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