>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage, here in San Francisco, the Moscone Center. This is theCUBE's live coverage of Google Next 19, Google Cloud computing conference. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante my cohost. Stu Miniman's here as well, he'll be coming on doing interviews. Our next guests are the founder and CEO of SignalFx, Karthik Rau, and Leonid Ingolnik, EVP of engineering. SignalFx has been a great company, we've been following for many, many years. Pioneer in a lot of the monitoring and serviceability of applications, now prime time, the world has spun to their doorstep. Karthik, congratulations on your success. It's prime time for your business. >> Ya, thank you, John. >> John: Welcome back. >> Great to be on, we're on again. >> I'm glad that you're on because we talked six years ago about some of the trends, we saw early. We saw the containers, Docker movement, and also Kubernetes got massive growth. You had the visibility of what these services are going to look like, cloud web services, kind of the next level. It's kind of here right now. >> Yeah, absolutely, there are two things that we predicted would happen. One was that architectures would get a lot more distributed, elastic, and it would require a more low-latency monitoring system that could do realtime analytics. That was one of the key changes. And then the other thing that we predicted was that developers would get more involved in operations. Which is the whole DevOps movement. And now both of those are very much in the mainstream, so we're really excited to see these trends. >> And looking at the Google keynotes today, obviously we're starting to see the realization of true infrastructure as code, you're starting to see the beginning signals of, look at, we can actually program the infrastructure, and not even have to deal with it. This is key, and you guys have some hardcore news, so let's get that out of the way. You guys got some updates, let's get into the news, and then we can get into the conversation around what you guys are doing in the industry. >> So, today we're bringing three things to the conference, to boost customers and prospects, starting with announcing our support for cloud functions. Cloud functions are great technology that we're seeing adopted by retail. For spiky workloads, things where you have a flash sale and you need to understand what's happening, it may be lasting minutes, where our platform really shows off the best, which is the one second resolution data. Some of our flash sales we see from existing customers don't last a minute, right, so looking at this in a minute resolution of being able to react to this in a machine time rather than human time, is something that our customers now expect. The second thing we are focusing on is Istio, and Istio on GKE specifically. We're seeing service mesh adoption continuing to go both in new, modern application, as well as taking legacy workloads and unlocking the potential of taking those legacy workloads to the cloud. And with Istio, and specifically on Microservices APM, it's not just applicable to Microservices, we see a lot of our customers realizing a lot of value from tracing abilities that a service mesh like Istio provides, an ability to understand you topology and service interactions for free, out of the box, whether it's on-premise with Istio or on the Google environment. And then lastly, so we see customers and prospects adopt Kubernetes, we're also starting to see the next layer above Kubernetes coming in. And, with Knative, getting the support out of the box, whether it's the dashboard, the tracing of the metrics, and that, that's the third announcement we have today. We're fully integrated with Google's offerings, and we're able to monitor and provide you with some actionable content, just in a flick of a switch. >> So support of Knative out of the box. >> Leonid: Out of the box. >> Full SignalFx, with Knative on Google Cloud. >> That is correct. So those three things. >> Karthik, I wonder if you could give us some insight as to what's going on in the marketplace. A multicloud is obviously a tailwind to you, but multicloud, to date, hasn't really been a strategy, it's sort of been an outcome of multi vendor. So, is multicloud increasingly becoming a strategy for your customers, and what specific role are you playing there to facilitate that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think particularly most of the larger enterprise accounts tend to have a multi vendor strategy, for almost every category, right? Including cloud, which typically is one of their largest spends. Typically what we see is people looking at certain classes or workloads, running on particular clouds, so it may be transactional systems running on AWS. A lot of their more traditional enterprise workloads that were running on Windows servers, potentially running on Azure, we see a lot of interest in data intensive sorts of analytics workloads, potentially running on GCP. And so I think larger companies tend to kind of look at it in terms of, what's the best platform for the use case that they have in mind. But in general, they are looking at multiple cloud vendors. >> So we heard some customers onstage today, talking about their strategy, I think Thomas asked one retail customer, how'd you decide what to put where? And essentially he said, well, it's either going to go into the cloud, lift and shift, we're going to refactor it, reprogram it essentially, or we're going to sunset it. What he didn't say is, we're going to leave some stuff on-prem. Which somewhat surprised me, 'cause of course, especially into financial services you're going to get a lot of stuff left on-prem. So what's your play, with regard to those various strategies, and for the legacy stuff, I know you're cloud native, that's your claim to fame, but can you help those legacy customers as well? Talk about that. >> Yes, absolutely. >> So I think, what we've seen is it's a given now, that organizations are going to move to cloud. It's a question of when, not if. And the cloud form factors are just, are fundamentally different, they're software-defined. Right, a traditional data center, you're monitoring network equipment, storage devices, you're monitoring disks and fan failures on individual servers. When you're running in a cloud, it's a software-defined infrastructure, and it's far more elastic. And so even if you're just lifting and shifting, how you think about monitoring and observing this new cloud infrastructure's fundamentally different. So we're there for the very first step of the journey for an organization, to get the visibility they need into the new architecture, and many times we're also helping them understand the before and after, so how do I compare my performance in my on-premise data center to what it looks like in the cloud? That's step one. Step two is, they start chipping away at those monoliths, or they have new initiatives, that are digital initiatives, that are running in Kubernetes, or container based architectures, microservices based architectures, and that is a fundamentally different world. How you observe and monitor, deploy, not just monitor, the entire supply chain of how you manage these systems is different. So there, they have to look at different solutions, and we're obviously one of the key players, helping them there. >> Leonid, we've been doing theCUBE now for a decade, and I think John, it was a decade ago we said, we made the statement that sampling is dead. So I love your approach, you're not just taking small samples to do your performance monitoring. What's the architecture that enables you to do that, could you talk about that a little bit? >> So I think the most interesting thing with more modern architectures, especially with microservices adoption, is the complexity of how the transaction flows through the system. And then, basically tossing the coin, like we used to be able to do, in previous generations, to capture some traces and get the data you need. Doesn't work anymore, because it's very tough to predict at the beginning of the trace where the transaction's going to go. We're taking a completely different approach on the market. We look at every single transaction, at scales, we have prospects that are talking at us about volumes of giga span in minutes, so one billion spans observed a minute, and with some of the interesting tech we've built, we are able to pick the interesting things. And the interesting things have a couple categories, transactions that occur infrequently, transactions that are maybe above P90, right, the slow ones, because when look about performance and the understanding of how the application performs, you really want to know what's slow, not what's normal. But you also have to capture enough of what's normal. So with some of our tech, we're still able to keep about 1% of transactions, but the right ones, and that's the biggest differentiator with what we put together for the APM product. >> One of the things I want to talk about with you guys is how you relate to some of Google's announcements. The key things, I'm oversimplifying now, but they got a server list kind of announcement, got Cloud Run environment things, the regions, which is global, and then obviously open source commitment. You mentioned functions, you mentioned Knative, obviously open source. You're seeing open source being much more of a production IT capability, so you guys obviously hit that with these solutions, so the question I have for you guys is, how hard is it for you guys to provide that real time monitoring, because Google needs to build an ecosystem, that's what they're not talking about, they didn't really talk about on stage, their ecosystem. So you guys are a natural fit into service mesh, which they showed onstage, Jennifer Lin showed a great demo. So Google has to build an ecosystem, you guys are clearly positioned, through your announcements, that you're deeply integrated with Google. Cisco announced and integration, obviously they have an integration, so integration seems to be the secret sauce, (laughs) with cloud, to play in this ecosystem. Could you guys elaborate on that dynamic, because it kind of changes the old formula for ecosystems? >> Yeah, it's very different, right? In the old days, you had proprietary systems, so the only way you could actually build an integration is, you had to get your product managers in a conference room with the vendor and get visibility in the roadmap, access to everything, and that's why there were, it just took a lot longer to get things done. I think what you're seeing with Google is, they've taken a very standards based approach to everything, right? So, whatever technologies that they're releasing, they're trying to build it as a standard, you can run it on any cloud. Instrumentation is a core part of their philosophy of any technologies that they're releasing, such that, you have a new platform, it has a metrics library, other standards based mechanisms to collect metrics, traces, events. What that does is it makes it easy for the ecosystem to just pick it up, right? Our belief has been, you know, in the old days monitoring was all about proprietary instrumentation and collection. Today it's all about analysis. So the fact that all of this is openly available, in open source or standards based mechanisms, is great for us, it's great for the customers, it's great for the ecosystem. >> That's their one-to-many way of building integration systems. >> And that's why you guys are supporting Knative, as an example. >> Yep. >> That's really kind of supporting the open source ecosystem, ties it to Google cloud. >> Yeah, I mean, we generally support, our customers are running in every single configuration (John laughing) and type of technology you can imagine, so it's our work philosophy to just be everywhere they are, and to support all of the tech that they might be running. But in general we're big supporters of open source, in that, you know, developers are now running most software. That's the world of web services and SaaS. And developers have a preference for understanding the stacks that they're running on, and being able to control it and so that is obviously why open source has just taken off the way it has. >> I think the other dynamic of embracing open-source and standards is it allows us to focus, not on the meetings with product managers and getting an insight into the roadmap, but on getting the standards based integrations deeply configured with some of, for example, content we provide out of the box for use to your own Google versus for use to your own premise or use to anywhere else. And that's where the differentiation and the value for the customer is, not in kind of getting together on the roadmap and figuring out what to build next. >> You guys should move fast to take advantage of the lift that they get. I'd love it if you guys could just take a minute each to explain SignalFx value proposition 'cause you guys I think are perfectly positioned now as this becomes infrastructure as code with cloud. When should a customer call you guys? When are guys needed? When do guys get called in? Where are you winning? Take a minute to explain when and where you guys fit into the customer environment. >> I would say as soon as a customer starts to leverage a cloud infrastructure, whether that's public cloud, private cloud, open shift, to open stack, pivotal cloud foundry, or a public cloud, how you monitor your infrastructure will be fundamentally different, and we can help you with that. And then along your journey, once you've moved to cloud and you start thinking about how do I build modern application architectures, modern web services, devops, then we are necessary. You cannot get to the cloud native stage where you're releasing software every week unless you have a monitoring system like SignalFx. >> Great, just great. I want to also get your pick your brain on some dynamic that I saw in the keynote, it might not be obvious to the folks that are in the mainstream, but Jennifer Lin gave a demo of taking a workload, and porting it over with a small script, no code modifications, running it on a container. >> Dave: The cloud vMotion >> Anthos migrate was the product but basically migrating workload into containers in the Kubernetes engine automatically with no re-writes, she said what you, where you want. So that kind of, I can see what she did there and that's very cool and that's a game changer that's infrastructureless code, but then she moves to a conversation around services meshes. 'Cause once you get these things on a containerized, inside the Kubernetes engine, you're kind of enabled for using service meshes. This is like the Holy Grail of microservices. This is a big growth area. Can you guys explain what this means, what does this service mesh mean, 'cause once these workloads start to be containerized you're going to see much more migration to this new model. Where does service mesh kick in and why is it important and what should people pay attention to? >> Well I would say one of the fundamental challenges of microservices is what people are calling more and more, observability, right. Because you have so many systems, like a single application or a single transaction, what is an application anymore? A single transaction can flow through dozens, hundreds, of individual microservices. So, and you're changing your applications all the time. So figuring out when you've introduced a problem very quickly is a big challenge. And so one of the big benefits service mesh brings is it provides automatic instrumentation of your applications and requests in a way that makes it very out of the box to get visibility across your entire environment. So that is step one, getting that visibility. The next step is then you obviously need to analyze this corpus of data and its massive, and that's where a solution like SignalFx comes in we can collect all this data and help you really T-signal for noise. Then the last step really is how do you take action on that data, how do you automate responses? Whether it's rolling back a canary release, or shifting a load balancing strategy so that if there's a bad node you stop sending traffic to that. All of that can be automated. And so what service mesh is doing is it's providing the sub street to allow you to really provide that closed loop automation, that infrastructure is code, you know that's the movement that everyone is really focusing on right now. It's a key technology to enable that. >> Tell me about the observability trends, because this has been a hot venture funded area. We hear trace, dynamic tracing, these are techniques, there's a variety of different mechanisms for observability. How does Kubernetes, and now service mesh's impact observability, where is the puck going to be, if you're going to skate to where the puck is, what's the state of the situation? >> Well I think what it does is it makes instrumentation a lot easier. So typically a challenge when you're running a old Java application from 10 years ago, getting visibility into the app, it's a monolith. You to get the full visibility and the full call stack, that's harder to collect. When you're in a microservices world with service mesh, you're getting that visibility automatically. And what becomes more important is understanding the east/west latencies across all these different microservices. So because instrumentation is so much easier with all these new technologies, what it means for monitoring is it really shifts the focus to who can make the most sense of this data, who can provide assistance to the operators to really help them pinpoint when there is a problem, what is the potential cause, and to triage it very quickly. So again, the whole value proposition is shifted to the analysis. >> So Leonid given that, what are your engineering priorities, maybe share a little road map if you could? >> Sure, so if you think about what we just talked about, adoption of Kubernetes, or service meshes, the challenges that those environments bring both the femorality of the environments on which you now deploy compared to what most of the operators and application developers are used to, as well as the constant motion in the system, right. Kupernetes will move the workload several times an hour and the amount of data those systems tend to generate becomes fairly difficult to cope not just to a monitoring system, but to a human, right? So how can you take about what Karthik talked about all this noise and get it into an actionable intelligence across tens of millions times series an hour possibly in the middle of the night, how do you get the operator to the root cause very quickly? And what kind of technologies do we need to have as a vendor, and that's where we spend a lot of time thinking about, how do we provide actionable insight for those highly femoral environments that are getting even more femoral? >> One of the themes that's here, and already we're seeing it pop out of Google Next, and we've seen it in the other cloud shows we've gone to is, complexity is increasing, and the business model that seems to work well is taking complexity and making things simple. >> Mhm >> Right >> Whether it's extraction layers or other techniques, how does a customer, who's got all these new suppliers, new dynamics, new shift in the marketplace, new business models, how does a customer deploy IT, deploy cloud, and move the complexity to a simplicity model? This is a hard challenge. >> Well, I think that's one of the fundamental mental model shifts that an organization needs to make. Complexity was your enemy in the old days. Right, because you were releasing software once a year, twice a year and so you don't want it to be complex. But if your goal is speed and innovation, you're going to have to accept some complexity to get that speed and innovation. You just have to decide where is that complexity acceptable and how do you change your processes and your tooling to minimize the impact of that complexity. So I think I would disagree with that sentiment because I think organizations have to start thinking about things differently if they really want to move quickly. >> So embrace complexity. >> You have to embrace complexity and you have to think about what are the mitigating factors I need to take in my organization structure, my processes, my tooling, to compensate for the additional complexity I'm creating, but still release software as quickly as I used to. >> I would add, I think in a lot of ways you're shifting the complexity from infrastructure management more up the stack. >> That's, ya. >> In many ways IT is getting more complex, to your point Karthik. >> Ya, I mean all of these extractions make perhaps the underlying infrastructure less complex to manage but you're absolutely right Dave, the applications will become more complex when you move to microservices and you've got 50 pizza box teams working on a bunch of microservices, there's an organizational dynamic as much as there's a tech dynamic, right. How do you get these 50 teams to communicate with one another if there's a issue, an incident. >> And the data pathways, the data pipelines, the journey of that data, is much, much more complex. >> Ya absolutely. >> Final question, as the developers and operators come together, that seems to be a big trend. Developers want frictionless environment, programmable internet, they're going to be spitting up these services and then the operators have to run it. Those worlds are coming together. What's your thoughts on the operations side and developers coming together? >> I think they're two peas in a pod. They're two parts, they're two necessary parts. I think you will see more and more automation move up the stack. I think the place to start is really in the infrastructure layer and it will make the lives of operators of these cloud environments simpler. And then I think that automation will move up the stack as well over time. >> What's the most important story coming out of Google Next, if you can just kind of read the tea leaves, get a sense of what's going on here? 2019, whole new year, whole new game changing. What are your guys' thoughts on what's kind of going on in the cloud business this year? What' going on at Google Next? What's the big story? >> Well I think from my perspective it's very clear they're focused a lot on multi cloud, cloud agnostic and where the right ones run anywhere and run on Google. That seems to be a big push. And then the other is they're just behind on go to market and they seem to be focusing quite a bit on investing in all of the other elements, non-technology elements, to make organizations successful. >> Leonid, on the tech side, what do you see as the big in story here? >> I think Google was always found on the tech and they're continuing to deepen it. I think more interesting for me the story is about the go to market and embracing the complexity of the enterprise. >> Right >> And recognizing that not every application that will come to Google Cloud will be architected in a modern way. The thousands upon thousands of applications that have to lift and shift still and surviving some of the announcements around the service mesh are great enablers for those customers to start embracing the cloud technology. >> Tech geeks love service mesh, I'm a big fan. Guys, thanks for sharing the insight. Give a quick plug for what's going on for SignalFx. What's going on in the company? What are you guys looking to do? Are you hiring, are you expanding, what's going on? >> Ya we're in rapid growth here as a company. We're really excited about microservices APM product that we introduced late last year and what that does is it brings distributed trace analytics to our core monitoring platform. So what that allows you to do is get bottoms up visibility into each individual component through our metrics system, but also a transaction oriented view through our micro services APM product. Bringing the two together, super excited about the level of sophistication and analytics that it's going to bring our customers. >> What's the head count? What's the head count now, roughly? >> We're about 250 people right now. >> 250 okay, and you've raised over nine figures, I think? >> Over a hundred million dollars yeah. >> That's great, congratulations. >> So Karthik as a founder, what's it like to have the vision early and seeing it, and staying the course? And you've stayed on the right wave. >> Yeah. >> And now the wave's gotten bigger, what's it like to be the founder and be where you are now? >> It's terrifying at first because you don't know if the markets are going to move in the direction you need them to, but it's very gratifying when that actually happens and we're very fortunate that the world is moving very squarely into cloud based architectures, and not just cloud but all of these modern run times that are exactly what we predicted the world would look like for the last six years now. >> And you had a great team, engineering team was solid, you've got great chops. Any advice for entrepreneurs out there who are now getting into this world, maybe younger entrepreneurs coming out, building some applications? What's your advice to other founders that are... >> I could spend hours on that topic (laughter) >> I think >> Dave: Ship early and often >> You just have to continue to have faith and conviction in your beliefs and stick it out because there are lots of twists and turns, especially in the early days if you're betting ahead of the curve, you need to be patient and continue to have belief in yourself and your ideas. >> Well congratulations the world has right spun to your doorstep, congratulations with SignalFx. Thanks for coming on theCube. We're in San Francisco for theCube's coverage. Day one of three days. I'm John with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. (light electronic music)