>>Hi everybody. This is Dave Volante. Welcome to this cube conversation where we're going to go back in time a little bit and explore the early days of Kubernetes. Talk about how it formed the improbable events, perhaps that led to it. And maybe how customers are taking advantage of containers and container orchestration today, and maybe where the industry is going. Matt Provo is here. He's the founder and CEO of storm forge and Chandler Huntington hoes. Hoisington is the general manager of EKS edge and hybrid AWS guys. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Thanks. So, Jenny, you were the vice president of engineering at miso sphere. Is that, is that correct? >>Well, uh, vice-president engineering basis, fear and then I ran product and engineering for DTQ masons. >>Yeah. Okay. Okay. So you were there in the early days of, of container orchestration and Matt, you, you were working at a S a S a Docker swarm shop, right? Yep. Okay. So I mean, a lot of people were, you know, using your platform was pretty novel at the time. Uh, it was, it was more sophisticated than what was happening with, with Kubernetes. Take us back. What was it like then? Did you guys, I mean, everybody was coming out. I remember there was, I think there was one Docker con and everybody was coming, the Kubernetes was announced, and then you guys were there, doc Docker swarm was, was announced and there were probably three or four other startups doing kind of container orchestration. And what, what were those days like? Yeah. >>Yeah. I wasn't actually atmosphere for those days, but I know them well, I know the story as well. Um, uh, I came right as we started to pivot towards Kubernetes there, but, um, it's a really interesting story. I mean, obviously they did a documentary on it and, uh, you know, people can watch that. It's pretty good. But, um, I think that, from my perspective, it was, it was really interesting how this happened. You had basically, uh, con you had this advent of containers coming out, right? So, so there's new novel technology and Solomon, and these folks started saying, Hey, you know, wait a second, wait if I put a UX around these couple of Linux features that got launched a couple of years ago, what does that look like? Oh, this is pretty cool. Um, so you have containers starting to crop up. And at the same time you had folks like ThoughtWorks and other kind of thought leaders in the space, uh, starting to talk about microservices and saying, Hey, monoliths are bad and you should break up these monoliths into smaller pieces. >>And any Greenfield application should be broken up into individuals, scalable units that a team can can own by themselves, and they can scale independent of each other. And you can write tests against them independently of other components. And you should break up these big, big mandalas. And now we are kind of going back to model this, but that's for another day. Um, so, so you had microservices coming out and then you also had containers coming out, same time. So there was like, oh, we need to put these microservices in something perfect. We'll put them in containers. And so at that point, you don't really, before that moment, you didn't really need container orchestration. You could just run a workload in a container and be done with it, right? You didn't need, you don't need Kubernetes to run Docker. Um, but all of a sudden you had tons and tons of containers and you had to manage these in some way. >>And so that's where container orchestration came, came from. And, and Ben Heineman, the founder of Mesa was actually helping schedule spark at the time at Berkeley. Um, and that was one of the first workloads with spark for Macy's. And then his friends at Twitter said, Hey, come over, can you help us do this with containers at Twitter? He said, okay. So when it helped them do it with containers at Twitter, and that's kinda how that branch of the container wars was started. And, um, you know, it was really, really great technology and it actually is still in production in a lot of shops today. Um, uh, more and more people are moving towards Kubernetes and Mesa sphere saw that trend. And at the end of the day, Mesa sphere was less concerned about, even though they named the company Mesa sphere, they were less concerned about helping customers with Mesa specifically. They really want to help customers with these distributed problems. And so it didn't make sense to, to just do Mesa. So they would took on Kubernetes as well. And I hope >>I don't do that. I remember, uh, my, my co-founder John furrier introduced me to Jerry Chen way back when Jerry is his first, uh, uh, VC investment with Greylock was Docker. And we were talking in these very, obviously very excited about it. And, and his Chandler was just saying, it said Solomon and the team simplified, you know, containers, you know, simple and brilliant. All right. So you guys saw the opportunity where you were Docker swarm shop. Why? Because you needed, you know, more sophisticated capabilities. Yeah. But then you, you switched why the switch, what was happening? What was the mindset back then? We ran >>And into some scale challenges in kind of operationalize or, or productizing our kind of our core machine learning. And, you know, we, we, we saw kind of the, the challenges, luckily a bit ahead of our time. And, um, we happen to have someone on the team that was also kind of moonlighting, uh, as one of the, the original core contributors to Kubernetes. And so as this sort of shift was taking place, um, we, we S we saw the flexibility, uh, of what was becoming Kubernetes. Um, and, uh, I'll never forget. I left on a Friday and came back on a Monday and we had lifted and shifted, uh, to Kubernetes. Uh, the challenge was, um, you know, you, at that time, you, you didn't have what you have today through EKS. And, uh, those kinds of services were, um, just getting that first cluster up and running was, was super, super difficult, even in a small environment. >>And so I remember we, you know, we, we finally got it up and running and it was like, nobody touch it, don't do anything. Uh, but obviously that doesn't, that doesn't scale either. And so that's really, you know, being kind of a data science focused shop at storm forge from the very beginning. And that's where our core IP is. Uh, our, our team looked at that problem. And then we looked at, okay, there are a bunch of parameters and ways that I can tune this application. And, uh, why are the configurations set the way that they are? And, you know, uh, is there room to explore? And that's really where, unfortunately, >>Because Mesa said much greater enterprise capabilities as the Docker swarm, at least they were heading in that direction, but you still saw that Kubernetes was, was attractive because even though it didn't have all the security features and enterprise features, because it was just so simple. I remember Jen Goldberg who was at Google at the time saying, no, we were focused on keeping it simple and we're going from mass adoption, but does that kind of what you said? >>Yeah. And we made a bet, honestly. Uh, we saw that the, uh, you know, the growing community was really starting to, you know, we had a little bit of an inside view because we had, we had someone that was very much in the, in the original part, but you also saw the, the tool chain itself start to, uh, start to come into place right. A little bit. And it's still hardening now, but, um, yeah, we, as any, uh, as any startup does, we, we made a pivot and we made a bet and, uh, this, this one paid off >>Well, it's interesting because, you know, we said at the time, I mean, you had, obviously Amazon invented the modern cloud. You know, Microsoft has the advantage of has got this huge software stays, Hey, just now run it into the cloud. Okay, great. So they had their entry point. Google didn't have an entry point. This is kind of a hail Mary against Amazon. And, and I, I wrote a piece, you know, the improbable, Verizon, who Kubernetes to become the O S you know, the cloud, but, but I asked, did it make sense for Google to do that? And it never made any money off of it, but I would argue they, they were kind of, they'd be irrelevant if they didn't have, they hadn't done that yet, but it didn't really hurt. It certainly didn't hurt Amazon EKS. And you do containers and your customers you've embraced it. Right. I mean, I, I don't know what it was like early days. I remember I've have talked to Amazon people about this. It's like, okay, we saw it and then talk to customers, what are they doing? Right. That's kind of what the mindset is, right? Yeah. >>That's, I, I, you know, I've, I've been at Amazon a couple of years now, and you hear the stories of all we're customer obsessed. We listened to our customers like, okay, okay. We have our company values, too. You get told them. And when you're, uh, when you get first hired in the first day, and you never really think about them again, but Amazon, that really is preached every day. It really is. Um, uh, and that we really do listen to our customers. So when customers start asking for communities, we said, okay, when we built it for them. So, I mean, it's, it's really that simple. Um, and, and we also, it's not as simple as just building them a Kubernetes service. Amazon has a big commitment now to start, you know, getting involved more in the community and working with folks like storm forage and, and really listening to customers and what they want. And they want us working with folks like storm florigen and that, and that's why we're doing things like this. So, well, >>It's interesting, because of course, everybody looks at the ecosystem, says, oh, Amazon's going to kill the ecosystem. And then we saw an article the other day in, um, I think it was CRN, did an article, great job by Amazon PR, but talk about snowflake and Amazon's relationship. And I've said many times snowflake probably drives more than any other ISV out there. And so, yeah, maybe the Redshift guys might not love snowflake, but Amazon in general, you know, they're doing great three things. And I remember Andy Jassy said to me, one time, look, we love the ecosystem. We need the ecosystem. They have to innovate too. If they don't, you know, keep pace, you know, they're going to be in trouble. So that's actually a healthy kind of a dynamic, I mean, as an ecosystem partner, how do you, >>Well, I'll go back to one thing without the work that Google did to open source Kubernetes, a storm forge wouldn't exist, but without the effort that AWS and, and EKS in particular, um, provides and opens up for, for developers to, to innovate and to continue, continue kind of operationalizing the shift to Kubernetes, um, you know, we wouldn't have nearly the opportunity that we do to actually listen to them as well, listen to the users and be able to say, w w w what do you want, right. Our entire reason for existence comes from asking users, like, how painful is this process? Uh, like how much confidence do you have in the, you know, out of the box, defaults that ship with your, you know, with your database or whatever it is. And, uh, and, and how much do you love, uh, manually tuning your application? >>And, and, uh, obviously nobody's said, I love that. And so I think as that ecosystem comes together and continues expanding, um, it's just, it opens up a huge opportunity, uh, not only for existing, you know, EKS and, uh, AWS users to continue innovating, but for companies like storm forge, to be able to provide that opportunity for them as well. And, and that's pretty powerful. So I think without a lot of the moves they've made, um, you know, th the door wouldn't be nearly as open for companies like, who are, you know, growing quickly, but are smaller to be able to, you know, to exist. >>Well, and I was saying earlier that, that you've, you're in, I wrote about this, you're going to get better capabilities. You're clearly seeing that cluster management we've talked about better, better automation, security, the whole shift left movement. Um, so obviously there's a lot of momentum right now for Kubernetes. When you think about bare metal servers and storage, and then you had VM virtualization, VMware really, and then containers, and then Kubernetes as another abstraction, I would expect we're not at the end of the road here. Uh, what's next? Is there another abstraction layer that you would think is coming? Yeah, >>I mean, w for awhile, it looked like, and I remember even with our like board members and some of our investors said, well, you know, well, what about serverless? And, you know, what's the next Kubernetes and nothing, we, as much as I love Kubernetes, um, which I do, and we do, um, nothing about what we particularly do. We are purpose built for Kubernetes, but from a core kind of machine learning and problem solving standpoint, um, we could apply this elsewhere, uh, if we went that direction and so time will tell what will be next, then there will be something, uh, you know, that will end up, you know, expanding beyond Kubernetes at some point. Um, but, you know, I think, um, without knowing what that is, you know, our job is to, to, to serve our, you know, to serve our customers and serve our users in the way that they are asking for that. >>Well, serverless obviously is exploding when you look again, and we tucked the ETR survey data, when you look at, at the services within Amazon and other cloud providers, you know, the functions off, off the charts. Uh, so that's kind of an interesting and notable now, of course, you've got Chandler, you've got edge in your title. You've got hybrid in, in your title. So, you know, this notion of the cloud expanding, it's not just a set of remote services, just only in the public cloud. Now it's, it's coming to on premises. You actually got Andy, Jesse, my head space. He said, one time we just look at it. The data centers is another edge location. Right. Okay. That's a way to look at it and then you've got edge. Um, so that cloud is expanding, isn't it? The definition of cloud is, is, is evolving. >>Yeah, that's right. I mean, customers one-on-one run workloads in lots of places. Um, and that's why we have things like, you know, local zones and wavelengths and outposts and EKS anywhere, um, EKS, distro, and obviously probably lots more things to come. And there's, I always think of like, Amazon's Kubernetes strategy on a manageability scale. We're on one far end of the spectrum, you have EKS distro, which is just a collection of the core Kubernetes packages. And you could, you could take those and stand them up yourself in a broom closet, in a, in a retail shop. And then on the other far in the spectrum, you have EKS far gate where you can just give us your container and we'll handle everything for you. Um, and then we kind of tried to solve everything in between for your data center and for the cloud. And so you can, you can really ask Amazon, I want you to manage my control plane. I want you to manage this much of my worker nodes, et cetera. And oh, I actually want help on prem. And so we're just trying to listen to customers and solve their problems where they're asking us to solve them. Cut, >>Go ahead. No, I would just add that in a more vertically focused, uh, kind of orientation for us. Like we, we believe that op you know, optimization capabilities should transcend the location itself. And, and, and so whether that's part public part, private cloud, you know, that's what I love part of what I love about EKS anywhere. Uh, it, you know, you shouldn't, you should still be able to achieve optimal results that connect to your business objectives, uh, wherever those workloads, uh, are, are living >>Well, don't wince. So John and I coined this term called Supercloud and people laugh about it, but it's different. It's, it's, you know, people talk about multi-cloud, but that was just really kind of vendor diversity. Right? I got to running here, I'm running their money anywhere. Uh, but, but individually, and so Supercloud is this concept of this abstraction layer that floats wherever you are, whether it's on prem, across clouds, and you're taking advantage of those native primitives, um, and then hiding that underlying complexity. And that's what, w re-invent the ecosystem was so excited and they didn't call it super cloud. We, we, we called it that, but they're clearly thinking differently about the value that they can add on top of Goldman Sachs. Right. That to me is an example of a Supercloud they're taking their on-prem data and their, their, their software tooling connecting it to AWS. They're running it on AWS, but they're, they're abstracting that complexity. And I think you're going to see a lot, a lot more of that. >>Yeah. So Kubernetes itself, in many cases is being abstracted away. Yeah. There's a disability of a disappearing act for Kubernetes. And I don't mean that in a, you know, in an, a, from an adoption standpoint, but, uh, you know, Kubernetes itself is increasingly being abstracted away, which I think is, is actually super interesting. Yeah. >>Um, communities doesn't really do anything for a company. Like we run Kubernetes, like, how does that help your bottom line? That at the end of the day, like companies don't care that they're running Kubernetes, they're trying to solve a problem, which is the, I need to be able to deploy my applications. I need to be able to scale them easily. I need to be able to update them easily. And those are the things they're trying to solve. So if you can give them some other way to do that, I'm sure you know, that that's what they want. It's not like, uh, you know, uh, a big bank is making more money because they're running Kubernetes. That's not, that's not the current, >>It gets subsumed. It's just become invisible. Right. Exactly. You guys back to the office yet. What's, uh, what's the situation, >>You know, I, I work for my house and I, you know, we go into the office a couple of times a week, so it's, it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's a crazy time. It's a crazy time to be managing and hiring. And, um, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's definitely a challenge, but there's a lot of benefits of working home. I got two young kids, so I get to see them, uh, grow up a little bit more working, working out of my house. So it's >>Nice also. >>So we're in, even as a smaller startup, we're in 26, 27 states, uh, Canada, Germany, we've got a little bit of presence in Japan, so we're very much distributed. Um, we, uh, have not gone back and I'm not sure we will >>Permanently remote potentially. >>Yeah. I mean, w we made a, uh, pretty like for us, the timing of our series B funding, which was where we started hiring a lot, uh, was just before COVID started really picking up. So we, you know, thankfully made a, a pretty good strategic decision to say, we're going to go where the talent is. And yeah, it was harder to find for sure, especially in w we're competing, it's incredibly competitive. Uh, but yeah, we've, it was a good decision for us. Um, we are very about, you know, getting the teams together in person, you know, as often as possible and in the safest way possible, obviously. Um, but you know, it's been a, it's been a pretty interesting, uh, journey for us and something that I'm, I'm not sure I would, I would change to be honest with you. Yeah. >>Well, Frank Slootman, snowflakes HQ to Montana, and then can folks like Michael Dell saying, Hey, same thing as you, wherever they want to work, bring yourself and wherever you are as cool. And do you think that the hybrid mode for your team is kind of the, the, the operating mode for the, for the foreseeable future is a couple of, >>No, I think, I think there's a lot of benefits in both working from the office. I don't think you can deny like the face-to-face interactions. It feels good just doing this interview face to face. Right. And I can see your mouth move. So it's like, there's a lot of benefits to that, um, over a chime call or a zoom call or whatever, you know, that, that also has advantages, right. I mean, you can be more focused at home. And I think some version of hybrid is probably in the industry's future. I don't know what Amazon's exact plans are. That's above my pay grade, but, um, I know that like in general, the industry is definitely moving to some kind of hybrid model. And like Matt said, getting people I'm a big fan at Mesa sphere, we ran a very diverse, like remote workforce. We had a big office in Germany, but we'd get everybody together a couple of times a year for engineering week or, or something like this. And you'd get a hundred people, you know, just dedicated to spending time together at a hotel and, you know, Vegas or Hamburg or wherever. And it's a really good time. And I think that's a good model. >>Yeah. And I think just more ETR data, the current thinking now is that, uh, the hybrid is the number one sort of model, uh, 36% that the CIO is believe 36% of the workforce are going to be hybrid permanently is kind of their, their call a couple of days in a couple of days out. Um, and the, the percentage that is remote is significantly higher. It probably, you know, high twenties, whereas historically it's probably 15%. Yeah. So permanent changes. And that, that changes the infrastructure. You need to support it, the security models and everything, you know, how you communicate. So >>When COVID, you know, really started hitting and in 2020, um, the big banks for example, had to, I mean, you would want to talk about innovation and ability to, to shift quickly. Two of the bigger banks that have in, uh, in fact, adopted Kubernetes, uh, were able to shift pretty quickly, you know, systems and things that were, you know, historically, you know, it was in the office all the time. And some of that's obviously shifted back to a certain degree, but that ability, it was pretty remarkable actually to see that, uh, take place for some of the larger banks and others that are operating in super regulated environments. I mean, we saw that in government agencies and stuff as well. >>Well, without the cloud, no, this never would've happened. Yeah. >>And I think it's funny. I remember some of the more old school manager thing people are, aren't gonna work less when they're working from home, they're gonna be distracted. I think you're seeing the opposite where people are too much, they get burned out because you're just running your computer all day. And so I think that we're learning, I think everyone, the whole industry is learning. Like, what does it mean to work from home really? And, uh, it's, it's a fascinating thing is as a case study, we're all a part of right now. >>I was talking to my wife last night about this, and she's very thoughtful. And she w when she was in the workforce, she was at a PR firm and a guy came in a guest speaker and it might even be in the CEO of the company asking, you know, what, on average, what time who stays at the office until, you know, who leaves by five o'clock, you know, a few hands up, or who stays until like eight o'clock, you know, and enhancement. And then, so he, and he asked those people, like, why, why can't you get your work done in a, in an eight hour Workday? I go home. Why don't you go in? And I sit there. Well, that's interesting, you know, cause he's always looking at me like, why can't you do, you know, get it done? And I'm saying the world has changed. Yeah. It really has where people are just on all the time. I'm not sure it's sustainable, quite frankly. I mean, I think that we have to, you know, as organizations think about, and I see companies doing it, you guys probably do as well, you know, take a four day, you know, a week weekend, um, just for your head. Um, but it's, there's no playbook. >>Yeah. Like I said, we're a part of a case study. It's also hard because people are distributed now. So you have your meetings on the east coast, you can wake up at seven four, and then you have meetings on the west coast. You stay until seven o'clock therefore, so your day just stretches out. So you've got to manage this. And I think we're, I think we'll figure it out. I mean, we're good at figuring this stuff. >>There's a rise in asynchronous communication. So with things like slack and other tools, as, as helpful as they are in many cases, it's a, it, isn't always on mentality. And like, people look for that little green dot and you know, if you're on the you're online. So my kids, uh, you know, we have a term now for me, cause my office at home is upstairs and I'll come down. And if it's, if it's during the day, they'll say, oh dad, you're going for a walk and talk, you know, which is like, it was my way of getting away from the desk, getting away from zoom. And like, you know, even in Boston, uh, you know, getting outside, trying to at least, you know, get a little exercise or walk and get, you know, get my head away from the computer screen. Um, but even then it's often like, oh, I'll get a slack notification on my phone or someone will call me even if it's not a scheduled walk and talk. Um, uh, and so it is an interesting, >>A lot of ways to get in touch or productivity is presumably going to go through the roof. But now, all right, guys, I'll let you go. Thanks so much for coming to the cube. Really appreciate it. And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Alante and we'll see you next time.