>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage at Mirantis Launchpad 2020, brought to you by Mirantis. >> Welcome back. And I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020. Of course we're spending a lot of time talking about Kubernetes. We're going to be digging in talking about some of the important developer tooling that Mirantis is helping to proliferate in the market, solve some real important challenges in the space. So happy to welcome to the program Miska Kaipiainen. He is the senior director of engineering with Mirantis. Miska, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, so Miska, I notice you've got on the Kontena sweatshirt. You were the founder of the company, did some tools. One of the tools that you and your team helped create was Lens. You and your team joined Mirantis, and recently Lens was pulled in. So maybe if you could just give us a little bit about your background. You do some coding yourself, the team that you have there, and let's tee up the conversation, 'cause it's that Lens piece that we're going to spend a bunch of time talking about. >> Yeah, so the background of what we did, basically Kontena, we started back in 2015, and we a the focus on creating technologies around the container orchestration technologies to basically to make developer tooling that are very easy to use for the developers. So during the years at Kontena, we did many different types of products, and maybe the most interesting product that we created was Lens. And now really when we joined Mirantis in January this year, so we have been able to work on Lens, and actually, since the Lens was made open source, fully open source in March this year, so it's been really kind of picking up, and now Mirantis acquired the whole technology, so we can really start investing even more in the development. >> All right, so let's talk specifically about Lens. As I teed up at the beginning, we're talking about managing multiple clusters. Gosh, and I think back to 2015. It was early on. Most people were still learning about Docker, Docker swarms, Kubernetes, Mesos. There were a lot of fights over how orchestration would be done. A little bit different discussion about what developers were doing, how they scaled out configurations, how they manage those. So help us understand kind of that core, what Lens does, and how the product has matured and expanded over those last five years. >> Yeah, so over the last five years, so originally Lens was developed for our internal product. So like Mesosphere and Docker, and they all have their own orchestration technologies even before Kubernetes. And we also started working on our own orchestration technology. And I'm a huge believer in when we are dealing with very complex technologies, so if you can visualize it and make it kind of more interesting to look at, so it will kind of help with the adoption, and it's kind of more acceptable to the market. And that's why we started doing Lens. And over the years, we turned Lens to work with Kubernetes environments, and nowadays really Lens is very much loved by the Kubernetes developers, who are those people who need to deal with the Kubernetes clusters on a daily basis. So they are not necessarily those ops people who are creating those clusters , but they are the people who actually use those clusters. >> Well, of course that that general adoption is something that, you know, super important. You have some stats you can share on, you talk about the love of developers. You said it's open source, it's available on GitHub, but how many people are using it? What are some of those usage stats? >> Yeah, so it was interesting. So when we released Lens open source under MIT license in March, so since then we have been getting, in half a year, we have been getting 8,000 stargazers on GitHub. That is kind of mind-blowing because we try to create projects and trying to create anything that would get a lot of traction in the past, but truly, it totally happened just now after years of trying. So it has been since the last six months, it's been just amazing the adopts and we have more than 50,000 users using Lens and the retention is great. People keep on coming back. So yeah, the numbers look very, very good for Lens, and we are just getting started. >> Yeah, well, it's something that this community definitely is huge growth, and anybody in this space remembers just the huge adoption of Docker, which of course the enterprise piece of Docker is now part of Mirantis. Inside those developers, help us understand a little bit more, what is it that has them really not only looking at the GitHubs, starring it, as you said, they're the stargazers. It's like a favorite, for those that aren't in the system. I've had a chance to look at some of the demos, and it seems rather straightforward. But if you could, just in your words, explain what it is that it solves for developers that otherwise they either had to do themselves or they had to cobble together a lot of different tools. We know developers out there. The wonderful thing is there's no shortage of tools to choose from. It's about the right tool that can do the right thing. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So Lens, we are calling it IDE for a reason. So we are talking about IDE for Kubernetes developers. And what does it mean actually is that we are taking all those necessary tools and technologies and packaging them, integrating them seamlessly together for the purpose of making it more easy for developers to deploy, operate, observe, inspect their workloads that are running on Kubernetes clusters. And I think the main benefits that Lens will provide for these developers is that if you're a newcomer in the Kubernetes ecosystem, so Lens gives you a very easy way to learn Kubernetes because it's so visual. And for more experienced users, it just radically improves the, let's say the speed of business and the way how you can perform things with your clusters. >> So one of the pieces that that Lens does is that multi-cluster management. So first of all, I believe, as you said, it's open source and can work with, is it any certified Kubernetes out there, whether it be from the public cloud, companies like VMware and Red Hat that have Kubernetes, of course, Mirantis has Kubernetes, too. And secondly, I think you teased out a little bit, but help help us understand a little bit. Multi-cluster management is something that the big players, you hear Azure and Google Cloud talking about how they look at managing not only other environments, but oh yeah, we can have other clusters and we can help you manage it. I think that's more on the ops side of things, as opposed to, as you said, this is really a developer tool set. >> Yeah, so of course, all the organizations, they want to most likely have some sort of centralized system where they can manage multiple clusters, and some companies provide systems for on-premises, and some public cloud vendors, they provide systems for provisioning those clusters on their own own systems. And then we have also the kind of multicloud management systems. Most of these technologies, they are really designed for the operations side, so how the IT administrations can manage these multiple clusters. So now if you look at the situation from the developer's perspective, they are now given access to certain number of clusters from different environments. And by the way, some of these clusters are also running on their local development environments on their laptops. So what Lens is doing is basically provides a unified user experience across all these clusters no matter what is the flavor of the Kubernetes. It can be the Minikube. It can be from AKS. It can be Mirantis Enterprise, Docker Enterprise offering, or whatever. So it kind of brings them all together and makes it very easy to navigate and go around and do your work. >> Yeah, well, that's, the promise of Kubernetes isn't that it just levels the playing field amongst everything. As I've talked to the founders of Kubernetes, people like Joe Beda said it's not a silver bullet. It's a thin layer. But that skillset is what's so important because there is a lot of difference between every platform they deal with. So as a developer, it's nice to have some tools that I can work across those environments. From a developer standpoint, I think it's on Windows, Linux, Mac, works across those environment. What do you hear from your customers? How are they using it? Is this something that they're like, oh hey, I can go make an adjustment on my mobile when I'm not necessarily in the office? Are we not quite there yet? >> Actually, it's kind of funny, because sometimes we hear these type of requests that we would like to have a mobile app version of Lens. I don't know how that would actually work in practice. So we haven't been doing anything on that front yet. I think still the most common use case is that developers, they are given access to clusters from somewhere and they are just desperately trying to find a kind of convenient way how to navigate around these different clusters and how to manage their workloads. And I think Lens is hitting the sweet spot in there with the ease of use. >> All right, so let me understand. It's been open sourced, yet Mirantis owns it. Is there a service or support? Does this tie into other products in the Mirantis portfolio? How do people get it? What do they need to, if anything, pay for it? And help us understand how this fits into the broader Mirantis story. >> Yes, so it's still kind of early days, so we just kind of announced that Lens is now part of Mirantis, let's say portfolio. So I must say that still the kind of main focus for us is around improving Lens and making it better for developers. So that's much more important than trying to think about the ways how potentially we could monetize this. So, but there are plans going ahead, going around for different ways how we can better support bigger enterprises who want to start using Lens in a big scale. >> Well, yeah, that's so important. Of course, developers, we need to lower the friction, help them adopt things fast. Miska, just get your general viewpoint, though. One of the big value propositions that Mirantis has is of course allowing enterprises to take advantage of these new types of solutions, especially today around Kubernetes. So help us understand from your standpoint the philosophy of what your team's helping to build and the customer engagements that you're having. >> Yes, so Mirantis, of course, has a broad portfolio of products, and many of those products, of course, are related to Kubernetes. And so we have many products which I'm also one of the leading development efforts around those. So some of the products are related to how to manage image repositories and registries. Some of them are related to how to handle the helm charts, which has basically become the defacto packaging format for Kubernetes applications. And we are kind of trying to bring all these different products and technologies together in a way that make it even more easy for developers then to access through Lens. So it's still a little bit work in progress, of course, since the Lens ecosystem is quite new, but we are on track there trying to make a beautiful one kind of experience for our customers. >> All right, well, final question I have for you. As you said, it's new there, but it gives a little taste as to feedback you're getting from the community. Anything we should be looking at on kind of the near to mid-term road map when it comes to Lens. >> Oh yeah, so we are just barely scratching the surface of the potential on what we can do with Lens. So one of the big features that we will be releasing still during this year in a couple of months time is going to be the extension API, which will allow all these cloud-native technology ecosystem vendors to bring their own technologies easily available and accessible through Lens. So it is possible for third parties to extend the user interface with their own kind of unique features and visualizations. And we are already actively working with certain partners to integrate their technologies through this extension API. So that's going to be huge. It's going to be game-changer. >> Well, the great thing about an open source project is people can go out, they can grab it now, they can give feedback, participate in the community. Miska, thank you so much for joining us and great to chat. >> Thank you for having me. Thank you. >> All right, stay with us for more coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)