(digital music) >> Welcome, everyone. Donald Klein here with CUBE Conversations, coming to you from our studios at theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. And today I'm fortunate enough to be joined by Paul Makowski, CTO of PolySwarm. PolySwarm is a fascinating company that plays in the security space, but is also part of this emerging block chain and token economy. Welcome, Paul. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Great, so why don't we just start and give everybody an understanding of what PolySwarm does and how you guys do it? >> Sure, so PolySwarm is a new effort (audio fading in and out) to try to fix the economics around how threat (missing audio) >> Donald: Okay. >> So, we see a lot of shortcomings with (audio fading in and out) I think it's more of a economic concern rather than (missing audio) (laughs) Rather than a concern regarding (missing audio) >> Donald: Okay. >> So, what PolySwarm is (missing audio) and change how (missing audio) >> Okay. >> So, it is a blockchain project (missing audio) will govern tomorrow's threat-intelligence base and perhaps, ideally, generate better incentives (missing audio) >> Okay, so, generally if I'm understanding right, you're playing in this threat-intelligence area, which is commonly know as bug-bounties. Correct, yeah? But you guys have kind of taken this in a new direction. Why don't you just explain to me kind of where this threat-intelligence distributed economy has been and where where you see it going in the future. >> Sure, so bug bounties are, we had spoke earlier about HackerOne, for example. Bug bounties are an effort to identify vulnerabilities, and open vulnerability reports to arbitrary people across the internet. And incentivize people to secure products on behalf of the product owner. >> So, I can be an independent developer, and I find a vulnerability in something, and I submit it to one of these platforms, and then I get paid or rewarded for this. >> Yeah, and so the likes of HackerOne is a player in the space that conducts these bug bounties on behalf of other enterprises. >> Donald: Got it. >> Large enterprises such as Google and Microsoft and Apple, even, run their own bug bounties directly. >> Donald: Interesting. >> But, there's also these centralized middle men, the likes of HackerOne. Now, PolySwarm is a little bit different. We've discussed perhaps distributing the bug bounty space, but what we're focusing on right now at PolySwarm 1.0 is really just determining whether or not files, URLs, network graphics are either malicious or benign. >> Donald: Interesting. >> There's this boolean determination to start with, and then we're going to expand from there to metadata concerning, perhaps, the malware family of an identified malicious file. And then from there we'd also like to get into the bug bounty space. >> Okay. >> So, by PolySwarm being a fully decentralized market, us, as Swarm Technologies, will not be the middle man. We will not be in the middle of these transactions. We think that is going to make everything a bit more efficient for all the players on the market. And will best offer precision reward to be both accurate and timely in threat-intelligence. >> Interesting, okay, alright so I want to talk to you just a little bit more, because not everybody out there may be fully familiar with how a kind of decentralized app works. Talk to us a little bit about how blockchain fits in, how smart contracts fit in, and maybe just a little about, like, if I were to work on the PolySwarm platform, would I set up my own smart contract? Would somebody set it up for me? How would that work? >> Great question. So, in general, we see smart contracts as a new way to literally program a market. And I think this concept is applicable to a lot of different spaces. My background and the PolySwarm team background is in information (missing audio). >> Donald: Okay. >> So, we're applying smart contracts and market design specifically to a problem area that we are experts in. >> Okay, and what kind of smart contracts are these? What platform are you running on? >> We're running on Ethereum. We had previously discussed possibly expanding to Bezos, although there are perhaps some reasons not to do that anymore right now. But yeah, on Ethereum, we've been publishing our proof of concept code for our smart contracts right now which is available on github.com/polyswarm. More directly to your question concerning developing applications that plug into our platform or plug in to any platform, we've also released a opensource framework called Perigord. Which is a framework for developing Ethereum distributed applications using Go, which is a language developed by Google. So, I hope that answers a little bit, but >> So, you're really pioneering this whole world of moving to a decentralized, distributed app framework. >> Yeah, so, we're not the first people in this space, but we are expanding the ease of development to the Go language space, away from strictly programming in JavaScript. A lot distributed applications today are programmed in JavaScript. And there's pros and cons to each language, but we're hoping to get the Go language engaged a little more. >> So, let's go back now around to the people that are going to be participating in this marketplace, right. You were talking about unlocking the economic potential that's latent out there. Talk a little bit more about that. >> Exactly, so we had a spoken a little bit ago about HackerOne, and one of the things that I think is really cool about HackerOne is the fact that it's offered globally. What makes that really cool is that HackerOne gets a lot of great submissions from people in locales that may not indigenously offer sufficient jobs for the amount of talent that the local economies are producing. So, that's a sort of latent talent. HackerOne is particularly popular in India, China, Eastern European countries, we'd like to also direct that talent toward solving the threatened intelligence problem, namely accurately and timely identifying threats in files or graphic files. So, we'd like to-- We are operating in a eight and a half billion dollar per year space, the antivirus space, and we'd like to unlock this latent talent to broaden what threats are detected and how effectively enterprises defend themselves through a crowdsourced contributed manner that will cover more of the threats. >> Interesting, and so why don't you just talk a little about URLs and why those are important. We've seen a lot of hacks in the news recently, people going to sign up for a token sale and then being rerouted to the wrong place, et cetera. So, talk about malicious URLs. I think that might be an interest for people. >> Sure, everyone is trying to determine what URLs are malicious. Google has built into Chrome their safe browsing program that's also present in Firefox, Microsoft in some equivalent. Everyone's trying to determine and prevent people from being phished. You mentioned there were a few ICOs in this space that unfortunately had their websites hacked and their Ethereum contribution address changed, the hackers made off with some money. What PolySwarm does at a base level is it creates a market for security experts, again, around the world, to effectively put their money where their mouth is and say I think to the tune of 10 Nectar, for example, Nectar is the name of the PolySwarm note, that this URL or this file is malicious or benign. And those funds are escrowed directly into the smart contracts that constitute PolySwarm. And at a later time, the security experts who are right, receive the escrowed rewards from the security experts who were wrong. So, it's this feedback loop. >> It sounds like participants are kind of betting on both sides of whether something's malicious or not? >> Yeah, in effect. Legally, I definitely wouldn't say betting. (laughs) But it's >> Donald: Fair enough. >> The correct answer is there, right? The way that PolySwarm works is and enterprise has a suspect file or URL and decides to swarm it and what they do on the backend for that is they can either directly post this file or URL to the network, the network being the Ethereum blockchain. Everyone that's watching it and is cognizant of PolySwarm will be aware that there's a suspect file that perhaps I want to decide whether or not it's malicious as a security expert. Again, around the world, security experts will make that decision. If this is a particular file that I think I have insight into, as a security expert, then I might put up a certain amount of Nectar because I believe it is one way or the other. The reason why I say it's more of a-- The correct answer is in the file, right? It is in fact either malicious or benign. But what PolySwarm's economic reward is both timeliness and accuracy in determining that mal intent, whether or not that file is (missing audio). >> Interesting. And so the use of the smart contract is pretty novel here, right? Because the smart contracts then execute and distribute the bounties directly to the participants based on answer, is that right? >> That's correct. And that's the real key part. That eliminates the middle man in this space. A lot of the talk around blockchain in general is about restlessness, about not having middle men. In PolySwarm the core smart contract, again which are on github.com/polyswarm, they are able to actually hold escrowed upon. Though we're not in the middle and those escrowed funds are release to people who effectively get it right through the cost of people who got it wrong. So, we think >> And this is all automated through the system? >> This is all automated through the system. If I could take a step back real quick here, some of the shortcomings we're trying to address in today's market are if you imagine a Venn diagram, there's a rectangle that has all of the different threats in this space and you have large circles that cover portions of the Venn diagram and those large circles are today's large antivirus companies. Those circles overlap substantially. And the reason for that is pretty straight forward. Did you hear about perhaps WannaCry? It was a ransomware-- >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> If you're an antivirus company and you're not cognizant, you're not detecting WannaCry, then it's real easy to write you off. But the difficulty there is on the backend what that incentivizes is a lot of security companies doing duplicated work trying to detect the same threat. So there's a little bit of a clumpiness, there's a little bit of overlap, in what they detect and further it's very difficult although we've been speaking with people at those companies. They're always interested in the latest threat and uniquely detecting things, but it's sometimes very difficult to make Dell's argument that hey I detect this esoteric family of power >> Donald: Malicious URL, or et cetera. >> Exactly and by the way you're also going to get hit with it. That's a very difficult argument. >> So, you're sort of addressing the under served areas, then, within security. >> Precisely, so the way that PolySwarm will look in that Venn diagram, is instead of large, mostly overlapping ovals, we'll have thousands of micro-engines written by security experts that each find their specialty. And that together this crowdsourced intelligence will cover more. >> Interesting, very good, very good, okay. So, just last question here. Talk around a little bit of the background. How did PolySwarm come together? I know you talked about Narf Industries, et cetera. Why don't you just give us a little of the background here? 'Cause it's impressive. >> Sure, so again my background, and the entire PolySwarm technical team's background, is information security. We also run and work for a computer security consultancy called Narf Industries. Our more public work has been for DARPA, as of late. There was a large competition that DARPA ran called the "Cyber Grand Challenge" that was the-- they were trying to create the autonomous equivalent of a human capture the flag competition, which is a hacking competition. Anyway, we helped develop the challenges for that program and otherwise helped in that phase. So that's a public-facing project. >> And you won part of that competition, is that correct? >> Yeah, so we weren't competing in DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge, but in the human capture the flags, we have won those. All the members of the core PolySwarm, and also Narf Industries, technical team have won DEF CON's capture the flag competition at least once. And some of us have helped run that competition. That's considered the world series of hacking (laughs). So, that's our background, and we're also all we've all previously worked directly for the U.S. government, so we're very much embedded in the cutting edge of cyber security. And, finally, the last thing I'll say, is Narf was recently awarded a contract with the Department of Homeland Security for investigating how to build confidentiality controls into a blockchain environment. The Department of Homeland Security was concerned about identity management. They wanted to apply a blockchain phase. But part of that, is obviously, you want to protect people's private information. So, how do you do that phase that, by default, is purely public. >> Got it, okay look we're going to have to end there, but let me just say, we would be remiss without mentioning the fact that your ICO's starting. When's that going to happen? >> So, we have an ICO that's going to go live February 6. Right now, we're just trying to generate buzz, talking to great people like yourself. After that lead up to the ICO, we'd like to encourage people to check out our website at polyswarm.io, we have a Telegram group that's growing everyday. And, again, a large part of what we would be funded by this ICO to accomplish is building the community around using PolySwarm. Fortunately, again, this is our space. So, we know a lot of people in this space, but we're always happy to be meeting people, so we'd love for all your viewers to join the conversation and engage with us. Our DMs on Twitter are open, et cetera. >> Okay, we hope they do. Probably just want to make one final point is that you guys are actually publishing all your code on GitHub ahead of the ICO, right? That kind of makes you unique in a very difficult space. >> It, unfortunately, does make us unique. I wish more projects did do that. But, yes, we are publishing our code in advance of the token sale. PolySwarm, if you're familiar with the conversation between securities and utility tokens, PolySwarm is very much a utility token. People will grade Nectar, which is the name of our Token, for threat intelligence. And part of that is we want to have a usable ecosystem on day one when people buy tokens. We want to make sure that you're not investing in some future thing. Obviously we're going to improve on it, but it will be usable from day one (missing audio). >> Alright, fantastic, so thank you, Paul. I appreciate you coming in. Alright, well thanks, everyone. Thank you for watching. This is Donald Klein with CUBE Conversations coming to you from Palo Alto, California. Thank you for watching. (digital music)

>>Everyone, welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special presentation on Cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. I'm John Furry, your host of The Cube. We've got a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Mattor Makki, who's the co-founder and VP of Product of Platform nine. She's gonna go into detail around Arlon, the open source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud native at scale. Bickley the chief architect of Platform nine Cube alumni. Going back to the OpenStack days. He's gonna go into why Arlon, why this infrastructure as code implication, what it means for customers and the implications in the open source community and where that value is. Really great wide ranging conversation there. And of course, Vascar, Gort, the CEO of Platform nine, is gonna talk with me about his views on Super Cloud and why Platform nine has a scalable solutions to bring cloud native at scale. So enjoy the program, see you soon. Hello and welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube. Pleasure to have here me Makowski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. >>Thank you for having >>Me. So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on Super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good and a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model, where you have a few large distributors of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of micro sites. These micro sites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think super cloud is a, is an appropriate term for >>That. So you brought a couple things I want to dig into. You mentioned Edge Notes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. Wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got iot, o ot, and it kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around cloud flare shutting down a site here, there's policies being made at scale. These new challenges there. Can you share because you can have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because it's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenge. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud across multiple edges and >>Regions? Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have, deploy number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other access you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that skill really needs some well thought out, well-structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when you scale, is not at the level. >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're talking about at scale Yep. Challenges here. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is, you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this change, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, It's not working. The exact same problem now happens and these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer's site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on all of these various factors at their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >>Okay. So I have to ask about scale because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success cloud native, you know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can configure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotpot is. And when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the, the two factors of scale is we talked about start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and POS from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to try us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because yeah, you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say you radio sell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did it, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes like ishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem. Another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that these security policies are configured properly. >>So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching, Can you share what our lawn is, this new product, What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. I'm very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arwan is, it's an open source project and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end to end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the sites of those clusters, security policies, your middleware plugins, and finally your applications. So what alarm lets you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what this solves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in. What's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, >>What would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right online. And if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of online, we, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each components, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage. But again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what Arlon really does. That's like the I pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency >>For those. So keeping it smooth, the assembly on things are flowing. C C I CD pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, the developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of application that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secure properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability integrated. And so it solves problems for both those >>Teams. Yeah. It's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud native developer. The OP teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, Kubernetes really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, c communities clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined in a declarative way. And Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so online addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>Ed, do I wanna get into the benefits? What's in it for me as the customer developer? But I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over at platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model on from model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fi, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why opensource and also opensource because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a block box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. I mean, what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that, Well, but that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for helpers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating me metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and you know, two things. I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SAS hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production >>Environment. I have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer, why should I be enthused about Arlo? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo customer? >>Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native es, and then we have our C I CD pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS CD pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of their groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Spico would be delighted. The folks that we've talked, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on s Amazon and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us >>Stability. Yeah, I think people are scared, not sc I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And, and I think this is gonna come up at co con this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Lon uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest rated and used CD open source tools that's out there, right? It's created by folks that are as part of Intuit team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is arlon also makes use of cluster api capi, which is a ES sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with algo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what Algo CD can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to a point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, Platform nine has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy Alon at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DEF test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that sla. >>And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with, that are familiar with, with Argo and then Arlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo CD and they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our line before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customer's hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and, you know, give you an inventory and that, >>So customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. So >>Especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yeah. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. >>And you provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. >>Yes. That's the key value >>Here. That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale up >>Profile and policy based declarative configuration and life cycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables Super club, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there's at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way so that our lot solves then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And alon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And, you know, alarm flows >>In one. Okay, so now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. There's under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me, seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge to their, where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for >>That. So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this Arlo solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, there's designed to do, the question is, what did, does the current pain look like of the apps breaking? What does the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo, and, and, and on all the other goodness to automate, What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, Is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely would be in indications of things are effed up a little bit. >>Yeah. More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so you are, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this because the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your, your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you are looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your, So those are, those are the >>Signals. This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the IIA terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. The company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and see, and boards is saying, how is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yeah. Do you see that same thing? >>Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloudnative at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things with things. So just >>Taking care of, and the CIO doesn't exist. There's no CSO there at the beach. >>Yeah. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for having >>Me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching. Welcome back everyone to the special presentation of cloud native at scale, the cube and platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here at Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine b. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or well later, earlier when opens Stack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of platform nine. >>Thank you very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now was realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just a success Exactly. Of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructure's code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our R lawn you guys just launched, the infrastructure's code is going to another level. And then it's always been DevOps infrastructure is code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon, connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructures code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it, everybody or most people know about infrastructures code. But with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure as configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D instead with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specify. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah, yeah. And, and that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. Not declaring, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source, so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code. It's code being developed. And so it's into integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new, new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space that, >>That's, I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is the new breed, the trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your >>View? It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at our GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the by intu. They had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, Vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our inaugural event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or application specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so to deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer too is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna continue. >>It's interesting. I just really wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD Stock is down arm has been on rise, we've remember pointing for many years now, that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in, in this community of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at ar GoCon, which came out of Intuit. We've had Maria Teel at our super cloud event, She's a cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? Yeah, >>So the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built AR lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, And >>What's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the, the, this abstraction or thin layer below the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads at the end of the day, and I talk to CXOs and IT folks that, that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructure's code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And here's my workloads running effectively. So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, right? >>So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem, like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's coming like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We've heard people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with AR loan you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call the profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, So >>It's essentially standard, like creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook, just deploy it. Now what there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I can just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructure as configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things are controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure as configuration is built kind of on, it's a super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years. I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Kubernetes has value. We're gonna hear this year at CubeCon a lot of this, what does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state, and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot rogue, that CubeCon coming up and now this'll be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at this year? It's the big story this year. What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jockeying for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of coupon and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career VMware over decades with them within 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here a platform. I you's been around for a while at this game, man. We talked about OpenStack, that project we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a Cloud Aati team at that time. We would joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform Nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? Opens Stack was an example and then Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah, I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you, Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing, doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud need of its scale? >>The, the hyper squares? >>Yeah, yeah. A's Azure Google, >>You mean from a business perspective, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep well, >>They got great performance. I mean, from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes. That's gonna be key, >>Right? Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyper skaters really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the, the new risk and arm ecosystems, the platforms. >>Yeah. Not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh the cloud is one big distributed computer. It's, it's hardware and you got software and you got middleware and he kinda over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. Yes, >>Exactly. >>It's, we're back in the same game. Thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud, cloud native develop for developers. And John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up. Hey, welcome back everyone to Super Cloud 22. I'm John Fur, host of the Cuba here all day talking about the future of cloud. Where's it all going? Making it super multi-cloud is around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and Edge. Got a great guest here, Vascar Gorde, CEO of Platform nine, just on the panel on Kubernetes. An enabler blocker. Welcome back. Great to have you on. >>Good to see you >>Again. So Kubernetes is a blocker enabler by, with a question mark I put on on there. Panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's just thing about what you guys are doing at Platform nine? Is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform nine while you're at the helm, right? >>Absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you to run the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what where we come into >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were kind of talking about the glory days in 2000, 2001 when the first ASPs application service providers came out. Kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloud-like >>It wasn't, >>And web services started then too. So you saw that whole growth. Now, fast forward 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now, when you look back then to here and all the different cycles, >>In fact, you know, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same but also extremely different. But more importantly now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have everybody's in the journey somewhere. >>Everyone is going digital transformation here. Even on a so-called downturn recession that's upcoming inflations sea year. It's interesting. This is the first downturn, the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. And if you look at the tech trends, GDPs down, but not tech. Nope. Cause pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming even in, in tech. So this is a unique factor which proves that that digital transformation's happening and company, every company will need a super cloud. >>Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernize their infrastructure. And modernizing infrastructure is not just some, you know, new servers and new application tools. It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. >>I wanna get your thoughts on Super Cloud because one of the things Dave Alon and I want to do with Super Cloud and calling it that was we, I, I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can, I'll speak from, he can speak for himself. We didn't like multi-cloud. I mean not because Amazon said don't call things multi-cloud, it just didn't feel right. I mean everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365. But it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized, it wasn't truly cloud enabled. It didn't, it felt like they're not ready for a market yet. Yet public clouds booming on premise. Private cloud and Edge is much more on, you know, more, More dynamic, more unreal. >>Yeah. I think the reason why we think Super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. Okay, you have a productivity cloud, you have a Salesforce cloud, you may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? So, but they're not connected. So you can say, okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's, you know, multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically. Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure, you need, but at the same time you need a single pan or a single platform for you to build your innovations on, regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think Super Cloud is actually a more tightly integrated orchestrated management philosophy we think. >>So let's get into some of the super cloud type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is as a pilot to get the conversations flowing with, with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products and the builders, Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third Cloudworks in public cloud. We see the use cases on premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit, but a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that open stack. We need an orchestration. And then containers had a good shot with, with Docker. They re pivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you got containers booming and Kubernetes as a new layer there. >>What's, >>What's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new defacto enabler? It >>Is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have 1, 2, 3 container based, Kubernetes based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here. It is in production at scale by many customers. And it, the beauty of it is yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team, right? So it's, it's one thing to buy a tool and >>Just be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. >>We provide, provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service and it can run anywhere. It can run in public private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge, it runs at this in stores about thousands of stores in a retailer. So we provide that and also for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons. We also un on-prem as an air gap version. Can >>You give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your customer? Right. >>So I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have hundreds of products, hundreds of r and d teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at few years back, each one was doing it on a different platforms, but they really needed to bring the agility. And they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev pro platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light out operation. In fact, the customer says like, like the Maytag service person, cuz we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. >>So it's kinda like an SRE vibe. One person managing a >>Large 4,000 engineers building infrastructure >>On their tools, >>Whatever they want on their tools. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform. What >>Benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? >>Speed, definitely. Okay. Definitely they're speeding. Speed uniformity because now they're building able to build, so their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. >>So a big problem that's coming outta this super cloud event that we're, we're seeing and we heard it all here, ops and security teams. Cause they're kind of part of one thing, but option security specifically need to catch up speed wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right? >>So we, we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams and we layer on top of that. We have like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you have multiple teams, okay, but you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually, you know, the product divisions of companies that are looking at or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally cio definitely. So it it's, it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure. But the ideal one we are beginning to see now many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams. So >>You working two sides to that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side. >>Okay. Another customer that I give an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail, retail, you know food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000. And they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy or browse or sit there. They have applications that were written in the nineties and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store or they can't move everything to the cloud because the store operations has to be local. The menu changes based on it's classic edge. It's classic edge, yeah. Right? They can't send it people to go install rack access servers then they can't sell software people to go install the software and any change you wanna put through that, you know, truck roll. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that >>You, you say little servers like how big one like a box, like a small little box, >>Right? And all the person in the store has to do like what you and I do at home and we get a, you know, a router is connect the power, connect the internet and turn the switch on. And from there we pick it up. >>Yep. >>We provide the operating system, everything and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage thousands of >>Them. True plug and play >>Two, plug and play thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So, so that's another example where on the edge then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds. Okay. But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the locations. >>So you guys got some success. Congratulations. Got some traction there. It's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that's come up is what is truly cloud native? Cuz there's lift and shift of the cloud >>That's not cloud native. >>Then there's cloud native. Cloud native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says what's cloud native, what isn't cloud native? >>Right. Look, I think first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud native, is CNC foundation. And I think it's very well documented, very well. >>Tucan, of course Detroit's >>Coming so, so it's already there, right? So we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20 year old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud native. Okay? You can't put to cloud, not you have to rewrite and redevelop your application in business logic using modern tools. Hopefully more open source and, and I think that's what Cloudnative is and we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now everybody wants to be cloudnative, but it's not that easy, okay? Because it's, I think it's first of all, skill set is very important. Uniformity of tools that there's so many tools there. Thousands and thousands of tools you could spend your time figuring out which tool to use. Okay? So I think the complexity is there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly being done. >>And I'll give you an example, I don't know how clear native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours, but you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how dominoes actually increase their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not, I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch what's happening, how it's delivered. There were a pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud native can provide. >>Being agility and having that flow to the application changes what the expectations >>Are >>For the customer. Customer, >>The customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn. >>That's to wrap it up. I wanna just get your perspective again. One of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you part of the Super Cloud 22 is you've seen many cycles, you have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career where you've been and what you've done and now let's CEO platform nine, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? And you've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now put into context this moment in time around Super Cloud. >>Sure. I think as you said, a lot of battles. CARSs being been in an asb, being in a real time software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side, I did the infrastructure right and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to go through to become cloud native and digitalize. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on is a couple of paddles come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced to honors like y2k. Everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for y2k. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive right across all industries. >>And disruptive. >>And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. Yeah. I think we are at that pivotal moment now in companies trying to become digital and cloudnative. You know, that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce is interesting and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this is that it's not just completely changing the gain, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of e-commerce, just putting up a shopping cart that made you an e-commerce or e retailer or an e e e customer, right? Or so. I think it's the same thing now is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you gonna operate? How are you gonna service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not gonna work. >>Nascar, thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of Super Cloud 22. We really appreciate, we're gonna keep this open. We're gonna keep this conversation going even after the event, to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open in the community. And we're gonna keep this going for, for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with cloud cloud computing. I'm Sean Fur with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Hello and welcome back. This is the end of our program, our special presentation with Platform nine on cloud native at scale, enabling the super cloud. We're continuing the theme here. You heard the interviews Super Cloud and its challenges, new opportunities around solutions around like Platform nine and others with Arlon. This is really about the edge situations on the internet and managing the edge multiple regions, avoiding vendor lock in. This is what this new super cloud is all about. The business consequences we heard and and the wide ranging conversations around what it means for open source and the complexity problem all being solved. I hope you enjoyed this program. There's a lot of moving pieces and things to configure with cloud native install, all making it easier for you here with Super Cloud and of course Platform nine contributing to that. Thank you for watching.

>>Hello, welcome to the Cube here in Palo Alto, California for a special presentation on Cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. I'm John Furr, your host of The Cube. We had a great lineup of three interviews we're streaming today. Meor Ma Makowski, who's the co-founder and VP of Product of Platform nine. She's gonna go into detail around Arlon, the open source products, and also the value of what this means for infrastructure as code and for cloud native at scale. Bickley the chief architect of Platform nine Cube alumni. Going back to the OpenStack days. He's gonna go into why Arlon, why this infrastructure as code implication, what it means for customers and the implications in the open source community and where that value is. Really great wide ranging conversation there. And of course, Vascar, Gort, the CEO of Platform nine, is gonna talk with me about his views on Super Cloud and why Platform nine has a scalable solutions to bring cloudnative at scale. So enjoy the program. See you soon. Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube here in Palo Alto, California for special program on cloud native at scale, enabling next generation cloud or super cloud for modern application cloud native developers. I'm John Furry, host of the Cube. A pleasure to have here, me Makoski, co-founder and VP of product at Platform nine. Thanks for coming in today for this Cloudnative at scale conversation. Thank >>You for having me. >>So Cloudnative at scale, something that we're talking about because we're seeing the, the next level of mainstream success of containers Kubernetes and cloud native develop, basically DevOps in the C I C D pipeline. It's changing the landscape of infrastructure as code, it's accelerating the value proposition and the super cloud as we call it, has been getting a lot of traction because this next generation cloud is looking a lot different, but kind of the same as the first generation. What's your view on super cloud as it fits to cloud native as scales up? >>Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, and I think the reason why Super Cloud is a really good, in a really fit term for this, and I think, I know my CEO was chatting with you as well, and he was mentioning this as well, but I think there needs to be a different term than just multi-cloud or cloud. And the reason is because as cloud native and cloud deployments have scaled, I think we've reached a point now where instead of having the traditional data center style model where you have a few large distributions of infrastructure and workload at a few locations, I think the model is kind of flipped around, right? Where you have a large number of microsites, these microsites could be your public cloud deployment, your private on-prem infrastructure deployments, or it could be your edge environment, right? And every single enterprise, every single industry is moving in that direction. And so you gotta rougher that with a terminology that, that, that indicates the scale and complexity of it. And so I think supercloud is a, is an appropriate term for that. >>So you brought a couple of things I want to dig into. You mentioned edge nodes. We're seeing not only edge nodes being the next kind of area of innovation, mainly because it's just popping up everywhere. And that's just the beginning. Wouldn't even know what's around the corner. You got buildings, you got iot, ot, and IT kind of coming together, but you also got this idea of regions, global infras infrastructures, big part of it. I just saw some news around CloudFlare shutting down a site here. There's policies being made at scale, These new challenges there. Can you share because you can have edge. So hybrid cloud is a winning formula. Everybody knows that it's a steady state. Yeah. But across multiple clouds brings in this new un engineered area, yet it hasn't been done yet. Spanning clouds. People say they're doing it, but you start to see the toe in the water, it's happening, it's gonna happen. It's only gonna get accelerated with the edge and beyond globally. So I have to ask you, what is the technical challenges in doing this? Because there's something business consequences as well, but there are technical challenges. Can you share your view on what the technical challenges are for the super cloud or across multiple edges and regions? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, in in the context of this, the, this, this term of super cloud, I think it's sometimes easier to visualize things in terms of two access, right? I think on one end you can think of the scale in terms of just pure number of nodes that you have deploy a number of clusters in the Kubernetes space. And then on the other axis you would have your distribution factor, right? Which is, do you have these tens of thousands of nodes in one site or do you have them distributed across tens of thousands of sites with one node at each site? Right? And if you have just one flavor of this, there is enough complexity, but potentially manageable. But when you are expanding on both these access, you really get to a point where that scale really needs some well thought out, well structured solutions to address it, right? A combination of homegrown tooling along with your, you know, favorite distribution of Kubernetes is not a strategy that can help you in this environment. It may help you when you have one of this or when you, when you scale, is not at the level. >>Can you scope the complexity? Because I mean, I hear a lot of moving parts going on there, the technology's also getting better. We we're seeing cloud native become successful. There's a lot to configure, there's a lot to install. Can you scope the scale of the problem? Because we're talking about at scale Yep. Challenges here. Yeah, >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, I I like to call it, you know, the, the, the problem that the scale creates, you know, there's various problems, but I think one, one problem, one way to think about it is, is, you know, it works on my cluster problem, right? So I, you know, I come from engineering background and there's a, you know, there's a famous saying between engineers and QA and the support folks, right? Which is, it works on my laptop, which is I tested this chain, everything was fantastic, it worked flawlessly on my machine, on production, It's not working. The exact same problem now happens and these distributed environments, but at massive scale, right? Which is that, you know, developers test their applications, et cetera within the sanctity of their sandbox environments. But once you expose that change in the wild world of your production deployment, right? >>And the production deployment could be going at the radio cell tower at the edge location where a cluster is running there, or it could be sending, you know, these applications and having them run at my customer site where they might not have configured that cluster exactly the same way as I configured it, or they configured the cluster, right? But maybe they didn't deploy the security policies, or they didn't deploy the other infrastructure plugins that my app relies on. All of these various factors are their own layer of complexity. And there really isn't a simple way to solve that today. And that is just, you know, one example of an issue that happens. I think another, you know, whole new ball game of issues come in the context of security, right? Because when you are deploying applications at scale in a distributed manner, you gotta make sure someone's job is on the line to ensure that the right security policies are enforced regardless of that scale factor. So I think that's another example of problems that occur. >>Okay. So I have to ask about scale, because there are a lot of multiple steps involved when you see the success of cloud native. You know, you see some, you know, some experimentation. They set up a cluster, say it's containers and Kubernetes, and then you say, Okay, we got this, we can figure it. And then they do it again and again, they call it day two. Some people call it day one, day two operation, whatever you call it. Once you get past the first initial thing, then you gotta scale it. Then you're seeing security breaches, you're seeing configuration errors. This seems to be where the hotspot is in when companies transition from, I got this to, Oh no, it's harder than I thought at scale. Can you share your reaction to that and how you see this playing out? >>Yeah, so, you know, I think it's interesting. There's multiple problems that occur when, you know, the two factors of scale, as we talked about, start expanding. I think one of them is what I like to call the, you know, it, it works fine on my cluster problem, which is back in, when I was a developer, we used to call this, it works on my laptop problem, which is, you know, you have your perfectly written code that is operating just fine on your machine, your sandbox environment. But the moment it runs production, it comes back with p zeros and pos from support teams, et cetera. And those issues can be really difficult to triage us, right? And so in the Kubernetes environment, this problem kind of multi folds, it goes, you know, escalates to a higher degree because you have your sandbox developer environments, they have their clusters and things work perfectly fine in those clusters because these clusters are typically handcrafted or a combination of some scripting and handcrafting. >>And so as you give that change to then run at your production edge location, like say your radio cell tower site, or you hand it over to a customer to run it on their cluster, they might not have not have configured that cluster exactly how you did, or they might not have configured some of the infrastructure plugins. And so the things don't work. And when things don't work, triaging them becomes nightmarishly hard, right? It's just one of the examples of the problem, another whole bucket of issues is security, which is, is you have these distributed clusters at scale, you gotta ensure someone's job is on the line to make sure that these security policies are configured properly. >>So this is a huge problem. I love that comment. That's not not happening on my system. It's the classic, you know, debugging mentality. Yeah. But at scale it's hard to do that with error prone. I can see that being a problem. And you guys have a solution you're launching. Can you share what Arlon is this new product? What is it all about? Talk about this new introduction. >>Yeah, absolutely. Very, very excited. You know, it's one of the projects that we've been working on for some time now because we are very passionate about this problem and just solving problems at scale in on-prem or at in the cloud or at edge environments. And what arlon is, it's an open source project, and it is a tool, it's a Kubernetes native tool for complete end to end management of not just your clusters, but your clusters. All of the infrastructure that goes within and along the site of those clusters, security policies, your middleware, plug-ins, and finally your applications. So what our LA you do in a nutshell is in a declarative way, it lets you handle the configuration and management of all of these components in at scale. >>So what's the elevator pitch simply put for what dissolves in, in terms of the chaos you guys are reigning in, what's the, what's the bumper sticker? Yeah, what >>Would it do? There's a perfect analogy that I love to reference in this context, which is think of your assembly line, you know, in a traditional, let's say, you know, an auto manufacturing factory or et cetera, and the level of efficiency at scale that that assembly line brings, right? Our line, and if you look at the logo we've designed, it's this funny little robot. And it's because when we think of online, we think of these enterprise large scale environments, you know, sprawling at scale, creating chaos because there isn't necessarily a well thought through, well structured solution that's similar to an assembly line, which is taking each component, you know, addressing them, manufacturing, processing them in a standardized way, then handing to the next stage. But again, it gets, you know, processed in a standardized way. And that's what arlon really does. That's like the deliver pitch. If you have problems of scale of managing your infrastructure, you know, that is distributed. Arlon brings the assembly line level of efficiency and consistency for >>Those. So keeping it smooth, the assembly on things are flowing. See c i CD pipe pipelining. Exactly. So that's what you're trying to simplify that ops piece for the developer. I mean, it's not really ops, it's their ops, it's coding. >>Yeah. Not just developer, the ops, the operations folks as well, right? Because developers, you know, there is, developers are responsible for one picture of that layer, which is my apps, and then maybe that middleware of applications that they interface with, but then they hand it over to someone else who's then responsible to ensure that these apps are secure properly, that they are logging, logs are being collected properly, monitoring and observability integrated. And so it solves problems for both >>Those teams. Yeah. It's DevOps. So the DevOps is the cloud needed developer's. That's right. The option teams have to kind of set policies. Is that where the declarative piece comes in? Is that why that's important? >>Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and you know, ES really in introduced or elevated this declarative management, right? Because, you know, s clusters are Yeah. Or your, yeah, you know, specifications of components that go in Kubernetes are defined a declarative way, and Kubernetes always keeps that state consistent with your defined state. But when you go outside of that world of a single cluster, and when you actually talk about defining the clusters or defining everything that's around it, there really isn't a solution that does that today. And so Arlon addresses that problem at the heart of it, and it does that using existing open source well known solutions. >>And do I want to get into the benefits? What's in it for me as the customer developer? But I want to finish this out real quick and get your thoughts. You mentioned open source. Why open source? What's the, what's the current state of the product? You run the product group over at Platform nine, is it open source? And you guys have a product that's commercial? Can you explain the open source dynamic? And first of all, why open source? Yeah. And what is the consumption? I mean, open source is great, People want open source, they can download it, look up the code, but maybe wanna buy the commercial. So I'm assuming you have that thought through, can you share open source and commercial relationship? >>Yeah, I think, you know, starting with why open source? I think it's, you know, we as a company, we have, you know, one of the things that's absolutely critical to us is that we take mainstream open source technologies components and then we, you know, make them available to our customers at scale through either a SaaS model or on-prem model, right? But, so as we are a company or startup or a company that benefits, you know, in a massive way by this open source economy, it's only right, I think in my mind that we do our part of the duty, right? And contribute back to the community that feeds us. And so, you know, we have always held that strongly as one of our principles. And we have, you know, created and built independent products starting all the way with fision, which was a serverless product, you know, that we had built to various other, you know, examples that I can give. But that's one of the main reasons why opensource and also open source, because we want the community to really firsthand engage with us on this problem, which is very difficult to achieve if your product is behind a wall, you know, behind, behind a block box. >>Well, and that's, that's what the developers want too. And what we're seeing in reporting with Super Cloud is the new model of consumption is I wanna look at the code and see what's in there. That's right. And then also, if I want to use it, I'll do it. Great. That's open source, that's the value. But then at the end of the day, if I wanna move fast, that's when people buy in. So it's a new kind of freemium, I guess, business model. I guess that's the way that long. But that's, that's the benefit. Open source. This is why standards and open source is growing so fast. You have that confluence of, you know, a way for developers to try before they buy, but also actually kind of date the application, if you will. We, you know, Adrian Karo uses the dating met metaphor, you know, Hey, you know, I wanna check it out first before I get married. Right? And that's what open source, So this is the new, this is how people are selling. This is not just open source, this is how companies are selling. >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, and you know, two things. I think one is just, you know, this, this, this cloud native space is so vast that if you, if you're building a close flow solution, sometimes there's also a risk that it may not apply to every single enterprises use cases. And so having it open source gives them an opportunity to extend it, expand it, to make it proper to their use case if they choose to do so, right? But at the same time, what's also critical to us is we are able to provide a supported version of it with an SLA that we, you know, that's backed by us, a SAS hosted version of it as well, for those customers who choose to go that route, you know, once they have used the open source version and loved it and want to take it at scale and in production and need, need, need a partner to collaborate with, who can, you know, support them for that production >>Environment. I have to ask you now, let's get into what's in it for the customer. I'm a customer. Yep. Why should I be enthused about Arla? What's in it for me? You know? Cause if I'm not enthused about it, I'm not gonna be confident and it's gonna be hard for me to get behind this. Can you share your enthusiastic view of, you know, why I should be enthused about Arlo? I'm a >>Customer. Yeah, absolutely. And so, and there's multiple, you know, enterprises that we talk to, many of them, you know, our customers, where this is a very kind of typical story that you hear, which is we have, you know, a Kubernetes distribution. It could be on premise, it could be public clouds, native Kubernetes, and then we have our C I C D pipelines that are automating the deployment of applications, et cetera. And then there's this gray zone. And the gray zone is well before you can you, your CS c D pipelines can deploy the apps. Somebody needs to do all of that groundwork of, you know, defining those clusters and yeah. You know, properly configuring them. And as these things, these things start by being done hand grown. And then as the, as you scale, what typically enterprises would do today is they will have their home homegrown DIY solutions for this. >>I mean, the number of folks that I talk to that have built Terra from automation, and then, you know, some of those key developers leave. So it's a typical open source or typical, you know, DIY challenge. And the reason that they're writing it themselves is not because they want to. I mean, of course technology is always interesting to everybody, but it's because they can't find a solution that's out there that perfectly fits the problem. And so that's that pitch. I think Ops FICO would be delighted. The folks that we've talk, you know, spoken with, have been absolutely excited and have, you know, shared that this is a major challenge we have today because we have, you know, few hundreds of clusters on ecos Amazon, and we wanna scale them to few thousands, but we don't think we are ready to do that. And this will give us the >>Ability to, Yeah, I think people are scared. Not sc I won't say scare, that's a bad word. Maybe I should say that they feel nervous because, you know, at scale small mistakes can become large mistakes. This is something that is concerning to enterprises. And, and I think this is gonna come up at co con this year where enterprises are gonna say, Okay, I need to see SLAs. I wanna see track record, I wanna see other companies that have used it. Yeah. How would you answer that question to, or, or challenge, you know, Hey, I love this, but is there any guarantees? Is there any, what's the SLAs? I'm an enterprise, I got tight, you know, I love the open source trying to free fast and loose, but I need hardened code. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, so two parts to that, right? One is Arlan leverages existing open source components, products that are extremely popular. Two specifically. One is Arlan uses Argo cd, which is probably one of the highest and used CD open source tools that's out there. Right's created by folks that are as part of into team now, you know, really brilliant team. And it's used at scale across enterprises. That's one. Second is Alon also makes use of Cluster api cappi, which is a Kubernetes sub-component, right? For lifecycle management of clusters. So there is enough of, you know, community users, et cetera, around these two products, right? Or, or, or open source projects that will find Arlan to be right up in their alley because they're already comfortable, familiar with Argo cd. Now Arlan just extends the scope of what City can do. And so that's one. And then the second part is going back to a point of the comfort. And that's where, you know, platform line has a role to play, which is when you are ready to deploy online at scale, because you've been, you know, playing with it in your DEF test environments, you're happy with what you get with it, then Platform nine will stand behind it and provide that >>Sla. And what's been the reaction from customers you've talked to Platform nine customers with, with that are familiar with, with Argo and then rlo? What's been some of the feedback? >>Yeah, I, I think the feedback's been fantastic. I mean, I can give you examples of customers where, you know, initially, you know, when you are, when you're telling them about your entire portfolio of solutions, it might not strike a card right away. But then we start talking about Arlan and, and we talk about the fact that it uses Argo adn, they start opening up, they say, We have standardized on Argo and we have built these components, homegrown, we would be very interested. Can we co-develop? Does it support these use cases? So we've had that kind of validation. We've had validation all the way at the beginning of our land before we even wrote a single line of code saying this is something we plan on doing. And the customer said, If you had it today, I would've purchased it. So it's been really great validation. >>All right. So next question is, what is the solution to the customer? If I asked you, Look it, I have, I'm so busy, my team's overworked. I got a skills gap. I don't need another project that's, I'm so tied up right now and I'm just chasing my tail. How does Platform nine help me? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, one of the core tenets of Platform nine has always been been that we try to bring that public cloud like simplicity by hosting, you know, this in a lot of such similar tools in a SaaS hosted manner for our customers, right? So our goal behind doing that is taking away or trying to take away all of that complexity from customers' hands and offloading it to our hands, right? And giving them that full white glove treatment, as we call it. And so from a customer's perspective, one, something like arlon will integrate with what they have so they don't have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it will, even in the next versions, it may even discover your clusters that you have today and you know, give you an inventory. And that will, >>So if customers have clusters that are growing, that's a sign correct call you guys. >>Absolutely. Either they're, they have massive large clusters, right? That they wanna split into smaller clusters, but they're not comfortable doing that today, or they've done that already on say, public cloud or otherwise. And now they have management challenges. So >>Especially operationalizing the clusters, whether they want to kind of reset everything and remove things around and reconfigure Yep. And or scale out. >>That's right. Exactly. And >>You provide that layer of policy. >>Absolutely. >>Yes. That's the key value here. >>That's right. >>So policy based configuration for cluster scale up, >>Well profile and policy based declarative configuration and lifecycle management for clusters. >>If I asked you how this enables supercloud, what would you say to that? >>I think this is one of the key ingredients to super cloud, right? If you think about a super cloud environment, there's at least few key ingredients that that come to my mind that are really critical. Like they are, you know, life saving ingredients at that scale. One is having a really good strategy for managing that scale, you know, in a, going back to assembly line in a very consistent, predictable way so that our lot solves then you, you need to compliment that with the right kind of observability and monitoring tools at scale, right? Because ultimately issues are gonna happen and you're gonna have to figure out, you know, how to solve them fast. And arlon by the way, also helps in that direction, but you also need observability tools. And then especially if you're running it on the public cloud, you need some cost management tools. In my mind, these three things are like the most necessary ingredients to make Super Cloud successful. And you know, our alarm fills in >>One. Okay. So now the next level is, Okay, that makes sense. Is under the covers kind of speak under the hood. Yeah. How does that impact the app developers and the cloud native modern application workflows? Because the impact to me, seems the apps are gonna be impacted. Are they gonna be faster, stronger? I mean, what's the impact if you do all those things, as you mentioned, what's the impact of the apps? >>Yeah, the impact is that your apps are more likely to operate in production the way you expect them to, because the right checks and balances have gone through, and any discrepancies have been identified prior to those apps, prior to your customer running into them, right? Because developers run into this challenge to their, where there's a split responsibility, right? I'm responsible for my code, I'm responsible for some of these other plugins, but I don't own the stack end to end. I have to rely on my ops counterpart to do their part, right? And so this really gives them, you know, the right tooling for that. >>So this is actually a great kind of relevant point, you know, as cloud becomes more scalable, you're starting to see this fragmentation gone of the days of the full stack developer to the more specialized role. But this is a key point, and I have to ask you because if this RLO solution takes place, as you say, and the apps are gonna be stupid, they're designed to do, the question is, what did does the current pain look like of the apps breaking? What does the signals to the customer Yeah. That they should be calling you guys up into implementing Arlo, Argo and, and all the other goodness to automate? What are some of the signals? Is it downtime? Is it, is it failed apps, Is it latency? What are some of the things that Yeah, absolutely would be indications of things are effed up a little bit. Yeah. >>More frequent down times, down times that are, that take longer to triage. And so you are, you know, the, you know, your mean times on resolution, et cetera, are escalating or growing larger, right? Like we have environments of customers where they're, they have a number of folks on in the field that have to take these apps and run them at customer sites. And that's one of our partners. And they're extremely interested in this because they're the, the rate of failures they're encountering for this, you know, the field when they're running these apps on site, because the field is automating their clusters that are running on sites using their own script. So these are the kinds of challenges, and those are the pain points, which is, you know, if you're looking to reduce your meantime to resolution, if you're looking to reduce the number of failures that occur on your production site, that's one. And second, if you are looking to manage these at scale environments with a relatively small, focused, nimble ops team, which has an immediate impact on your budget. So those are, those are the signals. >>This is the cloud native at scale situation, the innovation going on. Final thought is your reaction to the idea that if the world goes digital, which it is, and the confluence of physical and digital coming together, and cloud continues to do its thing, the company becomes the application, not where it used to be supporting the business, you know, the back office and the maybe terminals and some PCs and handhelds. Now if technology's running, the business is the business. Yeah. Company's the application. Yeah. So it can't be down. So there's a lot of pressure on, on CSOs and CIOs now and boards is saying, How is technology driving the top line revenue? That's the number one conversation. Yep. Do you see that same thing? >>Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's multiple pressures at the CXO CIO level, right? One is that there needs to be that visibility and clarity and guarantee almost that, you know, that the, the technology that's, you know, that's gonna drive your top line is gonna drive that in a consistent, reliable, predictable manner. And then second, there is the constant pressure to do that while always lowering your costs of doing it, right? Especially when you're talking about, let's say retailers or those kinds of large scale vendors, they many times make money by lowering the amount that they spend on, you know, providing those goods to their end customers. So I think those, both those factors kind of come into play and the solution to all of them is usually in a very structured strategy around automation. >>Final question. What does cloudnative at scale look like to you? If all the things happen the way we want 'em to happen, The magic wand, the magic dust, what does it look like? >>What that looks like to me is a CIO sipping at his desk on coffee production is running absolutely smooth. And his, he's running that at a nimble, nimble team size of at the most, a handful of folks that are just looking after things, but things are >>Just taking care of the CIO doesn't exist. There's no ciso, they're at the beach. >>Yep. >>Thank you for coming on, sharing the cloud native at scale here on the cube. Thank you for your time. >>Fantastic. Thanks for >>Having me. Okay. I'm John Fur here for special program presentation, special programming cloud native at scale, enabling super cloud modern applications with Platform nine. Thanks for watching. Welcome back everyone to the special presentation of cloud native at scale, the cube and platform nine special presentation going in and digging into the next generation super cloud infrastructure as code and the future of application development. We're here with Bickley, who's the chief architect and co-founder of Platform nine Pick. Great to see you Cube alumni. We, we met at an OpenStack event in about eight years ago, or later, earlier when OpenStack was going. Great to see you and great to see congratulations on the success of platform nine. >>Thank you very much. >>Yeah. You guys have been at this for a while and this is really the, the, the year we're seeing the, the crossover of Kubernetes because of what happens with containers. Everyone now has realized, and you've seen what Docker's doing with the new docker, the open source Docker now just the success Exactly. Of containerization, right? And now the Kubernetes layer that we've been working on for years is coming, bearing fruit. This is huge. >>Exactly. Yes. >>And so as infrastructures code comes in, we talked to Bacar talking about Super Cloud, I met her about, you know, the new Arlon, our, our lawn, and you guys just launched the infrastructures code is going to another level, and then it's always been DevOps infrastructures code. That's been the ethos that's been like from day one, developers just code. Then you saw the rise of serverless and you see now multi-cloud or on the horizon, connect the dots for us. What is the state of infrastructure as code today? >>So I think, I think I'm, I'm glad you mentioned it, everybody or most people know about infrastructures code. But with Kubernetes, I think that project has evolved at the concept even further. And these dates, it's infrastructure is configuration, right? So, which is an evolution of infrastructure as code. So instead of telling the system, here's how I want my infrastructure by telling it, you know, do step A, B, C, and D instead with Kubernetes, you can describe your desired state declaratively using things called manifest resources. And then the system kind of magically figures it out and tries to converge the state towards the one that you specified. So I think it's, it's a even better version of infrastructures code. >>Yeah. And that really means it's developer just accessing resources. Okay. That declare, Okay, give me some compute, stand me up some, turn the lights on, turn 'em off, turn 'em on. That's kind of where we see this going. And I like the configuration piece. Some people say composability, I mean now with open source so popular, you don't have to have to write a lot of code, this code being developed. And so it's into integration, it's configuration. These are areas that we're starting to see computer science principles around automation, machine learning, assisting open source. Cuz you got a lot of code that's right in hearing software, supply chain issues. So infrastructure as code has to factor in these new dynamics. Can you share your opinion on these new dynamics of, as open source grows, the glue layers, the configurations, the integration, what are the core issues? >>I think one of the major core issues is with all that power comes complexity, right? So, you know, despite its expressive power systems like Kubernetes and declarative APIs let you express a lot of complicated and complex stacks, right? But you're dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these yamo files or resources. And so I think, you know, the emergence of systems and layers to help you manage that complexity is becoming a key challenge and opportunity in, in this space. >>That's, I wrote a LinkedIn post today was comments about, you know, hey, enterprise is a new breed. The trend of SaaS companies moving our consumer comp consumer-like thinking into the enterprise has been happening for a long time, but now more than ever, you're seeing it the old way used to be solve complexity with more complexity and then lock the customer in. Now with open source, it's speed, simplification and integration, right? These are the new dynamic power dynamics for developers. Yeah. So as companies are starting to now deploy and look at Kubernetes, what are the things that need to be in place? Because you have some, I won't say technical debt, but maybe some shortcuts, some scripts here that make it look like infrastructure is code. People have done some things to simulate or or make infrastructure as code happen. Yes. But to do it at scale Yes. Is harder. What's your take on this? What's your view? >>It's hard because there's a per proliferation of methods, tools, technologies. So for example, today it's very common for DevOps and platform engineering tools, I mean, sorry, teams to have to deploy a large number of Kubernetes clusters, but then apply the applications and configurations on top of those clusters. And they're using a wide range of tools to do this, right? For example, maybe Ansible or Terraform or bash scripts to bring up the infrastructure and then the clusters. And then they may use a different set of tools such as Argo CD or other tools to apply configurations and applications on top of the clusters. So you have this sprawl of tools. You, you also have this sprawl of configurations and files because the more objects you're dealing with, the more resources you have to manage. And there's a risk of drift that people call that where, you know, you think you have things under control, but some people from various teams will make changes here and there and then before the end of the day systems break and you have no idea of tracking them. So I think there's real need to kind of unify, simplify, and try to solve these problems using a smaller, more unified set of tools and methodologies. And that's something that we try to do with this new project. Arlon. >>Yeah. So, so we're gonna get into Arlan in a second. I wanna get into the why Arlon. You guys announced that at AR GoCon, which was put on here in Silicon Valley at the, at the community meeting by in two, they had their own little day over there at their headquarters. But before we get there, vascar, your CEO came on and he talked about Super Cloud at our in AAL event. What's your definition of super cloud? If you had to kind of explain that to someone at a cocktail party or someone in the industry technical, how would you look at the super cloud trend that's emerging? It's become a thing. What's your, what would be your contribution to that definition or the narrative? >>Well, it's, it's, it's funny because I've actually heard of the term for the first time today, speaking to you earlier today. But I think based on what you said, I I already get kind of some of the, the gist and the, the main concepts. It seems like super cloud, the way I interpret that is, you know, clouds and infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, all of those things are becoming commodity in a way. And everyone's got their own flavor, but there's a real opportunity for people to solve real business problems by perhaps trying to abstract away, you know, all of those various implementations and then building better abstractions that are perhaps business or applications specific to help companies and businesses solve real business problems. >>Yeah, I remember that's a great, great definition. I remember, not to date myself, but back in the old days, you know, IBM had a proprietary network operating system, so of deck for the mini computer vendors, deck net and SNA respectively. But T C P I P came out of the osi, the open systems interconnect and remember, ethernet beat token ring out. So not to get all nerdy for all the young kids out there, look, just look up token ring, you'll see, you've probably never heard of it. It's IBM's, you know, connection for the internet at the, the layer two is Amazon, the ethernet, right? So if T C P I P could be the Kubernetes and the container abstraction that made the industry completely change at that point in history. So at every major inflection point where there's been serious industry change and wealth creation and business value, there's been an abstraction Yes. Somewhere. Yes. What's your reaction to that? >>I think this is, I think a saying that's been heard many times in this industry and, and I forgot who originated it, but I think that the saying goes like, there's no problem that can't be solved with another layer of indirection, right? And we've seen this over and over and over again where Amazon and its peers have inserted this layer that has simplified, you know, computing and, and infrastructure management. And I believe this trend is going to continue, right? The next set of problems are going to be solved with these insertions of additional abstraction layers. I think that that's really a, yeah, it's gonna >>Continue. It's interesting. I just, when I wrote another post today on LinkedIn called the Silicon Wars AMD stock is down arm has been on a rise. We remember pointing for many years now that arm's gonna be hugely, it has become true. If you look at the success of the infrastructure as a service layer across the clouds, Azure, aws, Amazon's clearly way ahead of everybody. The stuff that they're doing with the silicon and the physics and the, the atoms, the pro, you know, this is where the innovation, they're going so deep and so strong at ISAs, the more that they get that gets come on, they have more performance. So if you're an app developer, wouldn't you want the best performance and you'd wanna have the best abstraction layer that gives you the most ability to do infrastructures, code or infrastructure for configuration, for provisioning, for managing services. And you're seeing that today with service MeSHs, a lot of action going on in the service mesh area in in this community of, of co con, which will be a covering. So that brings up the whole what's next? You guys just announced our lawn at Argo Con, which came out of Intuit. We've had Mariana Tessel at our super cloud event. She's the cto, you know, they're all in the cloud. So they contributed that project. Where did Arlon come from? What was the origination? What's the purpose? Why our lawn, why this announcement? >>Yeah, so the, the inception of the project, this was the result of us realizing that problem that we spoke about earlier, which is complexity, right? With all of this, these clouds, these infrastructure, all the variations around and, you know, compute storage networks and the proliferation of tools we talked about the Ansibles and Terraforms and Kubernetes itself. You can, you can think of that as another tool, right? We saw a need to solve that complexity problem, and especially for people and users who use Kubernetes at scale. So when you have, you know, hundreds of clusters, thousands of applications, thousands of users spread out over many, many locations, there, there needs to be a system that helps simplify that management, right? So that means fewer tools, more expressive ways of describing the state that you want and more consistency. And, and that's why, you know, we built our lawn and we built it recognizing that many of these problems or sub problems have already been solved. So Arlon doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it instead rests on the shoulders of several giants, right? So for example, Kubernetes is one building block, GI ops, and Argo CD is another one, which provides a very structured way of applying configuration. And then we have projects like cluster API and cross plane, which provide APIs for describing infrastructure. So arlon takes all of those building blocks and builds a thin layer, which gives users a very expressive way of defining configuration and desired state. So that's, that's kind of the inception of, And >>What's the benefit of that? What does that give the, what does that give the developer, the user, in this case, >>The developers, the, the platform engineer, team members, the DevOps engineers, they get a a ways to provision not just infrastructure and clusters, but also applications and configurations. They get a way, a system for provisioning, configuring, deploying, and doing life cycle management in a, in a much simpler way. Okay. Especially as I said, if you're dealing with a large number of applications. >>So it's like an operating fabric, if you will. Yes. For them. Okay, so let's get into what that means for up above and below the the, this abstraction or thin layer below as the infrastructure. We talked a lot about what's going on below that. Yeah. Above our workloads. At the end of the day, you know, I talk to CXOs and IT folks that are now DevOps engineers. They care about the workloads and they want the infrastructures code to work. They wanna spend their time getting in the weeds, figuring out what happened when someone made a push that that happened or something happened. They need observability and they need to, to know that it's working. That's right. And is my workloads running effectively? So how do you guys look at the workload side of it? Cuz now you have multiple workloads on these fabric, >>Right? So workloads, so Kubernetes has defined kind of a standard way to describe workloads and you can, you know, tell Kubernetes, I want to run this container this particular way, or you can use other projects that are in the Kubernetes cloud native ecosystem like K native, where you can express your application in more at a higher level, right? But what's also happening is in addition to the workloads, DevOps and platform engineering teams, they need to very often deploy the applications with the clusters themselves. Clusters are becoming this commodity. It's, it's becoming this host for the application and it kind of comes bundled with it. In many cases it is like an appliance, right? So DevOps teams have to provision clusters at a really incredible rate and they need to tear them down. Clusters are becoming more, >>It's kinda like an EC two instance, spin up a cluster. We very, people used words like that. That's >>Right. And before arlon you kind of had to do all of that using a different set of tools as, as I explained. So with Armon you can kind of express everything together. You can say I want a cluster with a health monitoring stack and a logging stack and this ingress controller and I want these applications and these security policies. You can describe all of that using something we call a profile. And then you can stamp out your app, your applications and your clusters and manage them in a very, so >>Essentially standard creates a mechanism. Exactly. Standardized, declarative kind of configurations. And it's like a playbook. You deploy it. Now what's there is between say a script like I'm, I have scripts, I could just automate scripts >>Or yes, this is where that declarative API and infrastructures configuration comes in, right? Because scripts, yes you can automate scripts, but the order in which they run matters, right? They can break, things can break in the middle and, and sometimes you need to debug them. Whereas the declarative way is much more expressive and powerful. You just tell the system what you want and then the system kind of figures it out. And there are these things about controllers which will in the background reconcile all the state to converge towards your desire. It's a much more powerful, expressive and reliable way of getting things done. >>So infrastructure has configuration is built kind of on, it's as super set of infrastructures code because it's >>An evolution. >>You need edge's code, but then you can configure the code by just saying do it. You basically declaring and saying Go, go do that. That's right. Okay, so, alright, so cloud native at scale, take me through your vision of what that means. Someone says, Hey, what does cloud native at scale mean? What's success look like? How does it roll out in the future as you, not future next couple years? I mean people are now starting to figure out, okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Could be nice, it has value. We're gonna hear this year coan a lot of this. What does cloud native at scale >>Mean? Yeah, there are different interpretations, but if you ask me, when people think of scale, they think of a large number of deployments, right? Geographies, many, you know, supporting thousands or tens or millions of, of users there, there's that aspect to scale. There's also an equally important a aspect of scale, which is also something that we try to address with Arran. And that is just complexity for the people operating this or configuring this, right? So in order to describe that desired state and in order to perform things like maybe upgrades or updates on a very large scale, you want the humans behind that to be able to express and direct the system to do that in, in relatively simple terms, right? And so we want the tools and the abstractions and the mechanisms available to the user to be as powerful but as simple as possible. So there's, I think there's gonna be a number and there have been a number of CNCF and cloud native projects that are trying to attack that complexity problem as well. And Arlon kind of falls in in that >>Category. Okay, so I'll put you on the spot road that CubeCon coming up and obviously this will be shipping this segment series out before. What do you expect to see at Coan this year? What's the big story this year? What's the, what's the most important thing happening? Is it in the open source community and also within a lot of the, the people jogging for leadership. I know there's a lot of projects and still there's some white space in the overall systems map about the different areas get run time and there's ability in all these different areas. What's the, where's the action? Where, where's the smoke? Where's the fire? Where's the piece? Where's the tension? >>Yeah, so I think one thing that has been happening over the past couple of cons and I expect to continue and, and that is the, the word on the street is Kubernetes is getting boring, right? Which is good, right? >>Boring means simple. >>Well, well >>Maybe, >>Yeah, >>Invisible, >>No drama, right? So, so the, the rate of change of the Kubernetes features and, and all that has slowed but in, in a, in a positive way. But there's still a general sentiment and feeling that there's just too much stuff. If you look at a stack necessary for hosting applications based on Kubernetes, there are just still too many moving parts, too many components, right? Too much complexity. I go, I keep going back to the complexity problem. So I expect Cube Con and all the vendors and the players and the startups and the people there to continue to focus on that complexity problem and introduce further simplifications to, to the stack. >>Yeah. Vic, you've had an storied career, VMware over decades with them obviously in 12 years with 14 years or something like that. Big number co-founder here at Platform. Now you guys have been around for a while at this game. We, man, we talked about OpenStack, that project you, we interviewed at one of their events. So OpenStack was the beginning of that, this new revolution. And I remember the early days it was, it wasn't supposed to be an alternative to Amazon, but it was a way to do more cloud cloud native. I think we had a cloud ERO team at that time. We would to joke we, you know, about, about the dream. It's happening now, now at Platform nine. You guys have been doing this for a while. What's the, what are you most excited about as the chief architect? What did you guys double down on? What did you guys tr pivot from or two, did you do any pivots? Did you extend out certain areas? Cuz you guys are in a good position right now, a lot of DNA in Cloud native. What are you most excited about and what does Platform nine bring to the table for customers and for people in the industry watching this? >>Yeah, so I think our mission really hasn't changed over the years, right? It's been always about taking complex open source software because open source software, it's powerful. It solves new problems, you know, every year and you have new things coming out all the time, right? OpenStack was an example when the Kubernetes took the world by storm. But there's always that complexity of, you know, just configuring it, deploying it, running it, operating it. And our mission has always been that we will take all that complexity and just make it, you know, easy for users to consume regardless of the technology, right? So the successor to Kubernetes, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, you have some indications that people are coming up of new and simpler ways of running applications. There are many projects around there who knows what's coming next year or the year after that. But platform will a, platform nine will be there and we will, you know, take the innovations from the the community. We will contribute our own innovations and make all of those things very consumable to customers. >>Simpler, faster, cheaper. Exactly. Always a good business model technically to make that happen. Yes. Yeah, I think the, the reigning in the chaos is key, you know, Now we have now visibility into the scale. Final question before we depart this segment. What is at scale, how many clusters do you see that would be a watermark for an at scale conversation around an enterprise? Is it workloads we're looking at or, or clusters? How would you, Yeah, how would you describe that? When people try to squint through and evaluate what's a scale, what's the at scale kind of threshold? >>Yeah. And, and the number of clusters doesn't tell the whole story because clusters can be small in terms of the number of nodes or they can be large. But roughly speaking when we say, you know, large scale cluster deployments, we're talking about maybe hundreds, two thousands. >>Yeah. And final final question, what's the role of the hyperscalers? You got AWS continuing to do well, but they got their core ias, they got a PAs, they're not too too much putting a SaaS out there. They have some SaaS apps, but mostly it's the ecosystem. They have marketplaces doing over $2 billion billions of transactions a year and, and it's just like, just sitting there. It hasn't really, they're now innovating on it, but that's gonna change ecosystems. What's the role the cloud play in the cloud native of its scale? >>The, the hyperscalers, >>Yeahs Azure, Google. >>You mean from a business perspective? Yeah, they're, they have their own interests that, you know, that they're, they will keep catering to, they, they will continue to find ways to lock their users into their ecosystem of services and, and APIs. So I don't think that's gonna change, right? They're just gonna keep, >>Well they got great I performance, I mean from a, from a hardware standpoint, yes, that's gonna be key, right? >>Yes. I think the, the move from X 86 being the dominant way and platform to run workloads is changing, right? That, that, that, that, and I think the, the hyperscalers really want to be in the game in terms of, you know, the the new risk and arm ecosystems and the platforms. >>Yeah, not joking aside, Paul Morritz, when he was the CEO of VMware, when he took over once said, I remember our first year doing the cube. Oh the cloud is one big distributed computer, it's, it's hardware and he got software and you got middleware and he kind over, well he's kind of tongue in cheek, but really you're talking about large compute and sets of services that is essentially a distributed computer. >>Yes, >>Exactly. It's, we're back on the same game. Vic, thank you for coming on the segment. Appreciate your time. This is cloud native at scale special presentation with Platform nine. Really unpacking super cloud Arlon open source and how to run large scale applications on the cloud Cloud Native Phil for developers and John Furrier with the cube. Thanks for Washington. We'll stay tuned for another great segment coming right up. Hey, welcome back everyone to Super Cloud 22. I'm John Fur, host of the Cuba here all day talking about the future of cloud. Where's it all going? Making it super multi-cloud clouds around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and edge. Got a great guest here, Vascar Gorde, CEO of Platform nine, just on the panel on Kubernetes. An enabler blocker. Welcome back. Great to have you on. >>Good to see you >>Again. So Kubernetes is a blocker enabler by, with a question mark. I put on on that panel was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now great conversation operations is impacted. What's interest thing about what you guys are doing at Platform nine? Is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform nine while you're at the helm? Yeah, right. >>Absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you do on the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform. And that's what we, we come into, >>Patrick, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were gonna talk about the glory days in 2000, 2001, when the first as piece application service providers came out, kind of a SaaS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloudlike. >>It wasn't, >>And and web services started then too. So you saw that whole growth. Now, fast forward 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now, when you look back then to here and all the different cycles, >>I, in fact you, you know, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same but also extremely different. But more importantly now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have everybody's in the journey somewhere. >>Everyone is going digital transformation here. Even on a so-called downturn recession that's upcoming inflation's here. It's interesting. This is the first downturn in the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. And if you look at the tech trends, GDPs down, but not tech. >>Nope. >>Cuz the pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming even in, in tech. So this is a unique factor which proves that that digital transformation's happening and company, every company will need a super cloud. >>Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernize their infrastructure. And modernizing Infras infrastructure is not just some new servers and new application tools, It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. >>I wanna get your thoughts on Super Cloud because one of the things Dave Ante and I want to do with Super Cloud and calling it that was we, I, I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can, I'll speak from, he can speak for himself. We didn't like multi-cloud. I mean not because Amazon said don't call things multi-cloud, it just didn't feel right. I mean everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365. But it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized, it wasn't truly cloud enabled. It didn't, it felt like they're not ready for a market yet. Yet public clouds booming on premise. Private cloud and Edge is much more on, you know, more, more dynamic, more real. >>Yeah. I think the reason why we think super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. Okay, you have a productivity cloud, you have a Salesforce cloud, you may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? So, but they're not connected. So you can say okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's you know, multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically. Whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure, you need, but at the same time you need a single pain, a single platform for you to build your innovations on regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think Super Cloud is actually a more tightly integrated orchestrated management philosophy we think. >>So let's get into some of the super cloud type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is to, as a pilots, to get the conversations flowing with with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products and the builders, Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third cloudworks in public cloud. We see the use cases on premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit, but a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that open stack. We need an orchestration and then containers had a good shot with, with Docker. They re pivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you got containers booming and Kubernetes as a new layer there. What's the, what's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new defacto enabler? It >>Is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere else in the journey is going on. And you know, most companies are, 70 plus percent of them have won two, three container based, Kubernetes based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here, it is in production at scale by many customers. And the beauty of it is, yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team, right? So it's, it's one thing to buy a tool >>And just be clear, you're a managed service for Kubernetes. >>We provide, provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service and it can run anywhere. It can run in public private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge, it runs at this in stores are thousands of stores in a retailer. So we provide that and also for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons. We also un OnPrem as an air gap version. >>Can you give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your >>Customer? Right. So I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have, I dunno, hundreds of products, hundreds of r and d teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at few years back, each one was doing it on a different platforms but they really needed to bring the agility and they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev pro platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light out operation. In fact the customer says like, like the Maytag service person cuz we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. >>So it's kinda like an SRE vibe. One person managing a >>Large 4,000 engineers building infrastructure >>On their tools, >>Whatever they want on their tools. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform. >>What benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? >>Speed, definitely. Okay. Definitely they're speeding. Speed uniformity because now they're building able to build, so their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. >>So a big problem that's coming outta this super cloud event that we're, we're seeing and we've heard it all here, ops and security teams cuz they're kind of too part of one theme, but ops and security specifically need to catch up speed wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right. >>So we, we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams and we layer on top of that. We have like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you have multiple teams, okay, but you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually, you know, the product divisions of companies that are looking at or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally cio definitely. So it it's, it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure. But the ideal one we are beginning to see now many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams, >>You working two sides of that coin. You've got the dev side and then >>And then infrastructure >>Side side, okay. >>Another customer like give you an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail, retail, you know food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000. And they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy or browse or sit there. They have applications that were written in the nineties and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store or they can't move everything to the cloud because the store operations has to be local. The menu changes based on, It's a classic edge. It's classic edge. Yeah. Right. They can't send it people to go install rack access servers then they can't sell software people to go install the software and any change you wanna put through that, you know, truck roll. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that >>You, you say little servers like how big one like a net box box, like a small little >>Box and all the person in the store has to do like what you and I do at home and we get a, you know, a router is connect the power, connect the internet and turn the switch on. And from there we pick it up. >>Yep. >>We provide the operating system, everything and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage >>Thousands of them. True plug and play >>Two, plug and play thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So, so that's another example where on the edge then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds. Okay. But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the location. So >>You guys got some success. Congratulations. Got some traction there. It's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that's come up is what is truly cloud native? Cuz there's lift and shift of the cloud >>That's not cloud native. >>Then there's cloud native. Cloud native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says what's cloud native, what isn't cloud native? >>Right. Look, I think first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud native, is CNC foundation. And I think it's very well documented where you, well >>Con of course Detroit's >>Coming here, so, so it's already there, right? So, so we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20 year old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud native. Okay? You can't put to cloud native, you have to rewrite and redevelop your application and business logic using modern tools. Hopefully more open source and, and I think that's what Cloudnative is and we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now everybody wants to be cloudnative, but it's not that easy, okay? Because it's, I think it's first of all, skill set is very important. Uniformity of tools that there's so many tools there. Thousands and thousands of tools you could spend your time figuring out which tool to use. Okay? So I think the complexities there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly them. >>And I'll give you an example. I don't know how clear native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours, but you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how dominoes actually increase their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not, I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch what's happening, how it's delivered. There were a pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud native can provide. >>Being agility and having that flow to the application changes what the expectations of the, for the customer. >>Customer, the customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you learn >>Best car. To wrap it up, I wanna just get your perspective again. One of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you part of the Super Cloud 22 is you've seen many cycles, you have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career where you've been and what you've done and now the CEO platform nine, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry? And you've been, again, you've been an entrepreneur, you sold your company to Oracle, you've been seeing the big companies, you've seen the different waves. What's going on right now put into context this moment in time around Super >>Cloud. Sure. I think as you said, a lot of battles. Cars being been, been in an asp, been in a realtime software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side, I did the infrastructure right and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with a lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to go through to become cloud native and digitalize. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on is a couple of paddles come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced to honors like y2k. Everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for y2k. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive right across all industries. >>And disruptive. >>And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. Yeah. I think we are at that pivotal moment now in companies trying to become digital and cloudnative that know that is what I see >>Happening there. I think that that e-commerce was interesting and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this is that it's not just completely changing the game, it's just changing how you operate, >>How you think, and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of eCommerce, just putting up a shopping cart didn't made you an eCommerce or an E retailer or an e e customer, right? Or so. I think it's the same thing now is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you gonna operate? How are you gonna service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not gonna work. >>Mascar, thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of Super Cloud 22. We really appreciate, we're gonna keep this open. We're gonna keep this conversation going even after the event, to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open in the community. And we're gonna keep this going for, for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with cloud cloud computing. I'm Sean Feer with Super Cloud 22 in the Cube. Thanks for watching. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. >>Hello. Welcome back. This is the end of our program, our special presentation with Platform nine on cloud native at scale, enabling the super cloud. We're continuing the theme here. You heard the interviews Super Cloud and its challenges, new opportunities around the solutions around like Platform nine and others with Arlon. This is really about the edge situations on the internet and managing the edge multiple regions, avoiding vendor lock in. This is what this new super cloud is all about. The business consequences we heard and and the wide ranging conversations around what it means for open source and the complexity problem all being solved. I hope you enjoyed this program. There's a lot of moving pieces and things to configure with cloud native install, all making it easier for you here with Super Cloud and of course Platform nine contributing to that. Thank you for watching.

>>Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 live from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. We have to set two live sets here with the cube two remote sets over 100 guests on the program for three and a half days talking about the next decade and cloud innovation. And I have two alumni back with me. Please. Welcome back, Mandy Dolly, while the CMO of Boomi and ed. Makowski the head of product at Boomi guys. It's so great to see you. Great to see you, Lisa, thank you in person zoom. Incredible. So in the time, since it's been, since I've seen you, booty is a verb. You, I can see your cheeks bursting. Yeah. Just >>Boom, yet go, boom. It go. Boom. Yet, >>Talk to me about what, what that means, because this is something that you discovered through customers during the pandemic. >>Absolutely. And really it's a Testament to the platform that's been built and the experience of 18,000 customers, a hundred thousand community members, anytime there's disparate data. And it needs to be connected in a way that's secure, reliable performance. And it just works that confidence and trust our customers are telling us that they just Boomi it. And so we figured it was a rally cry. And as a marketing team, it was handed to us. We didn't have to push a Boulder up hill. Our customers are, are just booming it. And so our rally cry to the market is take advantage of the experience of those that have come before you and go build what you need to. It works, >>Period. It works well as the chief marketing officer, there's probably nothing better, nothing better than the validating voice of the customer, right? That's the most honest that you're going to get, but having a customer create the verb for you, there's going to be nothing that prepares you for that. Nothing like it, but also how great does that make it when you're having conversations with prospective customers or even partners that there's that confidence and that trust that your 18,000 plus now customer's house right in >>Lummi right. And adding what? Eight a day. Yeah. Every day we're adding eight new customers. >>Thank you customers a day. The Boomi versus what? A hundred thousand strong now. Yes. >>In two years we built that. Is that right? Yes. >>Wow. Oh my goodness. During the >>Pandemic, the momentum is incredible. Yeah. It's >>Incredible. >>Then you're on your growth from a usage perspective. So yeah, we're skyrocketing >>Use the most need like, uh, you know, neck braces from whiplash going so fast. >>Oh, we're ready. >>Good. I know, I know you are. So talk to me about, you know, we've seen such change in the last 22 months, massive acceleration to the cloud digital transformation. We're now seeing every company has to be a data company to survive and actually to be competitive, to be a competitor. But one of the things that used to be okay back in the day was, you know, these, uh, experiences that weren't integrated, like when you went to well, like when I was back in college and I would go in and you would pay for this class and that cause everything was disconnected and we didn't know what we didn't know. Now the integrated experience is table stakes for any organization. And talk to me about when you're talking with customers, where are they like across industries and going, we don't have a choice. We've got to be able to connect these experiences for our customers, for our employees and to be a comparator. >>Okay. Yeah. I mean, it used to be about for us application data integration, that sort of thing. That's where we were born. But particularly through the pandemic, it's become integrated experiences and automation. It's not just about moving data between systems, that sort of thing. It's about connecting with your end users, your employees, your customers, et cetera, like you were saying, and automating and using intelligence to continue automating those things faster. Because if, if you're not moving faster in today's world, you're, you're in peril. So, >>And that was one of the themes that we were actually talking about this morning during our kickoff that you're hearing is every company is a data company. And if they're not, they're not going to be around much longer many. Talk to me when you're talking with customers who have to really reckon with that and go, how do we connect these experiences? Because if we can't do that, then we're not going to be around. >>Yeah. The answer lies in the problems, right? There are real-world problems that need to be solved. We have a customer just north of here, a, a university. And, um, as they were bringing students back to campus, right, you're trying to deliver a connected campus experience. Well, how do you handle contact tracing, right. For COVID-19 that's a real modern day problem. Right? And so there you're able to now connect disparate data sources to go deliver on a way, an automated way to be able to handle that and provide safety to your students. Table-stakes oh, it is right. Digital identity management again in a university set setting critical. Right? So these things are now a part of our fabric of the way we live. The consumerization of tech has hit B2B. It's merging. Yeah. >>And it's good. There's definitely silver linings that have come out of the last 22 months. And I'm sure there will be a few more as we go through Omicron and whatever Greek letter is next in the alphabet, but don't want to hear we are at reinvent so much. There's always so much news at reinvent. Here we are. First 10th, 10th reinvent. You can't believe 10th reinvent. AWS is 15 years old brand new leader. And of course, yesterday ad starts the flood of announcements yesterday, today. Talk to me about what it's like to be part of that powerful AWS ecosystem from a partner perspective and how, how influential is Boomi and its customers and the Boomi verse in the direction that AWS goes in because there's so customer obsessed like you guys are >>Well, it was really exciting for us because we're a customer and a partner of AWS, right? We, we run our infrastructure on AWS. So we get to take advantage of all the new announcements that they make and all the cool stuff they bring to the table. So we're really excited for that. But also as all these things come up and customers want to take advantage of them, if they're creating different data, sets, different data silos or opportunity for automation around the business, we're right there for our customers and partners to go take advantage of that and quickly get these things up and running as they get released by AWS. So it's all very exciting. And we look forward to all these different announcements. >>One of the things also that I felt in the last day and a half, since everything really kicked off yesterday was the customer flywheel. AWS always talks about, we work backwards from the customer forwards. And that is a resounding theme that I'm hearing throughout all of the partners that I've talked about. They have a massive ecosystem. Boomi has a massive ecosystem to working with those partners, but also ensuring that, you know, at the end of the day, we're here to help customers resolve problems, problems that are here today, problems that are going to be here tomorrow. How do you help customers deal with Mandy with, with some of the challenges of today, when they say Mandy help us future-proof or integrations what we're doing going forward, what does that mean to Boomi? Yeah, >>I think for us, the way we approach it is you start with Boomi with a connectivity kind of problem, right? We're able to take disparate data silos and be able to connect and be able to create this backbone of connectivity. Once you have that, you can go build these workflows and these user engagement mechanisms to automate these processes and scale, right? So that's 0.1, we have a company called health bridge financial, right? They're a health tech company, financial services company. They are working towards, they run on AWS. They, they have, uh, a very, um, uh, secure, compliant infrastructure requirement, especially around HIPAA because they're dealing with healthcare, right? And they have needs to be able to integrate quickly and not a big budget to start with. They grew very quickly and Lummi powered their, their AWS ecosystem. So as our workloads grew on RDS, as well as SQS as three, we were able to go in and perform these HIPAA compliant integrations for them. So they could go provide reimbursement on medical spending claims for their end customers. So not only did we give them user engagement and an outstanding customer experience, we were able to help them grow as a business and be able to leverage the AWS ecosystem. That's a win, win, win across the board for all of us. >>That's one plus one equals three, for sure. Yep. One of the things too, that's interesting is, you know, when we see the plethora of AWS services, like I mentioned a minute ago, there's always so many announcements, but there's so much choice for customers, right? When you're talking ed with customers, Boomi customers that are looking for AWS services, tell me about some of those conversations. Can we help guide them along that journey? >>I mean, we help them from an architectural standpoint, as far as what services they should choose from AWS to integrate their different data sources within the AWS ecosystem and maybe to others, um, we've helped our customers going back a little bit to, to the future-proofing over the time we've at our platform, we've connected with our customers over 180,000 different data sources, including AWS and others, that as we continue to grow, our customers never need to upgrade. We're a cloud model, ourselves running an AWS. So they just get to keep taking advantage of that. Their business grows and evolves. And as AWS grows and evolves for them, and they're modernizing their infrastructure bringing in, in AWS, we continue to stay on the forefront with keeping connectivity and automation and integration options. >>And that's a massive advantage for customers in any industry, especially, I know one of the first things I thought of when the pandemic first struck and we saw this, you know, the rise of the pharma companies working on vaccine was Madrona. Madonna's a Boomi customer. If they are talk to me about some of the things that you've helped them facilitate, because there was that obviously that time where everyone's scattered, nobody could get onsite having a cloud native solution. Must've been a huge advantage. Yeah. Well getting us all back here, really >>Exactly. First and foremost, getting more people on board into their business to help go find the race for the cure. And then being able to connect that data right. That they were generating and really find a solution. So we had an integral role to play in that. That's definitely a feather in our cap. We're really proud of that. Um, again, right. It's it's about speed and agility and the way we're architected, we're a low code platform. We're not developer heavy. You can log in and go and start building right away. What, what used to take months now takes weeks. If not days, if you use the Boomi platform, those brittle code integrations no longer need to be a part of your day to day. >>And that probably was a major instrument in the survival of a lot of businesses in the very beginning when it was chaotic, right? And it was pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot, that, that, you know, one of the things we learned during the pandemic is that there is access to real-time data. Real-time integrations. Isn't a nice to have anymore. It's required. It's fundamental for employee experiences, customer experiences in every industry >>And banking. We've had several banks who were able to stand up and start taking PPP loans. Uh, they used to do this in person. They were able to take them within literally some of our banks within four days had the whole process built into it. >>Wow. And so from a differentiation perspective, how have your customer conversations changed? Obviously go Boomi. It is now is something that you do, you have t-shirts yet, by the way, they're coming. And can I get one? Yes, absolutely. Excellent. But talk to me about how those customer conversations have changed is, is what Boomi enables organizations is this snow at the C-suite the board level going? We've got to make sure that these data sources are connected because they're only gonna keep proliferating. >>Yeah, I think it's coming, right. We're not quite there yet, but as we're starting to get this groundswell at the integration developer level at the enterprise architect level, I think the C-suite especially is realizing the value of the delivery of this integrated experience now, right? These data fueled experiences are the differentiators for new business models. So transformation is something that's required. Obviously you need to modernize. We heard about that in the keynotes here at the conference, but now it's the innovation layer and that's where we're squarely focused is once you're able to connect this data and be able to modernize your systems, how do you go build new business models with innovation? That's where the C-suites leaning in with >>Us. Got it. And that's the opportunity is to really unlock the value of all this data and identify new products, new services, new target markets, and really that innovation kicks the door wide open on a competitor if you're focused on really becoming a data company, I think. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What are some of the things that, that you're looking forward to as we, as we wrap up 2021 and let's cross our fingers, we're going into a much better 20, 22. What question for both of you and we'll start with you, what's next for Boomi? >>So we just recently laid out our hyper automation vision, right. And what hyper automation is, is adding intelligence, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to your automation to make you go faster and faster and help you with decisions that you may have been making over and over as an example, or any workflows you do as an employee. So there is this convergence of RPA and iPads that's happening in the market. And we're on the forefront of that around robotic process automation. And then bringing that, those types of things into our platform and just helping our customers automate more and more, because that's what they're looking for. That's what go Boomi. It's all about. They've integrated their stuff. We were taking the lead from our customers who are automating things. We had blue force tracking as an example, where in Amsterdam, they have security guards running around and, and, and using, um, wearable devices to track them on cameras. And that's not an application integration use case that's automation. So we're moving there, we're looking with our customers on how we can help them get faster and better and provide things like safety and that use case. So, >>And we're our customers in terms of, of embracing hyper automation. Because when we talk about, we know a lot of, uh, news around AI and, and model last day and a half, but when you think about kind of like, where are most organizations with from a maturation perspective, are they ready for hyper automation? >>I think they're ready for automation. They're learning about hyper automation. I think we're pushing the term further ahead. You know, we're, we're, we're on the forefront of that because industries are thinking, our customers are thinking about automation. They're thinking about AIML, we're introducing them to hyper automation and, and kind of explaining to them, you're doing this already. Think more along these lines, how can you drive your business forward with these? And they're embracing it really well. So >>Is that conversation elevating up to the board level yet? Is that a board level initiative or >>What it is? It's, it's a little more grassroots. I think that's, I was thinking that's where came from because the employees teams are solving problems. They're showcasing these things to their executives and saying, look at the cool stuff we're doing for the business. And the executives are now saying, well with this problem, can we now go boob? Can we Boomi it because they're there, they're starting to understand what we can do. Okay. >>That's awesome. Oh my goodness. Mandy, you've been the chief marketing officer for three over three years now. I can't believe the amount of change that you've seen, not just the last 22 months, but the last three years. What are you excited about as Boomi heads into 2022? I think, >>And new opportunities to get deeper and broader into the market. Our ownership changed as you know this past year. And, um, you know, we have a new leg on growth, if you will, right? And so whole new trajectory ahead of us, bigger brand building more pervasiveness or ease of use around our platform, right? We're available now in a pay as you go model on our website and on a $50 a month model or, uh, um, atmosphere go and then also on marketplace. So we're making the product and the platform more accessible to more people so they can begin on faster, build faster, and go solve these problems. So really democratizing integration is something that I'm very excited about. Democratizing integration, as well as more air cover, just to let people know that this technology exists. So it's really a marketer's dream >>And why they should go buy me it. Right. Exactly. You guys. It was great to have you on the program. Congratulations on the success on, on becoming a verb. That's pretty awesome. I'll look forward to my t-shirt. So I smelled flu and >>You got it. >>All right. For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in life tech coverage.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. The virtual version. I'm Lisa Martin here with the guests from Bumi. Please welcome Ed Makowski, its head of product of the program and nice to see you today >>I see you, Lisa. >>So here we are in a very socially distant world. But I know a lot about movie, and that movie is really all about connecting people with what they want now. So talk to me before we dig into kind of what's going on with AWS. What's the landscape? That movie like in this year that has had so much change? >>So things have been going really well for us business wise, I think you know, as we've come through this pandemic or we continue to work through the pandemic, we're seeing a lot of our customers accelerating their their migration to the cloud acceleration, accelerating their modernization journeys. Um, in fact, we see the 30% uptick and usage in our platform. You know, in the last several months, as as people just continue to double down on automating, integrating their systems, working through integrated experiences. Toe Really like you said put put data in the hands of the users, the data that they're looking for on the work clothes that they're looking to automate. They're accomplishing that our platform. So things have been good. >>That's good in a year of such uncertainty. So as we kind of look at, you know, you talked about it. We've been talking about it for months now. This acceleration of the digital journey, that Cove it is really catalyzing. Let's get specific with from an integrated experience perspective, I think we're all as consumers, even Mawr demanding oven integrated experience. Now more than ever. How are you working with customers To help them achieve that? >>Sure. So So the way we look at the world through our lenses, data collectivity and user engagement, or are critical pieces to a cloud modernization or a cloud migration journey. So, just like in life, people make connections early on, and as they work through life, they leverage those connections to make advancements, that sort of thing. I did an interview actually a couple of weeks ago with an A list celebrity, where he gave us a bunch of feedback around connectivity where he talked about early on in his life. He made connections that that provided him value later in his career. We think of the same thing for a business, right? If you think about as a business, your customers, your employees, urine users, it's important to take your most strategic asset, which is your data, and and put that toe work for you and make connections with those users, employees, partners, etcetera, eso we look at those is integrated experiences, right, and we we offer a platform that, in a low code way, allows the business to make those connections with users in those integrated experiences. >>Love to know who the A list celebrity was, but I won't ask you to develop that information because we look at that, you know, nowadays we had this massive shift in the last eight months or so where I think as consumers we've been everything's been on demand for a while. We're used to getting what we want. And in the business world there was a big shift and trying to figure out companies well known companies, you know, filing for Chapter 11 and trying to figure out How do we pivot? Not just once, but it's a Siris of pivots, right? So talk to me about From From an integrated experiences perspective, any customers that you kind of think in particular really, really highlight what Bhumi is doing there to allow these customers to have connected integrated experience while you're helping those customers modernized and transform their businesses. >>Yeah, I mean, I could talk to a couple of examples where you know, when when the pandemic hit in the coven situation hit, we had a lot of, you know, I think the world saw there were a lot of mom and pop shops downtown Main Street where they were trying to collect information from industry from from their governments and industries. And they were trying to really relay that information out to, um, their customers and users. And most of them, those small businesses, uh, weren't I t enabled in any way, shape or form, and we tried to figure out what is the business can we do to help solve some of these challenges and a booming for good initiative? And we put out a solution called answers on demand that we gave out to free for free and within I believe it was two weeks. We had only over 2500, you know, customers from all different shops around the country that that registered and basically were ableto themselves stand up a frequently asked question. Ah, site within their Web page chatbots that they were embedded. They were able to bed in the Web page on a low code way, and that was kind of one example. Another from an enterprise example, is you think of things like, Hey, a new employee starts and typically they can walk in the first day. People hand them forms, they walk around, they meet with different departments. How do I get myself on boarded to an organization? Well, in the world today, everybody expects things to be on their mobile. They expect things to be done immediately, and they're not gonna goto 10 different APs in order to onboard themselves to go get swag or sign themselves up for their payroll, etcetera. That's a classic, you know, integrated integrated experiences use case that we help with where it's Hey, we can help with integrating those systems in the back end and provide an integrated experience to your new employees that come on board so they can walk through and be up and running within your company very quickly in a remote way. So we offer all the tooling that businesses can customize. Those make them look like they're, you know, they're color schemes of their business. So on and so forth create custom work flows all again in a low code way because we focus on time to value. It's about getting something done very quickly versus along I t projects That's going to take, you know, 23 years. >>Yeah, I remember. I think it was booming world last year where Chris, your CEO, was talking about, uh, the on boarding experience when he started at Bumi and how massively transformed that is. But to your point right now, there's so many things that we don't have time for. And so when there's obstacles in our way or processes or more convoluted, it just makes everything you know, not function well together or allow customers really maximize their investments in particular technologies. I wanted to get your take on Speaking of maximizing investments, How does booming help have you worked with partner with AWS to help your customers maximize their investments in AWS is technology and services. Sure >>so So we you know, we built our platform first and foremost on top of the AWS platform. So we sit there natively and we take advantage of all of a W s S s services. Behind the scene seems to offer secure platform that customers can work in from a loco development environment. From there you can take advantage. You can take your Bumi integrations and you can run them within three a w your own A w s environment if you'd like to. So we've actually launched a ah Bumi Quick start that allows you to Okay, quickly deploy a run time that spends up in the AWS cloud so you can run your workloads there in a secure way. If you've got your own security set up, you can run within that domain versus going within boonies cloud if you'd like. We're also about to release an elastic version of that That's kubernetes base so that you could, you know, scale that up and down and take advantage of your AWS. Resource is not in a fixed way. But Maurin, a survivalist type capacity. We also have data catalog and prep capabilities now, which we didn't have last year. But we have We've added these so that you can explore your AWS endpoints. You can explore any business and points that you have and kind of look at what data you have that you can, you know, harvest thio, pull together and and offer that make that available to your customers and users. You can run all of that in your AWS environment as well. We put >>a >>bunch of focus and adventure oven architectures so as a you know, as a classic integration scenario, a lot of people focus on pub sub patterns, those types of things. So we're we released connectivity to event bridge, sqs, etcetera. We also support connectivity to red shift so you can handle data warehousing scenarios. So and a lot of investment in the AWS ecosystem in the last year and a half to two years, and we continue, you know, we're going to continue doing that. We're just kind of at the beginning of that. So >>Bumi has over 12,000 customers ranging from, you know, the big guys, nonprofits like American Cancer Society, etcetera. How do you work with customers as head of product toe help them influence the road back to be able to take in the information that they need to. For example, we wanna we wanna be ableto work with me and really modernized but also maximize or a W s investment. What is that customer feedback loop like? >>Sure, So we've got within booming. We have a customer success team that focuses on all of those customers and different tiers. Verticals, um, you know, different horizontal plays, etcetera. But we have success. People that look out, you know, for our customers meet with them on a regular basis. They bring a lot of that feedback back into product. I'm an executive sponsor for a number of our customers where I meet with them directly to understand the projects, use cases. What are they trying to achieve and take? That is input, but but very specifically, we do quarterly webinars for our customers where we get each of our product managers, including myself, do a two hour session where we go through every single detail of here is what we are expecting ourselves that delivered to you as a customer over the next year, and that gives our customers the opportunity to see all those details. We published them online publicly. We then allow them to come back through direct relationships with product or customer success. To request these enhancements. We score them, we go through. We do commit a tely east. 25% of our roadmap to customers specific requests. Um, you know, even the 75% other piece of the road map we're looking at what we feel is the best interest of our customers and what we want to take them in an innovative way. But like I said, the 25% are direct commitment to Hey, customer wants X Y Z feature will put that in the 25% >>That's he, especially right now to be able to be able to. I don't want to be reactive because we often use that as a bad term. But be able to pivot quickly and and take that information in and make the changes needed that will benefit countless others if we go back to integrated experiences, you know, here we are at this virtual aws reinvent. We're so used to being surrounded in Vegas by 45,000 people. But talk to me about how Bhumi is helping AWS customers with their integrated experiences. What are some of the things that you guys are really excited about that you're enabling now? >>So with an integrated experience, you know, again, I go back to the three things that any customer AWS customer specifically need thio think about in order to create an ingrate experience. So data readiness is the first piece. So with a W s, you'll be spinning up a number of the services. You'll be putting data in the cloud so on and so forth. But you need to make sure that that data is of high quality. Um, it's secure. It's understood something like, you know, 60 to 70% of data that you haven't enterprises is unknown, and we help solve some of those challenges through our catalog and prepping tools. So even if you're moving a bunch of your processes and data applications into the cloud, we can help customers with data readiness and making sure it's security of high quality. The second piece is pervasive connectivity. So it is about connecting all of your data sources. So we do have an open platform. You have all your AWS services that we can help you connect to get data from those sources or or transfer them to those sources. But we also allow you to extend out into on Prem or other clouds as well. So as much as we love and work with a W s, we do understand that people need to move things into the cloud out of the cloud, etcetera. You know, we help with all of those connectivity challenges that an organization may face. Uh and then the third is that user engagement engagement piece So you could move data all around all you want. You can understand your data, but unless you're putting it in the hands of the user and allowing them to act on that data in some way, shape or form the tools we have, you know, around workflow and building those in a low code way, you could do all of this in a, you know, a unified platform that we have that you can go in and building a low code way. You don't have to be a pure hardcore Java developer to get things done. We focus on time to value. So you can. You know, we have stories of customers building their first set of integrations or work flows and, you know, minutes or a couple of hours versus some of our competitors who take days, weeks or months. >>So from a local perspective, something I'm just curious about, that's kind of be a facilitator of during the last, you know, eight months of things changing and customers not being able suddenly to get into their data centers air on site, talk to me a little bit about some of the things maybe even anecdotally, that you've heard about Bhumi Loco development platform being facilitator of people that couldn't get to a data center. >>Yeah, so I mean, all of the development even before covert, all all loco development that you did for Bumi was in a Web browser. We've always been that right. So we have that capability. And then from a run time, I was talking earlier about how you can run in a ws cloud. But you can also set your runtime behind a firewall. If it is at a facility, you can put it in. You know, any locations around the world. So when the pandemic hit and folks started needing to work remotely, it was kind of a non event for many of our developer, our local developers, because they can now access the browser from home and still access. All those resource is whether it's on site in a W s or wherever they were then forced to Okay, The rest of the business is saying we need to make data available. We need to actually now put processes in place. And and Bumi became an asset to say, Wait a minute. It's not about just integration behind the scenes, that's plumbing that nobody sees. Our users started becoming heroes in their business by standing up work flows and saying I can quickly because it's low code. Oh, you need to collect information about, you know, in some cases, you know, citizen information that they used to go to. You know, I don't know that I could talk about this government, but citizens used have to go into a building in order to fill out forms and whatnot. We need to collect data live. How can I do that? Okay. This government now just use boom me to start posting these on their website. These work flows in a secure way. You know, that's just, um, examples. I talked about answers on demand before, but but we've seen this pivot of user engagement Mawr out of, you know, bringing middleware and integration out of the shadows of I t into solving real problems as people are now this first around the world at home. So >>solving your problems and probably helping a lot of businesses not just survive the last few months and forward but thrive as well as theirs. We know some things from this will be permanent. Let's question to you just can you give us a sneak peek into some of the solutions and the initiatives that Booby and AWS are working on together? Yes. >>So I talked a little bit about this before, so we are in Advanced Tech Partner were a public sector partner. We run our platform on AWS again, so we continue to work on how we can keep expanding and taking advantage of A W S two services To make things more scalable. Onda were more and more secure. It's always a top priority given the shift to the cloud and a W s is helping us with those we have are quick starts that we're working on again to make things quicker and easier for people to stand up integration workloads in AWS catalog and prep again. All of the connectivity that we have to things like event bridge, sqs Red shift, etcetera. Um, you know, those are all the things we're collaborating on with them. And again through the next year, we'll continue to keep focusing on more and more to just make running your booming environment in AWS more and more seamless. >>Seamless. I'll take it well and thank you so much for sharing what's going on with Louis and AWS in this virtual event. We appreciate your time. >>Yeah. Thank you so much. >>Bread. McCaskey. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 A virtual edition