>> Narrator: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, here in Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, founder and CEO of a start-up, solo.io, Idit Levine. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> All right, so one of the things we were talking in the open. Lauren Cooney, who you know, and I were talking about, well, you know, Cloud Foundry. We've been talking about digital transformation. The enterprise for years, but there's always these new technologies. It was, you know, Kubernetes came this wave, now server-less is the wave, and you know, Amazon's kind of overarching, you know, discussion in the market place. That's why I'm glad to bring you in because your company, a startup, plays across a number of these, you know, emerging spaces in the Cloud Foundry space. So, give our audience a little bit about your background and what led to the foundation of solo.io. >> Yeah, thanks. So I was in start-up all my life. I worked in DynamicOps, we got acquired by VMWare, so vRealize, if you remember. And then I moved to another start-up, got inquired by Verizon, so cloud switch, who was moving back in the day from micro, from on prem to off prem. And then I moved to Dell EMC, to the city office and that was great because what I was doing was basically started the dojo of Cloud Foundry. So, me and Ryan Gallagher, if you know him, and Patrick Dennis, we are the three who started it and we basically co-located with the Cloud Foundry team and we worked very, very closely with them. And what we did, what I was doing a lot was bringing in innovation so we created some opensource projects like Key Unique if you heard about it about UniCare, you know, building and running UniCare. We worked with a lot of the ecosystem and the reason we started Solo is because I felt, I really feel, I really felt that the EMC is a great place but that it sometimes slow you down because of the big organization and I felt that we can do much faster outside. So that's why we opened, we started Solo, and all the purpose with Solo is basically playing two tracks. One of them is we really, really want people to use our product, so we want to target the people who has the problem, which is the enterprise. So that's where we're really, really targeting to help them move to what we really master which is the opensource community, so all the innovation. So, that's exactly what we're doing, basically helping them to take their monolithic application, move them to microservices and to Serverless, but by using very, very unique and innovative technology like Envoy and a lot of others. >> Okay, so we hear a lot of times it's you know, of course, companies, they need to move faster. They need to go through this transformation. It's the API economy. And that's, I think, where Gloo fits in there. So Gloo is spelled G-L-O-O, >> Right. >> What's a function gateway? How does this help with, kind of, you know, is it API Sprawl these days? Or, you know, all these various services. You know, how is this the glue that brings everything together? >> So as I said, we're working in two ecosystems, right? The first one is the enterprise. So the main use case that we are trying to solve as I said is the movement. We wanted to make sure that people will be able to take the monolithic and at least extend them to microservices like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, and to Serverless, and also in the free time to kind of like move it. So that was kind of like our purpose. But we needed some technology for that, and we looked outside and discovered that the first thing that we needed is probably a very good API gateway. But it need to route on the function level, and it need to discover the function, and a lot of technology that just wasn't exist back then. So what we did was basically build one, which is Gloo. That's the first thing that we needed because we had no choice. There wasn't anything that actually we seriously, and trust me, and looking very well of all the opensource project, there's nothing like what we built out there, in terms of the quality of the technology and what we're capable of doing. So that's why we built it. We didn't plan to make it a product, but that was the purpose. And the second thing. Now we're building more stuff, and we need maybe to extend to service-match, or function-match, like we call it. Again, not because we want to. Because we have no choice. Right? So this is not a core product, but it's really, we're building is about, we're targeting everything that's related to this use case and we're trying to move. >> Okay, so Google and Microsoft in their keynotes talked about an API gateway, opensource project, I hear service-match, I'm thinking about ISDL. How does Gloo fit-- >> So as I said, there's a beautiful, we are not competing because as I said, at the beginning, my purpose, look, I will look at the situation. That's how somebody can use it. But they're just not moving fast enough for us as a startup. So we had to actually create it. Now, when we created it, we created it specifically to our use case, right? We needed the function, that we knew that our purpose was to take all that, those ecosystems of monolithic, microservices, and Serverless, and look and see, what is the smallest unit of compute that's common between them, and cut everything to it, and that's the function. So basically, what we're doing, we're taking all these ecosystems, cut everything to function, and then reassemble a movement between them. That's something that they just didn't give us, so we had to build it. But the beauty of it is because we are, you know, we are really innovative and that's what we know how to do, we decided to leverage the opensource, so for instance is build on Envoy, right, because it is the best proxy that exists today. And we extended it, because we needed some functionalities, so we created a lot of filter, right? Because it was very important to us to make Envoy basically have this functionality. So we are not competing with none of them, because mainly, that's not what we're doing. We're just focusing on the use case. But theoretically, if you're looking at API gateway, I will say hands down we're probably the best that exists out there, which is, that's not what we started with. >> Yeah, it's really smart, coming, you know, no small startup's going to be, oh, well, we're going to, you know, in Silicon Valley maybe they think they're going to take down the giants and break the world and competing is everything, but I like you actually spent some time working in the EMC CTO office, and there are certain things we will always look at. And it's like, there's this gap. Here's what we have today, and here's absolutely where we know where the market is going. >> Right. >> So, you know, the analogy I hear today is like, well, customers they've got their applications. They need to modernize them. So it's been the last year or so, there's been this discussion of lift and shift. It made people cringe. I said, you know, I've lifted the virtualization way. One of the biggest challenges where, was I took this old application which, to be frank, stunk, and I kept it alive for years longer, even though the server was no longer supported, the OS was no longer supported, but I could just virtualize it and that was great. I want to get to 12-factor, microservice architecture, even Serverless might be the foundation that I'd like to build this. I cannot lift and shift to get Serverless. There is no path from old to there. So it sounds like you're >> What we're doing. Trying to attack some of that there, am I getting that right? >> Yes, I mean, basically, I will give you an example of a customer that we have, right? So, they came, their monolithic application, right? And they really want it to move. And you know, it's really hard to maintain this, so they said, you know what, we really want it to move to Serverless. That's the engineering part, right? They're saying, we want it to move to engineering. They came to the boss and they said, well, what we want to do is to take it, rewrite it, and put it as a greenfield, right? Basically as a Serverless. So the boss said, no problem, go, evaluate how much time it will take, and then come back to me. So they went and they did it, and they basically came with nine months. So the boss said, okay, so, no. And the reason is because nine months means a year, and also, I didn't get any feature on this year. Right? They will fire me. So what we're doing is we're saying, take this monolithic application, it's working, don't touch it, extend it. First of all, extend, on the new functionality, going to the Serverless and to microservices, and we're supporting everything, and it's brand new. I mean, I can start telling you what is the platform that we support. It's almost everything. And then, the second thing is that, on your spare time, start breaking it. Now, there's no magic. I know people are saying there's an algorithm. That's never going to work. Trust me, and I did a lot of software in my life. You can't guess this stuff. You actually need to rewrite them. But on your spare time, when you're available, and on the way, you know, on your pace of learning. And I feel that that's what we're giving. We're basically giving them the freedom to do that on their spare time, and we're giving a lot of other tools, like for instance, debug. So we create, we opensource a project called Squash, that basically be able to attach debuggers to microservices, to Serverless, and to monolithic, in different language, different everything, and jump between them. So you basically can create what I call library up, and jump cross that. So I feel that what we're targeting is basically make this movement easy, with any technology that we can put out there. >> Yeah. The whole application modernization is a real challenge. If I look at, you know, in this space, Pivotal's acquisition of Pivotal Labs was to help them. A lot of services, things that we're looking at, Pivotal going public. How much of their business is actually services, how much of it is you know, subscription and software? How much are you, is this just tooling you're building, or are you helping customers get through some of the services that maybe it's time for you to talk, how many people do you have on your team? Like, I look at the website, I see like five people, so. >> Yeah, that's actually what we are. So I mean, specifically, we are five. We are startup. We got actually really well funded from True Ventures, great, great investors. And what was important to me, was not to do a lot of mistakes of the other startups doing, which is basically scale too fast, right? I wanted first to putting a product out there, I want to see what's going on. And today, because we opensource, because we all can use Amazon and so on, we don't need a lot of money to actually create the additional projects. So that's what we did. Specifically, I can tell I'm getting a lot of resumes and right now, I'm actually pushing them back, because it's really, really important to me to scale on the right side. Now we're starting to have customers, we will have to scale, right? So that's that. In terms of how much, so that's enough. We are five and as I said, it's good, but we are not in the services. Actually people they're doing an amazing job. We don't want to touch that. What we do want to make sure is that they're giving the tools to do them themselves and they will hire probably people to do the services. >> Are you able to share how much funding, you said True Ventures is one of the funding? >> So we got 2.5 from True Ventures, and then we got 500 from Haystack and another 250 from Wave Ventures, capital. >> Okay, and five people. You're hiring too. What are you looking for? >> Yeah, so we're definitely going to hire more. We need a full stack engineer, we need a system engineer. Right now it's very flat architecture. A lot of really, really good people. I mean, my engineers are people who was in the Israeli Army as lackers, you know, very, very technical. People who are, walk with me in EMC, and so on. Very, very good people. And our purpose is to grow as system engineers a little bit, UI, and we also need some help to scale. >> And you're located here in Boston, correct? >> I am, I am. I have one engineer in Seattle, but all the rest are here. >> Okay, and the products itself, you know, opensource, and the things that are available, so-- >> For now, so we started as an open, we did put it as an opensource project. This is the platform I feel should be opensource. But there will be features that we will not opensource. A lot of more things that makes sense for the enterprise, we will not opensource. But yeah, right now, everything is opensource, and we wanted to share for the community. >> Okay, and from the customers you're talking to, what's their biggest challenge, you know, things like Serverless, you know, are they getting their arms around it, especially, you know, out here in the east coast, as opposed to, you know, some of the startups in the like? >> So actually, people in the enterprise, I mean, I think I nailed the use case, because you know, I went, I'm talking a lot in conference, QCon is one of the conference that I really, really liked and talked a lot, and when I talk there to the people, everybody has this problem, which I have a monolithic, how do you move them? Most of them trying to move to container right now. That's where it is. But the beauty of how we built Gloo, and that was totally on purpose, is the fact that, and I actually have a diagram showing it, today those enterprise that are only using monolithic. I don't know, like Bank of America, I think is only monolithic. Then if you're looking, there's people only using microservices, probably Google and others. And then there is companies like iRobot for instance. So it's going all the way to Serverless. That's all there, right? Bam, which is amazing. But, and there is companies that's sharing it, right? That means they're microservices and Serverless, so monolithic, and then. And EMC for instance, they have like Serverless, microservices and monolithic. What we're trying to do is basically, the beauty of what we build, is basically a platform on top of an envoy. So we can actually create the customized offer for you that will be only what you need. And what we will help you is to basically glue, this is what the name, glue your environment, so it will give you one experience that you can manage it or you can mix and match, you can do whatever you want, and it's really, really clean. So when I'm talking to customers today, mainly where they are is like monolithic to microservices, but they love this use case. I mean, I didn't meet a customer yet that I show him the demo of how we're taking a spring boot application and move it, and he said that they don't want it to proceed. So it's good. >> Wow. Fascinating stuff. I really appreciate you sharing. Definitely, we hear from customers all the time. It's moving from the old to the new, it's I need to live in both of those worlds, and they can't split those teams, it can't be islands, I need to pull this together. It's definitely through a multi-cloud, and seems like it's happening in the development environment too. So, Idit Levine, solo, congratulations on where you've gone. Look forward to catching up much more in the future. We're back with lots more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry summit in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.