/traffic being generated at the edge? That could be a sensor company, probably do a number of IoT companies that are pushing data up and it turns out that it's a lot of data or they have compliance challenges, they're going to have PAI come out of a region. So these are some of the use cases we were looking at. These use cases are new use cases, even in older applications, there are needs that can be fulfilled with an edge. Here's an example I tend to use to describe the problem, not that this is a use case. When I talk to OVC and I'm trying to explain to them why an edge matters, at least thematically, I ask the question; if you go to an e-commerce site, how much time do you spend buying versus browsing? What is your answer? >> The buying is a very small piece of it. >> Yeah. >> But it's the most important part. >> 99% of the time is spent looking at read-only stuff. Why do we need to go back to the core if you're not buying? What if the inventory could be pushed to the edge and you can just interact and look at the inventory, and when you make a purchase decision that goes to the core? That's what's possible with the edge. In fact, I believe that some number of years down the line, that's how all applications are going to behave. The things that are read-only, state management, state validation, cookie validation for example, for authentication, these are things that are going to happen at the edge of the internet or wherever the edge happens to be, and then actual purchase decisions or state change decisions will happen in the core. >> Alright. Haseeb, explain to us where in the stack your solution fits. You mentioned everything from the hyper-scale clouds to Equanex out to devices in cars and the like, so where is your layer? Where is your secret sauce? >> So we expect to sit at the internet edge, once the wireless edge is a real thing 5G becomes out there, we expect to sit somewhere there, somewhere between the internet edge. We are, the way we think about this is there are aggregation points, on the internet, in the network, where you have need to put compute so you can make aggregate decisions across multiple devices. That's where we are building our company. In terms of the stack, we are essentially helping our customers run their compute. Think of us as a platform where customers can bring their code, if you will. Because at the end of the day it's computing. Yes, it's about traffic and data but you still need to run compute somewhere, so we are helping our customers run that compute at the internet edge or the wireless edge. >> Okay. Are your customers some of the Telcos, MSPs cloud providers and the enterprise or how does that relationship work? >> The ideal customers for us are SAS companies who are running applications on the internet that generate money. They care about performance. And they will pay money if we can cut their performance by whatever factor it happens to be. Providers, service providers, in our mind, are partners for us. So we're engaged actually with a number of providers out there who are trying to figure out how to, basically, monetize their existing infrastructure investments better. And edge is a new concept that has been introduced to them and they, as you know, a lot of providers already have edge strategies and we're trying to getting involved with them to see how we can bring more SAS companies to engage with service providers. Which is a really hard thing today. >> It sounds like you solve problem for some Fortune 1,000 customers too, though? >> Yes. >> So do they get involved also? >> Yes, look, the best way to build a startup is you come up with a thesis and very quickly go find four or five people who absolutely believe in the same thing, and they work with you. So, we've been fortunate enough to find a few folks who say, "Look, this is a problem we've been thinking "about for a while, "let's partner together to build a better solution." That's been going really well. >> Great. So, the company itself, I believe you just launched a few months ago, so. >> Haseeb: We started a few months ago. >> Where is the product? What's the state of the funding? >> How many people do you have? >> Sure. >> How many customers? >> We raised a seed round in November. Seed rounds have gotten larger as well these days. They're like the ACE from 10 years ago. We are at a point now where we are demonstrating our platform to our early customers and by early summer we expect to have people on the platform. So, things are moving fast, but I think this problem is becoming more and more clear to many people. Sometimes people don't call it edge computing, people have all kinds of phrases for it, but when it comes to helping customers get better performance out of their existing stacks, that is a very promising concept to many people running applications on the internet. So we are approaching it from that perspective. Edge happens to be the way we solve the problem, so I guess we're an edge computing company, but end of the day we're trying to make applications run faster on the internet. >> Okay. Last thing, give us a viewpoint the next year or two out, what do you expect to see in this space and how should we be measuring success for your firm? >> Sure. Things always take longer than we think they will. I never want to forget that lesson I learned many years ago. I think, look, it's still early days for edge computing. I think a lot of companies who have been bruised by the problem, in that they've tried to build up pops, or tried to get their logic as close to their end points as possible, are going to be adopting it sooner than others. I think in terms of broader option where any developers tZero thinking of core plus edge, that's a five year out thing, and we should, I mean, that's just out there somewhere. But there's enough companies out there, there's enough new use cases out there in the next couple of years that allow company like ours to exist. In fact, I am quite confident that there are probably five other smart people, smarter than me doing this already. This is a real problem, it needs to be solved. >> Alright, well, Haseeb Budhani, it's great to catch up. Thank you so much for helping us interact with our community, understand where these emerging trends in Edge and everything that happens. Distributed architecture is absolutely our biggest challenges of our time, and I look forward to seeing where you and your customers go in the future. >> Absolutely. Thank you so much, Stu. Appreciate your time. >> Alright. And thank you for joining us. Of course, check out theCUBE.net for all of the videos. Check out wikibon.com where it is absolutely digging in deep to how edge is impacting architectures. Peter Burris, David Floyer and the team digging in deep to understand that more and always love your feedback so feel free to give us any comments back. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (light music)