Joe Duffy, Pulumi & Justin Fitzhugh, Snowflake | AWS re:Invent 2020
>>from around the globe. It's the >>Cube with digital >>coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, >>AWS and >>our community partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes ongoing coverage of this year's AWS reinvent. You know, normally we'd be in the middle of the San Sands Convention Center. We have two sets and 50,000 of our closest friends. We'd be deking out on cloud. Seems like a long time ago, but the show must go on. And it does. Joe Duffy is here. He's the co founder and CEO of Gloomy, and Justin Fits you is the vice president engineering for Cloud Engineering for snowflake. Welcome, gentlemen. Good to see you. >>It's good to be here, >>Joe. I love what you guys are doing. You know, leading your customers to the cloud and really attacking that I t labor problem that we've dealt with for years and years by playing a role in transforming what I would say is I t ops into cloud ups with programmable infra infrastructure practices. So take >>a >>moment to tell us. Why did you and your co founder start the company how you got it off the ground? People are always interested in how you got it funded. You got a couple of Seattle VCs, Madrona and Tola involved. Any a just got involved. So congrats on that. What's the story of your company? >>Yeah. So my background and my co founder Eric's background. You know, we spent multiple decades at Microsoft just really obsessing over developer platforms and productivity and trying to make you know developers lives as as as as productive as possible. You know, help them harness the power of software >>toe create, >>you know, innovative new applications and really spent time on technologies like Visual Studio and Ahmed. And and, you know, it really struck us that the cloud is changing everything about how we develop software. And yet from our perspective, coming from developer landed had almost changed nothing. You know, most of our customers were still, you know, developing software like they did 15 years ago, where it was a typical enter your application, they'd kind of write the code and then go to their I t team and say, Hey, we need to run this somewhere. Can you provisioned a few virtual machines? Can you prevision You know, maybe a database or two and and And so And then we went and talked Thio, you know, infrastructure teams and found out Hey, you know, folks were really toiling away with tools that air a pale in comparison when it comes to the productivity that we we were accustomed Thio on the developer side. And then frequently we heard from leaders that there were silos between the organizations. They couldn't build things quickly enough. They couldn't move quickly enough in cloud Native and the new public cloud capabilities just really were pushed pushing on that, really, you know. But the most innovative companies we kept hearing were the ones who figured this out, who really figured out how to move faster in the cloud. Companies like Snowflake really are leveraging the cloud toe transform entire businesses. You look at uber lyft Airbnb, these companies that really harnessed the cloud toe not just from a technical productivity standpoint, but really transform the business. Eh? So that was the opportunity that we saw Kalemie was Let's take a step back. We call this cloud engineering. Let's imagine a world where every developers, a cloud developer and infrastructure teams are enabling that new way of building. >>Great. So you mentioned cloud engineering. Now, Justin, you've done a bit a bit of cloud engineering yourself in your day. You know, the Cube has been following Snowflake very closely since it launched really mid last decade. And we've we've covered your novel, architectural approach and your cloud only mantra. Talk about that. And have there been any changes in how you're thinking about cloud adoption and how that's as that's increased and you've seen new use cases emerged. >>Yeah, so I think, you know, obviously Snowflake was was built on the foundation of cloud first, and in fact, cloud Onley are only platform and only infrastructure is is based on the cloud. But, you know, for us, it was absolutely key on. How do you develop a platform and a product that's completely elastic? Lee, scalable on drily, really allows for kind of the paper use and paper consumption model. We didn't really it would be very difficult for us to offer this and Thio offer a product in this way. On def, you start to think about kind of from a cloud engineering perspective. Um, we don't have the typical network engineers. A typical data center engineers that you that you might have seen previously. Instead, we're shifting our model in our what we do include engineering away from kind of an operations model or even devotes model towards the software engineering model. E. I think that's the That's the big shift to cloud engineering is that we're looking to hire and we're building a team of software engineers to build systems and platforms and and tooling Thio have the system self managed as much as possible, and it changes to our infrastructure that we look at any changes in our platform are all through, commits and and deployed via pipelines, as opposed to having Operator's log on and make these changes. And so that's the shift that I think we're seeing. And that's to kind of match the overall stuff like Model of Cloud, first and on and where the product is like just going. >>Like you said in cloud only, Justin, you use Pollux me in your own engineering and also in your product externally. Is that correct? And how so? >>Yeah, we actually use it in, specifically and, um, in our platform, in order to kind of deployed to manage and, uh, just operate a kind of our overall cloud infrastructure. We specifically use it more focused on the good days and and continue ization side of things. But that use cases kind of rapidly expanding across the organization. >>So I'm curious of what do you guys we're seeing in the market place? Joe, you know, thinking about cloud broadly, What's the impact that you're seeing on businesses? Who are the big players that you see out there? Maybe you could talk about some of the differentiation that you've noticed. >>Yeah, I think this notion of plot engineering, you know, even 3.5 years ago when we got started was in its infancy. You know, we definitely saw that. Hey, you know, the world is moving and shifting left, you know, it's just was saying and really, people are looking for new ways to empower developers, but that empowerment has to come with guard rails, right? And so what we're seeing is oftentimes, teams are now modernizing their entire platform infrastructure platform, and they're looking to technologies like kubernetes to do that. But increasingly, you know, aws, Azure gp. You know, when we started, um, there weren't any great managed kubernetes clusters. And now today, fast forward. You know Onley 3.5 years and and many of our customers are using flew me to help them get up and running with the chaos in AWS, for example, you look at a lot of folks transforming on Prem as well again many times, adopting kubernetes is sort of a if they intend to stay on Prem. You know, Thio, at least modernize their approach to application infrastructure delivery. That's where Pollux me really can help. It could be a bridge. Thio hate from on Prem to the public cloud. There's certainly a lot of folks doing great work in the space, you know, I think VM Ware has really kind of emerged as sort of vanguard thought leader in this in this space, especially with, you know, hep dio and now kind of pivotal joining the story. We see other, you know, great companies like hash in court, for we're doing good work in this space. Um, certainly we integrate with a lot of their technologies on you. Combine those with the public cloud providers. There's also a lot of just smaller startups in the space which you know, strikes in my heart. I love I love supporting the startup ecosystem. You know, whether that's for cell or net lif I or server list. You know, really trying to help developers harness more of the cloud. I think that's an emerging trend that we're gonna see accelerating in the coming years. >>Yeah. Thank you. You've mentioned a number of interesting emerging tools companies in the ecosystem. I mean, Justin talked about kubernetes. Are there other tooling that you're using that that might be, you know, some of your customers might like toe to know about. >>Yeah, I think so. So one thing I wanted to actually follow up with what Joe said here is is around kind of the multi cloud nature of what we do is is the tools, like gloomy are critical for us to be able to abstract away specific cloud provider AP ice and such and so given Snowflake operates on all three major public clouds and offers a seamless experience amongst all three of them. We have to have something that abstracts some of that complexity and some of those technical details away. Andi, that's why I kind of blew me, made sense in in this case and has helped us kind of achieved that cloud neutrality piece. Um, in terms of other tools that that you're thinking that we're talking about, I think Bellamy is doing a great job kind of on some of these on some of the kind of that interaction and infrastructure and sensation. But we're looking for tooling to kind of look for the overall workflow automation piece on orchestration. So what sits on top of say, you're using intervals using terra form? You may be using Polonia's well, but what kind of orchestrates all these pieces together? Onda, How do you kind of build workflow automation? And I think there's a lot of companies and technology providers that air starting up in this area to kind of stitch all these pieces together so that you kind of have a seamless kind of work flow across across your infrastructure. >>Got it. So, Joe, I'm kind of curious you talked a little bit about your background at Microsoft, and you're even a TMC where you're helping, you know, people manage Luns. It was a sort of skill set that is not in high demand today. Early. Shouldn't be people really need to transform? I've said that a lot in the queue, but But, you know, maybe talk a little bit about the experiences that you've had in the past that informed the direction that Pollux me is taking and where you see it going specifically. I mean, I've been talking a lot about the next decade of cloud is not gonna be the same as the last decade of the cloud. How did you How do you see it? >>Yeah, I think I recognize a clear trend, you know, in with cloud computing. Uh, you know, back I can't remember 13 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, When, when When the Azure project started. You know Dave Cutler, who actually founded the anti project at Microsoft, Actually, was was one of the first engineers that started Azure. And he called it a cloud operating system. And, you know, I think that vision of hey, the cloud is the new operating system is something that we're still just chipping away at. And that was that was a clear trend, you know, having seen these transformations in the past, you know the shift from, you know, dos to windows from windows to mobile Thio, client server thio now the cloud every step of the way. We always transform the way we build applications. And I think where we're at now is horse, really in the midst of a transition that I think we'll look back. You never know when it's happening right? But you can always look back in hindsight and see that it did happen. And I think the trend that we're going through now with service meshes and just, you know, micro services and service list is really we're building distributed applications. These clouds made of applications, they're distributed applications. And that was the trend that I, I recognized, also recognizes another trend, which is, you know, we spent 30 years building great tools. You know, I d s test frameworks sharing and reuse package managers. We figured out static analysis and how to fix security problems in this in in programming languages that we've got today. Let's not go rebuild all that. Let's leverage that, and and so that's what Eric and I said they want, you know, Let's stand on the shoulders of giants. Let's leverage all this good work that has come before us. Let's just apply that to the infrastructure domain and really try toe smooth things out. Give us a new sort of level playing field to build on. From here is we go forward and I'm excited that Parliament gives us that foundation that we can now build on top of >>Great and Justin, of course, were covered. Aws reinvent you guys. It was kind of your your first platform. It's your largest, the largest component of your business. And I have been saying, Ah lot that, you know the early days of cloud was about infrastructure last 32 throw in some database. But really, there's a new workload that's emerging. And you guys are at the heart of that where people are putting governed data giving access to that data, making it secure, uh, sharing that data across an ecosystem so that new workload is really driving new innovation. I wonder how you see that what you see the next half a decade or decades looking like in terms of innovation? >>Yeah, I think I think it za valid point, which is, um, it's less about infrastructure and more about the services that you're providing with that infrastructure. And what what value are you able to add and So I think that's it, Snowflake. The thing that we're really focused on, which is abstract away, all these tunes and all these knobs and such, and the how much remember you have on a specific and a piece of infrastructure or describes or anything like that. So what's the business value? And how can we present that business value in a uniform way, regardless of kind of the underlying service provider on baby to a different class of business users, someone who wants a low data and just two analysts against that they really don't want to understand what's happening underneath. And I think that's that's where this club engineering piece comes in. Um, and what my team is doing is really focused on How do we abstract away that kind of lower level infrastructure and scalability pieces and allow the application developers to develop this application that is providing business value in a transparent and seamless way and in elastic way such that we can scale up and down we can. We have the ability, obviously, to replicate both within regions and clouds, but also across different clouds. So from a business resiliency and and up time point of view. That's that's something that's been really important. Um, and I think also how do we security is? Becoming is obviously a huge, huge importance, given the classifications type of day that people are putting within our platform. So how are we able Thio ensure that there is a pipeline where developers have reviews and commits of any kind of changes going into the system and their arm's length away, and could be fully audited for various clients and regular regulatory needs? And that's something that kind of this suffer engineering cloud engineering concept has really helped develop and allowed us Thio obviously be successful with various different types of industries. >>Joe, we're almost out of time. I wonder if you could bring us home. I mean, some of the things Justin was talking about I mean, I definitely see a lot of potential disruption coming from the world of developers. Uh, he was talking. He was talking about consumption models different than many of the SAS pricing models. And how do you How do you see it? Developers air kind of the really the new source of innovation. Your final thoughts. >>Yeah. I think we're democratizing access to the cloud for everybody. I think you know it's not just about developers, but it's It's really all engineers of all backgrounds, its developers, its infrastructure engineers, its operations engineers, its security engineers. You know, Justin's mentioning compliance and security. These air really critical elements of how we deliver software into the cloud. So I think you know what you're going to see is you're gonna see a lot of new, compelling experiences built thanks to cloud capabilities. You know, the fact that you've got a I and M l and all these infinitely scalable data services like snowflake and, you know, just an arm's length away that you can use as building blocks in your applications. You know, application developers love that. You know, if we can just empower them to run fast, they will run fast, and we'll build great applications. And infrastructure teams and security engineers will be central to enabling that that new future. I think you also see that you know infrastructure and cloud services will become accessible to an entirely new audience. You know, kids graduating from college, they understand Java script. They understand python now they can really just harness the cloud to build amazing new experiences. So I think we're still, you know, still early days on the transition to the cloud. I know where many years on the journey, but we've got many, many years, you know, in our future. And it's very exciting. >>Well, thank you, guys, Joe and Justin. I really appreciate it. Congratulations on your respective success. I know is Joe said you got a lot more work to do, but I really appreciate you coming on the Cube. >>Awesome. Thank you. You're >>welcome. All right, so we're here covering reinvent 2020. The virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. Were unpacking the cloud and looking to the future. You're watching the cube?
SUMMARY :
It's the He's the co founder and CEO of Gloomy, and Justin Fits you You know, leading your customers to the cloud and really attacking that Why did you and your co founder start the company how you got it off the ground? make you know developers lives as as as as productive as possible. You know, most of our customers were still, you know, developing software like they did 15 years So you mentioned cloud engineering. And so that's the shift that I think we're seeing. Like you said in cloud only, Justin, you use Pollux me in your own engineering and also in our platform, in order to kind of deployed to manage and, Who are the big players that you see out there? There's also a lot of just smaller startups in the space which you know, you know, some of your customers might like toe to know about. to kind of stitch all these pieces together so that you kind of have a seamless kind of work flow across you know, maybe talk a little bit about the experiences that you've had in the past that informed the direction And I think the trend that we're going through now with service meshes and just, you know, micro services and service And you guys are at the heart of that where people are And what what value are you able And how do you How do you see it? So I think we're still, you know, still early days on the transition to the cloud. I know is Joe said you got a lot more work to do, but I really appreciate you coming on the Cube. You're All right, so we're here covering reinvent 2020.
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