>> [Narrator} From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome back to theCUBE on cloud. We're talking about developers and well, so many people remember the meme from 2010 of Steve Ballmer jumping around on stage developer, developers and developers. Many people know what is really important about developers they probably read the 2013 book called "The New Kingmakers" by Stephen O'Grady. And I'm really happy to welcome to the program Rachel Stephens who's an industry analyst with RedMonk who was cofounded by the aforementioned Stephen O'Grady. Rachel great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I've had the opportunity to read some of what you've done. We've interacted on social media. We've come to talk at events back when we used to do those in people. In person I don't- >> Busy times >> So glad that you get to come on the program, especially you were the ones that I reached out when we had this developer track. If you could just give our audience a little bit about your background that developer credit that you have because as I joke, I've got a closet full of hoodies but I'm an infrastructure guy by training. I've been learning about, containers and serverless and all this stuff for years but I'm not myself much a developer I've touched a thing or two in the years. >> Yeah. So happy to be here. RedMonk has been around since 2002 and have kind of been beating that developer drum ever since then kind of. As the company, I'm the founder. Stephen James noticed that the decision making the developers is really a driver for what was actually ending up in the enterprise. And as even more true as cloud came onto the scene as open source exploded. And I think it's become a lot more of a common view now but in those early days, it was probably a little bit more of a controversial opinion. But I have been with the firm for coming up on five years now. I work as an industry analyst. We kind of help people understand bottoms up technology adoption trends. So that that's where I spend my time focusing is what's getting used in the enterprise. Why, what kind of trends are happening? And so, yeah, that's where we all come from. That's the history of RedMonk in 30 seconds. >> Awesome. Rachel, you talk about the enterprise and developers. For the longest time I just said there was this huge gap. You talk about bottoms up. It's like, well, developers use the tools that they want. If they don't have to, they don't pay for anything. And the general IT and the business sides of the house were like, "We don't know what those people in the corner are doing, it's important." And things like that. But today it feels like that that's closed a bunch. Where are we in your estimation? Are our developers, do they have a clear seat at the table? The title we had for this is whether the enterprise developer is enterprise developer and oxymoron in 2020, in 2021? >> I think enterprise developers have a lot more practical authority than people give them credit for, especially if you're kind of looking at that old view of the world where everything is driven by a buyer decision or kind of this top down purchasing motion. And we've really seen that authority of what is getting used and why change a lot in the last year, And like last decade, even more of people who are able to choose the tools that meet the job and bring in tools, regardless of whether they may be have that official approval through the right channels. Because of the convenience of trying to get things up and running we are asking developers to do so much right now and to go faster and shifting things left. And so the things that they are responsible for incorporating into the way they are building apps is growing, and so as we are asking developers to do more and to do more quickly, the tools that they need to do those tasks to get these apps built, the decision making is falling to them. This is what I need. This is what needs to come in. And so we are seeing basically the tools that enterprise are using are the tools that developers want to be using and they kind of just find their way into the enterprise. >> Now, I want to key off what you were talking about. Just developers are being asked to do more and more. We see these pendulum swings in technology. There was a time where it was like, "Well, I'll outsource it because that'll be easier and maybe it'll be less expensive." And number one, we found it wasn't necessarily cheaper. Number two, I couldn't make changes and I didn't understand what was happening. So when I talked to enterprises today absolutely, I need to have skillsets internally. I need to be able to respond to things fast and therefore I need skills and I need people that can build what they have. What do you see? What are those skill sets that are so important today? we've talked so many times over the years there's the skills gap. We don't have enough data scientists. We don't have enough developers. We don't have any of these things. So what do we have? And where were things trending? >> Yeah, it's one of those things for developers where they both have probably the most full tool set that we've seen in this industry in terms of things that are available to them. But it's also really hard because it also indicates that there's just this fragmentation at every level of the stack. And there's this explosion of choice in decisions that is happening up and down the stack of how are we going to build things. And so it's really tricky to be a developer these days in that you are making a lot of decisions, and you are wiring a lot of things together, and you have to be able to navigate a lot of things. And I think one of the things that is interesting here is that we have seen the phrase like full stack developer really carried a lot of panache maybe earlier this decade and has kind of fallen away just because we've realized that it's impossible for anybody to be able to span this whole broad spectrum of all of the things we are asking people to do. So we're seeing this explosion of choice which is meaning that there is a little bit more focus in where developers, we're trying to actually figure out what is my niche, what is it that I'm supposed to focus on? And so it's really just this balancing of act of trying to see this big picture of how to get this all put together and also have this focused area realizing that you have to specialize at some point. >> Rachel is such a great point there we've absolutely seen that Cambrian explosion of developer tools that are out there. If you go to the CNCF as landscape and look at everything out there or go to any of your public cloud providers there's no way that anybody even working for those companies know a good portion of the tools that are out there. So nobody can be a master of everything. How about from a cloud standpoint? There's the discussion of, what do I shift left? Can I just say okay, this piece of it, it can be a managed service, I don't need to think about it versus what skills that I need to have in house? What is it that's important? And obviously, as analysts, we know it varies greatly across companies, but what are some of those top things that we need to make sure that enterprises have the skillset and the tools in house that they should understand and what can they push off to their platform of choice? >> Yeah, I think your comment about managed services is really prescient because one of the trends that we are watching closely it's just this rise of managed services. And it kind of ties back into the concept you had before about like what in NITMSA have like the Nicholas car, IT doesn't matter, and we're pushing this all away. And then we realized, "Oh, we got to bring that all back." But we also realized we really want as enterprises want to be spending our time doing differentiated work and why we're together your entire infrastructure isn't necessarily differentiated for a lot of companies. And so it's trying to find this mix of where can I push my abstraction higher or to find a managed service that can do something for me? And we're seeing that happen in all levels of the stack. And so what we're seeing is this rise of composite apps, where we're going to say, "Okay, I'm going to pull in back end APIs from a whole bunch of tools like Twilio or Stripe or Alsera, or Algolia all of those things are great tools that I can incorporate into my app, and I can have this great user interface that I can use. And then I don't have to worry quite so much about building it all myself but I am responsible for wiring it all together. So I think it's that wired together set of interests that is happening for developers has the tool set that they are spending a lot of time with. So we see the managed services being important playing an important role in how apps are composed. And it's the composition of that app sort of is happening internally. >> One of the regular research items that I see at a RedMonk is, what languages, where are the trends going? There's been some relative stability but then some things change. I look at the tool set, you mentioned full stack developer. I talked to a full stack developer a couple of years ago and he's like, "Like, ah." Like Terraform is my life and I love everything and I've used it forever. And that was 18 months. And I kind of laugh because it's like, okay, I measure a lot of the technologies that I use in the decades, not that, "Oh wait, this came out six months ago and it's kind of mature." And of course, CICD come on, if it's six weeks old it's probably gone through a lot of iterations. So what do you say, do you have any research that you can share as to looking forward? What are the skill sets we need? How should we be training our force? What do we need to be looking at in this kind of next decade of cloud? >> Yeah, so when you spoke about languages we do a semi-annual review of language usage as seen on GitHub and discussion as seen on Stack Overflow which we fully recognize is not a perfect representation of how these languages are used in the broader world but those are data sets that we have access to that are relatively large and open. So just before anyone writes me, angry letters I said that's not the way that we should be doing it (laughs) but one of the things that we've seen over time is that there is a lot of relative stability in those top tier languages in terms of how they are used. And there's some movement at the bottom but the trends we're seeing where the languages are moving is type safety and having a safer language and the communities that are building upon other communities. So things like we're seeing Kotlin, that is able to kind of piggyback off of being a JVM based language and having that support from Google or we're seeing TypeScript where it can piggyback off of the breadth of deployment of JavaScript, things like that. So those things where we're combining together multiple trends that developers are interested in the same time, combined with an ecosystem that's already rich and full. And so we're seeing that there's definitely still movement in languages that people are interested in but also language on its own is probably pretty stable. So as you start to make language choices as a developer that's not where we're seeing a ton of like turnover. Language frameworks on the other hand, like if you're a JavaScript developer and all of a sudden, there's just explosion of frameworks that you need to choose from. That's maybe a different story, a lot more turnover there and harder to predict, but language trends are a little bit more stable over time. >> There's a lot change. Changing over time. Boy, I got to dig into, relatively recently I went down like the JAMStack ecosystem I've been digging into serverless for a number of years. What's your take on that? There's certain people I talked to and they're like, "I don't even need to be a coder. I can be a marketing person, and I can get things done." When I talked to some developers they're like, "Citizen developers, they're not developers, come on. I really need to be able to do this." So I'll give you your choice as to, serverless and some of these trends to kind of expand who can code and develop. >> Yeah, so for both trans like JAMstack and serverless, one of the things that we see kind of early in the iteration of a technology is that it is definitely not going to be the right tool for every app. And the number of apps that they approach will fit for, will grow as the tool develops and that you add more functionality over time. And all of these platforms expand the capability but definitely not the correct tool choice in every case. That said we do watch both of those areas with extreme interest in terms of what this next generation of apps can look like and probably will look like in a lot of cases. And I think that it is super interesting to think about who gets to build these apps, because I think one of the things that we probably haven't landed on the right language yet is what we should call these people because I don't think anyone associates themselves as a low code person, like if you're someone from marketing and all of a sudden you can build something technical that's really cool. And you're excited about that nobody else on your team can build. You're not walking around saying, "I am a low code marketing person" Like that's demeaning. Like I know I'm a technical marketer. Look what I just did. And if you're someone who codes professionally for a living and you use a low code tool to get something out the door quickly and you don't want to demean or say, "oh hi, I did a low code, that in a sec." Everybody is just trying to solve problems. And everybody is trying to figure out how to do things in the most effective way possible and making trade offs all the time. And so I don't think that the language of low code really is anything that resonates with any of the actual users of low code tools. And so I think that's something that we as an industry need to work on finding the correct language because it doesn't feel like we've landed there yet. >> Yeah, quick Rachel, what want to get your take on just careers for developers now to think about in 2020, everyone is distributed lots of conversations about where do we work? Can we bring your remote? Many of the developers I talked to already were remote. I had a chance to interview the head of remote for GitHub there were over a thousand people and they're fully remote. So, remote absolutely a thing for developers. But if you talk about careers it's no longer, "Oh, Hey, here's my CV." It's, "I'm on GitHub. You can see the code I've done." We haven't talked about open source yet. So give us your take on kind of developers today, career paths and kind of the online community there. >> Yeah. Oh, this could be its whole own conversation. (laughs) I'll try to figure it out the, my points. So I think one of the things that we are trying to figure out in terms of balance is how much are we expecting people to have done on the side? It's like a side project hustle versus doing exclusively getting your job done and not worrying too much about how many green squares you have on your GitHub profile. And I think it's a really emotional and fraught discussion in a lot of quarters because it can be exclusionary for people saying that you need to be spending your time on the side, working on this open source project because there are people who have very different life circumstances. Like if you're someone who already has kids or you're doing elder care or you are working another job and trying to transition into becoming a developer, it's a lot to ask these people to also have a side hustle. That said, it is probably working on open source having an understanding of how tools are done, having this experience and skills that you can point to and contributions you can point to, is probably one of the cleaner ways that you can start to move in the industry and break through to the industry because you can show your skills to other employers. You can kind of maybe make your way in as a junior developer because you've worked on a project and you make those connections. And so it's really still, again, it's one of those balancing act things where there's not a perfect answer because there really is two correct sides of this argument. And both of the things are true at the same time where it's it's hard to figure out what that early career path maybe looks like or even advancing in a career path if you're already a developer, it's, it's tricky. >> Well, I want to get your take on something too. I go back a decade or two, when I started working with Linux about 20 years ago back in the crazy days where it was just kind of lot of work and patches everywhere, and lots of different companies trying to figure out what they would be doing. And most of the people contributing to the free software before we even were calling it open source most of the time it was their side hustle. It was the thing they're doing. It was their passion project. I've seen some research in the last year or so that says the majority of people that are contributing to open source are doing it for their day job. Obviously there's lots of big companies. There's plenty of small companies. When I go to the Linux Foundation shows I mean, you've got whole companies that, that's their whole business. So I want to get your take on governance, contribution from the individual versus companies there's a lot of change going on there. Heck the public clouds, their impact on what's happening open source. What are you seeing there? And what's good, what's bad? What do we need to do better as a community? >> Yeah, I think the governance of opensource projects is definitely a live conversation that we're having right now about what does this need to look like? What role do companies need to be having, and how things are put together is a contribution or leadership position in the name of the individual or the name of the company. Like all of these are live conversations that are ongoing in a lot of communities. I think one of the things that is interesting overall though is just watching if you're taking a really zoomed out view of what open source looks like, where it was at one point deemed at cancer by one of the vendors in this space, and now it is something that is just absolutely, an inherent part of most tech vendors and end users is an important part of how they are building and using software today. Like open source is really an integral tool in what is happening in the enterprise and what's being built in the enterprise. And so I think that it is a natural thing that this conversation is evolving in terms of what is the enterprise's role here and how are we supposed to govern for that? And I don't think that we have landed on all the correct answers yet but I think that just looking at that long view it makes sense that this is an area where we are spending some time focusing. >> So Rachel, without giving away state secrets we know RedMonk, you do lots of consulting out there. What advice do you give to the industry? We said, we're making progress. There's good things there. But if we say, okay, I want to at 2030, look back and say, "Boy, this is wonderful for developers, everything's going good." What things have we've done along the way, where have we made progress? >> Yeah, so I think it kind of ties back to the earlier discussion we were having around composite apps and thinking about what that developer experience looks like, I think that right now it is incredibly difficult for developers to be wiring everything together. And there's just so much for developers to do to actually, get all of these apps from source to production. So when we talk with our customers, a lot of our time is spent thinking, how can you not only solve this individual piece of the puzzle, but how can you figure out how to fit it into this broader picture of what it is the developers are trying to accomplish? How can you think about where you're art fits not only your tool or your project whatever it is that you are working on, how does this fit? Not only in terms of your one unique problem space but where does this problem space fit in the broader landscape? Because I think that's going to be a really key element of what the developer experience looks like in the next decade, is trying to help people actually, get everything wired together in a coherent way. >> Rachel, no shortage of work to do there, really appreciate you joining us thrilled to have you finally as a CUBE alumni. Thanks so much for joining. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> All right. Thank you for joining us. This is the Developer Content for theCUBE on cloud. I'm Stu Miniman. And as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe, these are Cloud Native Insights. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. We talk about cloud native, we're talking about how customers can take advantage of the innovation and agility that's out there in the clouds, one of the undercurrents, not so hidden if you've been watching the program so far. We've talked a bit about serverless, say something that's helping remove the friction, allowed developers to take advantage of technology and definitely move really fast. So I'm really happy to welcome to the program, for coming from Fauna. First of all, I have the CTO and Co-founder, who's Evan Weaver. And also joining him is the new CEO Eric Berg. They said, both from Fauna, talking serverless, talking data as an API and talking the modern database. So first of all, thank you both for joining us. >> Thanks for having us Stu. >> Hi, good to be here. >> All right, so Evan, we're going to start with you. I love talking to founders always. If you could take us back a little bit, Fauna as a project first before it was a company, you of course were an early employee at Twitter. So if you could just bring us back a little bit, what created the Fauna project and bring us through a brief history if you would. >> So I was employee 15 and Twitter, I joined in 2008. And I had a database background, I was sort of a performance analyst and worked on Ruby on Rails sites at CNET networks with the team that went on to found GitHub actually. Now I went to Twitter 'cause I wanted Twitter the product to stay alive. And for no greater ambition than that. And I ended up running the back end engineering team there and building out all the distributed storage for the core business objects, tweets, timelines, the social graph, image storage, the cache, that kind of thing. And this was early in the cloud era. API's were new and weird. You couldn't get Amazon EC2 off the shelf easily. We were racking hardware and code ancient center. And there were no databases or platforms for data of any kind. They really let us the Twitter engineering team focus on building the product. And we did a lot of open source work there. Some of which has influenced Fauna, originally, Twitter's open source was hosted on the Fauna GitHub account, which predated Twitter like you mentioned. And I was there for four years build out the team, basically scaled the site, especially scaled the Twitter.com API. And we just never found a platform which was suitable for what we were trying to accomplish. Like a lot of what Twitter did was itself a platform. We had developers all over the world using the Twitter API to interact with tweets. And we're frustrated that we basically had to become specialists in data systems because there wasn't a data API, we can just build the product on. And ultimately, then data API that we wished we had, is now Fauna. >> Well, it's a story we've loved hearing. And it's fascinating one, is that the marketplace wasn't doing what we needed. Often open source is a piece of that, how do we scale that out? How do we build that? Realized that the problem that you have is what others have. And hey, maybe there's a company. So could you give us that transition, Fauna as a product, as a company, where was it understood that, hey, there's a lot of other people that can take advantage from some of the same tools that you needed before. >> I mean, we saw it in the developers working with the Twitter platform. We weren't like, your traditional database experiences, either manage cloud or on-prem, you have to administrate the machine, and you're responsible for its security and its availability and its location and backups and all that kind of thing. People building against Twitter's API weren't doing that. They're just using the web interface that we provided to them. It was our responsibility as a platform provider. We saw lots of successful companies being built on the API, but obviously, it was limited specifically to interacting with tweets. And we also saw peers from Twitter who went on to found companies, other people we knew in the startup scene, struggling to just get something out the door, because they had to do all this undifferentiated heavy lifting, which didn't contribute to their product at all, if they did succeed and they struggled with scalability problems and security problems and that kind of thing. And I think it's been a drag on the market overall, we're essentially, in cloud services. We're more or less built for the enterprise for mature and mid market and enterprise companies that already had resources to put behind these things, then wasn't sort of the cloud equivalent of the web, where individuals, people with fewer resources, people starting new projects, people doing more speculative work, which is what we originally and Jack was doing at Twitter, it just get going and build dynamic web applications. So I think the move to cloud kind of left this gap, which ultimately was starting to be filled with serverless, in particular, that we sort of backtracked from the productivity of the '90s with the lamp era, you can do everything on a single machine, nobody bothered you, you didn't have to pay anyone, just RPM install and you're good to go. To this Kubernetes, containers, cloud, multi site, multi region world where it's just too hard to get a basic product out the door and now serverless is sort of brought that around full circle, we see people building those products again, because the tools have probably matured. >> Well, Evan, I really appreciate you helping set the table. I think you've clearly articulated some of the big challenges we're seeing in the industry right now. Eric, I want to bring you into the conversation. So you relatively recently brought in as CEO, came from Okta a company that is also doing quite well. So give us if you could really the business opportunity here, serverless is not exactly the most mature market, there's a lot of interest excitement, we've been tracking it for years and see some good growth. But what brought you in and what do you see is that big opportunity. >> Yeah, absolutely, so the first thing I'll comment on is what, when I was looking for my next opportunity, what was really important is to, I think you can build some of the most interesting businesses and companies when there are significant technological shifts happening. Okta, which you mentioned, took advantage of the fact of SaaS application, really being adopted by enterprise, which back in 2009, wasn't an exactly a known thing. And similarly, when I look at Fauna, the move that Evan talked about, which is really the maturation of serverless. And therefore, that as an underpinning for a new type of applications is really just starting to take hold. And so then there creates opportunities that for a variety of different people in that stack that to build interesting businesses and obviously, the databases is an incredibly important part of that. And the other thing I've mentioned is that, a lot of people don't know this but there's a very good chunk of Okta's business, which is what they call their customer identity business, which is basically, servicing of identity is a set of API's that people can integrate into their applications. And you see a lot of enterprises using this as a part of their digital transformation effort. And so I was very familiar with that model and how prevalent, how much investment, how much aid was out there for customers, as every company becoming a software company and needing to rethink their business and build applications. And so you put those two trends together and you just see that serverless is going to be able to meet the needs of a lot of those companies. And as Evan mentioned, databases in general and traditionally have come with a lot of complexity from an operational perspective. And so when you look at the technology and some of the problems that Fauna has solved, in terms of really removing all of that operational burden when it comes to starting with and scaling a database, not only locally but globally. It's sort of a new, no brainer, everybody would love to have a database that scales, that is reliable and secure that they don't have to manage. >> Yeah, Eric, one follow up question for you. I think back a few years ago, you talked to companies and it's like, okay, database is the center of my business. It's a big expense. I have a team that works on it. There have been dealt so much change in the database market than most customers I talked to, is I have lots of solutions out there. I'm using Mongo, I've got Snowflake, Amazon has flavors of things I'm looking at. Snowflake just filed for their IPO, so we see the growth in the space. So maybe if you could just obviously serverless is a differentiation. There's a couple of solutions out there, like from Amazon or whether Aurora serverless solution but how does Fauna look to differentiate. Could you give us a little bit of kind of compared to the market out there? >> Sure, yeah, so at the high level, just to clarify, at the super high level for databases, there tends to be two types operational databases and then data warehouse which Snowflake is an example of a data warehouse. And as you probably already know, the former CEO of Snowflake is actually a chairman of Fauna. So Bob Muglia. So we have a lot of good insight into that business. But Fauna is very much on the operational database side. So the other half of that market, if you will, so really focused on being the core operational store for your application. And I think Evan mentioned it a little bit, there's been a lot of the transformation that's happened if we rewind all the way back to the early '90s, when it was Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server were kind of the big players there. And then as those architectures basically hit limits, when it came to applications moving to the web, you had this whole rise in a lot of different no SQL solutions, but those solutions sort of gave up on some of the promises of a relational database in order to achieve some of the ability to scale in the performance required at the web. But we required then a little bit more sophistication, intelligence, in order to be able to basically create logic in your application that could make up for the fact that those databases didn't actually deliver on the promises of traditional relational databases. And so, enter Fauna and it's really sort of a combination of those two things, which is providing the trust, the security and reliability of a traditional relational database, but offering it as serverless, as we talked about, at the scale that you need it for a web application. And so it's a very interesting combination of those capabilities that we think, as Evan was talking about, allows people who don't have large DevOps teams or very sophisticated developers who can code around some of the limitations of these other databases, to really be able to use a database for what they're looking for. What I write to it is what I'm going to read from it and that we maintain that commitment and make that super easy. >> Yeah, it's important to know that the part of the reason that operational database, the database for mission critical business data has remained a cost center is because the conventional wisdom was that something like Fauna was impossible to build. People said, you literally cannot in information science create a global API for data which is transactional and consistent and suitable for relying on, for mission critical, user login, banking payments, user generated content, social graphs, internal IT data, anything that's irreplaceable. People said, there can be no general service that can do this ubiquitously a global internet scale, you have to do it specifically. So it's sort of like, we had no power company. Instead, you could call up Amazon, they drive a truck with a generator to your house and hook you up. And you're like, right on, I didn't have to like, install the generator myself. But like, it's not a good experience. It's still a pain in the neck, it's still specific to the location you're at. It's not getting utility computing from the cloud the way, it's been a dream for many decades that we get all our services through brokers and API's and the web and it's finally real with serverless. I want to emphasize that the Fauna it technology is new and novel. And based on and inspired by our experience at Twitter and also academic research with some of our advisors like Dr. Daniel Abadi. It's one of the things that attracted us, Snowflake chairman to our company that we'd solve groundbreaking problems in information science in the cloud, just the way Snowflakes had. >> Yeah, well and Evan, yeah please go on Eric. >> Yeah, I'm just going to have one thing to that, which is, in addition, I think when you think about Fauna and you mentioned MongoDB, I think they're one of a great examples of database companies over the last decade, who's been able to build a standalone business. And if you look at it from a business model perspective, the thing that was really successful for them is they didn't go into try to necessarily like, rip and replace in big database migrations, they started evolving with a new class of developers and new applications that were being developed and then rode that obviously into sort of a land and expand model into enterprises over time. And so when you think about Fauna from your business value proposition is harnessing the technological innovation that Evan talked about. And then combining this with a product that bottoms up developer first business motion that kind of rides this technological shift into you creating a presence in the database market over time. >> Well, Evan, I just want to go back to that, it's impossible comment that you made, a lot of people they learn about a technology and they feel that that's the way the technology works. Serverless is obviously often misunderstood from the name itself, too. We had a conversation with Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS a couple years ago, and he said, "If I could rebuild AWS from the ground up today, "it would be using all serverless," that doesn't mean only lambda, but they're rebuilding a lot of their pieces underneath it. So I've looked at the container world and we're only starting the last year or so, talking about people using databases with Kubernetes and containers, so what is it that allows you to be able to have as you said, there's the consistency. So we're talking about acid there, not worry about things like cold starts, which are thing lots of people are concerned about when it comes to serverless and help us understand a little bit that what you do and the underlying technologies that you leverage. >> Yeah, databases are always the last to evolve because they're the riskiest to change and the hardest to build. And basically, through the cloud era, we've done this lift and shift of existing on premises solutions, especially with databases into cloud machines, but it's still the metaphor of the physical computer, which is the overriding unit of granularity mental concept, everything like you mentioned, containers, like we had machines then we had Vms, now we have containers, it's still a computer. And the database goes in that one computer, in one spot and it sits there and you got to talk to it. Wherever that is in the world, no matter how far away it is from you. And people said, well, the relational database is great. You can use locks within a single machine to make sure that you're not conflicting your data when you update it, you going to have transactionality, you can have serialize ability. What do you do, if you want to make that experience highly available at global scale? We went through a series of evolutions as an industry. From initially that the on-prem RDBMS to things like Google's percolator scheme, which essentially scales that up to data center scale and puts different parts of the traditional database on different physical machines on low latency links, but otherwise doesn't change the consistency properties, then to things like Google Spanner, which rely on synchronized atomic clocks to guarantee consistency. Well, not everyone has synchronized atomic clocks just lying around. And they're also, their issues with noisy neighbors and tenancy and things because you have to make sure that you can always read the clock in a consistent amount of time, not just have the time accurate in the first place. And Fauna is based on and inspired and evolved from an algorithm called Calvin, which came out of a buddy's lab at Yale. And what Calvin does is invert the traditional database relationship and say, instead of doing a bunch of work on the disk and then figuring out which transactions won by seeing what time it is, we will create a global pre determined order of transactions which is arbitrary by journaling them and replicating them. And then we will use that to essentially derive the time from the transactions which have already been committed to disk. And then once we know the order, we can say which one's won and didn't win and which happened before, happen after and present the appearance of consistency to all possible observers. And when this paper came out, it came out about a decade ago now I think, it was very opaque. There's a lot of kind of hand waving exercises left to the reader. Some scary statements about how wasn't suitable for things that in particular SQL requires. We met, my co-founder and I met as Fauna chief architect, he worked on my team at Twitter, at one of the database groups. We were building Fauna we were doing our market discovery or prototyping and we knew we needed to be a global API. We knew we needed low latency, high performance at global scale. We looked at Spanner and Spanner couldn't do it. But we found that this paper proposed a way that could and we can see based on our experience at Twitter that you could overcome all these obstacles which had made the paper overall being neglected by industry and it took us quite a while to implement it at industrial quality and scale, to qualify it with analysts and others, prove to the world that it was real. And Eric mentioned Mongo, we did a lot of work with Cassandra as well at Twitter, we're early in the Cassandra community. Like I wrote, the first tutorial for Cassandra where data stacks was founded. These vendors were telling people that you could not have transactionality and scale at the same time, and it was literally impossible. Then we had this incrementalism like things with Spanner. And it wasn't till Fauna that anyone had proved to the world that that just wasn't true. There was more marketing around their failure to solve the information science problem, than something fundamental. >> Eric, I'm wondering if you're able to share just order of magnitude, how many customers you have out there from a partnership standpoint, we'd like to understand a little bit how you work or fit into the public cloud ecosystems out there. I noticed that Alphabets General Venture Fund was one of the contributors to the last raise. And obviously, there's some underlying Google technology there. So if you could just customers and ecosystem. >> Yeah, so as I mentioned, we've had a very aggressive product lead developer go to market. And so we have 10s of thousands of people now on the service, using Fauna at different levels. And now we're focused on, how do we continue to build that momentum, again, going back to the model of focus on a developer lead model, really what we're focused on there is taking everything that Evan just talked about, which is real and very differentiated in terms of the real core tech in the back end and then combining that with a developer experience that makes it extremely easy to use and really, we think that's the magic in terms of what Fauna is bringing, so we got 10s of thousands of users and we got more signing up every day, coming to the service, we have an aggressive free plan there and then they can migrate up to higher paying plans as they consume over time. And the ecosystem, we're aggressively playing in the broader serverless ecosystem. So what we're looking at is as Evan mentioned, sometimes the databases is the last thing to change, it's also not necessarily the first thing that a developer starts from when they think about building their application or their website. And so we're plugging into the larger serverless ecosystem where people are making their choices about potentially their compute platform or maybe a development platform like I know you've talked to the folks over at JAMstack, sorry at Netlify and Purcell, who are big in the JAMstack community and providing really great workflows for new web and application developers on these platforms. And then at the compute layer, obviously, our Amazon, Google, Microsoft all have a serverless compute solution. CloudFlare is doing some really interesting things out at the edge. And so there's a variety of people up and down that stack, if you will, when people are thinking about this new generation of applications that we're plugging into to make sure that the Fauna is that the default database of choice. >> Wonderful, last question, Evan if I could, I love what I got somebody with your background. Talk about just so many different technologies maturing, give us a little bit as to some of the challenges you see serverless ecosystem, what's being attacked, what do we still need to work on? >> I mean, serverless is in the same place that Lamp was in the in the early '90s. We have the old conservatives ecosystem with the JAMstack players that Eric mentioned. We have closed proprietary ecosystems like the AWS stack or the Google Firebase stack. As to your point, Google has also invested in us so they're placing their bets widely. But it's seeing the same kind of criticism. That Lamp, the Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, it's not mature, it's a toy, no one will ever use this for real business. We can't switch from like DV2 or mumps to MySQL, like no one is doing that. The movement and the momentum in serverless is real. And the challenge now is for all the vendors in collaboration with the community of developers to mature the tools as those the products and applications being built on the new more productive stack also mature, so we have to keep ahead of our audience and make sure we start delivering and this is partly why Eric is here. Those those mid market and ultimately enterprise requirements so that business is built on top of Fauna today, can grow like Twitter did from small to giant. >> Yeah, I'd add on to that, this is reminiscent for me, back in 2009 at Okta, we were one of the early ISVs that built on in relied 100% on AWS. At that time there was still, it was very commonplace for people racking and stacking their own boxes and using Colo and we used to have conversations about I wonder how long it's going to be before we exceed the cost of this AWS thing and we go and run our own data centers. And that would be laughable to even consider today, right, no one would ever even think about that. And I think serverless is in a similar situation where the consumption model is very attractive to get started, some people sitting there, is it going to be too expensive as I scale. And as Evan mentioned, when we think about if you fast forward to kind of what the innovation that we can anticipate both technologically and economically it's just going to be the default model that people are going to wonder why they used to spend all these time managing these machines, if they don't have to. >> Evan and Eric, thank you so much, is great to hear the progress that you've made and big supporters, the serverless ecosystem, so excited to watch the progress there. Thanks so much. >> Thanks Stu. >> Thanks for having us Stu. >> All right and I'm Stu Miniman. Stay tuned. Every week we are putting out the Cloud Native Insights. Appreciate. Thank you for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>> Presenter: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe, these are cloud native insights. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. When we launched this program, we talked about, how do we take advantage of the innovation and agility that's in the cloud? And of course, one of the big components that we've talked about for many years on theCUBE is, how do we empower developers? and developers are helping change things, and I'm really happy to welcome to the program first time guests that helped build many of the tools that developers are very well familiar. So Tom Preston Werner, he is the co-founder of Chatterbug, he is the creator of redwoodjs, we had an early episode, the JAMstack Netlify team, he's also on the board for that, and we'll talk about those pieces. People might know him, if you check him out on Wikipedia, you know, GitHub, he was one of the co-founders as well as held both CTO and CEO roles there. I could go on but Tom, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, so let's start there, Tom, you know, when I live in the enterprise space, how do you take advantage of new things? One of the biggest challenges out there is, let's go to something new, but let's do it the old way. And we know that that really doesn't take advantage of it you know, I think back to the oldest, some of the older technologies, it's like, well, you know, if I talk to people that are riding horses, what do they want? You know, well, I want faster horses, not the, you know, let's completely change things. I was hearing a stat that, you know, back in the early days of cars, we had like, 30% of them were electric cars, and now it's one. So what's old is new again, but I digress. One, as I mentioned, you know, GitHub, of course, is, you know, such a fundamental piece when we look at in the technology space over the last decade, you know, get in general, GitHub, specifically, of course, has created so much value engaged, you know, just millions and millions of developers and transform businesses. Take us back a little bit and you know, like to get your philosophy on, you know, building tools, how do you do it? How do you think about it? And what's inspired you? >> Yeah, I think it goes a long way back to just wanting to build things for the community. One of the first big projects I worked on was called Gravatar, and I remember laying in bed staring at the ceiling, just trying to think up some idea that that would contribute to what we then called The Blogosphere, and I came up with an idea for avatars that would follow you around and I coded it up and I got it out to a few bloggers and they started using it, and it caught on and it was really, it really introduced me to this idea that no matter who you are, where you come from, or what your background is, you know, I grew up in Iowa, things are very different there. And with with the Internet, and the ability to code, you can impact the world in really significant ways. And so it follows on from there, and I think GitHub is an extension of that desire to really put things into the world that will be useful for people, and knowing that, if you have the ability to code and especially with the advent of web applications as a common tool, there's such power in that you have global reach, you just need a computer and the ability to code and you can create these things, and GitHub kind of became that. It was just, it started out really as a side project, and I hoped that someday it would be able to support me to work on it full time. But I, we started building it just because we wanted it to exist. And that's most of what I work on is, is just ideas that I want to exist in the world. >> Yeah, it's been one of those great trends to watch at, you know, there were certain technologies that used to have to be a nation state, or, you know, one of the one of the global 50 companies to take advantage of it. Now, tools like GitHub, making it so that, you know, the smallest company or even the individuals can participate in communities, can create and build you know, the building is such an important theme. So Maybe, let's fast forward a little bit if we would, I mentioned Netlify and JAMstack, you talked about the blogosphere, that team is helping to really reinvent how we think about the web, you know, it's real time, It's high performance, and you know, we need to be able to get that to where everybody is. So, you know, back in the early days, web pages, you know, relatively static and, you know, had certain criteria, and now, of course, you know, edge devices and the global population change things. So, you know, you, you've been engaged in a, you know, huge supporter of that project, and that'll lead us towards the redwoods discussion, but maybe bring us as to how you got involved there, and what got you excited? >> Well, like you said, Everything old is new again and I think that's true in fashion. It's also true in technology, in a lot of ways, and the JAMstack really is taking these old ideas where the web started, taking files and just serving them as static files and it's super fast, and it's extremely secure. This is how the internet started, and now we've sort of come full circle. But we've added a lot of really nice things and workflows on top of that. And so my journey into the JAMstack, I suppose, started more than a decade ago, when I started working on a project called Jekyll, that's a, I called it at the time, A Blog Aware Static Site Generator. So you would write your blog articles, and you would run it through Jekyll, and that would take your markdown, you'd write your articles in markdown, and it would combine them with a, some kind of a theme that you would have, and that would output static pages that represented your blog, and then you could serve those from any kind of static blog serving system. GitHub had has one built in called GitHub Pages, and so we ended up adopting Jekyll for GitHub Pages. So everything that you put up on GitHub Pages. would be run through Jekyll, and so it was a really natural place to put your blog. And so I had a blog post, one of my blog posts using Jekyll was called Blogging Like A Hacker. And it was this idea that you don't need WordPress, you don't need to have a database somewhere that's, that's hackable, that's going to cause you security problems, all the WordPress admin stuff that constantly is being attacked. You don't need all that, like you can just write articles in flat files, and then turn them into a blog statically and then put those up to serve them somewhere, right? And so when I say it like that, it sounds a little bit like the JAMstack, right? That's not how we thought about it at the time, because it was really hard to do dynamic things. So if you wanted to have comments on your blog for instance, then you needed to have some third party service that you would embed a component onto your blog, so you could receive comments. And so you had to start gluing things together, but even then, again, that sounds a little bit like the JAMstack. So it's all of these ideas that have been, evolving over the last decade to 15 years, that now we finally have an entire tool chain and adding Git on top of that and Git based workflows, and being able to push to GitHub and someone like Netlify can pick those up and publish them, and you have all these third party services that you can glue together without having to build them yourself. All of the billing things, like there's just the ecosystem is so much more advanced now, so many more bits are available for you to piece together that in a very short amount of time, you can have an extremely performant site capable of taking payments, and doing all of the dynamic things that we want to do. Well, many, I should say many of the dynamic things that we want to do, and it's fast and secure. So it's like the web used to be when the web started, but, now you can do all the modern things that you want to do. >> You're giving me flashbacks remembering how I glued discus into my Tumblr instance when that was rolling out. (laughing) >> That's what I was referring to, discuss. >> Yeah, so absolutely, you talk about there's just such a robust ecosystem out there, and one of the real challenges we have out there is, people will come in and they say, "Oh my gosh, where do I start?" And it's like, well, where do you want to go? There's the Paradox of Choice, and that I believe is one of the things that led you to create Redwoods. So help explain to our audience you know, you created this project Redwood, it related to JAMstack, but, but I'll let you explain you know, what it is in life needed? >> Yeah, Redwood is a response to a couple of things. One of those things, is the JavaScript world has, as everything has evolved in tremendous way, in all kinds of ways and almost entirely positive I think. The language itself has been improved so much from when I was a teenager using view source and copy pasting stuff into you know, some random X Files fan site. To now it's a first class language I can compete with with everything, from a ergonomics perspective. I really enjoy programming in it and I come from a Ruby, Ruby on Rails background and now I'm very happy in JavaScript that was not true even five, seven years ago, right? So JavaScript itself has changed a lot. Along with that comes NPM in the whole packaging universe, of availability of modules, right? So most of the things that you want to do, you can go and you can search and find code that's going to do those things for you, and so being able to, to just pull those into your projects so easily. That is amazing, right? The power that that gives you is tremendous. The problem comes in when, like you said, you have the Paradox of Choice. Now you have, not just one way to do something, but you have 100 ways to do something, right? And now as a as a developer, and especially as a new developer, someone who's just learning how to build web applications, you come into this and you say, all you see is the complexity, just overwhelming complexity, and every language goes through this. They go through a phase of sort of this Cambrian explosion of possibilities as people get excited, and you see that the web is embracing these technologies, and you see what's possible. Everyone gets excited and involved and starts creating solution after solution after solution, often times to the same problems. And that's a good thing, right, like exploring the territory is a good and necessary part of the evolution of programming languages and programming ecosystems. But there's comes a time where that becomes overwhelming and starts to trend towards being a negative. And so at Chatterbug, which is a foreign language learning service, if you want to learn how to speak French or Spanish or German, we'll help you do that, as part of that work, we started using react on the front end, because I really love what react brings you from a JavaScript and interactivity perspective. But along with react, you have to make about 50 other choices of technologies to use to actually create a fully capable website, something for state management, you got to choose a way to do JavaScript or sorry, CSS. There's 100 things that you have to choose, and it's, it seems very arbitrary and you go through a lot of churn, you choose one, and then the next day an article comes out and then people raving about another one, and then you choose, you're like, Oh, that one looks really nice. You know, grass is always greener, and so Redwood is a bit of a, an answer to that, or a response to that, which is to say, we've learned a lot of things now about what works in building with react, especially on the front end. And what I really want to do is have a tool that's more like Ruby on Rails, where I come from, having done years and years of Ruby on Rails, what GitHub was built with. And Ruby on Rails presents to you a fully capable web application framework that has made all the choices or most of the choices, many of the important choices. And the same is kind of missing in the JavaScript TypeScript world and so, when I saw Netlify come out with their feature where you could commit the code for a lambda function to your repository, and if you push that up to GitHub, Netlify will grab it, and they will orchestrate deploying that code to an AWS lambda so that you can run business logic in a lambda but without having to touch AWS, because touching AWS is another gigantic piece of complexity, and their user interfaces are sometimes challenging, I'll say. That, that then made me think that, here finally is the ability to combine everything that's awesome about the JAMstack and static files, and security, and this workflow, with the ability to do business logic, and that sounded to me like the makings of a full stack web application framework, and I kept waiting for someone to come out and be like, hey, tada, like we glued this all together, and here's your thing, that's rails, but for the JAMstack, JavaScript, TypeScript world and nobody was doing it. And so I started working on it myself, and that has become Redwoodjs. >> It's one of the things that excited me the early days when I looked into Serverless was that, that low bar to entry, you know, I didn't have to have, you know, a CS degree or five years of understanding a certain code base to be able to take advantage of it. Feels like you're hoping to extend that, it believe it's one of your passions, you know, helping with with Chatterbug and like, you know, helping people with that learning. What do you feel is the state out there? What's your thoughts about kind of the future of jobs, when it when it comes to this space? >> I think the future of jobs in technology and especially software development is, I mean, there is no, there is no better outlook for any profession than that. I mean, this is the, this is where the world is going, more and more of what we want to accomplish, we do in software and it happens across every industry. I mean, just look at Tesla's for instance, right? You think about automobiles and the car that you owned, you know, 10 years ago, and you're like, I don't know, I know there's a computer in here somewhere, but like, I don't really, you know, either the software for it is terrible, and you're like, who, when was the last time you actually use the navigation system in your car, right? You just like get like just turn that off because it's, it's so horrible. And then Tesla comes along and says, hey, what if we actually made all this stuff useful, and had a thoughtful interface and essentially built a car that where everything was controlled with software, and so now cars are are basically software wrapped in hardware, and the experience is amazing. And the same is true of everything, look at your, look at how many things that your phone has replaced that used to be physical devices. Look at manufacturing processes, look at any any element of bureaucracy, all of this stuff is mediated by computers, and oftentimes it's done badly. But this just shows how much opportunity there is speaking of like governmental websites, right, you go to the DMV, and you try to schedule an appointment, and you just have no confidence that that's going to work out because the interfaces feel like they were written 15 years ago, and sometimes I think they were, written that long ago. But there's so much, there's still so much improvement to be had and all of that is going to take developers to do it. Unless, you know, we figure out how to get AI to do it for us, and there's been some very interesting things lately around that angle, but to me, it's, humans will always be involved. And so, at some level, humans are telling machines what to do, whether you're doing it more or less directly, and having the ability to tell machines what to do gives you tremendous leverage. >> Yeah, we're big fans, if you know Erik Bryjolfsson and Andy McAfee from MIT, they've, you know, are very adamant that it's the combination of people plus machines that always will win against either people alone or machines alone. Tom, what, you know, right now we're in the middle of a global pandemic, there're financially, there's a lot of bad news around the globe right now. I've talked to many entrepreneurs that said, well, a downturn market is actually a great time to start something new. You're an investor, you've helped build lots of things. We talked a lot about lowering the bar for people to create and build new things. What do you see are some of the opportunities out there, if you know, you had to recommend for the entrepreneurs out there? Where should they be looking? >> I'd say look at all of the things in your life that have become challenging, because where there's challenge, where there's pain, there's opportunity for solutions. And especially when there's a big environmental change, which we see right now, with COVID-19, obviously has changed a lot of our behaviors and made some of the things that used to be easy. It's made those a lot harder, and so you see, certain segments of the economy are doing extremely well, namely technology and things that allow us to do interviews like this instead of in person, and so those industries are doing extremely well. So you look at the you look at the stock market in the United States, and it's it's very interesting, because while much of the country is suffering, the people that are already wealthy are doing very well, and technology companies are doing very well. And so the question for me is, what are the opportunities that we have, leveraging technology in the internet, to where we can create more opportunities for more people, to get people back to work, right? I think there's so much opportunity there. Just look at education, like the entire concept of educating kids right now and I have three. So we feel this very much, it has been turned on its head. And so we so you see many people looking for solutions in that space, and that's, I think that's as it should be. When things get, when things get challenged when our, our normal daily experience is so radically changed, there's opportunity there, because people are willing to change more quickly in a crisis, right? Because you need, you need something like any solution. And so some choice is going to be made, and where that's happening, then you can find early adopters more easily, than you can under other circumstances, and so in economic downturns, you often see that kind of behavior where these are crisis moments for people, you have an opportunity to come in and if you have something that could solve a problem for them, then you can get a user where that may have not been a problem for a person before. So where there is, where there is a crisis, there is always opportunity to help people solve their problems in different and better ways to address that crisis. So again, it goes back to pain, you know, and it doesn't have to be the pain from a crisis. It could be a pain from from anything. Just like with GitHub, it was, it was hard to share code as developers like it was, there was too much pain, and this was, we started it in 2008, right after the housing crisis. It was unrelated to that, but it turns out that when you start a company, when the economy is depressed in a certain way, then at least you can look forward to the economy getting better as you are building your company. >> Oh, Tom, Preston Werner, thank you so much for joining pleasure talking with you. I appreciate all of your input. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me. >> I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for joining this Episode of cloud native insights. Thank you for watching the theCUBE. (light music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. And when we kicked off this program, Cloud Native Insights, we wanted to talk about the innovation and agility that's happening, not just Cloud as a location. We're going to draw down a little bit into one of the very important pieces of a company and that's their websites and their applications, that live in that environment. And of course, that comes from a lot of changes over the years. Any of us that have been in tech for a couple of decades have worked from the early days, to of course today's multimedia globally distributed environment and everyone during the global pandemic, of course, has been (indistinct) straining their use of the internet. So really excited to welcome to the program the two co-founders of Netlify. I have Matt Biilmann, who is the CEO, and his co-founder Christian Bach, who is the president both of Netlify really the company behind Jamstack, which we're going to explain and talk about a bit. Matt and Chris, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us >> All right so, let's start with just some of the basics. I expect that some of our audience is not familiar with Jamstack. You do a quick Google search and it's JavaScript, its APIs, its markup. And you say, okay, I understand what a bunch of that means. But, yeah, if you could give us kind of a compare contrast to what web development was before and how Jamstack's really helping to revolutionize what's happening in this space. >> Yes, so for many years, we built websites and web applications with an application based architecture, where every website or every application would be this monolithic application with typically like a load balancer, a set of web servers, application servers, and that database and every request through a page would go through this whole stack it would pass through the application layer, talk to the database, fetch template, merge data and template, build HTML on the fly and send it back to the user. And basically what we saw happening and what's been happening with the Jamstack is this decoupling of the actual front-end presentation layer of the websites and web applications and then the back-end layer. And the advantages there is that if you can really pre-build the front-end application layer, you can take the actual HTML, or an application shell and distribute it across a globally distributed network, you can get it into the hands of the user's browser very quickly. And then the back end, what we've seen happening there is that it's split up to all these different APIs and services you no longer have your one monolithic back end you have all these different services. Where some of your own but a lot of them are other people's services like Stripe or Twilio or Algolia or Contentful. So we've seen this shift to this architecture, where we're considered in a way that the stack has moved up a little from the old tooling where something like the LAMP stack would be common in really naming the programming language, the specific web server, the Linux server, the operating system, and so on right? And then up to a level where it's really about getting an application into the browser, using JavaScript as the runtime and talking to this whole new economy of APIs and services. >> Yeah, Chris I wonder if you could bring us inside your customers and the companies that you talk to. I think about for the longest time it was, maybe I just outsource my web development, but website is one of those key components that I share my value, I share what's going on, I want to be able to change it pretty often and there's so much more that I can do today than I could have done 10 years ago. We've watched that mark. So, help us understand, what skill sets do people need to have? what type of companies are using Jamstack? And, bring in if you can, Netlify. How is this a business and not just, an open source standards movement, that's helping to revolutionize what's happening? >> Absolutely, I mean, First of all, people using this and companies use this is extremely wide. Wide vertical, right? Its very horizontal. This is anyone with a digital property basically, right? I think what we've seen all the time is that, that we have a lot more channels than we used to have, right? So we started off just maybe having the one dot com, right? With limited functionality. And today, you have a multiple channels, right? You have the landing pages, you have the domains, you have lots of activities online. You have mobile apps and commerce is often a big part of it, and I would say especially the last few months, there's a lot of people that had the digital convergence points as one of many. And now it's the only ones, right? So I think it's become extremely important. I also think that when you look at your web infrastructure in general, it has been very complex, right? And you need a lot of different people, right? And you need to maintain staging environments, production lines, development environments. You need to, have a wide set of skills to maintain these things, right? And if a web developer wanted to do a lot of things, right? They have to go and tap DevOps and so on on the shoulder, right? And I think what the Jamstack is about saying, hey, you can get so much further as a web developer. Now, if you take the modern built tools, you can take the Git workflows, and you wrap around the browser that has become a full-fledged operating system and the API economy as Matt was just talking about. You have these workflows, or you potentially have these workflows, where you can get so much further, right? And that's very much Netlify submission. So Netlify saw this opportunity of decoupling the front end from the back end of the building from the hosting of creating an approach to making websites that would be many times faster, 'cause you have multiple points of origin and you don't feel fredurous. It's many times safer. There's not that huge surface area of attack. It's much more scalable, and so on. It was sort of a win-win-win. But the problem was, there was no viable workflow. If you take a traditional CDN, and you put it in, it doesn't matter really, if it's one or the other. As good as they (indistinct) services, they're all meant to sit in front of an origin, right? They're meant to buffer something. And if you have the gems, there's no origin in that way, right? The network in itself has to be an origin so it has to be architectured quite differently. And then there's a lot of things around CDCI and how you server lists and so on. That all had to be sort of re-merged . And Netlify is that glue, it is that platform that takes you from local development all the way out to edge nodes. But allows you to mix and match any tool. So it's not program independent. So you can say, well, we use a build tool, and that's PHP or Ruby or JavaScript, the react or Next or whatever it might be, right? And we use these APIs for this server, for this property. Over here we have a commerce site. Over here, we have a dotcom, that needs a huge enterprise CMS with tons of stakeholders. But the thing is that all of those now becomes something that plugs into your website. Rather than have to drive the website itself. And that's sort of frees up the silos. So when we see people using Netlify, we have companies using Netlify. Big Fitness Company, for example, that own fitness company that uses us for developer documentation, or their marketing sites, but also for their dotcom. But even if you go to the equipment that people have at home, and you log in, that's actually using some very nifty identity and remote based access control for Netlify and if you watch the video there, it's also going through a Netlify player, all right? We have fast food chains that has their dotcom and their marketing sites, but also the kiosks down in the store like the menus, the screens there. Rather than being an old Windows NT server running some .NET application in a dusty corner, why not have it like that? And so, both the category but also Netlify sort of brings in a solution and because it's decoupled from all those architectural choices, that means that you can now use the solution in a much, much wider setting. And we were sort of first to market doing this. They get serverless approach where you just push your serverless functions to get better Netlify. First Feature Deploy Previews Were invented by us and so on. So the Jamstack is an extremely wide fundamental architectural approach that matches basically anyone that wants to build web properties. Netlify is the segnostic wide platform that just makes it possible. >> Yeah, good Chris actually, I saw the Peloton use case up on the website and you're right, a very different experience rather than I bring my device, is it synced? Does it work with it? Really integrates those solutions. And you just brought up serverless, which is actually how I got connected to talk in Netlify. So, Matt, sorry, I think you wanted to jump in there but I was wondering if you could help us. I've looked at serverless and what the promise of serverless of course, is that I don't need to think about that underlying infrastructure. I just like developers build our applications. Well, feels like that's really the same mission that you have. And they're serverless is a piece of your story. So, maybe explain (indistinct) that out a little for us. >> Absolutely, I think it ties in, right? Basically, what we saw just from a architectural perspective was this approach of really decoupling front end and back end and so on and working in a new way that gave a lot of benefits to the inducers in performance and security and so on right? But on the other hand, early on, what we saw was that to adopt that approach, like developers had to deal with lot of different moving pieces like CICD, CDN. What to do about the API endpoints that didn't need to be dynamic, and so on. And as Netlify, what we saw was that we could give one intro and workflow for all of this and make it extremely easy for developers to work with this thing. And serverless plays a really important piece there, right? Because when Amazon pioneered AWS Lambda and took it to the world, right? I think the promise also for the front-end web developers of being able to simply write code and then not have to worry at all about where is it actually running? How are we scaling it? How are we operating it and so on, right? That's a really powerful promise, right? But at the same time, in the same way, what we saw earlier on was that for a front-end team to actually adopt serverless functions as part of the Jamstack, it introduced another level of complexity of now having to manage your serverless functions independent from your front end figuring out API Gateway endpoints for every one of them. And how about deployment pipeline for your functions layer versus deployment pipelines for the actual front end layer that's supposed to talk to those front ends. How about staging environments versus to production environments? How do you manage all that, right? So we saw that there was this inherent incredible potential, but also a lot of complexity, right? And as Netlify we saw that if we could give front end developers a web developers in general, an ene-to-end workflow, where they can work both with the front-end framework, write the code that will get deployed into the browser, but also just have a folder where they can write this serverless functions and then know that Netlify will take care of all of the wiring, right? When you open a pull request and get with new function we'll give you a URL on our globally distributed CDN where you can view both the whole front end, but also the function and sidestep sort of all of the complexities of linking together API Gateways, to functions of managing CICD pipelines and test environments and so on. And in the end, the serverless functions starts becoming a really important part of this Jamstack approach, right? Because you have this world where you have a front end that's often talking to many different APIs and services where again, some of your own and some other people's services. But really often you need some place to glue those together or to build your own custom API endpoint that talks to a couple of them and it has access to server site secrets and so on, right? And this idea of not having to suddenly operate and manage a whole set of servers and infrastructure just for that part of it, but simply just writing the code and then knowing, that you don't have to worry about the operation scalability or anything around that code. That's a really powerful paradigm. >> Yeah, that's one of the real challenges of the Cloud as you talk about the Paradox of Choice. There's so many ways to do things. Not necessarily... It's simple anybody... I was a blogger for many years and it was like, well, I'll just use the self-hosted WordPress, because I don't want to have to worry about that piece of it. Matt, I watched it you did a presentation talking about if I wanted to do WordPress hosted in a AWS that absolutely is not simple. I heard a podcast from one of your board members, Tom Preston Werner, talking about we need to be more opinionated. We need to be able to give more guidance to developers, maybe Chris if you could, how are we when the proliferation of choice, keeps increasing, making sure that people can... How do I make that decision tree? And how do we try to keep it simple? >> Absolutely, I mean, and I actually think that, that's a super relevant question, because you have a lot of choice as a web developer today. Front-end developers used to cut out Photoshop files and turn them into HTML, right? Now with the new advanced markup, and they have all these frameworks and flavors of JavaScript to choose between and there's these powerful build tools, And all those workflows and the browser can do everything you can imagine, right? And so yeah, there is a lot of choice out there, right? And I think, for Netlify what's extremely important is that we are opinionated in the right places. And so when it comes to, for example, a front-end tool and built tools and these things that web developers often face with having to choose between. Our role is to make it as simple as possible to use any of them. But also give you the opportunity of saying, well, this new paradigm allows you to actually mix and match, right? It allows you to use this tool for this property and this tool for this property and gives you a ton of flexibility. But still, come under one roof of a platform like Netlify. And I think that is very powerful. And so we also don't want to choose for you, we want to inform your choices and we want to make it as easy as possible to go and say, hey, these are my needs, what direction should I be going? And of course, we work with enterprise clients, so on migration services, and so on, right? And where we help them a lot with that. But if we locked down on a single flavor, or a single bill tool or a single front end framework, then we also limit the application of what we bring to market and we want to remain a little more open-ended there. But I think there's a lot complexity, a platform like Netlify is all about simplification. So all that wiring that Matt just mentioned, that at least goes, right? You don't spend hours configuring bondage caching and trying to find those edge cases, it just works. And that's a huge game changer for a lot of people, right? But there's definitely parts of the ecosystem that has a lot of choice. And we do our best to inform. And I think, under hand holding part, adjacent to that is the story of, well, do we then start using content management systems? Is this a whole new? Is it out with the old and in with the new? And I would say, you still have a lot of those needs, right? You still have non-technical people, for example, that needs to be able to update and create moves and content, and so on, right? And create content. And so you very often will need and an E-commerce solution or content management systems and so on. But what we're seeing there, is that we're speaking basically with every single major CMS out there. That are saying we're working on a headless system, or we already have a headless version, or we just gone full headless, that means that we work decoupled. So we don't no longer need to build the site. But we just provide like an independent source of content. And then it plugs into a platform like Netlify. So that can bring a lot of simplicity. And now you just have to maintain your content, but you don't have to worry about all the different environments and what is up to date and how does some of the infrastructure look like you press a button that commits to get a default preview, and it looks the same everywhere. >> I'm curious, what impact the current global pandemic has had on Netlify, and your customers. I saw you've got a COVID tracking project that you've done. But also now just there's different considerations when I think about what services I need to access from the web and what kind of connectivity the ultimate end user would have. So, what learnings have you had? What's involved there? >> In, obviously we, it depends a lot on, as Chris mentioned, right? The game circus is adopted horizontally across all kinds of areas and businesses and so on, right? So, we've of course seen businesses in sectors that are having a hard time and on the other hand, we've seen businesses and sectors that are exploding, right? We did immediately when the lockdown started happening and the pandemic started happening we set aside like a free plan for projects working in the space of tackling the information sharing around COVID and finding solutions and so on. And that was really interesting to see you mention the COVID tracking project, right? Which was a project like built a short time by small group of distributed incredibly talented front end developers and scientists and so on, right? And I think it was interesting to see that, how the Jamstack and our tooling and so on also really made it possible for them to build as a small distributed team the set of data information and tooling to a global audience, right? Seeing huge traffic peaks at time and just knowing that their architecture and our infrastructure could handle it for them. >> All right. Chris, I've got one, a little bit off to the side here. When I look at what Netlify is doing, you talk about having an open and independent web. And while we are fully supportive of that, we're a little concerned sometimes. If you look at what's happening across the globe, there's a lot of discussions. Will the internet actually fragment? Will certain countries wall off certain environments? Any concerns there? What do you look at? What are you hearing from your customers when you talk about that mission? >> It's one of the big challenges of all time, right? I think we all maybe took for given the Internet as the standard it became right? The way that you can publish without permission is pretty magnificent, right? And it would be indescribably painful for civilization if we lost that, right? And I think fragmentation is something that we all have to sort of worry around. From the way we see it, is that the web, the traditional monolithic approach, right? To which led to as a web that wasn't secure enough and wasn't scalable enough and wasn't performing enough and that's, for example, what opened the door for mobile applications, right? Where it just didn't make sense to pull in the UI every time you turn the page. So we ended up with a form that's it. We prebuilt the application, you download it, and then you speak to service for anything then atmosphere come up with it, right. And that makes perfect sense. That's basically the same architecture that we're bringing to the web a very large scale. Of course, the problem is that now there are gatekeepers there, right? There people, you have to ask for permission to publish and so on. And, and there are other attempts to say, "Hey, we need a performing web." And there's a very big players out there that say, "Let's come over and just..." Do we even need to call it the Internet? Can we just call it our company website? I'm not going to name any names here, right? But leading down, it's what we've called walled gardens, that are great for absolutely no one except for the company. And what we believe is that if you have a web that is secure and is scalable, and it's performant enough to justify at least the architecture maintaining and not having to run into any walled gardens and still say no, you don't need to use a handful of commercial platforms if you want to be heard rather than have your own web properties on your own custom domains, right? I think that's the part of the open independent viable web that we're fighting for. Basically, one that adopts and keeps adopting an architecture that is something that levels the playing field. And then they would also say, why Netlify? I mean, a few years before we started, like, try configuring your own CDN. And like that was reserved for the very, very large tech players. Now you can comment, you can literally click a button on Netlify, you get custom domain and ACS post process site that's globally distributed, automatically integrated into get. And that's on the premium plan. And so as a startup, you can level set together with everyone else and be available widely across the globe without performance issues, immediately. And so in that way, I'm also seeing that's a democrat sensation of performance, right? That means that, that's great. And for places where you see developing economies, where you often have brownouts, where you often can't depend on having viable services and is locally and so on, this idea of having he cover that and having something that's just automatically, you know what, don't even worry about it, because it's already ready to go in all these packets all around the world. That's a huge game changer. That's actually what we see a lot of adoption of the gems they can never find in those places as well. Guess that's just such a promise to the architecture. So, I hear what you're saying and I'm also very concerned about a fragmented web for political reasons as well across the globe. And from our angle, the way we fight for this is to make sure that it retains using an architecture that makes it accessible for me. >> Yeah, I heard many years ago, a friend of mine said, if you're a technologist it means that in general you are a technology optimist, which I definitely try to be. So, I love Chris how you've just brought in some of the potential opportunity Matt, I want to give you just... People out there they hear like oh, 5G is coming, it's going to completely change the world. Anything that you're seeing on your side as to real opportunities that we will see, just a step function in what your company is using. Jamstack, partnering with Netlify in your ecosystem. What are some of the early things that you see that are exciting you down the line for this? >> Part of it is simply like the whole ecosystem around the gem stalk growing up and the tooling, the APIs, the frameworks available around it, and the level of innovation that's triggered. And especially how it's triggering in... Especially how we're seeing like the potential for small, distributed teams to work together and build things with a global impact in a short time. And I remember a couple of years ago, we did a hackathon with together with freeCodeCamp. And of course, like since it was with freeCodeCamp, it was mostly like teams were mostly fairly new to programming and so on, right? It was pretty amazing to see what over a weekend with this architecture and with this tooling, with the vendors that were present there and helping out and so on, what the small teams could actually get done in a weekend, right? Like I remember the winning team had an app where the whole room would see an image on the main stage screen and then on their phone, try to place that image on the map and you would real time see how people ranked, how close they got and get a winner and so on, right? And that was all just from combining APIs and tooling, like history, like Netlify, like Honor Bee, like Google Maps, and so on, right? And I think, in some way we shouldn't forget just how much this kind of ecosystem of readily available APIs and services around this front end stake. It's allowing people to build things that years ago would have taken a very big team probably like a year to build, and suddenly you can have a relatively small group of relatively new programmers built something really impressive, right? So I think that's a trend we'll see continue accelerating And me and Chris are personally involved in advising and helping out a lot of these new startups in the space that are trying to bring new tooling to the world that makes more and more of these things possible and accessible. >> Well, Chris and Matt, I really appreciate you both joining such an exciting space. Talk about the cloud, agility and innovation, such a robust ecosystem. Thank you so much for joining. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> And I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for joining and look forward to hearing more about your CUBE insight. (soft music)

(soft music) >> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio here for a CUBE conversation. Really like when we can dig into help some of the nonprofits in our industry, going to be talking about, training, helping other people lift up their careers. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guests, Jerome Hardaway. He's the founder of vets who code coming down from Nashville, Jerome, I seem to remember a time where I was able to travel. I did some lovely hiking even saw bear last time I was down in Nashville. Thanks so much for joining us. Roger that. Thank you, a funny story. I saw a cow on the loose while driving on the highway yesterday. So not much has changed. (Jerome laughs) Thank you guys for having me. >> Yeah, it is a little bit of strange times here in the Covert area. I live kind of suburban Massachusetts area. One of my neighbors did report a small bear in the area. I'm definitely seeing more than just the usual, what kind of wild turkeys and the like that we get up in New England, but let's talk about Vets Who Code. So, you're the founder, the name doesn't leave much up for us to guess what you do, but tell us a little bit as to the inspiration and the goals of your organization. Roger that, Vets Who Code is the first veteran founded, operated and led, a remote 501 C three that focuses on training veterans regardless where they are and modern age of technologies. Our stack right now, I would say is focused more towards front-end DevOps with a lot of serverless technologies being built-in. And that's pretty much what exactly what we do well. >> Well awesome, I had been loving digging into the serverless ecosystem the last few years. Definitely an exciting area, help us understand a little bit, who comes and joins this? What skill set do they have to have coming in? And explain a little bit the programs that they can offer that they can be part of. >> Yeah, cool. So we run Vets Who Code like a mixture between a tech company or a tech nonprofit, I guess, using those practices while also using military practices as well. And the people that come in are veterans and military spouses. And we try to use what we call a pattern matching practice, showcasing like. Hey, these are the things, he's been in military. This is how it translates to the tech side. Like, our sit reps is what you guys would call stand up. Kanban is what we would call like systems checks and frag orders, Op orders, things like that, or, our SLPs. So we turn around, we just train them, retrain them. So that way they can understand the lingo, understand how things, how you code, move and communicate and make sure that these guys and girls, they know how the work as JavaScript engineers and a serverless community. As of right now, we've helped 252 veterans in 37 States get jobs, our social economic impacts, then I think it's at 17.6 million right now. So it all from the comfort of their homes, that's like the cool and free, and those are like the coolest things that we've been able to do. >> Wow, that's fascinating. Jerome, I heard something that you've talked about, leveraging the military organizational styles. I'm just curious, there's in the coding world a lot of times we talk about Conway's law, which is that the code will end up resembling the look of the organization. And you talk about DevOps, DevOps is all about various organizations collaborating and working together. It seems a little bit different from what I would think of traditional military command and control. So is that anything you've given any thought to? Is there some of the organizational pieces that you need to talk to people about? Moving into these environments compared to what they might've had in the military. >> Negative, I think the biggest misconception that we have is that people, when you're talking about how the military moves, they're thinking of the military of yesteryear of 20, 30, 40 years ago. They're not thinking of global war on terrorism veterans and how we move and things like that. We understand distributed chains. We understand cause we call, that's what we've done at CENTAF and CENTCOM in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we honored, like we are already doing a lot of this stuff, we just naming it different. So that's part of the thing that we have as an advantage as the, cause all the people who are educators, there are veterans who learn how to code and they've been working in industry and they know. And so when they're teaching, they know the entire process that a veteran's going to go through. So that's how now we focus on things. And so the organizational structure for us first term to second term veterans is pretty normal. If you're coming out within the last, heck 10 years. (Jerome laughs) >> Yeah, absolutely. That's wonderful. And I I've had the opportunity to work with plenty of people that had come from the military. Very successful in the tech industry, definitely tend to be hard workers and engaged in what they'r doing. Curious, you talked about being able to do this remotely and then it is free. What's the impact of the current global pandemic? Everything that's happening here in 2020 been on what you're doing in your resources. >> Of the impact, unfortunately, I mean, not unfortunately, fortunately it has been nothing but positive. It's been crazy, we've gotten more applications. We have people are seeing that during, I was the crazy person in the room, when in 2014, when I was saying nonprofits should move to remote first protocols. So that way they could have greater impact for less, with less financial resources. And back then I was the, like what are you talking about? This is the way we've always done. Well now everybody was scrambling to try to figure out how to help people without being in same room with them. We were like, Oh, okay, lt's do today. So we got an influx of people applying, influx of people, sending me, trying to get into our next cohort in August. It's just, the biggest thing that has happened for Vets Who Code is yet, it's been a really positive experience for us, which is really weird to say, but I think it has, my doomsday Murphy's law style of preparing, I assume that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. So I try to prepare for that. So being open source, being serverless, being having everything in a manner to where--in case I was out of the pot, out of the situation, other people operate having this distributed teams, or there are other leaders that can take over and do things. It's all stuff that, I guess I got from the military. So, we were know we were prepared because there was absolutely zero pivot for us. If anything, it has been more resources. We've been able to dive deeper in more subjects because people have had more time, but, we can do, we can dive deeper into AWS. We started a lunch and learn every two weeks. We actually have a lunch and learn next week with Dr. Lee Johnson. And she's going to be talking, we open that to it by all juniors and entry level devs, developers, regardless of whether you're a veteran or not, we just throw it on Twitter and let them get in. And the focus will be on tech ethics. We all know, right now we've been leading the charge on trying to make sure people are supercharging their skills during this time frame. So that's what, it's been very positive. I've been working with magazine, front-end masters. It's been awesome. >> Well, that's wonderful. Wish everyone had the mindset coming into 2020, because it does seem that anything that could go wrong has, (both laugh) I'm curious, once people have skilled up and they've gone through the program, what connections do you have with industry? How do you help with job placement in that sort of activity? >> That is the most asked question, because that is the thing that people expect because of code schools, because of our educational program protocols. We don't really need that issue because our veterans are skilled enough to where to hiring managers know the quality that we produce. I live in Nashville and I've only been able to place one veteran that I've trained locally in the community because of fame companies have snatched up every other veteran I've ever trained in the community, so things like that, it's not a problem because no, a usually 80% of our veterans have jobs before they even graduate. So you're literally picking up, picking people who, they know they have the potential to get a bit companies if they put the work in and it's just as they come, we actually have people. I think a company reached out to me yesterday and I was like, I don't even have people for you. They already have jobs. (jerome laughs) Or I'm in a situation now where all my senior devs are looking for fame companies. Cause that's one of the things we do is that we support our veterans from reentry to retirement. So we're not like other code schools where they only focus on that 30 to 60 to 90 days, so that first job, our veterans, they keep coming back to re-skill, get more skills, come up to the lunch and learns, come to our Slack side chats to become better programmers. And once they're, so we've helped several of our programmers go from entry-level dev to senior dev, from absolutely zero experience. And so, I think that's the most rewarding thing. When you see a person who they came in knowing nothing. And three years later, like after the cohort safe they got their job and then they come back after they got the jobs, they want to get more skills and they get another job and then they come back. And the next thing, my favorite, one of my favorites Schuster, he starts at a local web shop, a web dev shop in Savannah, Georgia. And then next thing, oh, he's on Amazon, he's at Amazon three years later and you're like, Oh wow, we did that, that's awesome. So that's the path that we do is awesome. >> I'm curious, are there certain skill sets that you see in more need than other? And I'm also curious, do you recommend, or do you help people along with certain certifications? Thinking, the cloud certifications definitely have been on the rise, the last couple years. >> I feel like the cloud, the cloud certifications have been on the rise because it's expensive to like test for that stuff. If a person messes up, unless you have a very dedicated environment to where they can't mess up, they can cost you a lot of money, right? So you want that certain, right? But for us, it's been, we just focused on what we like to call front-end DevOps. We focus on Jamstack, which is JavaScript, APIs and markup, also along with a lot of serverless. So we're using AWS, we're using, also they're, they're learning Lambda functions, all this stuff. We're using a query language called GraphQL. We're using Apollo with that query language. We're using some node, React, GET, Speed. And a lot of third party API has to do like a lot of heavy lifting cause we believe that the deeper dive that a person has in a language and being able to manipulate and utilize APIs that they can, the better they will be, Right? So, same way that colleges do it, but a more modern take like colleges, they give you the most painful language to learn, which is usually like C right? Where you had to make everything a very low-level language. And then you're going through this process of building. And because of that, other languages are easier because you felt the pain points. We do the same thing, but with JavaScript, because it's the most accessible, painful language on earth, that's what I called it with Wire magazine last year anyway. (jerome laughs) >> So Jerome, you've laid out how you you're well organized. You're lean and financially, making sure that things are done responsibly. We want to give you the opportunity though. What's the call to action? Vets Who Code, you're looking for more people to participate. Is it sponsorships? Work in the community, look to engage. >> Roger that, we are looking for two things. One, we're always looking for people to help support us. We're open source, we're on GitHub sponsors. Like the people who we we're up, we're open source. But the people that do most of our tickets are the students themselves. So that's one of the best things about us. there is no better move, feeling that having something in production that works, right? It actually does something right? Like, Oh, this actually helps people, right? So we help have our veterans like actually pull tickets and do things like that. But, we also, we build, we're building out teams that they're on all the time as well. We have our new tutorials team or veterans. They literally built front facing tutorials for people on the outside. So that way they can learn little skills as we also have podcasts team and they're always podcasting, always interviewing people that in community, from our mentors to our students, to our alumni. And so just, let's throw our podcasts on Spotify. Let's do some codes, the best Code podcast and sponsor song get up. >> Wonderful, Jerome. We want to give you the final word. you're very passionate. You've got a lot interested, loved hearing about some of the skill sets that you're helping others with. What's exciting you these days? What kind of things are you digging into, beyond Vets Who Code? >> Oh man, everything serverless dude. As a front-end, as a person who was full stack and move to front-end. This has never been a more exciting time to learn how to code because there's so many serverless technologies and is leveling the playing field for front-end engineers, just knowing a little bit of like server-side code and having DevOp skills and being able to work in a CLI, you can do like Jamstack and the people that are using it. You have Nike, you have governments. It's just, it's such an exciting time to be a front-end. So I'm just like, and just seeing also how people are like really turning towards wanting their data more open source. So that's another thing that's really exciting for me. I've never been a person that was very highbrow when it came to talking about code. I felt like that was kind of boring, but seeing how, when it comes to like how code is actually helping normal, average everyday people and how the culture as a whole is starting to get more hip to how, API is like our running the world and how tech is being leveraged for. And it gets them, I'm on fire with these conversations, so I try to contain it cause I don't want to scare anyone on TV, but we could talk like, we could talk hours of that stuff. Love it. >> Well, Jerome, thank you so much for sharing with our community, everything you're doing and wonderful activity Vets Who Code, definitely call out to the community, make sure check it out, support it. If you can and tie so much in Jerome, I've got a regular series I do called Cloud Native Insights that are poking at some of those areas that you were talking about serverless and some of the emerging areas. So Jerome, thanks so much for joining, pleasure having you on the program. >> Roger that, thank you for having me. >> All right. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the videos that we have as well as Siliconangle.com for the news an6d the writeups, what we do. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of DockerCon Live 2020. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay Jenny, great to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> James Governor, nail on the Keynote there. Chat was phenomenal. That was pre-recorded but James is also in the chat stream. A lot of good conversations. That hit home for me that keynote. One, because memory lane was going down right into the 80s when it was a revolution. And we got him in the green room here. James Governor, welcome. >> James is here, hi James. >> Here we go. >> Fresh off the keynote. >> It's always a revolution. (John laughs) >> Well, in the 80s, I used to love your talk. A couple of key points I want to share and get your thoughts on was just to some highlights for the crowd is one, you walk through. Some of the key inflection points that I think were instrumental and probably some other ones depending on your perspective of where you were in the industry at that time. Whether you were a systems programmer or a networking guy, there was a proprietary world and it was a revolution back then. And UNIX was owned by AT&T if no one remembers. You couldn't even use the word. You had to trade market. So we actually had to call it XINU which is UNIX spelled backwards in all the text and whatnot. And even open source software freeware was kind of illegal. MIT did some work, Northeastern and Berkeley and other schools. It was radical back then so-- >> Yeah, we've come a long way for sure. I think that for me that was one of the things that I wanted to really point to in the keynote was that yes we have definitely come a long way and development culture is about open culture. >> I think the thing that I like to point out especially hate to sound like I'm old but I am. But I lived through that and the younger generation coming and have all these new tools. And I got to say not that I walked through to school in the snow with no shoes on but it's a pretty cool developer environment now. But remember things were proprietary back then. If you start to see the tea leaves now, I look at the world, you see these silos. You see silos that's kind of, they're not nestle proprietary but they might necessarily be open. So you kind of have a glimpse of open source on these projects and these companies. Whether they're tech companies, it feels open but it might not be. It could be walled garden. It could be data being hoarded. So as data opens up, this is interesting to me because I want to get your thoughts on this because in a way it feels proprietary but technically it's not proprietary. What's your thoughts on this? Because this is going to be the next 20 years of evolution. What's your thoughts? >> I think the productivity wins. Whoever packages technology in a way that makes it most productive for people. That's what wins. And open source, what's productive. It is very accessible. It enabled new waves. Get installed and you've got a package from... You got access to just a world of open-source. A world of software that was a big revolution. And I guess the cloud sort of came next and I think that's been one of the big shifts. You talk about proprietary. What matters is how easy you make things to people to do their work. And in that regard, obviously Amazon is in fact a bigger distribution network. Makes technology super consumable by so many people. I guess I would say that open is good and important but it's not the only thing. As you say, data is a lock-in and it's right and people are choosing services that make them productive. Nobody worries about whether Amazon Lambda is proprietary. They just know that they can build companies or businesses or business processes on it. >> You know it's interesting back in the day just to kind of segue with the next topic. We were fighting proprietary operating systems, UNIX and others. We're also fighting for proprietary Network protocol stacks. SNA was owned by IBM. DECnet was digital, the number one network. And then TCP/IP and OpenSan's interconnect came out. That's the OSI model for us old ones. That set the table. That changed the face of everything. It really enabled a lot. So when I see containers, what Docker did early on the pioneering phases of Docker containers, it unleashed a new reality of coolness and scale and capabilities. And then in comes Kubernetes and in comes micro services. So this path is showing some real strength for new kinds of capabilities. So how does a developer navigate all this because data lock-in does it a data plane seems to be a control point. What are we fighting now in your opinion? shouldn't say we're fighting but what are we trying to avoid if operating systems was for closing opportunities and network protocol stacks before closing in the past? What do you see as barriers that need to be broken down in the open source world around going down this great path of micro services, decomposed applications, highly cohesive architectures? >> Honestly there's enough work to be getting on with without like fighting someone in that regard. I mean we're fighting against technical debt. I just don't think that people are serrated about fighting against proprietary anymore. I think that's less than a concern. Open-source technology is great. It's how most work gets done in our industry today. So you mentioned Kubernetes and certainly Docker. Though we did a phenomenal job of packaging up and experience that map to see CICD. That map to the developer workplace people like do. Phenomenal job and I think that for me at least when I look at where we are as an industry, it's all about productivity. So there are plenty of interesting new platforms. I think in my keynote, that's my question. I'm less interested in microservices than I am in distributed work. I'm interested in one of the tools that are going to enable us to become more productive, solve more problems, build more applications and get better at building software. So I think that's my sort of focus. There will always be lock-in. And I think you will also have technologies mitigate against that. I mean clear messages today from Docker about supporting multiple clouds. For a while at least multiclouds seem like something only the kind waivers were interested in but increasingly we're seeing organizations where that is definitely part of how they're using the cloud. And again I think very often it's within specific areas. And so we see organizations that are using particular clouds for different things. And we'll see more of that. >> And the productivity. I love the passion, love that in the keynote. That was loud and clear. Two key points I want to get your reaction on that. You mentioned one was inclusion. Including more people, not seeing news. It's kind of imperative. And also virtual work environments, virtual events. You kind of made a highlight there. So again people are distributed remote first. It's an opportunity to be productive. Can you share your thoughts on those two points? One is, as we're distributed, that's going to open the aperture of more engagement. More people coming in. So code of conduct not as a file you must read or some rule. Culturally embracing a code of conduct. And then also, virtual events, virtual groups convening like we're doing here. >> Yeah I mean for me at least Allison McMillan from github and she just gave such a great demo at the recent sunlight event where she finished and she was like, it was all about, I want to be able to put the kids to bed for a nap and then go code. And I think that's sort of thinking people band around the phrase ruling this together but I mean certainly parenting is a team sport. But I think it's interesting we're not welcome. It was interesting that was looking at the chat, going through, I was being accused of being woke. I was being accused of being a social justice warrior. But look at the math. The graph is pretty clear. Women are not welcomed in tech. And that means we're wasting 50% of available resource to us. And we're treating people like shit. So I thought I underplayed that in the talk actually. Something like, "Oh, why is he complaining about Linus?" Well, the fact is that Linus himself admitted he needed to change his persona in order to just be more modern and welcoming in terms of building software and building communities. So look we've got people from around the world. Different cultural norms. All of the women I know who work in tech suffer so much from effectively daily harassment. Their bonafides are challenged. These are things that we need to change because women are brilliant. I'm not letting you signaling or maybe I am. The fact is that women are amazing at software and we do a terrible job of supporting them. So women of other nationalities, we're not going to be traveling as much. I think you can also grow. No we can't keep flying around as much. Make an industry where single parents can participate more effectively. Where we could take advantage of that. There're 200 million people in Nigeria. That hunger to engage. We won't even give them a visa and then we may not be treating them right. I just think we need an industry reset. I think from a we need to travel less. We need to do better work. And we need to be more welcoming in order that that could be the case. >> Yeah, there's no doubt a reset is here and you look at the COVID crisis is forcing that function there because one, people are resetting and reinventing and trying to figure out a growth strategy. Whether it's a business or teams. And what's interesting is new roles and new responsibilities is going to emerge and I think you're right about the women in tech. I completely agree and have evidence myself and reported on it ad nauseam. But the thing is data trumps opinion. And the data is clear on this issue. So if anyone will call you a social justice warrior I just say pound sand and tell them that go on their way. And just look at the data and clear. And also the field is getting wider. When I was in computer science major back in the day, it was male-dominated yes but it was very narrow. Wasn't as broad as it is now. You can do things so much more and in fact in Kelsey Hightower's talk, he talks to persona developers. The ones that love to learn and ones that don't want to learn anything. Just want to code and do their thing. And ones that care about just app development and ones that just want to get in and sling k-8 around like it's nobody's business or work with APIs, work with infrastructure. Some just want to write code. So there's more and more surface area in computer science and coding. Or not even computer science, it's just coding, developing. >> Well, I mean it's a bigger industry. We've got clearly all sorts of challenges that need to be solved. And the services that we've got available are incredible. I mean if you look at the work of companies like Netlify in terms of developer experience. You look at the emergence of JamStack and the productivity that we're seeing there, it's a really exciting time in the industry. >> No doubt about that. >> And as I say I mean it's an exciting time. It's a scary time. But I think that we're moving to a world of more distributed work. And that's my point about open source and working on code bases from different places and what the CapCloud can enable. We can work in a different way and we don't all need to be in San Francisco, London, or Berlin as I said in the Keynote. >> I love the vision there and the passion. I totally agree with it. I think that's a whole another distributed paradigm that's going to move up the stack if you will and software. I think it's going to be codified in cloud native and cloud scale creates new services. I mean it's the virtual world. You mentioned virtual events. Groups convening like the 67,000 people coming together virtually here at DockerCon. Large, small one-on-ones group dynamics are a piece of it. So share your thoughts on virtual events and certainly it's people are now just kicking the tires, learning. You do a zoom, you do a livestream. You do some chat. It's going to evolve and I think it's going to look more like a CICD pipeline and anything else. As you start to bring media together, we get 43 sessions here. Why not make it a hundred sessions? So I think this is going to be one of those learning environments where it's not linear, it's different. What's your vision of all this if you had to give advice for the folks out there? Not event plans, with people who want to gather groups and be productive. What's your thinking on this? >> Well, it sort of has to happen. I mean there are a lot of people doing good work in this regard. Patrick Dubois, founder of DevOps days. He's doing some brilliant work delineating. Just what are all the different platforms? What does the streaming platform look like that you can use? Obviously you've got one here with theCUBE. Yeah, I mean I think the numbers are pretty clear. I mean Microsoft Build had 245,000 registered attendees and I think something that might have been to begin. The patterns are slightly different. It's not like they're going to be there the whole time but the opportunity to meet people where they are, I think is something that we shouldn't ignore. Particularly in a world not everyone again has the privilege of being able to travel. You're in a different country or as I say perhaps your life circumstances mean you can't travel. From an accessibility perspective, clearly virtual events offer an opportunity that we haven't fully nailed. I think Microsoft performance in this regard has been super interesting. They were already moving that way and Kobe just slammed it up to another level. What they did with Build recently was actually, I mean they're a media company, right? But certainly developed a focused media company. So I think you'll be okay. You're about the business of software John. Don't worry Microsoft don't give you some space there. (John and James laughing) We're under the radar at theCUBE 365 for the folks who are watching this. This is our site that we built with our software. So we're open and Docker was instrumental and I think the Docker captains were also very instrumental and trying to help us figure out the best way to preserve the content value. I personally think we're in this early stage of, content and community are clearly go hand in hand and I think as you look at the chat, some of the names that are on there. Some of the comments, really there's a new flywheel of production and this to me is the ultimate collaboration when you have these distinct groups coming together. And I think it's going to just be a data dream where people aren't the product, they're actually a contributor. And I think this open source framework that you're talking about is going to be certainly just going to evolve rapidly. I think it's just not even scratching the surface. I just think this is going to be pretty massive. And services whatever you want to define that. It could be an API to anything. It's going to be essentially the scale point. I mean why have a monolith piece of software running something. Something Microsoft teams will work well here. Zoom will work well there but ultimately what's in it for me the person? This is the key question. Developers just want to develop. You're going to hear that throughout the day. Kelsey Hightower brings up some great points in his session and Amanda silver at Microsoft, she had a quote on one of her videos. She said, "App developers are the first responders "in this crisis." And that's the first time I've heard someone say that out loud and that hits home for me because it's true. And right now app developers are one of the front lines. They're providing the app support. They're providing to the practitioners in the field. This is something that's not really written about in the press. What's your reaction to app developers are the first responders in this crisis. >> Well I mean first I think it's important to pay tribute to people that actually are first responders. Writing code can make us responsive but let's not forget there are people that are lacking PPE and they are on the frontline. So not precise manner but I might frame it slightly differently. But certainly what the current situation has shown us is productivity is super important. Target has made huge investments in building out its own software development capabilities. So they used to be like 70% external 30% internal and they turn that round to like 80% internal 20 external. And they've been turning on a dime and well there's so much going on at the moment. I'm like talking about target then I'm remembering what's happening in Minneapolis today. But anyway we'll talk about that. But yeah organizations are responding quickly. Look at the numbers that Shopify is happening because all sorts of business is something like we need to be an online business. What's the quickest way to do that. And Shopify was able to package something up in a way that they they could respond to challenges. Huge social challenges. I'm a big believer the future's unwritten at this point and I think there's a lot of problems out there you point out and the first responders are there I agree. I'm just thinking that there's got to be a better path for all of us. And this brings up the whole new roles and responsibilities around this new environment and I know you're doing a lot of research. Can you share some thoughts on what you're kind of working on now James? That's important, I'll see what's trending here at DockerCon is. Compose the relationship with Microsoft, we've got security, Dockers now, multicloud approach, making it easier, that's their bread and butter. That's what they're known for. They kind of going back to that roots of why they pioneered in the first place. So as that continues ease-of-use, what's your focus area right now that you're researching that you could share with the audience? >> Well, I mean I'd say this year for me I've got probably three key areas. One is what's called GitOps. So it's the notion that you're using Git as a system of record. So that started off randomly making changes, you have an audit trail. You begin to have some sort of sense of compliance in software changes. I think the idea of everything has to be by a sort of a pull request. That automation model is super thing to me. So I've been looking at that. A lot of development teams are using those approaches. Observability is a huge trend. We're moving to the idea of testing and production. The kind of stuff that's been evangelized so successfully by charity majors honeycomb. It's super exciting to me and it's true because in effect, you're always testing in production, your dev environment. I mean we used to have this idea that you'd have a Dev and a Dev stage. You're have a staging environment. The only environment that really matters is where the rubber meets the road. And that is deployment. So I think that having having better tools for that is one of the areas I'm looking at. So how are tools innovating that area? And it won't be the thing that this is my own personal thing. I've been talking about progressive delivery which is asking a question about reducing risk by really understanding the blast radius of the service to be able to roll it out to specific use of populations first. Understanding who they are and enrolling it up so it's the idea that like maybe you brought something out to your employees first. Maybe you are in California and you roll something out in Tokyo knowing that not many people are using that service. It is a live environment but people are not going to be adversely affected if it happens. So Canary's Blue-Green deployments and also experimentation. This is sort of one of the areas I'm being sort of pulled towards. It's sort of product management and how that's really converging with software development. I feel like that's one of the things I haven't fully, I mean I think it's when they have research focused but you have to respond to new information. Anyhow, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the world of product management. It's those companies to be most respect in terms of companies that are crushing it in the digital economy. They have such a strong product management focused. Everything is driven by product managers that understand technology and that's an exciting shift. The one that I'm paying greater attention. >> You do some great work and I love the focus on productivity software development. Getting those app developers out there and it's interesting. I just think that it's such an exciting time. It's almost intoxicating. Some people drinking on Twitter online and having beers because they're in different time zone. But if you look up and down the action that's going on, you got at the application developers side, all the things you were mentioning services. But when you look at the cloud side, you got almost this operating system reset. It's a systems architecture. So you have the hall and that's up and down. The middle of the stack to the bottom, you have this operating systems thinking and evolution. And then you got at the top, the pure software developers. And this is again to me the big aha moment. For the industry there's a true opportunity to scale that in unbelievable ways. And you don't have to pick a side. You can do a top of the stack bottom stack. So I think kubernetes and micro services really bring this whole enablement piece to the table. And that fascinates me and I think that's going to change what the apps will look like. It'll give more productivity and then making the internet programmable unit, that's new systems. So that seems to be the trend. You're a systems guy, your girl or you're a developer. How do you see that evolving? Do you get to that level? >> Developer experience is not necessarily the key value of Kubernetes. It's supremely flexible sort of system. It does offer you that portability. But I think what I'm seeing now is how people are taking Kubernetes and kind of thinking, so you've got VMware, acquires Heptio, brings Pivotal into the fold, starting about what that platform looks like. I think Pivotal with cloud foundry did a great job of thinking through operator experience. Operator experience is not the same as developer experience. I think we're going to see a bit more specialization of roles. Meanwhile at that point, you've got the cloud players all doing pretty awesome job supporting Kubernetes. But it gives that portability promise. So I think for me, one of the things is not expecting everyone to do everything. It's like Kelsey said, some people just want to come into work and do their job and they're super important. And so VMware I think a history of certification of application environments. So of them it's sort of quite--and certification of humans. It's quite natural that they would be somebody that would think about how do we make Kurbenetes more consumable and packaged in a way that more people take advantage of it. Docker was such a phenomenon and now seeing how that sort of evolving into that promise of portability is beginning to be realized. So I think the specialization, the pendulum is going to swing back just a little bit. >> I think it's just great timing and congratulations on all the work and thanks for taking the time for participating in DockerCon with the Keynote. Taking time out of your day and coming in and doing this live interview. The chat looks good. Hit some great, get some fans in there. It's a great opportunity and I think Docker as the pioneers, pivoting in a new direction, it's all about developer productivity and James you've been on it. @monkchips is his Twitter handle, follow him, hit him up. I'm John Furrier here in the studio for DockerCon 2020. Ginebra CEO and you got Brett Fisher on the captain's channel. If you go to the site, you'll see the calendar. Jump into any session you want. They'll be live on the time or on-demand instantly. TheCUBE track has a series of enemies. You've got Amazon, we got Microsoft, get some great guests, great practitioners that are literally having an impact on society. So thanks for watching. James, thanks for spending the time. >> Thank you very much John. >> Okay James Governor, founder of Monkchips, great firm, great person-- >> RedMonk, RedMonk is the company. Monkchips is the Twitter. >> Redmonk, Monkchips. RedMonk, RedMonk. >> RedMonk is the company. >> RedMonk, RedMonk. >> @monkchips is his Twitter handle and RedMonk is the firm, thank you for the correction. Okay more coverage DockerCon after this short break. Stay with us. The next segment is coming up. Stay with us here at theCUBE DockerCon. (gentle music)