>> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of KubeCon 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, my cohost this week. Our next guest Shiv Ramji, VP of Product at DigitalOcean, fast growing startup, now growing company. Congratulations, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> So you guys got some hard news, you got product, Kubernetes product, and you guys just upgraded your status on CNCF. Let's jump into the product news real quick. What's the hard news? >> Yeah, so we just announced a Kubernetes product and service on our platform. And you know, we've had a lot of customers who've actually have been deploying Kubernetes on our platform, either themselves or through a managed provider. And a lot of customers, specifically businesses, have been asking us to provide native support for Kubernetes. So now this is native support for Kubernetes on the DigitalOcean platform. >> What does native support for customers mean specifically? Is it managing the workload down to, how, what level of granularity, I guess, is the question. Be specific about this support. >> Yeah, yeah. So essentially, typically developers who are deploying container workloads or Kubernetes workloads do this themselves. Now we make it very, very easy. So you can come into our platform and, within a few clicks, deploy a Kubernetes cluster with your typical integrations of monitoring or container registry and the Kubernetes dashboard. >> So you basically just select a couple features and they can go from there? It's just run a gun? >> It's just a few clicks and you are running. And the reason why we did that, and sort of the history of the company has really focused on removing friction for developers to get started. So we make it very, very easy from a product experience perspective, and also from a cost perspective. So we remove all the barriers for any team size to get started. And so that's why we've made the product very, very easy to use, very simple. And then we also plan to have a lot of tutorials around containers or containerizing an application and scaling in the microservices work. >> Lauren: That's great. >> Talk about the security aspect of it. It's been a big topic here. We were talking about it on our intro, Lauren and I, around, you know, that it's evolving in real time. Things are moving fast. Up front work needs to get done. How do your customers think about security in context of the Kubernetes offering? >> So we have a story for that. We are trying to essentially deploy some native integrations and some open source projects that help us do security scanning, so the goal is to essentially let our customers know of vulnerabilities that they may have based on the images that they are deploying. And you know, all of us are guilty of it. We will get a public container image and launch it, and then realize that there are some security flaws. So that's something we do want to address as we continue to roll out additional features throughout this year. >> I know we've interviewed you guys before, but I want you to just take a minute and explain, for the folks watching who might not know DigitalOcean, what you guys do, your value proposition, who you guys target, how you sell the product, what's the service, all that good stuff. Share a one minute update on what you guys do. >> So we are a New York based company that were founded in 2012 out of Techstars. And the value proposition is very simple in that we want to be the cloud platform for developers and their teams, so that they're focused on software that changes the world. And what that means is we take all the complexity in our product development process, essentially to make it very easy for a developer to go from concept or idea to production as fast as they can. Once they get there, we want to also enable them to scale reliably on our platform. And essentially, all of the features that we've launched have been driven by customer demand. So they tell us that, hey, we're scaling on your platform, we really need these additional features, and that's how we respond. So we're very developer-obsessed, and focus on that specific persona, and help them get to the cloud as quickly as possible. >> So you're solving the problem for the developer. Bait pain points are, what? >> So there are three. We think of learning as the first one, as a barrier to developers. So this is why we've built a library of tutorials. There are about 1400 plus tutorials. We get about three million unique visitors on our platform. And about 80% of our customers actually came from one of the tutorials. Right, so that's such a great source of >> Lauren: Documentation is so important. >> Documentation. So important. So that's our first one. The second one is building. This idea of let's remove all friction for you to go from zero, essentially an idea, to production as fast as possible. So there're two things we do there. One, we try to make the product very simple and easy to use. And two, we are very price competitive. So we have a very competitive price to performance ratio in the market, with the idea that, if you want to keep your total cost of operations as low as possible. And so, that's another reason why developers, teams, and also businesses are now, we are in their consideration set, because they're like, well developers love this product, and I can get a cost benefit. Why would I not do that? And then the last one is scaling, which is once you're growing your application, you're going to need ability to scale and support. And so we provide free support to all of our customers, regardless of the size of your workload or size of customer or business. And I think that's a very important value proposition for us. >> So who do you compete against? Like, who are a couple of your competitors? >> So, the best way to answer that is to see, so we go to our customers and see who they compare us with. And typically we are compared against AWS and Google. >> Lauren: Okay, okay. >> And so, they are the ones who will come to us and say, "Hey, we're about to launch an app, or we're considering moving our workloads, you know, here's what our setup looks like in Google or AWS. You know, can you provide us similar capabilities?" And a lot of the times tends to be, you know, our developers already love you. If you have this capabilities and features set, we would love to move our workloads. >> Well I think you've got a tremendous amount of active developers as well, correct? >> Yes, yes. >> So, and you're growing that exponentially. What is, kind of your growth look like, year over year? >> Yeah, so last year we signed the one millionth developer on our platform. There's essentially one million developers that have created an account on our platform. And we sometimes have developers who come in and out of our platforms, if you're done with your project, right, if you're a student. But we have about half a million active developers on our platform, and growing rapidly. And we also foster a community which is growing tremendously. So we've got about three and a half million active developers in our communities, reading articles, and going through Q&A, and posting very interesting projects. >> Those are some great numbers. I mean, they're up there with Salesforce growth. So that's tremendous. >> And also the other news is you're upgrading your membership. Cloud Native Compute Foundation, CNCF. Talk about that dynamic, why? Size, did you fall into new bucket or you guys are increasing your participation? What's the news? >> Yeah, I mean, we were founded really on this idea of we believe in helping the community, and so free and open source software is what we've built our business on. And so, as we got active with Kubernetes ourselves, and we've been using Kubernetes for two years internally, so we have lots of lessons of our own. And as we were bringing this product to market, it was only the right, it was the right time for us to really upgrade our membership to gold with the CNCF, with the goal of getting to their platinum level where we can contribute to standards and bodies and really influence the evolution of all the tooling around containers and microservices. So, it was the right, the timing was right, and it's the right evolution of us continuing to support the community. >> Making some good profit, contribute that, and help out CNCF. >> Shiven: Absolutely. >> As the VP of Product, you have the keys to the kingdom as they say, in the product management world. (laughing) You got to balance engineering management with product, and you got to look to the market for the, you know, the needs of the customers, and of course they're helping you. Big time developers aren't afraid to share their opinion of what they need. >> Shiven: Never. >> Pain points, that's a good, good, good, good job there. What is on the road map for you? What's next? How are you looking at short, mid, long-term evolution of DigitalOcean's product strategy? >> Yeah, so I'll break it down in three different areas. The first part is really having a core complete feature set for a modern application that's being built in the cloud. So this is where, over the last 12 months, we've developed, we've deployed, developed and deployed load balancers, cloud firewalls, object storage, block storage, a new control panel experience, and a bunch of networking features that we have released. And so, we have some new features coming this year, which allow you to do, you know, the VPC feature, specifically, that allows businesses to have private networking and peering. That's been a top requested feature, so that's something that's going to come later this year to round out our core platform. And then, beyond that, we have two or three different things that we're doing. So the first category is just having a better developer experience. So this is everything from the experience you have when you are launching any cloud resource, whether it's for a control panel, or API, or CLI. So, continue to make that frictionless. So we have a few updates coming there to our control panel, improvements to our API, and adding a bunch of integrations so that, if you're using different products to manage your cloud infrastructure, we make that very, very easy. The second thing is marketplaces. So, a lot of, as you know, lots of other providers have marketplaces and different versions of marketplaces. A lot of our customers and vendors are now coming to us saying, "You have a really big audience and customer base. We really want to integrate our products so we can make it easy for them to spin up those resources." So marketplaces is the second large category that we're working on later this year. We'll have a lot of updates on that. And the third one is tied to developer experience, but it's essentially the Kubernetes product that we're launching. We also have plans to enable a marketplace-like integrations, and a lot of the CICD integrations, so that once you're up and running with your cluster, you got to get your CICD pipelines and tooling working, so that's an area. >> I want to ask you about multicloud, and where you guys are at with multicloud, and kind of connecting to the other cloud providers that are competitors, but, you know, your users are going to want to use as well as your solution. >> Yeah, this is where I think Kubernetes fits really, really well with the multicloud story for us, which is why, sort of, why now for us. If your workloads are in Kubernetes, and this is why we are going to support all of the latest community versions that are available. If your workloads are in Kubernetes, it becomes very easy for you to move those over to our platform, and so. I think we're going to see a combination of sometimes customers will have split workloads, sometimes they'll run different types of workloads in our platform, and so I think Kubernetes really opens up that possibility >> Lauren: That's great. To do that. There's still some more tooling to be done, but that's essentially where we're at. >> How many employees you guys have now? What's the number? >> We are roughly north of 400. So still very small. >> Well, congratulations. You guys are a growing company. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for sharing the news. >> Thank you very much. >> Absolutely. >> Great job. DigitalOcean. You know, hot startup, growing rapidly, I'm sure they're hiring like crazy. >> We are. >> So go check 'em out. The news here at KubeCon is positive industry. Rising tide floats all boats. That's a philosophy we have seen on theCUBE and great ecosystems, of course that's happening here. More live coverage here in Copenhagen, Denmark after this short break. Stay with us. (upbeat music)

>> Presenter: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's the Cube. Covering Kubecon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back everyone, we're live here with the Cube in Copenhagen, Denmark, for KubeCon 2018 Europe, via the CFCF Cloud Native Computing foundation, part of the Linux foundation. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Lauren Cooney here this week. And up next to Yaron Haviv, the founder, and CTO of Iguazio, and Doug Davis, who is the co-chair of the serverless working group, And the CNCF, as well as a developer advocate for IBM, IBM cloud. Great to see you welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for coming in. So love the serverless work, and want to dig into that with a bunch of questions. So, super important trend as we see in that success functions, and all the good stuff that's going on, programmable infrastructure. So I want to dig into that. But first, Yaron, I want to get into what's going on with the business, what's new with you? Iguazio, I saw you're on the sponsorship list here, you're doing a lot of work. You have some news as well. What's going on at KubeCon, Europe for you. >> Yeah, so we're expanding on the business side very nicely, taking more momentum, and this strength towards edge analytics, edge cloud, people starting to understand that central cloud is not the only way to build clouds. We're also progressing nicely on our serverless framework, called Nuclio. It just was published, maybe eight months ago, already made 2000 stars in GitHub, you know, users. We've got some quotes, NPR's around production version of that, including strong partnership with Acer, on being able to run the same functions in Acer, and the cloud in a joint development effort, as well as customers actually using it to build real-time analytics use case in development in the cloud, and deployment in different locations. >> Our audience knows you well, you've been on the cube many times. You also write for us, as well as other blogs with your opinion pieces and commentary. It's always edgy, and strong, and right on the money, I want to ask you your thoughts on serverless, because you were there from day one, I remember the conversation. It wasn't called serverless, we were talking about resource pools and looking at cloud computing, pontificating about, potentially, what Kubernetes and orchestration was going to look like. It's happening. So, are you happy with the progress of the industry, performance of the tech stack? What's your thoughts on serverless today, state of the union? What's your opinion? >> I think it's progressing nicely. I think many people call everything almost, serverless now. You have serverless data bases, you have serverless everything. I think serverless will become, more and more, a feature of a platform, not necessarily a thing. But, like Salesforce will have serverless functions, Wix will have serverless functions, for their own stuff. Obviously cloud platforms, analytic platforms, et cetera. So there'll be, maybe a family of generic ones, and a family of platform specific, that are more use case oriented. >> Does that connect with your business plan for Iguazio? Are you evolving with it? How are you navigating those waters on the adoption side. >> So, you know, I'm sort of trying to be inclusive, I think there's room for more than one serverless framework. There's also OpenWhisk, and Openfazzer, and a few of those. Our focus is mainly real-time analytics, and high performance in data processing. Yes, we can also do other things, but maybe we won't invest too much in some features that are more front-end oriented, or stuff like that. >> John: So you're staying focused on the core. >> Yes, on the other hand, other people to deal with front-end, we'll focus on HTTP, and Blue Logic, and things like that. Most of the frameworks don't have the same capabilities of Nuclio, like real-time stream distribution, real-time, low latencies, all that stuff. So, I think there's room for multiple frameworks, and that's also part of the relationship with Acer. Acer have their own product, which is very good with integration with the Acer stack, and the Acer components. On the other hand there is real-time analytics, in IOT Nuclio is stronger, So, there interest is, rather than saying, no we'll choose just one horse, why won't we enable the market, and allow the people the choice in solution. >> That's great. On IBM's side, Doug I want to get your thoughts on the working group, as well as IBM. You guys have done a lot of open source, IBM well known in the Linux history books, as we know. And now very active again, continuing that mission, congratulations, and thanks for doing that. But the serverless working group. This is a broader scope now, can you just give us some color on the commentary around how that's evolving, because you guys have a lot of blue chip customers. Cloud Foundry just did a survey, I was talking to Abby Kearns yesterday, about the results came back, mainstream tech, not middle of the country, but they heard about Kubenettis like, what's kubenettis? So you have people going, Okay, I've got a job to do, but now kubenettis has arrived, this is a key part of a micro-services focus. >> Right. Yeah, and so the way the serverless group got started was, about a year ago the CNCF TOC, technical oversight committee, decided serverless is kind of a new technology, we want to figure out what's going on in that space, and so they started up a working group. And our job wasn't to really decide what to do about it yet, it was to sort of give us the landscape of what's going on out there, what are people doing? What does serverless even mean, relative to function of the service, or even the other as's, and stuff like that What does a serverless framework generally look like? What do people use it for? Use cases, and stuff like that. And then at the end of that we produced a white paper with our results, as well as a landscape spreadsheet, to say all of the various technologies out there in that space, who's doing what. Without trying to pick winners, just saying what's there. And then we ended with a set of recommendations in terms of what possible next steps the CNCF could do in this space, with an eye towards interoperability building more than anything else, because that's what, really, we care about. We don't want vendor lock in and all the other good stuff. And so we had a set of recommendations, and one of the main ones was, two main things, one was function signatures was a very popular one, but we decided to focus on eventing first, because we thought that might be an easier fruit to pick off the tree first. And so we were going to focus on the formats, or meta data of an event, as it transfers between systems. And so from the service working group we create a cloud events, sort of little sub-group within our working group, to focus on creating a specification around what the meta-data around an event would look like, just so we can get some commonality. That way, at least the infrastructure between the two systems can transfer the events back and forth, much in the same way HTTP layer, doesn't have to understand the body of the message, but can look at common headers, and know how to route it properly. Same kind of thing with eventing. And again, this is all about trying to get interoperability, and portability for applications, and users more than anybody else. And so that's kind of where our focus has been on. How can we help the end user not get locked into one platform, not get locked into one solution, and make their life easier overall. >> Great. Where are you now with that? Is it running? Is it-- >> Overall done. No. >> Oh you're complete, yeah (laughs) >> Doug: But we did that last week. No, actually as of last week though, we just released our first version, 0.1. It's a very, very basic thing, and people might look at it and say, what's the big deal? But even with that simple little thing we've been able to get some level of interoperability between the various platforms. And if people actually join, when is it? Friday 11 o'clock? >> Yaron: Yeah. >> We have a session where someone's going to demonstrate interoperability between, oh gosh, IBM, you guys, Microsoft. >> Google. >> Dameware, Google. All the various companies involved in this thing. >> Love it, that's great. >> Huawei. >> Yeah. They're all going to be either sending or receiving events, using the cloud event format, to prove interoperability around the specification. So we're just at 0.1, we have some way to go, but that first step was huge just to get agreement, and everybody to the table to agree. So it's been really fun >> And it wasn't easy, it wasn't easy. And he's the peacemaker in the group. (laughs) I'm the troublemaker, he's the peacemaker. >> We have a lot of vocal people in the group, yes. (laughs) >> We're not pointing at anyone. >> No, never. >> Important first step obviously, commonality, and having some sort of standardization kind of thinking. >> Doug: Yes. >> Yaron: Don't use the standard word. There are people allergic to that. >> Well yeah, the standard bodies and what not, but in terms of the community work going on, this is super important. What's the impact of that? Obviously it's a small step, but a big step, right? So, what's it going to impact? What's next, what's coming next now that you've got the meta-data, and you've got the interoperability, what's next? >> Well, obviously we need to finish it up, because 0.1 is obviously just the first step. As I said, I think beyond that people are really itching to do function signatures. Because I think if you can get the event format coming in to be somewhat similar, and then you can get portability of moving your function from one platform to another, with hopefully minimal changes from a function signature point of view, you're a long way there towards getting portability for people. And I think that's probably the next step we're going to be looking at. >> What's the technical case from a commercial entity like yourself, who's in business to make money, obviously you have a business to run. As you build out your architecture, where is this going to be applied for you? What's the impact of this project to your product? >> So beyond my strong religion around open APIs, and you've seen the blogs I've written about it, our interest is twofold. First, we're not the market leader, Amazon is the market leader, et cetera. So if we have a better technology, and things are standard, it's easier for customers to move. Second, is we believe in interoperability, closer to the data, closer to where the processing, especially when 5G is going to evolve, and we're going to see bottlenecks between metro locations. Our sales is, go develop in the cloud, and then push it, you know the diesel twin model. This is exactly what we're demonstrating with Acer. You could develop at Acer, our Nuclio functions and deploy in a factory. So it may not be the same platform, it may not be the same serverless framework. So having the ability to run the same code in different frameworks or different platforms is very important. >> And IBM, you're doing a lot of work. OpenWhisk has been something that's gotten a lot of press and notoriety. What's up with you guys and open source? Obviously we see you guys out there doing a lot of studies and a lot content, a lot of coding. What's new over on the IBM side of the house with serverless? >> From my point of view, I think probably the biggest thing is, we're leading the charge in putting OpenWhisk to run on top of Kubernetes. And I think what's interesting about that is we're going to see, probably, some changes to Kubernetes need to be made to get the better performance that we need. Because when OpenWhisk runs vanilla on top of, say run C, or the docker stuff, we have a lot more freedom there. Pausing containers, stuff like that. Stuff you can't do in Kubernetes. We're probably going to see some more pressure on Kubernetes to add some more features, to get the kind of performance numbers we need going forward. >> And scale too, is important to understand. I was just talking about the keynotes earlier with another guest, and Cern is up there. They have a thousand nodes, it's not massive numbers yet, at scale, I mean Amazon are the big clouds, you guys have clouds. You've got a lot of nodes, so it's a lot more scale going on in the cloud as Kubernetes starts to get it's footing. >> Doug: Yep. >> How do you explain Kubernetes, how do both of you guys explain Kubernetes to the IT transformation group out there, that's going cloud operations. >> So what we've seen, because we're also selling an appliance, a full integrated solution, people, in the enterprise, they don't necessarily want to understand low level of Kubernetes. And actually serverless is a nice way for doing that. If you look at the new Nuclio dashboard, you just go, you write some code, you click deploy, it auto scales, you don't need to think about the underlying cube cut whole, the underlying networking. It's all done there for you. And I think, what you see in the trend in the industry, some people call it serverless, some people call it other things, is more and more abstractions, where users will deploy code, will deploy containers, and some frameworks underneath will deal with the high availability, elasticity, all that. I think that's what enterprise customers are looking for. Not everyone is eBay, and Google, and Netflix. >> John: Your thoughts? >> What I think is interesting, I agree with what you said, but I think it's interesting is you actually have a wider range of people, right. You have some people who think Kubernetes, as you said, nice abstraction layer, you don't have to get into the nitty gritty if you don't need to. But Kubernetes does allow you to get under the covers and twiddle those lower level bits if you actually need to. I think that's one of the things that. People who start out with Docker, they like it, it's so simple to use, and it's wonderful, and they love it. But they found it a little bit limiting, because it was too opinionated, or it didn't give you access to things under the covers. Kubernetes, I think, is trying to find that right balance between the two, and I think for the most part they kind of hit it. There's a little bit more of a learning, because it's not quite as user friendly as Docker is. But once you get over that learning hump, all the flexibility it gives you, people seem to really, really, like that. >> What are some of the things that people do under the covers, you mentioned some tweaks here and there. Is it policy based stuff? What's happening under the covers that Kubernetes getting that their groove swing on now. >> There is something called custom resource definition. So for example, when we deploy a Nulio, maybe OpenWhisk or others have it as well. It's essentially, Nuclio becomes another resource that you can actually view when you're running the Kubernetes CLI, or all the other things that manage it's liveliness, et cetera. So those are services that you get for free as a platform. But if you want your function to keep being alive you need to code your functions into the liveliness API, the thing that monitors it staying alive. So you're getting a generic service, but you need to work with it. >> Yeah, actually I'd go one step further with that and abstract it a little. Because obviously Kubernetes has a lot of knobs you can turn, a lot more than other platforms, like Docker has. But I think, for me the biggest benefit of Kubernetes is the plugability. Custom resource definitions, one of them. Ripping out schedulers, or whatever controllers you want, and replace it with your own. That kind of flexibility to say, I don't have to leave the entire Kubernetes world just to run my own scheduler, or write the infrastructure around it, I can plug in my own. That's the kind of flexibility people seem to really, really like. That way they don't feel locked in, they can still play with part of the ecosystem, but get the flexibility and customization they need. >> Awesome, great commentary there. I want to get your thoughts on KubeCon 2018 Europe, for CNCF. Continuing to see growth in CNCF, fantastic to see. As the boat gets full of people, you've got to be the peacemaker if you're co-chair. As people want to start getting their claws into the projects, this imbalance on the community side, are you guys happy with the direction, obviously the success, and the visibility is increased. What's your take on the show here? What are you guys doing? What's going on around the event for you guys. >> So it only started today, but my impression, comparing it with the previous show in the U.S. There are a lot more decision makers here. I don't know if it's the European culture of not funding every student to every show, or just the maturity of the ecosystem. But that's something I've noticed, the discussions I had with decision makers. and they're also not everyone, like in the U.S.A. everyone wants to build it their own way. People here think about operationalizing solutions, so sometimes you need to take something that someone else already built and test. >> And what's the conversations like, that you're having? Is it architecture? Is it deploying production workloads? >> So for us it's a lot about use cases, because we're doing things in a very different way. We're doing some nice demos on how, we're running real-time analytics with the sample database as the core, and we're showing how it's equivalent to another solution that they may build. And that immediately clicks. The other aspect is really, there is so much technology, but we need someone to wrap it up for us as a package solution. >> Doug, your thoughts. First of all I love your shirt, it says code with all the words in the community. >> Doug: Yeah, it's one of my favorite shirts. I like it. >> Love that shirt. I'm just looking at it like, all these questions are popping in my head. What's your plan at the show here? What's your goal, what are you guys doing, what conversations are you hearing in the hallways? >> Well, obviously being from IBM, we just promote IBM as much as we can. But beyond that, really talk about interoperability around what we're doing here, and make sure people understand that we're not here to necessarily sell our products, which we obviously want to do. We want to make sure that we do it in a way that gives people choice. And that's why we have the serverless working group, the cloud events spec. It's all about giving everybody the choice to move from one platform to another, to get their job done. As much as we want people to buy our stuff, if the customer isn't happy in getting what they need, then we're all going to lose. >> And these projects are super important to get the solidarity around these, quote, standards. >> And just to follow on your previous question about the conference, and stuff that we'd like. Obviously it's great that it's growing so much, but what I really like about this conference, beyond some other ones that I've seen is, a lot of the other ones tend to have more marketing flair to them. And obviously there's a little bit of that here, people are promoting their stuff, but I love the fact that most of the stuff that I'm doing here aren't in the sessions. Because the sessions are great and interesting, but it's the hallway chatter, and interacting with people face to face, and not just to meet them, to actually have real technical, deep discussion with them, here at the conference, because everybody's here you can do that much better face to face than you can over a Zoom call, or something else. The productivity from that level is just astronomical, I love it. >> Yeah, I totally agree. And one thing I would add, just my observation, interviews in the hallways, is that we're living, and we talk about this on the Cube all the time, a modern software architectures here. And it's got some visibility around it, it's not filled in yet, but I think there's clear visibility. Cloud, micro-service, interoperability, portability, pretty clear. And I think people are engaged, people are excited. So you have the progressive new guard coming in, on board. Great job. Thanks for coming on the cube, we appreciate that. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Iguazio and IBM, here on the Cube, breaking down KubeCon 2018 Europe. More live coverage, stay with us, we'll be right back after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Live in Copenhagen, Denmark, of KubeCon 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, my cohost. Exciting startup news here. Obviously, it's a growing ecosystem, all the big names are in it, but, great ecosystem of startups. One launching here, we have Bassam Tabbara, who's the founder and CEO of Upbound, here on theCUBE. Website is going to go live in a few hours. We're here for a quick preview. Thanks for joining theCUBE today. Appreciate it. >> Oh, my pleasure. >> So, you got a company. No one knows about it. (Bassam laughing) Now they're going to hear about it. What are you guys doing? What is Upbound about? And what are you doing? >> So Upbound is going after the problem of multi-cloud. So the way to think about it is that, you know, we're seeing now the ubiquity of Kubernetes, and if you think about what Kubernetes has done, it has solved the problem of taking many machines and making them into one, and doing all the scheduling and management and becoming the operating system of a cluster, right? Upbound is the next level up. Upbound is essentially taking multiple clusters and solving a similar set of problems around running distributed systems, distributed services, global services across clusters. It was really interesting to hear CERN this morning talking about how their managing 210 clusters and you think about 210 clusters, if you would talk about 210 machines, you'd be like, "Wow, that's a lot of machines", right? This is 210 clusters, and so a similar set of problems exist at a higher level, and that's the focus of Upbound. >> So, you guys are announcing a financing, $9 million from an investment Series A financing. Google Ventures as a lead and a variety of industry super-reputable investors. What was the value proposition pitch? What got Google Ventures excited? What was the core value, technology, business model? Give us the deck. >> My understanding of their investment thesis, and it's hard to claim that you always understand this. Essentially, the next level of infrastructure problem is essentially around multi-cloud and enterprises are managing many clusters today, many different cloud environments, whether it's across regions of a public cloud vendor or it's across public cloud vendors or across hybrid boundaries, on premise verse private cloud versus public cloud. It's become a challenge to run things across clusters and there's a lot of interesting scenarios to be solved at that level. That was the premise of the investment. >> John: So, are you guys a management software piece? Are you guys technology? What's the product? >> We're essentially building a service that helps companies run across cloud environments. And it's based on Kubernetes, 'cause Kubernetes is an amazing platform to build on top of, and we've learned that through our investment in Rook. You know, it's a great extension points and awesome community to be working with, We're offering a service for multi-cloud. >> Right, is it going to be, some shape of it, going to be open source or what are you looking at in particular? >> Yeah, obviously there'll be parts of it that are open source. We're a big open-source company. The team that's in Upbound, that's actually the team that's behind Rook, and Rook is a CNCF project now and all open source, obviously. And so, yeah, we're definitely an open-source player. >> Good. >> So you're exposed to the storage challenges with Rook and all the future kind of architecture. We just had Adrian Cockcroft on. we were both high fiving each other and celebrating that microservices is going to be a modern era. >> Bassam: Yes. >> How do you guys solve that problem? What is it going to be, the buyer going to be in a cloud architect? Is it going to be a storage person? Is it an ops person? Who's the target buyer of your service? Or user of your service? >> Well essentially people, DevOps people, that are managing multiple clusters today and understand the challenges around managing multiple clusters, no normalization of policies, separate users, separate user management, observability. All those things come up with a strategist, and of course, let's not forget, stateful workloads and managing state across environments is, I'd say, probably one of the harder problems. So, you know, the buyer is essentially somebody in DevOps, and then obviously, the CTO, CIO level gets involved at some point, but it's a draw. >> When you guys were forming the company. Obviously, with the Rook project, you were exposed to some of the pain points, you mentioned a few of them. What was the one pain point that jumped out at you the most and you said, "Hey, we can build a company around this"? >> The fact that most enterprises are now managing multiple cloud environments and they are completely independent. Anything that they try to normalize or do across them is... There's a human involved, or there's some homegrown script involved to actually run across clusters. And honestly, that's the same problem that people are trying to solve across machines, right? And that led to some, you know, the work that's happening around orchestration, Kubernetes, and others. It's only logical that we move up a level and solve similar set of problems. >> Yeah, I have a question about your service. Just, along the lines of, There are a lot of people coming into this market with, "We've got this integration solution that is multi-cloud," or, "We have this kind of API platform that can solve "for multi-cloud and run applications "cross multiple cloud platforms." >> Right. >> What is your differentiator? >> Yeah, so I mean, multi-cloud has become a thing now, as you've observed. I think the power of what we're doing is that we're building a control plane based on Kubernetes and the great work that's happening in the Kubernetes space around multi-cluster and federation and everything else, and offering a set of services that layer on top of that that solve some critical problems across clouds, including stateful workloads and migration portability across clouds. And essentially, inherently building this on the Kubernetes platform and our experience with that and our experience with the community around Kubernetes, I think is differentiated. >> So that leads me to our next question. So your pricing model, you said that you were going to be open source. So is that control plane going to be open source and then some services are going to be bucketed into-- >> Yeah, it's probably too early for us to talk about the pricing model, but think of it as a service a manage service for multi-cloud. >> Great. >> You can imagine that... Open source is actually quite compatible with a service play. >> Yes it is. >> And $9 million, that's a good chunk of cash. Congratulations. Use of funds? Obviously, hiring out of the gate? What's your priorities on the use of funds on the first round of funding? >> So we're going to accelerate hiring, we're going to accelerate delivering the service, and that's, you know, this is the fun part of a startup. (John laughing) This is my second one. It's the next 18 months is all building and growing and doing product. >> John: And what's your five-year pro-forma revenue projection? (laughing) You made it up on 30C. >> Let me pull up my spreadsheet. (hosts laughing) >> I love those VC slides, "Yeah, we're makin up year five." No, but you want to have some growth, so the trend is your friend. Here, it's multi-cloud, >> That's right. >> And obviously the growth of microservices. Obviously, right. >> That's right. >> Anything else out there that's on your mind observationally, looking at the market? As you start coming, certainly you're doing a lot of due diligence on the market. What are your risk factors? How you thinking about it? What are you looking at closely? How are you studying some of the trend data? >> I mean at some level, the way to think about this is Cloud Native is still at its infancy, right, despite all the amazing momentum that's building around it. I think, you know at some level, we use the term Cloud Native but it's really just cloud computing. I think the adoption cycle is going to be interesting, so that's something that I think about a lot. You know, how long will people kind of make transformative changes to what they're doing? But, I believe the power of open source and the community is that people are. I mean look at this conference. A lot of people are here, including-- >> No doubt open source is a good bet. >> That's right. >> I think the thing that we're watching, love to get your reaction to, and Lauren, you too, is that Stu Miniman, my cohost. He's not here, he's at the Dell EMC World event. We talk about this all the time around what's the migration going to look like from on-prem to cloud? Meaning, how's the on-prem is transferring to cloud ops? >> That's right. >> Right? So okay, perfect for your case, I think. What's the ratio, what's hybrid cloud going to look like when you have a true private cloud, true cloud environment on premise? >> Yeah. >> 'Cause this speaks to the multi-cloud trend because if I can have an on-premise operation, I can make-- >> Very much. >> Well you have to look at the applications too. I mean, that's critical because you've got these monolithic applications that have to be essentially changed and ported into different environments to become multi-cloud. There's heavy lifting there. >> Yeah, I think the interesting thing about what you're describing here is that it used to be that if you're running on premise you're using a completely different stack from say what you're running in public cloud, right? And so, not only was the choice about where you're hosting your compute and your networking and storage, but it was also a choice of stacks, right? Open stack or whatever you're running on premise, and then there was Amazon or others, right? What is happening now is that we're actually normalizing on stacks. So this whole movement around Kubernetes is essentially a way to say that there is now a common stack, regardless of where you're actually being deployed, right? The store is not always there and that's, but it'll get there, right? At some level, it gives people more choices about where they want to host, and in fact, if... Portability becomes more interesting 'cause you could move in and out of clouds, right? There are costs to doing that. Data gravity is a thing, but-- >> John: The containers are helpful. >> Containers are helpful, but, you know, that Amazon truck goes in one direction. (John chuckling) It is interesting to think about that. But at least it becomes possible for people to think about how to manage their infrastructure and how to manage their services across clouds. And, end result is it'll have more choices. >> Well, I think this community, you talked about on our intro today about portability is really what this community cares a lot about. >> Bassam: Very much. >> Choice and non-lock-in. >> Very much. It's amazing how many companies that we talk to that actually have a, like a strategies, you know, CTO, CIO-level down, around not getting locked in to any vendor. Yet, they are not able to fulfill that. >> Yeah, it's hard to talk about lock in when you actually don't even know what Cloud Native is. So, it's interesting discussion, and Adrian Cockcroft was just on from Amazon, and he and I were talking with Lauren about, that's a developer organization and management discussion. >> Yeah. >> First. >> Bassam: That's right. >> So you can't, you don't know what it is? How do you know what-- (Bassam laughing) >> Well, there's... >> A lock in looks like? You can't play chess if you don't know what checkmate looks like. >> Yeah, but the good news is that developers are high up on that food chain now and they're able to actually make these buy decisions. So I think that's going to be critical. >> Well congratulations on the financing. >> Bassam: Thank you. >> Love the company name, Upbound? >> Yes. >> Upbound. >> Bassam: Essentially going above the clouds. >> Above the clouds. >> Like it. >> Congratulations. Looking forward to tracking the progress. And great to have you on theCUBE. $9 million dollars in fresh financing. Upbound just scored a great deal for multi-cloud. Again, that's a great trend. Congratulations. More CUBE coverage here in a moment. Thanks for watching. Be right back, stay with us.

>> Announcer: It's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the CloudNative Computing Foundation. And its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage, here in Copenhagen Denmark this is KubeCon 2018 Europe, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Lauren Cooney. Our next guest is Tyler Jewell, he's the CEO of WSO2 with some big news, they're introducing a new programming language called Ballerina. Welcome to theCUBE thanks for joining us! >> Hey thank you for having me. >> So you're now the new CEO of WSO2, couple months almost a year. You guys have big news introducing a new programming language called Ballerina here. Tell us a bit about what this is. What's the big story? >> Well Ballerina is our approach to addressing the integration gap, which is what happens when integration products like ESB's are not agile, and programming languages make integration difficult. This is a language and a platform that have been co-designed together to be both integration simple, and agile. >> So take a step back how did you get here? Talk about what WSO2 is, and then why the motivation to do the language? What are some of the specific details, and how long have you been working on it? Take a minute to explain what the situation is. >> Well WS02 is a company that's been around for 13 years, we have 550 employees and we have about 500 customers, and we make integration software. These are things like message brokers, data mediation, and we do this for large scale projects around the world. And all of our technology is open-source. Now we power roughly five trillion transactions a year around the world, and we've done thousands of integration projects and what we've found is that they are all still waterfall development. You have to plan these things long in advance, it requires huge teams, and there's no decentralization of the work. And we need to make integration agile again. And in order to do that we needed to basically rethink the entire approach to the way that integrations are done. And we put it into a programming language so that we can do compile time abstractions that generate distributed system primitives. >> It's almost like you're solving your own problem, probably the frustration must have been all imagined. Another waterfall project again coming back, again and again repeating it, with Cloud the time to market is one of the key value propositions. Integration obviously with Kubernetes, workflows, and also portability is a big concern. What are some of the things that are driving that demand right now in your mind? Is is speed is it the tech demand for applications, what's the key? >> I think that what we're seeing is, really sophisticated and complex demand coming from kind-cuser consumers. Companies like Uber Slack and Amazon have witnessed this. And in order to scale to meet this complex demand, these organizations have had to create architectures that are highly disaggregated. And infrastructure like Kubernetes facilitates that disaggregation of architecture. Now when we saw the API economy, this was one form of disaggregation but now we've got microservices and serverless which are tenexing that. And as you disaggregate your architecture, you're going to have an explosion of programmable endpoints. There are 50 billion right now. The forecasts are that it's going to go to well over a trillion. And when that happens, integration is the glue that brings these things together. Integration is going to be the next generation problem that we have to deal with. >> Totally right I was just going to say glue layer, but you mentioned glue. Folks are getting out of the keynote right now, the CloudNative Foundation. Pretty massive growth, look at the logosly he sponsors. Just the amount of companies now joining. It seems like a land grab on one hand, but it's really the market just driving it. And it's coming down to this notion of glue layers, where with open-source it's about really taking pre-existing code, and then figuring out how to abstract that, make it simpler, create security, these are all operating system kind of questions. >> Well I think also it's open right? I mean that is part of the key here, it's the fact that it's open-source. And I think you guys are the last independent type of company that is actually doing this from an open-source perspective, is that right? >> Yeah we are the seventh largest open-source company, all the software that we publish is Apache License, and we found a way to monetize open-source without having to play open core games, where there's proprietary stacks on top of that. >> Lauren: That's great. >> What's the licensing concerns that you're seeing with Apache versus other foundations, where are developers gravitating to these days? That's always a question people always look at after the fact, they just jump in and start coding. What are some of the updates that you see in the industry around licensing and IP? >> Well first, we're still seeing a massive shift away from proprietary software into open-source software. There's still a lot of organizations that are adopting proprietary, but now they have program offices dedicated to open-source, and it encourages onboarding, adoption and giving back to open-source projects, so that trend is still significant. And as a result there's a lot of open-source foundations and non-profits that are benefiting from that. I think we're seeing huge growth in the Linux foundation, and all of its sub-organizations that are there, and we've also seen a resurgence in other open-source foundations like the Eclipse foundation as well. >> Lauren and I were talking about the opening about Kubernetes and that, outside of our bubble in Silicon Valley or the industry, you go to a standard enterprise. Waterfall moving to agile, Kubernetes is new. >> Tyler: Yeah. >> So in your opinion, what does Kubernetes mean for enterprises, and how should people think about the big movement to CloudNative, with respect to continuing the application development and continuing the innovation? >> I think that the momentum around Kubernetes, particularly around the ecosystem consolidating around it, means that we have a de facto standard for a run-time platform that can engage both operations and development. And in the first time over the past 20 years, we do not have a fragmented market anymore. And when you don't have a fragmented market, the productivity gains that come from the value added layers on top of that are going to increase dramatically, and I think that's why we so many vendors here, and why we see now I think almost 4,000 people at this conference this year as well. >> It's super awesome. What do you see as the next wave of innovation with the standardization? With the standardization people can rally around it. >> Yeah. >> Where's the next work being done around Kubernetes? >> I think that the next level of work here is, this is the year of the service mesh. And really the service mesh is a representation of how you build complex orchestrations, and applications that have a lot of compositions around that so workflow, stateful behaviors, long running processes, this is the next layer up, and that's where the standardization is going to go next. >> And certainly containers are great. How about security what's your view on security? Because that's a big discussion we were asking ourselves, okay what's the state of the art? Obviously Google's got an approach, we're seeing what they're doing. Is it baked is it being baked out? What's new what's your view on security? >> I think that security continues to be a massive problem. The introduction of GDPR this year really brings the spotlight onto all the data privacy issues that we have to deal with around the world, but I think we have a fundamental problem with security which is it's still this baked-on, add-on thing that's applied to your applications, and instead we actually need to look at programming languages in the apps that you write, as being security proof from the very beginning. And that's going to require a programming language to do that at the lowest level and the OS as well >> How is Ballerina handling that? Are they doing it up front? >> Well our approach to it is that we assume all data is tainted. And that the developer has to explicitly say this is safe data to avoid intrusion and tax on that, and so the compiler will actually reject any code that is not explicitly given that tag. >> Yeah assume the worst, hope for the best right? >> How are you looking to onboard developers to this platform this is a different programming language, talk a little bit about that. >> This is a programming language which means it's all about developer evangelism all day long. And you and I both started our careers 20 years ago in developer evangelism Lauren right? So it is going door to door, meet up to meet up, giving technical demos and encouraging people to get involved in the community and to write apps with it, that's how you do it. >> What's the state of the language now shipping? Is it available? What's the announcement? What's your plan how are you going to roll this thing out? >> It is shipping now, we just hit our .970 release we've been at it for 3 years, we've got a hundred committers on the project, but we just went public this week with Ballerina.io. At the .970 release, we are still making some minor language tweaks, and we hope to get to a Juanado language lock by the end of this year, and then we'll have backwards compatibility for three to five years with that. And probably sometime this summer, WSO2 our company will offer commercial support, and have it in use and production with our customer accounts >> And any feedback from early users? What's the vibe what's the feedback, what are you hearing? >> The vibe is hot right? It's a new programming language, it's got an awesome logo associated with this, but more importantly the language is easy for anyone to learn in a couple of hours, and developers love to see the glue that they can pick up and put into their toolbox that quickly. >> For the folks watching that aren't here in Europe, that didn't make the trip from the US or are watching remote, What's the big takeaway in your mind of the KubeCon 2018 Europe? What's the stage look like for you here? What's the show happenings? What's the big themes what's the takeaway? >> I think that the big takeaway is that the scale is finally now approachable for the rest of us on that, and that the ecosystem is ready to support you, and that it's crossed the chasm out of the early adopter and into the growth phase and ready for broad based adoption at this point. >> And the growth of microservices has been pretty significant? >> Ridiculous. >> Yeah cool. (laughter) Tyler thanks for coming on theCUBE appreciate it! >> Lauren: Thank you. >> Utterly my pleasure thank you for having me. >> Hey live coverage here in Denmark, we're in Copenhagen for KubeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)