(upbeat music) >> We are back, approaching the finish line here at Supercomputing 22, our last interview of the day, our last interview of the show. And I have to say Dave Nicholson, my co-host, My name is Paul Gillin. I've been attending trade shows for 40 years Dave, I've never been to one like this. The type of people who are here, the type of problems they're solving, what they talk about, the trade shows are typically, they're so speeds and feeds. They're so financial, they're so ROI, they all sound the same after a while. This is truly a different event. Do you get that sense? >> A hundred percent. Now, I've been attending trade shows for 10 years since I was 19, in other words, so I don't have necessarily your depth. No, but seriously, Paul, totally, completely, completely different than any other conference. First of all, there's the absolute allure of looking at the latest and greatest, coolest stuff. I mean, when you have NASA lecturing on things when you have Lawrence Livermore Labs that we're going to be talking to here in a second it's a completely different story. You have all of the academics you have students who are in competition and also interviewing with organizations. It's phenomenal. I've had chills a lot this week. >> And I guess our last two guests sort of represent that cross section. Armando Acosta, director of HPC Solutions, High Performance Solutions at Dell. And Matt Leininger, who is the HPC Strategist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Now, there is perhaps, I don't know you can correct me on this, but perhaps no institution in the world that uses more computing cycles than Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is always on the leading edge of what's going on in Supercomputing. And so we want to talk to both of you about that. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. >> Sure, glad to be here. >> For having us. >> Let's start with you, Armando. Well, let's talk about the juxtaposition of the two of you. I would not have thought of LLNL as being a Dell reference account in the past. Tell us about the background of your relationship and what you're providing to the laboratory. >> Yeah, so we're really excited to be working with Lawrence Livermore, working with Matt. But actually this process started about two years ago. So we started looking at essentially what was coming down the pipeline. You know, what were the customer requirements. What did we need in order to make Matt successful. And so the beauty of this project is that we've been talking about this for two years, and now it's finally coming to fruition. And now we're actually delivering systems and delivering racks of systems. But what I really appreciate is Matt coming to us, us working together for two years and really trying to understand what are the requirements, what's the schedule, what do we need to hit in order to make them successful >> At Lawrence Livermore, what drives your computing requirements I guess? You're working on some very, very big problems but a lot of very complex problems. How do you decide what you need to procure to address them? >> Well, that's a difficult challenge. I mean, our mission is a national security mission dealing with making sure that we do our part to provide the high performance computing capabilities to the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. We do that through the Advanced Simulation computing program. Its goal is to provide that computing power to make sure that the US nuclear rep of the stockpile is safe, secure, and effective. So how we go about doing that? There's a lot of work involved. We have multiple platform lines that we accomplish that goal with. One of them is the advanced technology systems. Those are the ones you've heard about a lot, they're pushing towards exit scale, the GPU technologies incorporated into those. We also have a second line, a platform line, called the Commodity Technology Systems. That's where right now we're partnering with Dell on the latest generation of those. Those systems are a little more conservative, they're right now CPU only driven but they're also intended to be the everyday work horses. So those are the first systems our users get on. It's very easy for them to get their applications up and running. They're the first things they use usually on a day to day basis. They run a lot of small to medium size jobs that you need to do to figure out how to most effectively use what workloads you need to move to the even larger systems to accomplish our mission goals. >> The workhorses. >> Yeah. >> What have you seen here these last few days of the show, what excites you? What are the most interesting things you've seen? >> There's all kinds of things that are interesting. Probably most interesting ones I can't talk about in public, unfortunately, 'cause of NDA agreements, of course. But it's always exciting to be here at Supercomputing. It's always exciting to see the products that we've been working with industry and co-designing with them on for, you know, several years before the public actually sees them. That's always an exciting part of the conference as well specifically with CTS-2, it's exciting. As was mentioned before, I've been working with Dell for nearly two years on this, but the systems first started being delivered this past August. And so we're just taking the initial deliveries of those. We've deployed, you know, roughly about 1600 nodes now but that'll ramp up to over 6,000 nodes over the next three or four months. >> So how does this work intersect with Sandia and Los Alamos? Explain to us the relationship there. >> Right, so those three laboratories are the laboratories under the National Nuclear Security Administration. We partner together on CTS. So the architectures, as you were asking, how do we define these things, it's the labs coming together. Those three laboratories we define what we need for that architecture. We have a joint procurement that is run out of Livermore but then the systems are deployed at all three laboratories. And then they serve the programs that I mentioned for each laboratory as well. >> I've worked in this space for a very long time you know I've worked with agencies where the closest I got to anything they were actually doing was the sort of guest suite outside the secure area. And sometimes there are challenges when you're communicating, it's like you have a partner like Dell who has all of these things to offer, all of these ideas. You have requirements, but maybe you can't share 100% of what you need to do. How do you navigate that? Who makes the decision about what can be revealed in these conversations? You talk about NDA in terms of what's been shared with you, you may be limited in terms of what you can share with vendors. Does that cause inefficiency? >> To some degree. I mean, we do a good job within the NSA of understanding what our applications need and then mapping that to technical requirements that we can talk about with vendors. We also have kind of in between that we've done this for many years. A recent example is of course with the exit scale computing program and some things it's doing creating proxy apps or mini apps that are smaller versions of some of the things that we are important to us. Some application areas are important to us, hydrodynamics, material science, things like that. And so we can collaborate with vendors on those proxy apps to co-design systems and tweak the architectures. In fact, we've done a little bit that with CTS-2, not as much in CTS as maybe in the ATS platforms but that kind of general idea of how we collaborate through these proxy applications is something we've used across platforms. >> Now is Dell one of your co-design partners? >> In CTS-2 absolutely, yep. >> And how, what aspects of CTS-2 are you working on with Dell? >> Well, the architecture itself was the first, you know thing we worked with them on, we had a procurement come out, you know they bid an architecture on that. We had worked with them, you know but previously on our requirements, understanding what our requirements are. But that architecture today is based on the fourth generation Intel Xeon that you've heard a lot about at the conference. We are one of the first customers to get those systems in. All the systems are interconnected together with the Cornell Network's Omni-Path Network that we've used before and are very excited about as well. And we build up from there. The systems get integrated in by the operations teams at the laboratory. They get integrated into our production computing environment. Dell is really responsible, you know for designing these systems and delivering to the laboratories. The laboratories then work with Dell. We have a software stack that we provide on top of that called TOSS, for Tri-Lab Operating System. It's based on Redhead Enterprise Linux. But the goal there is that it allows us, a common user environment, a common simulation environment across not only CTS-2, but maybe older systems we have and even the larger systems that we'll be deploying as well. So from a user perspective they see a common user interface, a common environment across all the different platforms that they use at Livermore and the other laboratories. >> And Armando, what does Dell get out of the co-design arrangement with the lab? >> Well, we get to make sure that they're successful. But the other big thing that we want to do, is typically when you think about Dell and HPC, a lot of people don't make that connection together. And so what we're trying to do is make sure that, you know they know that, hey, whether you're a work group customer at the smallest end or a super computer customer at the highest end, Dell wants to make sure that we have the right setup portfolio to match any needs across this. But what we were really excited about this, this is kind of our, you know big CTS-2 first thing we've done together. And so, you know, hopefully this has been successful. We've made Matt happy and we look forward to the future what we can do with bigger and bigger things. >> So will the labs be okay with Dell coming up with a marketing campaign that said something like, "We can't confirm that alien technology is being reverse engineered." >> Yeah, that would fly. >> I mean that would be right, right? And I have to ask you the question directly and the way you can answer it is by smiling like you're thinking, what a stupid question. Are you reverse engineering alien technology at the labs? >> Yeah, you'd have to suck the PR office. >> Okay, okay. (all laughing) >> Good answer. >> No, but it is fascinating because to a degree it's like you could say, yeah, we're working together but if you really want to dig into it, it's like, "Well I kind of can't tell you exactly how some of this stuff is." Do you consider anything that you do from a technology perspective, not what you're doing with it, but the actual stack, do you try to design proprietary things into the stack or do you say, "No, no, no, we're going to go with standards and then what we do with it is proprietary and secret."? >> Yeah, it's more the latter. >> Is the latter? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're not going to try to reverse engineer the industry? >> No, no. We want the solutions that we develop to enhance the industry to be able to apply to a broader market so that we can, you know, gain from the volume of that market, the lower cost that they would enable, right? If we go off and develop more and more customized solutions that can be extraordinarily expensive. And so we we're really looking to leverage the wider market, but do what we can to influence that, to develop key technologies that we and others need that can enable us in the high forms computing space. >> We were talking with Satish Iyer from Dell earlier about validated designs, Dell's reference designs for for pharma and for manufacturing, in HPC are you seeing that HPC, Armando, and is coming together traditionally and more of an academic research discipline beginning to come together with commercial applications? And are these two markets beginning to blend? >> Yeah, I mean so here's what's happening, is you have this convergence of HPC, AI and data analytics. And so when you have that combination of those three workloads they're applicable across many vertical markets, right? Whether it's financial services, whether it's life science, government and research. But what's interesting, and Matt won't brag about, but a lot of stuff that happens in the DoE labs trickles down to the enterprise space, trickles down to the commercial space because these guys know how to do it at scale, they know how to do it efficiently and they know how to hit the mark. And so a lot of customers say, "Hey we want what CTS-2 does," right? And so it's very interesting. The way I love it is their process the way they do the RFP process. Matt talked about the benchmarks and helping us understand, hey here's kind of the mark you have to hit. And then at the same time, you know if we make them successful then obviously it's better for all of us, right? You know, I want to secure nuclear stock pile so I hope everybody else does as well. >> The software stack you mentioned, I think Tia? >> TOSS. >> TOSS. >> Yeah. >> How did that come about? Why did you feel the need to develop your own software stack? >> It originated back, you know, even 20 years ago when we first started building Linux clusters when that was a crazy idea. Livermore and other laboratories were really the first to start doing that and then push them to larger and larger scales. And it was key to have Linux running on that at the time. And so we had the. >> So 20 years ago you knew you wanted to run on Linux? >> Was 20 years ago, yeah, yeah. And we started doing that but we needed a way to have a version of Linux that we could partner with someone on that would do, you know, the support, you know, just like you get from an EoS vendor, right? Security support and other things. But then layer on top of that, all the HPC stuff you need either to run the system, to set up the system, to support our user base. And that evolved into to TOSS which is the Tri-Lab Operating System. Now it's based on the latest version of Redhead Enterprise Linux, as I mentioned before, with all the other HPC magic, so to speak and all that HPC magic is open source things. It's not stuff, it may be things that we develop but it's nothing closed source. So all that's there we run it across all these different environments as I mentioned before. And it really originated back in the early days of, you know, Beowulf clusters, Linux clusters, as just needing something that we can use to run on multiple systems and start creating that common environment at Livermore and then eventually the other laboratories. >> How is a company like Dell, able to benefit from the open source work that's coming out of the labs? >> Well, when you look at the open source, I mean open source is good for everybody, right? Because if you make a open source tool available then people start essentially using that tool. And so if we can make that open source tool more robust and get more people using it, it gets more enterprise ready. And so with that, you know, we're all about open source we're all about standards and really about raising all boats 'cause that's what open source is all about. >> And with that, we are out of time. This is our 28th interview of SC22 and you're taking us out on a high note. Armando Acosta, director of HPC Solutions at Dell. Matt Leininger, HPC Strategist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Great discussion. Hopefully it was a good show for you. Fascinating show for us and thanks for being with us today. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us >> Dave it's been a pleasure. >> Absolutely. >> Hope we'll be back next year. >> Can't believe, went by fast. Absolutely at SC23. >> We hope you'll be back next year. This is Paul Gillin. That's a wrap, with Dave Nicholson for theCUBE. See here in next time. (soft upbear music)

>>How do y'all and welcome back to the cube where we're live from Dallas at a Supercomputing 2022. My name is Savannah Peterson. Joined with L AED today, as well as some very exciting guests talking about one of my favorite and most complex topics out there, talking about quantum a bit today. Please welcome Ken and Matthew. Thank you so much for reading here. Matthew. Everyone's gonna be able to see your shirt. What's going on with hybrid quantum? I have >>To ask. Wait, what is hybrid quantum? Yeah, let's not pretend that. >>Let's not >>Pretend that everybody knows, Everyone already knows what quantum computing is if we goes straight to highway. Yeah. Okay. So with the brief tour detour took qu regular quantum computing. Yeah, >>No, no. Yeah. Let's start with quantum start before. >>So you know, like regular computers made of transistors gives us ones and zeros, right? Binary, like you were talking about just like half of the Cheerios, right? The joke, it turns out there's some problems that even if we could build a computer as big as the whole universe, which would be pretty expensive, >>That might not be a bad thing, but >>Yeah. Yeah. Good for Dell Got mill. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. We wouldn't be able to solve them cuz they scale exponentially. And it turns out some of those problems have efficient solutions in quantum computing where we take any two state quantum system, which I'll explain in a sec and turn it into what we call a quantum bit or qubit. And those qubits can actually solve some problems that are just infeasible on even these world's largest computers by offering exponential advantage. And it turns out that today's quantum computers are a little too small and a little too noisy to do that alone. So by pairing a quantum computer with a classical computer, hence the partnership between IQ and Dell, you allow each kind of compute to do what it's best at and thereby get answers you can't get with either one alone. >>Okay. So the concept of introducing hybridity, I love that word bridge. I dunno if I made it up, but it's it for it. Let's about it. Abri, ding ding. So does this include simulating the quantum world within the, what was the opposite? The classical quantum world? Classical. Classical, classical computer. Yeah. So does it include the concept of simulating quantum in classical compute? >>Absolutely. >>Okay. How, how, how do, how do you do that? >>So there's simulators and emulators that effectively are programmed in exactly the same way that a physical quantum machine is through circuits translated into chasm or quantum assembly language. And those are the exact same ways that you would program either a physical q p or a simulated >>Q p. So, so access to quantum computing today is scarce, right? I mean it's, it's, it's, it's limited. So having the ability to have the world at large or a greater segment of society be able to access this through simulation is probably a good idea. >>Fair. It's absolutely a wonderful one. And so I often talk to customers and I tell them about the journey, which is hands on keyboard, learning, experimentation, building proof of concepts, and then finally productization. And you could do much of that first two steps anyway very robustly with simulation. >>It's much like classical computing where if you imagine back in the fifties, if, if the cube was at some conference in 1955, you know, we wouldn't have possibly been able to predict what we'd be doing with computing 70 years later, right? Yeah. That teenagers be making apps on their phones that changed the world, right? And so by democratizing access this way, suddenly we can open up all sorts of new use cases. We sort of like to joke, there's only a couple hundred people in the world who really know how to program quantum computers today. And so how are we gonna make thousands, tens of thousands, millions of quantum programmers? The answer is access and simulators are an amazingly accessible way for everyone to start playing around with the >>Fields. Very powerful tool. >>Wow. Yeah. I'm just thinking about how many, there's, are there really only hundreds of people who can program quantum computing? >>I kind of generally throw it out there and I say, you know, if you looked at a matrix of a thousand operations with hundreds of qubits, there's probably, I don't know, 2000 people worldwide that could program that type of a circuit. I mean it's a fairly complex circuit at that point and >>I, I mean it's pretty phenomenal When you think about how early we are in adoption and, and the rollout of this technology as a whole, can you see quite a bit as, as you look across your customer portfolio, what are some of the other trends you're seeing? >>Well, non quantum related trends or just any type you give us >>Both. >>Yeah. So >>We're a thought leader. This is >>Your moment. Yeah, so we do quite a bit. We see quite a bit actually. There's a lot of work happening at the edge as you're probably well aware of. And we see a lot of autonomous mobile robots. I actually lead the, the research office. So I get to see all the cool stuff that's really kind of emerging before it really regrets >>What's coming next. >>Let's see, Oh, I can't tell you what's coming next, but we see edge applications. Yes, we see a lot of, of AI applications and artificial intelligence is morphing dramatically through the number of frameworks and through the, the types and places you would place ai, even places I, I personally never thought we would go like manufacturing environments. Some places that were traditionally not very early adopters. We're seeing AI move very quickly in some of those areas. One of the areas that I'm really excited about is digital twins and the ability to eventually do, let's come up on acceleration with quantum technologies on, on things like computational fluid dynamics. And I think it's gonna be a wonderful, wonderful area for us moving forward. >>So, So I can hear the people screaming at the screen right now. Wait a minute, You said it was hybrid, you're only talking the front half. That's, that's cat. What about the back half? That's dog. What about the quantum part of it? So I, on Q and, and I apologize. Ion Q >>Ion >>Q, Yeah Ion Q cuz you never know. You never never know. Yeah. Where does the actual quantum come in? >>That's a great >>Question. So you guys have one of these things. >>Yeah, we've built, we currently have the world's best quantum computer by, by sub measures I drop there. Yeah, no big deal. Give me some snaps for that. Yeah, Ken knows how to pick em. Yeah, so right. Our, our approach, which is actually based on technology that's 50 years old, so it's quite, quite has a long history. The way we build atomic clocks is the basis for trapped eye quantum computing. And in fact the first quantum logic gate ever made in 1995 was at NIST where they modified their atomic clock experiment to do quantum gates. And that launched really the hardware experimentalist quantum Peter Revolution. And that was by Chris Monroe, our co-founder. So you know that history has flown directly into us. So to simplify, we start with an ion trap. Imagine a gold block with a bunch of electrodes that allow you to make precisely shaped electromagnetic fields, sort of like a rotating saddle. >>Then take a source of atoms. Now obviously we're all sources of atoms. We have a highly purified source of metal atium. We heat it up, we get a nice hot plume of atoms, we ionize those atoms with an ionizing later laser. Now they're hot and heavy and charged. So we can trap them in one of these fields. And now our electromagnetic field that's spitting rapidly holds the, the ions like balls in a bowl if you can imagine them. And they line up in a nice straight line and we hold them in place with these fields and with cooling laser beams. And up to now, that's how an atomic clock works. Trap an item and shine it with a laser beam. Count the oscillations, that's your clock. Now if you got 32 of those and you can manipulate their energy states, in our case we use the hyper fine energy states of the atom. >>But you can basically think of your high school chemistry where you have like an unexcited electron, an excited electron. Take your unexcited state as a zero, your excited state as a one. And it turns out with commercially available lasers, you can drive anywhere between a zero, a one or a super position of zero and one. And so that is our quantum bit, the hyper fine energy state of the atrium atom. And we just line up a bunch of them and through there access the magical powers of supervision entanglement, as we were talking about before, they don't really make sense to us here in the regular world, but >>They do exist. But what you just described is one cubit. That's right. And the way that you do it isn't exactly the same way that others who are doing quantum computing do it. That's right. Is that okay? >>And there's a lot of advantages to the trapped iron approach. So for example, you can also build a super conducting qubit where you, where you basically cool a chip to 47 mil kelvin and coerce millions of atoms to work together as a single system. The problem is that's not naturally quantum. So it's inherently noisy and it wants to deco here does not want to be a quantum bit. Whereas an atom is very happy to be by itself a qubit because we don't have to do anything to it. It's naturally quantum, if that makes sense. And so atomic qubits, like we use feature a few things. One the longest coherence times in the industry, meaning you can run very deep circuits, the most accurate operations, very low noise operations. And we don't have any wires. Our atoms are connected by laser light. That means you can connect any pair. So with some other technologies, the qubits are connected by wires. That means you can only run operations between physically connected qubits. It's like programming. If you could only use, for example, bits that are adjacent with an i untrapped approach, you can connect any pair so that all to all connectivity means your compilation is much more efficient and you can do much wider and deeper circuits. >>So what's the, what is the closest thing to a practical application that we've been able to achieve at this point? Question. And when I say practical, it doesn't have to be super practical. I mean, what is the, what is the sort of demonstration, the least esoteric demonstration of this at this point? >>To tie into what Ken was saying earlier, I think there's at least two areas that are very exciting. One is chemistry. Chemistry. So for example, you know, we have water in our cup and we understand water pretty well, but there's lots of molecules that in order to study them, we actually have to make them in a lab and do lots of experiments. And to give you a sense of the order of magnitude, if you wanted to understand the ground state of the caffeine molecule, which we all know and has 200 electrons, you would need to build a computer bigger than the moon. So, which is, you know, again, would be good profit for Dell, but probably not gonna happen time soon. That's >>Kind of fun to think about though. Yeah, that's a great analogy. That >>Was, yeah. And in fact it'd be like 10 moons of compute. Okay. So build 10 moons of >>Computer. I >>Love the sci-fi issue. Exactly. And now you can calculate caffeine, it's crazy or it just fits in a quantum computer the size of this table. And so we're using hybrid quantum computing now to start proving out these algorithms not for molecules as complex as caffeine or what we want in the future. Like biologics, you know, new cancer medications, new materials and so forth. But we are able to show, for example, the ground state of smaller molecules and prove a path to where, you know, decision maker could see in a few years from now, Oh, we'll be able to actually simulate not molecules we already understand, but molecules we've never been able to study a prayer, if that makes sense. And then, >>Yeah, I think there's a key point underneath that, and I think goes back to the question that you asked earlier about the why hybrid applications inherently run on the classical infrastructure and algorithms are accelerated through qs, the quantum processing units. >>And so are you sort of time sharing in the sense that this environment that you set up starts with classical, with simulation and then you get to a point where you say, okay, we're ready, you pick up the bat phone and you say I wanna, >>I would say it's more like a partnership, really. Yeah, >>Yeah. And I think, I think it's kind of the, the way I normally describe it is, you know, we've taken a look at it it from a really kind of a software development life cycle type of perspective where again, if you follow that learn experiment, pro proof of concept, and then finally productize, we, we can cover and allow for a developer to start prototyping and proofing on simulators and when they're ready all they do is flip a switch and a manifest and they can automatically engage a qu a real quantum physical quantum system. And so we've made it super simple and very accessible in a democratizing access for developers. >>Yeah. Makes such big difference. Go ahead. >>A good analogy is to like GPUs, right? Where it's not really like, you know, you send it away, but rather the GPU accelerates certain operations. The q p. Yeah, because quantum mechanics, it turns out the universe runs on linear algebra. So one way to think about the q p is the most efficient way of doing linear algebra that exists. So lots of problems that can be expressed in that form. Combinatorial optimization problems in general, certain kinds of machine learning, et cetera, get an exponential speed up by running a section of the algorithm on the quantum computer. But of course you wouldn't like port Microsoft Word. Yeah, exactly. You know, you're not gonna do that in your product. It would be a waste of your quantum computer. >>Not just that you wanna know exactly how much money is in your bank account, not probabilistically how much might be ballpark. Yeah. Realm 10, moon ballpark, right? >>10 moon ballpark. Be using that for the rest of the show. Yeah. Oh, I love that. Ken, tell me a little bit about how you identify companies and like I n Q and and end up working with Matthew. What, what's that like, >>What's it like or how do you >>Find it's the process? Like, so, you know, let's say I've got the the >>We're not going there though. Yeah. We're not >>Personal relationship. >>Well, >>You can answer these questions however you want, you know. No, but, but what does that look like for Dell? How do you, how do you curate and figure out who you're gonna bring into this partnership nest? >>Yeah, you know, I, I think it was a, it's, it was a, a very long drawn out learning opportunity. We started actually our working quantum back in 2016. So we've been at it for a long time. And only >>In quantum would we say six years is a long time. I love >>That. Exactly. >>By the way, that was like, we've been doing this for age for a >>Long time. Yeah. Very long time before >>You were born. Yes. >>Feels like it actually, believe it or not. But, so we've been at it for a long time and you know, we went down some very specific learning paths. We took a lot of different time to, to learn about different types of qubits available, different companies, what their approaches were, et cetera. Yeah. And, and we ended up meeting up with, with I N Q and, and we also have other partners as well, like ibm, but I N q you know, we, there is a nice symbiotic relationship. We're actually doing some really cool technologies that are even much, much further ahead than the, you know, strict classical does this, quantum does that where there's significant amount of interplay between the simulation systems and between the real physical QS. And so it's, it's turning out to be a great relationship. They're, they're very easy to work with and, and a lot of fun too, as you could probably tell. Yeah. >>Clearly. So before we wrap, I've got it. Okay. Okay. So get it. Let's get, let's get, yeah, let's get deep. Let's get deep for a second or a little deeper than we've been. So our current, our current understanding of all this, of the universe, it's pretty limited. It's down to the point where we effectively have it assigned to witchcraft. It's all dark energy and dark matter. Right. What does that mean exactly? Nobody knows. But if you're in the quantum computing space and you're living this every day, do you believe that it represents the key to us understanding things that currently we just can't understand classical models, including classical computing, our brains as they're constructed aren't capable of understanding the real real that's out there. Yeah. If you're in the quantum computing space, do you possess that level of hubris? Do you think that you are gonna deliver the answers? >>I'm just like, I think the more you're in the space, the more mysterious and amazing it all seems. There's a, but there is a great quote by Richard Feinman that sort of kicked off the quantum exploration. So he gave a lecture in 1981, so, you know, long before any of this began, truly ages ago, right? Yeah. And in this lecture he said, you know, kind of wild at that time, right? We had to build these giant supercomputers to simulate just a couple atoms interacting, right? And it's kind of crazy that you need all this compute to simulate what nature does with just a handful >>Particles. Yeah. >>Really small. So, and, and famously he said, you know, nature just isn't classical. Damn it. And so you need to build a computer that works with nature to understand nature. I think, you know, the, the quantum revolution has only just begun. There's so many new things to learn, and I'm sure the quantum computers of 40 years from now are not gonna look like the, you know, the computers of today, just as the classical computers of 40 years ago look quite different to us now, >>And we're a bunch of apes. But you think we'll get there? >>I, yeah, I, I mean, I, I have, I think we have, I feel incredibly optimistic that this tool, quantum computing as a tool represents a sea change in what's possible for humans to compute. >>Yeah. I think it's that possibility. You know, I, when I tell people right now in the quantum era, we're in the inac stage of the quantum era, and so we have a long way to go, but the potential is absolutely enormous. In fact, incomprehensibly enormous, I >>Was just gonna say, I don't even think we could grasp >>In the, from the inac is they had no idea of computers inside of your hand, right? Yeah. >>They're calculating, you know, trajectories, right? Yeah. If you told them, like, we'd all be video chatting, you >>Know, >>Like, and kids would be doing synchronized dances, you know, you'd be like, What? >>I love that. Well, well, on that note, Ken Matthew, really great to have you both, everyone now will be pondering the scale and scope of the universe with their 10 moon computer, 10 moons. That's right. And, and you've given me my, my new favorite bumper sticker since we've been on a, on a roll here, David and I, which is just naturally quantum. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's one of my new favorite phrases from the show. Thank you both for being here. David, thank you for hanging out and thank all of you for tuning in to our cube footage live here in Dallas. We are at Supercomputing. This is our last show for the day, but we look forward to seeing you tomorrow morning. My name's Savannah Peterson. Y'all have a lovely night.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, brilliant humans and welcome back to theCUBE. We're live from Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson. Joined here with John Furrier, John, so exciting, day three. >> Day three, cranking along, doing great, final day of KubeCon, it wraps up. This next segment's going to be great. It's about WebAssembly, the hottest trend here, at KubeCon that nobody knows about cause they just got some funding and it's got some great traction. Multiple players in here. People are really interested in this and they're really discovering it. They're digging into it. So, we're going to hear from one of the founders of the company that's involved. So, it'll be great. >> Yeah, I think we're right at the tip of the iceberg really. We started off the show with Scott from Docker talking about this, but we have a thought leader in this space. Please welcome Matt Butcher the CEO and co-founder of Fermyon Thank you for being here. Welcome. >> Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Favorite thing to talk about is WebAssembly after that is coffee but WebAssembly first. >> Hey, it's the morning. We can talk about both those on the show. (all chuckles) >> It might get confusing, but I'm willing to try. >> If you can use coffee as a metaphor to teach everyone about WebAssembly throughout the rest of the show. >> All right. That would be awesome. >> All right I'll keep that in mind. >> So when we were talking before we got on here I thought it was really fun because I think the hype is just starting in the WebAssembly space. Very excited about it. Where do you think we're at, set the stage? >> Honestly, we were really excited to come here and see that kind of first wave of hype. We came here expecting to have to answer the question you know, what is WebAssembly and why is anybody looking at it in the cloud space, and instead people have been coming up to us and saying, you know this WebAssembly thing, we're hearing about it. What are the problems it's solving? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> We're really excited to hear about it. So, people literally have been stopping us in restaurants and walking down the street, hey, "You're at KubeCon, you're the WebAssembly people. Tell us more about what's going on." >> You're like awesome celeb. I love this. >> Yeah, and I, >> This is great >> You know the, the description I used was I expected to come here shouting into the void. Hey, you know anybody, somebody, let me tell you about WebAssembly. Instead it's been people coming to us and saying "We've heard about it. Get us excited about it," and I think that's a great place to be. >> You know, one of the things that's exciting too is that this kind of big trend with this whole extraction layer conversation, multicloud, it reminds me of the old app server days where, you know there was a separation between the back end and front end, and then we're kind of seeing that now with this WebAssembly Wasm trend where the developers just want to have the apps run everywhere and the coding to kind of fall in, take a minute to explain what this is, why it's important, why are people jazzed about there's other companies like Cosmonic is in there. There's a lot of open source movement behind it. You guys are out there, >> Savannah: Docker. >> 20 million in fresh funding. Why is this important? What is it and why is it relevant right now? Why are people talking about it? >> I mean, we can't... There is no penasia in the tech world much for the good of all of us, right? To keep us employed. But WebAssembly seems to be that technology that just sort of arose at the right time to solve a number of problems that were really feeling intractable not very long ago. You know, at the core of what is WebAssembly? Well it's a binary format, right? But there's, you know, built on the same, strain of development that Java was built on in the 90's and then the .net run time. But with a couple of little fundamental changes that are what have made it compelling today. So when we think about the cloud world, we think about, okay well security's a big deal to us. Virtual machines are a way for us to run other people's untrusted operating systems on our hardware. Containers come along, they're a... The virtual machine is really the heavyweight class. This is the big thing. The workhorse of the cloud. Then along come Containers, they're a little slimmer. They're kind of the middleweight class. They provide us this great way to sort of package up just the application, not the entire operating system just the application and the bits we care about and then be able to execute those in a trusted environment. Well you know, serverless was the buzzword a few years ago. But one thing that serverless really identified for us is that we didn't actually have the kind of cloud side architecture that was the compute layer that was going to be able to fulfill the promise of serverless. >> Yeah. >> And you know, at that time I was at Microsoft we got to see behind the curtain and see how Azure operates and see the frustration with going, okay how do we get this faster? How do we get this startup time down from seconds to hundreds of milliseconds, WebAssembly comes along and we're able to execute these things in sub one millisecond, which means there is almost no cost to starting up one of these. >> Sub one millisecond. I just want to let everyone rest on that for a second. We've talked a lot about velocity and scale on the show. I mean everyone here is trying to do things faster >> Yep >> Obviously, but that is a real linchpin that makes a very big difference when we're talking about deploying things. Yeah. >> Yeah, and I mean when you think about the ecological and the cost impact of what we're building with the cloud. When we leave a bunch of things running in idle we're consuming electricity if nothing else. The electricity bill keeps going up and we're paying for it via cloud service charges. If you can start something in sub one millisecond then there's no reason you have to leave it running when nobody's using it. >> Savannah: Doesn't need to be in the background. >> That's right. >> So the lightweight is awesome. So, this new class comes up. So, like Java was a great metaphor there. This is kind of like that for the modern era of apps. >> Yeah. >> Where is this going to apply most, do you think? Where's it going to impact most? >> Well, you know, I think there are really four big categories. I think there's the kind of thing I was just talking about I think serverless and edge computing and kind of the server class of problem space. I think IOT is going to benefit, Amazon, Disney Plus, >> Savannah: Yes, edge. >> And PBS, sorry BBC, they all use WebAssembly for the players because they need to run the same player on thousands of different devices. >> I didn't even think about that use case. What a good example. >> It's a brilliant way to apply it. IOT is a hard space period and to be able to have that kind of layer of abstraction. So, that's another good use case >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And then I think this kind of plugin model is another one. You see it was Envoy proxy using this as a way to extend the core features. And I think that one's going to be very, very promising as well. I'm forgetting one, but you know. (all chuckles) I think you end up with these kind of discreet compartments where you can easily fit WebAssembly in here and it's solving a problem that we didn't have the technology that was really adequately solving it before. >> No, I love that. One of the things I thought was interesting we were all at dinner, we were together on Tuesday. I was chatting with Paris who runs Deliveroo at Apple and I can't say I've heard this about too many tools but when we were talking about WebAssembly she said "This is good for everybody" And, it's really nice when technologies come along that will raise the water level across the board. And I love that you're leading this. Speaking of you just announced a huge series aid, 20 million dollars just a few days ago. What does that mean for you and the team? >> I mean there's a little bit of economic uncertainty and it's always nice, >> Savannah: Just a little bit. >> Little bit. >> Savannah: It's come up on the show a little bit this week >> Just smidge. and it's nice to know that we're at a critical time developing this kind of infrastructure layer developing this kind of developer experience where they can go from, you know, blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes or less. It would be a tragedy if that got forestalled merely because you can't achieve the velocity you need to carry it out. So, what's very exciting about being able to raise around like that at this critical time is that gives us the ability to grow strategically, be able to continue releasing products, building a community around WebAssembly as a whole and of course around our products at Fermyon is a little smaller circle in the bigger circle, and that's why we are so excited about having closed around, that's the perfect one to extend a runway like that. >> Well I'm super excited by this because one I love the concept. I think it's very relevant, like how you progress heavyweight, middleweight, maybe this is lightweight class. >> I know, I'm here for the analogy. No, it's great, its great. >> Maybe it's a lightweight class. >> And we're slimming, which not many of us can say in these times so that's awesome. >> Maybe it's more like the tractor trailer, the van, now you got the sports car. >> Matt: Yeah, I can go.. >> Now you're getting Detroit on us. >> I was trying for a coffee, when I just couldn't figure it out. (all chuckles) >> So, you got 20 million. I noticed the investors amplify very good technical VC and early stage firm. >> Amazing, yeah. >> Insight, they do early stage, big early stage like this. Also they're on the board of Docker. Docker was intent to put a tool out there. There's other competition out there. Cosmonic is out there. They're funded. So you got VC funded companies like yourselves and Cosmonic and others. What's that mean? Different tool chains, is it going to create fragmentation? Is there a common mission? How do you look at the competition as you get into the market >> When you see an ecosystem form. So, here we are at KubeCon, the cloud native ecosystem at this point I like to think of them as like concentric rings. You have the kind of core and then networking and storage and you build these rings out and the farther out you get then the easier it is to begin talking about competition and differentiation. But, when you're looking at that core piece everybody's got to be in there together working on the same stuff, because we want interoperability, we want standards based solutions. We want common ways of building things. More than anything, we want the developers and operators and users who come into the ecosystem to be able to like instantly feel like, okay I don't have to learn. Like you said, you know, 50 different tools for 50 different companies. "I see how this works", and they're doing this and they're doing this. >> Are you guys all contributing into the same open source? >> Yep, yeah, so... >> All the funding happens. >> Both CNCF and the ByteCode Alliance are organizations that are really kind of pushing forward that core technology. You know, you mentioned Cosmonic, Microsoft, SOSA, Red Hat, VMware, they're all in here too. All contributing and again, with all of us knowing this is that nascent stage where we got to execute it. >> How? >> Do it together. >> How are you guys differentiating? Because you know, open source is a great thing. Rising Tide floats all boats. This is a hot area. Is there a differentiation discussion or is it more let's see how it goes, kind of thing? >> Well for us, we came into it knowing very specifically what the problem was we wanted to solve. We wanted this serverless architecture that executed in sub one millisecond to solve, to really create a new wave of microservices. >> KubeCon loves performance. They want to run their stuff on the fastest platform possible. >> Yeah, and it shouldn't be a roadblock, you know, yeah. >> And you look at someone like SingleStore who's a database company and they're in it because they want to be able to run web assemblies close to the data. Instead of doing a sequel select and pulling it way out here and munging it and then pushing it back in. They move the code in there and it's executing in there. So everybody's kind of finding a neat little niche. You know, Cosmonic has really gone more for an enterprise play where they're able to provide a lot of high level security guarantees. Whereas we've been more interested in saying, "Hey, this your first foray into WebAssembly and you're interested in serverless we'll get you going in like a couple of minutes". >> I want to ask you because we had Scott Johnston on earlier opening keynote so we kind of chatted one-on-one and I went off form cause I really wanted to talk to him because Docker is one of the most important companies since their pivot, when they did their little reset after the first Docker kind of then they sold the enterprise off to Mirantis they've been doing really, really well. What's your relationship to Docker? He was very bullish with you guys. Insights, joint investor. Is there a relationship? You guys talk, what's going on there? >> I mean, I'm going to have to admit a little bit of hero worship on my part. I think Scott is brilliant. I just do, and having come from the Kubernetes world the Fermyon team, we've always kind of kept an eye on Docker communicated with a lot of them. We've known Justin Cormack for years. Chris Cornett. (indistinct) I mean yeah, and so it has been a very natural >> Probably have been accused of every Docker Con and we've did the last three years on the virtual side with them. So, we know them really well. >> You've always got your finger on the pulse for them. >> Do you have a relationship besides a formal relationship or is it more of pass shoot score together in the industry? >> Yeah. No, I think it is kind of the multi-level one. You come in knowing people. You've worked together before and you like working with each other and then it sort of naturally extends onto saying, "Hey, what can we do together?" And also how do we start building this ecosystem around us with Docker? They've done an excellent job of articulating why WebAssembly is a complimentary technology with Containers. Which is something I believe very wholeheartedly. You need all three of the heavyweight, middleweight, lightweight. You can't do all the with just one, and to have someone like that sort of with a voice profoundly be able to express, look we're going to start integrating it to show you how it works this way and prevent this sort of like needless drama where people are going, oh Dockers dead, now everything's WebAssembly, and that's been a great.. >> This fight that's been going on. I mean, Docker, Kubernetes, WebAssembly, Containers. >> Yeah. >> We've seen on the show and we both know this hybrid is the future. We're all going to be using a variety of different tools to achieve our goals and I think that you are obviously one of them. I'm curious because just as we were going on you mentioned that you have a PhD in philosophy. (Matt chuckles) >> Matt: Yeah. >> Which is a wild card. You're actually our second PhD in philosophy working in a very technical role on the show this week, which is kind of cool. So, how does that translate into the culture at Fermyon? What's it like on the team? >> Well, you know, a philosophy degree if nothing else teaches you to think in systems and both human systems and formal systems. So that helps and when you approach the process of building a company, you need to be thinking both in terms of how are we organizing this? How are we organizing the product? How do we organize the team? We have really learned that culture is a major deal and culture philosophy, >> Savannah: Why I'm bringing it up. >> We like that, you know, we've been very forward. We have our chip values, curiosity, humility inclusivity and passion, and those are kind of the four things that we feel like that each of us every day should strive to be exhibiting these kinds of things. Curiosity, because you can't push the envelope if you don't ask the hard questions. Humility, because you know, it's easy to get cocky and talk about things as if you knew all the answers. We know we don't and that means we can learn from Docker and Microsoft >> Savannah: That's why you're curious. >> And the person who stops by the booth that we've never met before and says, "hey" and inclusivity, of course, building a community if you don't execute on that well you can't build a good community. The diversity of the community is what makes it stronger than a singular.. >> You have to come in and be cohesive with the community. >> Matt: Yeah. >> The app focus is a really, I think, relevant right now. The timing of this is right online. I think Scott had a good answer I thought on the relationship and how he sees it. I think it's going to be a nice extension to not a extension that way, but like. >> It probably will be as well. >> Almost a pun there John, almost a pun. >> There actually might be an extension, but evolution what we're going to get to which I think is going to be pure application server, like. >> Yep, yep. Like performance for new class of developer. Then now the question comes up and we've been watching developer productivity. That is a big theme and our belief is that if you take digital transformation to its conclusion IT and developers aren't a department serving the business they are the business. That means the developer workflows will have to be radically rebuilt to handle the velocity and new tech for just coding. I call it architectural list. >> I like that. I might steal that. >> It's a pun, but it's also brings up the provocative question. You shouldn't have to need an architecture to code. I mean, Java was great for that reason in many ways. So, if that happens if the developers are running the business that means more apps. The apps is the business. You got to have tool chains and productivity. You can't have fragmentation. Some people are saying WebAssembly might, fork tool chains, might challenge the developer productivity. what's your answer to that? How would you address that objection? >> I mean the threat of forking is always lurking in the corner in open source. In a way it's probably a positive threat because it keeps us honest it keeps us wanting to be inclusive again and keep people involved. Honestly though, I'm not particularly worried about it. I know that the W-3 as a standards body, of course, one of the most respected standards bodies on the planet. They do html, they do cascading style sheets. WebAssembly is in that camp and those of us in the core are really very interested in saying, you know, come on in, let's build something that's going to be where the core is solid and you know what you got and then you can go into the resurgence of the application server. I mean, I wholeheartedly agree with you on that, and we can only get there if we say, all right, here are the common paradigms that we're all going to agree to use, now let's go build stuff. >> And as we've been saying, developers are setting, I think are going to set the standards and they're going to vote with their code and their feet, if you will. >> Savannah: A hundred percent. >> They will decide if you're not aligning with what they want to do. okay. On how they want to self-serve and or work, you'll figure that out. >> Yep, yep. >> You'll get instant feedback. >> Yeah. >> Well, you know, again, I tell you a huge fan of Docker. One of the things that Docker understood at the very outset, is that they had an infrastructure tool and developers were the way to get adoption, and if you look at how fast they got adoption versus many, many other technologies that are profoundly impacted. >> Savannah: Wild. >> Yeah. >> Savannah: It's a cool story. >> It's because they got the developers to go, "This is amazing, hey infrastructure folks, here's an infrastructure tool that we like" and the infrastructure folks are used to code being tossed over the wall are going, "Are you for real?" I mean, and that was a brilliant way to do it and I think that what.. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> We want to replay in the WebAssembly world is making it developer friendly and you know the kind of infrastructure that we can actually operate. >> Well congratulations to the entire community. We're huge fans of the concept. I kind of see where it's going with connect the dots. You guys getting a lot of buzz. I have to ask you, my final question is the hype is beyond all recognition at this point. People are super pumped and enthusiastic about it and people are looking at it maybe some challenging it, but that's all good things. How do you get to the next level where people are confident that this is actually going to go the next step? Hype to confidence. We've seen great hype. Envoy was hyped up big time before it came in, then it became great. That was one of my favorite examples. Hype is okay, but now you got to put some meat on the bone. The sizzle on the stake so to speak. So what's going to be the stake for you guys as you see this going forward? What's the need? >> Yeah, you know, I talk about our first guiding story was, you know, blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes. That's what you need to win developers initially. So, what's the next story after that? It's got to be, Fermyon can run real world applications that solve real world problems. That's where hype often fails. If you can build something that's neat but nobody's quite sure what to do with it, to use it, maybe somebody will discover a good use. But, if you take that gambling asset, >> Savannah: It's that ending answer that makes the difference. >> Yeah, yeah. So we say, all right, what are developers trying to build with our platform and then relentlessly focus on making that easier and solving the real world problem that way. That's the crucial thing that's going to drive us out of that sort of early hype stage into a well adopted technology and I talk from Fermyon point of view but really that's for all of us in the WebAssembly. >> John: Absolutely. >> Very well stated Matt, just to wrap us up when we're interviewing you here on theCUBE next year, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't say today? >> All this stuff about coffee we didn't cover today, but also.. (all chuckles) >> Savannah: Here for the coffee show. Only analogies, that's a great analogy. >> I want to walk here and say, you know last time we talked about being able to achieve density in servers that was, you know, 10 times Kubernetes. Next year I want to say no, we're actually thousands of times beyond Kubernetes that we're lowering people's electricity bill by making these servers more efficient and the developers love it. >> That your commitment to the environment is something I want to do an entirely different show on. We learned that 7-8% of all the world's powers actually used on data centers through the show this week which is jarring quite frankly. >> Yeah, yeah. Tragic would be a better way of saying that. >> Yeah, I'm holding back so that we don't go over time here quite frankly. But anyways, Matt Butcher thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you so much for having me it was pleasure.. >> You are worth the hype you are getting. I am grateful to have you as our WebAssembly thought leader. In addition to Scott today from Docker earlier in the show. John Furrier, thanks for being my co-host and thank all of you for tuning into theCUBE here, live from Detroit. I'm Savannah Peterson and we'll be back with more soon. (ambient music)

(soft music) >> Good morning from Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live on our second day of coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, great to be back with you. The buzz is here, no doubt. We've been talking a lot about the developers. And one of the biggest bottlenecks that they face in software delivery, is when they're stuck waiting for access to environments. >> Yeah, this next segment's going to be very interesting. It's a company that's making DevOps more productive, but recognizing the reality of how people are working remotely, but also company to company developers. People are collaborating in all kinds of forms, so this is really going to be a great segment. >> Exactly. Two new guests to theCUBE who know theCUBE, but are first time on theCUBE from Release Hub, Tommy McClung, it's CEO and Matt Carter, it's CMO. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us here. >> So we want to dig into Release Hub, so the audience really gets an understanding. But Tommy, I want to get an understanding of your background. >> Sure. >> You've been at Release Hub for what, three years? >> Yep, I'm the co-founder. >> Before that you were at TrueCar? >> I was, yeah, I was the CTO at TrueCar. And prior to that, I've been a software engineer my entire career. I've started a couple of companies before this. Software engineer at heart. I've been working on systems management and making developers productive since 2000, long time. So it's fun to be working on developer productivity stuff. And this is our home and this is where I feel the most comfortable. >> Lisa: Yeah. And Matt, you're brand new to the company as it's chief marketing officer. >> Matt: Yeah, so I just joined earlier this month, so really excited to be here. I came over from Docker, so it's great to be able to keep working with developers and helping them, not only get their jobs done better and faster, but just get more delight out of what they do every day, that's a super important privilege to me and it's exciting to go and work on this at Release here. >> Well, they're lucky to have you. And we work together, Matt, at Docker, in the past. Developer productivity's always been a key, but communities are now more important. We've been seeing on theCUBE that developers are going to decide the standards, they're going to vote with their axes and their code. And what they decide to work on, it has to be the best. And that's going to be the new defacto standard. You guys have a great solution that I like. And I love the roots from the software engineering background because that's the hardest thing right now, is how do you scale the software, making things simpler and easier. And when things happen, you don't want to disrupt the tool chains, you want to make sure the code is right, you guys have a unique solution. Can you take a minute to explain what it is and why it's so important? >> Tommy: Yeah, I'll use a little bit of my experience to explain it. I was the CTO of a company that had 300 engineers, and sharing a handful of environments, really slowed everybody down, you bottleneck there. So in order to unlock the productivity of that team, developers need environments for development, they need it for testing, they need it for staging, you run your environments in production. So the environment is the key building block in every software development process. And like my last company, there were very few of them, one or two, everybody sharing them. And so the idea at Release is to make environments available on demand, so if a developer needs one for anything, they can spin one up. So if they want to write their code in a environment based in the cloud, they can do that, if they want to test on a poll request, an environment will automatically spin up. And the environments are full stack, include all the services, data, settings, configuration that runs the app. So developers literally get an isolated copy of the application, so they can develop knowing they're not stepping on other developers' toes. >> John: Can you give an example of what that looks like? Do they have to pre-configure the environment, or how does that work? Can you give an example? >> Yeah, sure. You have to, just like infrastructure is code, we call this environments is code. So you need to define your environment, which we have a lot of tools that help you do that. Analyze your repositories, help you define that environment. Now that you have the template for that, you can easily use that template to derive multiple environments out of it. A key part of this is everybody wants to make sure their development and data is secure. It runs within the AWS account of our customer. So we're the control plane that orchestrates it and the data and applications run within the context of their AWS account, so it's- >> John: What's the benefit? >> Tommy: Well, bottlenecking, increased developer productivity, developer happiness is a big one. Matt talks about this all the time, keeping developers in flow, so that they're focused on the job and not being distracted with, "Hey DevOps team, I need you to go spin up an environment." And a lot of times in larger organizations, not just the environments, but the process to get access to resources is a big issue. And so DevOps was designed to let developers take control of their own development process, but were still bottlenecking, waiting for environments, waiting for resources from the DevOps team, so this allows that self-service capability to really be there for the developer. >> Lisa: Matt, talk about... Target audience is the developer, talk about though... Distill that down into the business value. What am I, if I'm a financial services organization, or a hospital, or a retailer in e-commerce, what is my business value going to be with using technology like this and delighting those developers? >> Matt: I think there's three things that really matter to the developers and to the financial leader in the organization, A, developers are super expensive and they have a lot of opportunities. So if a developer's not happy and finding joy and productivity in what they're doing, they're going to look elsewhere. So that's the first thing, the second thing is that when you're running a business, productivity is one measure, but also, are you shipping something confidently the first time, or do you have to go back and fix things? And by having the environment spun up with all of your name space established, your tendencies are managed, all of your data being brought in, you're testing against a very high fidelity version of your application when you check in code. And so by doing that, you're testing things more quickly, and they talk a lot about shifting left, but it's making that environment as fully functional and featured as possible. So you're looking at something as it will appear in production, not a subset of that. And then the last thing, and this is one where the value of Figma is very important, a lot of times, you'll spin up an environment on AWS and you may forget about it and might just keep running and chewing up resources. Knowing that when you're done it goes away, means that you're not spending money on things just sitting there on your AWS instance, which is very important for competitors. >> Lisa: So I hear retention of developers, you're learning that developers, obviously business impact their speed to value as well. >> Tommy: Yep. >> And trust, you're enabling your customers to instill trust in their developers with them. >> Tommy: That's right, yeah. >> Matt: And trust and delight, they can be across purposes, a developer wants to move fast and they're rewarded for being creative, whereas your IT team, they're rewarded for predictability and consistency, and those can be opposing forces. And by giving developers a way to move quickly and the artifact that they're creating is something that the IT team understands and works within their processes, allows you to let both teams do what they care about and not create a friction there. >> John: What about the environment as a service? I love that 'cause it makes it sound like it's scaling in the cloud, which you have mentioned you do that. Is it for companies that are working together? So I don't want to spin up an environment, say we're a businesses, "Hey, let's do a deal. "I'm going to integrate my solution into yours. "I got to get my developers to maybe test it out, "so I'm spinning up an environment with you guys," then what do I do? >> Tommy: Well as far as if you're a customer of ours, is that the way you're asking? Well, a lot of times, it's being used a lot in internal development. So that's the first use case, is I'm a developer, you have cross collaboration amongst teams, so a developer tools. And what you're talking about is more, I'm using an environment for a demo environment, or I'm creating a new feature that I want to share with a customer, That's also possible. So if I'm a developer and I'm building a feature and it's for a specific customer of mine, I can build that feature and preview it with the customer before it actually goes into production. So it's a sandbox product development area for the developers to be actually integrating with their customers very, very quickly before it actually makes its way to all of the end users. >> A demo? >> It could be a demo. >> It's like a collaboration feature? >> Sandbox environment. We have customers- >> Kind of like we're seeing more of this collaboration with developers. This becomes a well- >> Tommy: And it's not even just collaboration with internal teams, it's now you're collaborating with your customer while you're building your software, which is actually really difficult to do if you only have one environment, you can't have- >> John: Yeah, I think that's a killer right there, that's the killer app right there. >> Matt: Instead of sending a Figma to a customer, this is what's going to look like, it's two dimensions, this is the app. That is a massive, powerful difference. >> Absolutely. In terms of customer delay, customer retention, employee engagement, those are all inextricably linked. Can you share, Matt, the voice of the customer? I just saw the release with TripActions, I've been a TripActions user myself, but give us this sense, I know that you're brand new, but the voice of the customer, what is it? What is it reflecting? How is it reinforcing your value prop? >> Matt: I think the voice that comes through consistently is instead of spending time building the system that is hard to do and complicated and takes our engineering cycles, our engineers can focus on whether it's platform engineering, new features and whatnot, it's more valuable to the company to build features, it's more exciting for a developer to build features and to not have to keep going back and doing things manually, which you're doing a... This is what we do all day long. To do it as a sideline is hard. And the customers are excited 'cause they get to move onto higher value activities with their time. >> Lisa: And everybody wants that, everybody wants to be able to contribute high value projects, programs for their organization rather than doing the boring stuff. >> Tommy: Yeah. I think with TripActions specifically, a lot of platform engineering teams are trying to build something like this in house, and it's a lot of toil, it's work that isn't value added, it enables developers to get their job done, but it's not really helping the business deliver a feature to the user. And so this whole movement of platform engineering, this is what those groups are doing and we're a big enabler to those teams, to get that to market faster. >> John: You're targeting businesses, enterprises, developers. >> That's right. >> Mainly, right, developers? >> Yeah. >> What's the business model? How are you guys making money? What's the strategy there? >> Yeah, I mean we really like to align with the value that we deliver. So if a user creates an environment, we get paid when that happens. So it's an on-demand, if you use the environment, you pay us, if you don't, you don't. >> John: Typical cloud-based pricing. >> Yeah. >> Pay as you go. >> Tommy: Usage based pricing. >> Is there a trigger on certain of how it gets cost? Is it more of the environment size, or what's the- >> Yeah, I mean there's a different tier for if you have really large, complicated environments. And that's the trend, that distributed applications aren't simple anymore, so if you have a small little rails app, it's going to be cheaper than if you have a massive distributed system. But manageable, the idea here is that this should help you save money over investing deeply into a deep platform engineering team. So it's got to be cost effective and we're really cognizant of that. >> So you got a simple approach, which is great. Talk about the alternative. What does it look like for a customer that you want to target? What's their environment? What does it look like, so that if I'm a customer, I would know I need to call you guys at Relief Hub. Is it sprawl? Is it multiple tool chains? Chaos, mayhem? What does it look like? >> Tommy: Yeah, let's have Matty, Matt could do this one. >> When you look at the systems right now, I think complexity is the word that keeps coming up, which is that, whether you're talking about multi-cloud or actually doing it, that's a huge thing. Microservices proliferation are happening over and over again, different languages. What I'm excited about with Release, is not dissimilar from what we saw in the Docker movement, which is that there's all this great stuff out there, but there's that common interface there, so you can actually run it locally on your machine, do your dev and test, and know that it's going to operate with, am I using Couchbase or Postgres or whatever, I don't care, it's going to work this way. Similar with Release, people are having to build a lot of these bespoke solutions that are purpose built for one thing and they're not designed to the platform. And the platform for platform engineering gives us a way to take that complexity out the equation, so you're not limited to what you can do, or, "Oh crud, I want to move to something else, "I have to start over again," that process is going to be consistent no matter what you're doing. So you're not worried about evolution and success and growth, you know that you've got a foundation that's going to grow. Doing it on your own, you have to build things in that very bespoke, specific manner, and that just creates a lot more toil than you'd want to get if you were using a platform and focusing on the value after your company. >> Matt Klein was just on here. He was with Lyft, he was the one who open source Envoy, which became very popular. We asked him what he thought about the future and he's like, it's too hard to work with all this stuff. He was mentioning Yamo code, but he got triggered a little bit, but his point was there's a lot to pull together. And it sounds like you guys have this solution, back in the old days, spin up some EC2, compute, similar way, right? "Hey, I don't want to person a server, I person a server, rack and stack, top of rack switch, I'm going to go to the cloud, use EC2. >> Tommy: Yeah, I mean just think about if- >> You're an environment version of that. Why wait for it to be built? >> Yeah. >> Is that what I'm getting- >> Yeah, I mean, and an application today isn't just the EC2 instances, it's all of your data, it's your configuration. Building it one time is actually complicated to get your app to work it, doing it lots of times to make your developers productive with copies of that, is incredibly difficult. >> John: So you saw the problem of developers waiting around for someone to provision an environment. >> Tommy: That's right. >> So they can do whatever they want to do. >> Tommy: That's right. >> Test, ship, do, play around, test the customer. Whatever that project scope is, they're waiting around versus spinning up an environment. >> Yeah, absolutely, 100%. >> And that's the service. >> That's what it is. >> Take time, reduce the steps it takes, make it more productive. >> And build an amazing developer experience that you know your developers are going to love. If you're at Facebook or Google, they have thousands of DevOps people building platforms. If you're a company that doesn't have that resource, you have a choice of go build this yourself, which is a distraction, or invest in something like us and focus on your core. >> John: You got Matt on board, got a new CMO, you got enterprise class features and I saw the press release. Talk about the origination story, why you developed it, and then take a minute to give a plug for the company, on what you're looking for, I'm sure you're hiring, what's going on? >> Tommy: Yeah, I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. My last experience at TrueCar, I saw this problem firsthand. And as the CTO of that company, I looked into the market for a solution to this, 'cause we had this problem of 300 developers, environments needed for everything. So we ended up building it ourselves and it costs multiple millions of dollars to build it. And so as the buyer at the time, I was like, man, I would've spent to solve this, and I just couldn't. So as a software engineer at heart, having seen this problem my entire career, it was just a natural thing to go work on. So yeah, I mean, for anybody that wants to create unlimited environments for their team, just go to releasehub.com. It's pretty self-explanatory, how to give it a shot and try it out. >> Environments is a service, from someone who had the problem, fixed it, built it- >> That's right. >> For other people. What are you guys hiring, looking for some people? >> Yeah, we have engineering hires, sales hires, Matt's got a few marketing hires coming, >> Matt: I was going to say, got some marketing coming. >> Selfishly he has that. (John laughs) The team's growing and it's a really great place to work. We're 100% remote. Part of this helps that, we build this product and we use it every day, so you get to work on what you build and dog food, it's pretty cool. >> Great solution. >> We love remote development environments. Being here and watching that process where building a product and a feature for the team to work better, wow, we should share this with customers. And the agility to deliver that was really impressive, and definitely reinforced how excited I am to be here 'cause we're building stuff for ourselves, which is- >> Matt: Well we're psyched that you're here in theCUBE. Matt, what's your vision for marketing? You got a hiring plan, you got a vision, I'm sure you got some things to do. What's your goals? What's your objective? >> My goal is... The statement people say, you can't market to developers. And I don't want to market to developers, I want to make sure developers are made aware of how they can learn new things in a really efficient way, so their capabilities grow. If we get people more and more successful with what they're doing, give them joy, reduce their toil and create that flow, we help them do things that make you excited, more creative. And that's to me, the reward of this. You teach people how to do that. And wow, these customers, they're building the greatest innovations in the world, I get to be part of that, which is awesome. >> Lisa: Yeah. Delighted developers has so many positive business outcomes that I'm sure organizations in any industry are going to be able to achieve. So exciting stuff, guys. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the program. Good luck with the growth and congrats on what you've enabled so far in just a few short years. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thanks you so much. >> Thank you for having us on. >> Appreciate it. >> Pleasure. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live in Detroit, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon '22. We're back after a short break. (soft music)

>>Good morning and welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson and I'm here on set of the cube, my co-host John Farer. How you doing this morning, John? >>Doing great. Feeling fresh. Day two of three days of coverage, feeling >>Fresh. That is that for being in the heat of the conference. I love that attitude. It's gonna >>Be a great day today. We'll see you at the end of the day. Yeah, >>Well, we'll hold him to it. All right, everyone hold 'em accountable. Very excited to start the day off with an internet, a legend as well as a cube og. We are joined this morning by Matt Klein. Matt, welcome to the show. >>Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Yep. >>It's so, what's the vibe? Day two, Everyone's buzzing. What's got you excited at the show? You've been here before, but it's been three years you >>Mentioned. I, I was saying it's been three years since I've been to a conference, so it's been interesting for me to see what is, what is the same and what is different pre and post covid. But just really great to see everyone here again and nice to not be sitting in my home by myself. >>You know, Savannah said you're an OG and we were referring before we came on camera that you were your first came on the Cub in 2017, second Cuban event. But you were, I think, on the first wave of what I call the contributor momentum, where CNCF really got the traction. Yeah. You were at Lift, Envoy was contributed and that was really hyped up and I remember that vividly. It was day zero they called it back then. Yeah. And you got so much traction. People are totally into it. Yeah. Now we've got a lot of that going on now. Right. A lot of, lot of day Zero events. They call 'em co, co-located events. You got web assembly, a lot of other hype out there. What do you see out there that you like? How would you look at some of these other Sure. Communities that are developing, What's the landscape look like as you look out? Because Envoy set the table, what is now a standard >>Practice. Yeah. What's been so interesting for me just to come here to the conference is, you know, we open source Envoy in 2016. We donated in 2017. And as you mentioned at that time, Envoy was, you know, everyone wanted to talk about Envoy. And you know, much to my amazement, Envoy is now pervasive. I mean, it's used everywhere around the world. It's like, never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that it would be so widely used. And it's almost gotten to the point where it's become boring. You know, It's just assumed that Envoy is, is everywhere. And now we're hearing a lot about Eeb p f and Web assembly and GI ops and you know, AI and a bunch of other things. So it's, it's actually great. It's made me very happy that it's become so pervasive, but it's also fun. Yeah. We mention to, to look around all other stuff >>Like congratulate. It's just a huge accomplishment really. I think it's gonna be historic, historical moment for the industry too. But I like how it progressed. I mean, I don't mind hype cycles as long as it's some vetting. Sure. Of course. You know, use cases that are clearly defined, but you gotta get that momentum in the community, but then you start gotta get down to, to business. Yep. So, so to speak and get it deployed, get traction. Yep. What should projects look like? And, and give us the update on Envoy. Cause you guys have a, a great use case of how you got traction. Right. Take us through some of the early days of what made Envoy successful in your opinion. Great question. >>Yeah. You know, I, I think Envoy is fairly unique around this conference in the sense that Envoy was developed by Lyft, which is an end user company. And many of the projects in this ecosystem, you know, no judgment, for better or worse, they are vendor backed. And I think that's a different delivery mechanism when it's coming from an end user where you're solving a, a particular business case. So Envoy was really developed for Lyft in a, you know, very early scaling days and just, you know, trying to help Lyft solve its business problems. So I think when Envoy was developed, we were, you know, scaling, we were falling over and actually many other companies were having similar problems. So I think Envoy became very widely deployed because many companies were having similar issues. So Envoy just became pervasive among lift peer companies. And then we saw a lot of vendor uptake in the service mesh space in the API gateway space among large internet providers. So, I I I, I think it's just, it's an interesting case because I think when you're solving real problems on the ground, in some ways it's easier to actually get adoption than if you're trying to develop it from a commercial backing. >>And that's the class, I mean, almost, It's almost like open source product market fit. It is in its own way. Cause you have a problem. Absolutely. Other people have the same problem finding >>Too. I mean, it's, it's designed thinking from >>A different, When, when I talk to people about open source, I like to tell people that I do not think it's any different than starting a company. I actually think it's all the same problems finding pro product, market fit, hiring, like finding contributors and maintainers, like doing PR and marketing. Yeah. Getting team together, traction, getting, getting funding. I mean, you have to have money to do all these things. Yeah. So I think a lot of people think of open source as I, I don't know, you know, this fantastic collaborative effort and, and it is that, but there's a lot more to it. Yeah. And it is much more akin to starting a >>Company. Let's, let's just look at that for a second. Cause I think that's a good point. And I was having a conversation in the hallway two nights ago on this exact point. If the power dynamics of a startup in the open source, as you point out, is just different, it's community based. So there are things you just gotta be mindful of. It's not top down. >>Exactly. It's not like, >>Right. You know, go take that hill. It's really consensus based, but it is a startup. All those elements are in place. Absolutely. You need leadership, you gotta have debates, alignment, commit, You gotta commit to a vision. Yep. You gotta make adjustments. Build the trajectory. So based on that, I mean, do you see more end user traction? Cause I was, we were talking also about Intuit, they donated some of their tow code R goes out there. Yep. R go see the CDR goes a service. Where's the end user contributions to these days? Do you feel like it's good, still healthy? >>I, I mean, I, I'm, I'm biased. I would like to see more. I think backstage outta Spotify is absolutely fantastic. That's an area just in terms of developer portals and developer efficiency that I think has been very underserved. So seeing Backstage come outta Spotify where they've used it for years, and I think we've already seen they had a huge date, you know, day one event. And I, I think we're gonna see a lot more out of that >>Coming from, I'm an end user, pretend I'm an end user, so pretend I have some code. I want to, Oh man, I'm scared. I don't am I'm gonna lose my competitive edge. What's the, how do you talk to the enterprise out there that might be thinking about putting their project out there for whether it's the benefit of the community, developing talent, developing the product? >>Sure. Yeah. I would say that I, I would ask everyone to think through all of the pros and cons of doing that because it's not for free. I mean, doing open source is costly. It takes developer time, you know, it takes management time, it takes budgeting dollars. But the benefits if successful can be huge, right? I mean, it can be just in terms of, you know, getting people into your company, getting users, getting more features, all of that. So I would always encourage everyone to take a very pragmatic and realistic view of, of what is required to make that happen. >>What was that decision like at Lyft >>When you I I'm gonna be honest, it was very naive. I I think we've, of that we think we need to know. No, just didn't know. Yeah. I think a lot of us, myself included, had very minimal open source experience. And had we known, or had I known what would've happened, I, I still would've done it. But I, I'm gonna be honest, the last seven years have aged me what I feel like is like 70 or a hundred. It's been a >>But you say you look out in the landscape, you gotta take pride, look at what's happened. Oh, it's, I mean, it's like you said, it >>Matured fantastic. I would not trade it for anything, but it has, it has been a journey. What >>Was the biggest surprise? What was the most eye opening thing about the journey for you? >>I, I think actually just the recognition of all of the non-technical things that go into making these things a success. I think at a conference like this, people think a lot about technology. It is a technology conference, but open source is business. It really is. I mean, it, it takes money to keep it going. It takes people to keep >>It going. You gotta sell people on the concepts. >>It takes leadership to keep it going. It takes internal, it takes marketing. Yeah. So for me, what was most eyeopening is over the last five to seven years, I feel like I actually have not developed very many, if any technical skills. But my general leadership skills, you know, that would be applicable again, to running a business have applied so well to, to >>Growing off, Hey, you put it out there, you hear driving the ship. It's good to do that. They need that. It really needs it. And the results speak for itself and congratulations. Yeah. Thank you. What's the update on the project? Give us an update because you're seeing, seeing a lot of infrastructure people having the same problem. Sure. But it's also, the environments are a little bit different. Some people have different architectures. Absolutely different, more cloud, less cloud edges exploding. Yeah. Where does Envoy fit into the landscape they've seen and what's the updates? You've got some new things going on. Give the updates on what's going on with the project Sure. And then how it sits in the ecosystem vis-a-vis what people may use it for. >>Yeah. So I'm, from a core project perspective, honestly, things have matured. Things have stabilized a bit. So a lot of what we focus on now are less Big bang features, but more table stakes. We spend a lot of time on security. We spend a lot of time on software supply chain. A topic that you're probably hearing a lot about at this conference. We have a lot of software supply chain issues. We have shipped Quicken HTB three over the last year. That's generally available. That's a new internet protocol still work happening on web assembly where ha doing a lot of work on our build and release pipeline. Again, you would think that's boring. Yeah. But a lot of people want, you know, packages for their fedora or their ADU or their Docker images. And that takes a lot of effort. So a lot of what we're doing now is more table stakes, just realizing that the project is used around the world very widely. >>Yeah. The thing that I'm most interested in is, we announced in the last six months a project called Envoy Gateway, which is layered on top of Envoy. And the goal of Envoy Gateway is to make it easier for people to run Envoy within Kubernetes. So essentially as an, as an ingress controller. And Envoy is a project historically, it is a very sophisticated piece of software, very complicated piece of software. It's not for everyone. And we want to provide Envoy Gateway as a way of onboarding more users into the Envoy ecosystem and making Envoy the, the default API gateway or edge proxy within Kubernetes. But in terms of use cases, we see Envoy pervasively with service mesh, API gateway, other types of low balancing cases. I mean, honestly, it's, it's all over the place at >>This point. I'm curious because you mentioned it's expanded beyond your wildest dreams. Yeah. And how could you have even imagined what Envoy was gonna do? Is there a use case or an application that really surprised you? >>You know, I've been asked that before and I, it's hard for me to answer that. It's, it's more that, I mean, for example, Envoy is used by basically every major internet company in China. I mean, like, wow. Everyone in China uses Envoy, like TikTok, like Alibaba. I mean like everyone, all >>The large sale, >>Everyone. You know, and it's used, it's used in the, I'm just, it's not just even the us. So I, I think the thing that has surprised me more than individual use cases is just the, the worldwide adoption. You know, that something could be be everywhere. And that I think, you know, when I open my phone and I'm opening all of these apps on my phone, 80 or 90% of them are going through Envoy in some form. Yeah. You know, it's, it's just that pervasive, I blow your mind a little bit sometimes >>That does, that's why you say plumber on your Twitter handle as your title. Cause you're working on all these things that are like really important substrate issues, Right. For scale, stability, growth. >>And, you know, to, I, I guess the only thing that I would add is, my goal for Envoy has always been that it is that boring, transparent piece of technology. Kind of similar to Linux. Linux is everywhere. Right? But no one really knows that they're using Linux. It's, it's justs like Intel inside, we're not paying attention. It's just there, there's >>A core group working on, if they have pride, they understand the mission, the importance of it, and they make their job is to make it invisible. >>Right. Exactly. >>And that's really ease of use. What's some of the ease of use sways and, and simplicity that you're working on, if you can talk about that. Because to be boring, you gotta be simpler and easier. All boring complex is unique is not boring. Complex is stressful. No, >>I I think we approach it in a couple different ways. One of them is that because we view Envoy as a, as a base technology in the ecosystem, we're starting to see, you know, not only vendors, but other open source projects that are being built on top of Envoy. So things like API Gateway, sorry, Envoy Gateway or you know, projects like Istio or all the other projects that are out there. They use Envoy as a component, but in some sense Envoy is a, as a transparent piece of that system. Yeah. So I'm a big believer in the ecosystem that we need to continue to make cloud native easier for, for end users. I still think it's too complicated. And so I think we're there, we're, we're pushing up the stack a bit. >>Yeah. And that brings up a good point. When you start seeing people building on top of things, right? That's enabling. So as you look at the enablement of Envoy, what are some of the things you see out on the horizon if you got the 20 mile stare out as you check these boring boxes, make it more plumbing, Right? Stable. You'll have a disruptive enabling platform. Yeah. What do you see out there? >>I am, you know, I, again, I'm not a big buzzword person, but, so some people call it serverless functions as a service, whatever. I'm a big believer in platforms in the sense that I really believe in the next 10 to 15 years, developers, they want to provide code. You know, they want to call APIs, they want to use pub subsystems, they want to use cas and databases. And honestly, they don't care about container scheduling or networking or load balancing or any of >>These things. It's handled in the os >>They just want it to be part of the operating system. Yeah, exactly. So I, I really believe that whether it's an open source or in cloud provider, you know, package solutions, that we're going to be just moving increasingly towards systems likes Lambda and Fargate and Google Cloud Run and Azure functions and all those kinds of things. And I think that when you do that much of the functionality that has historically powered this conference like Kubernetes and Onvoy, these become critical but transparent components that people don't, they're not really aware of >>At that point. Yeah. And I think that's a great call out because one of the things we're seeing is the market forces of, of this evolution, what you just said is what has to happen Yep. For digital transformation to, to get to its conclusion. Yep. Which means that everything doesn't have to serve the business, it is the business. Right. You know it in the old days. Yep. Engineers, they serve the business. Like what does that even mean? Yep. Now, right. Developers are the business, so they need that coding environment. So for your statement to happen, that simplicity in visibility calling is invisible os has to happen. So it brings up the question in open source, the trend is things always work itself out on the wash, as we say. So when you start having these debates and the alignment has to come at some point, you can't get to those that stay without some sort of defacto or consensus. Yep. And even standards, I'm not a big be around hardcore standards, but we can all agree and have consensus Sure. That will align behind, say Kubernetes, It's Kubernetes a standard. It's not like an i e you know, but this next, what, what's your reaction to this? Because this alignment has to come after debate. So all the process contending for I am the this of that. >>Yeah. I'm a look, I mean, I totally see the value in like i e e standards and, and there's a place for that. At the same time, for me personally as a technologist, as an engineer, I prefer to let the, the market as it were sort out what are the defacto standards. So for example, at least with Envoy, Envoy has an API that we call Xds. Xds is now used beyond Envoy. It's used by gc, it's used by proprietary systems. And I'm a big believer that actually Envoy in its form is probably gonna go away before Xds goes away. So in some ways Xds has become a defacto standard. It's not an i e e standard. Yeah. We, we, we have been asked about whether we should do that. Yeah. But I just, I I think the >>It becomes a component. >>It becomes a component. Yeah. And then I think people gravitate towards these things that become de facto standards. And I guess I would rather let the people on the show floor decide what are the standards than have, you know, 10 people sitting in a room figure out >>The community define standards versus organizational institutional defined standards. >>And they both have places a >>Hundred percent. Yeah, sure. And, and there's social proof in both of them. Yep. >>Frankly, >>And we were saying on the cube that we believe that the developers will decide the standard. Sure. Because that's what you're basically saying. They're deciding what they do with their code. Right. And over time, as people realize the trade of, hey, if everyone's coding this right. And makes my life easier to get to that state of nirvana and enlightenment, as we would say. Yeah. Yeah. >>Starting strong this morning. John, I I love this. I'm curious, you mentioned Backstage by Spotify wonderful example. Do you think that this is a trend we're gonna see with more end users >>Creating open source projects? Like I, you know, I hope so. The flip side of that, and as we all know, we're entering an uncertain economic time and it can be hard to justify the effort that it takes to do it well. And what I typically counsel people when they are about to open source something is don't do it unless you're ready to commit the resources. Because opensourcing something and not supporting it. Yeah. I actually can be think, I think it'd be worse. >>It's an, it's insult that people, you're asking to commit to something. Exactly. Needs of time, need the money investment, you gotta go all in and push. >>So I, so I very much want to see it and, and I want to encourage that here, but it's hard for me to look into the crystal ball and know, you know, whether it's gonna happen more >>Or less at what point there were, are there too many projects? You know, I mean, but I'm not, I mean this in, in a, in a negative way. I mean it more in the way of, you know, you mentioned supply chain. We were riffing on the cube about at some point there's gonna be so much code open source continuing thundering away with, with the value that you're just gluing things. Right. I don't need the code, this code there. Okay. What's in the code? Okay. Maybe automation can help out on supply chain. Yeah. But ultimately composability is the new >>Right? It is. Yeah. And, and I think that's always going to be the case. Case. Good thing. It is good thing. And I, I think that's just, that's just the way of things for sure. >>So no code will be, >>I think, I think we're seeing a lot of no code situations that are working great for people. And, and, but this is actually really no different than my, than my serverless arguing from before. Just as a, as a, a slight digression. I'm building something new right now and you know, we're using cloud native technologies and all this stuff and it's still, >>What are you building? >>Even as a I'm, I'm gonna keep that, I'm gonna keep that secret. I know I'm, but >>We'll find out on Twitter. We're gonna find out now that we know it. Okay. Keep on mystery. You open that door. We're going down see in a couple weeks. >>Front >>Page is still an angle. >>But I, I was just gonna say that, you know, and I consider myself, you know, you're building something, I'm, I see myself an expert in the cloud native space. It's still difficult, It's difficult to, to pull together these technologies and I think that we will continue to make it easier for people. >>What's the biggest difficulties? Can you give us some examples? >>Well, just, I mean, we still live in a big mess of yammel, right? Is a, there's a, there's a lot of yaml out there. And I think just wrangling all of that in these systems, there's still a lot of cobbling together where I think that there can be unified platforms that make it easier for us to focus on our application logic. >>Yeah. I gotta ask you a question cuz I've talked to college kids all the time. My son's a junior in CS and he's, you know, he's coding away. What would you, how does a student or someone who's learning figure out where, who they are? Because there's now, you know, you're either into the infrastructure under the hood Yeah. Or you're, cuz that's coding there option now coding the way your infrastructure people are working on say the boring stuff so everyone else can have ease of use. And then what is just, I wanna just code, there's two types of personas. How does someone know who they are? >>My, when I give people career advice, my biggest piece of advice to them is in the first five to seven to 10 years of their career, I encourage people to do different things like every say one to two to three years. And that doesn't mean like quitting companies and changing companies, it could mean, you know, within a company that they join doing different teams, you know, working on front end versus back end. Because honestly I think people don't know. I think it's actually very, Yeah. Our industry is so broad. Yeah. That I think it's almost impossible to >>Know. You gotta get your hands dirty to jump >>In order to know what you like. And for me, in my career, you know, I've dabbled in different areas, but I've always come back to infrastructure, you know, that that's what I enjoy >>The most. Okay. You gotta, you gotta taste everything. See what you, what >>You like. Exactly. >>Right. Last question for you, Matt. It's been three years since you were here. Yep. What do you hope that we're able to say next year? That we can't say this year? Hmm. Beyond the secrets of your project, which hopefully we will definitely be discussing then. >>You know, I I, I don't have anything in particular. I would just say that I would like to see more movement towards projects that are synthesizing and making it easier to use a lot of the existing projects that we have today. So for example, I'm, I'm very bullish on backstage. Like I, I've, I've always said that we need better developer UIs that are not CLIs. Like I know it's a general perception among many people. Totally agree with you. Frankly, you're not a real systems engineer unless you type on the command line. I, I think better user interfaces are better for humans. Yep. So just for a project like Backstage to be more integrated with the rest of the projects, whether that be Envo or Kubernete or Argo or Flagger. I, I just, I think there's tremendous potential for further integration of some >>Of these projects. It just composability That makes total sense. Yep. Yep. You're, you're op you're operating and composing. >>Yep. And there's no reason that user experience can't be better. And then more people can create and build. So I think it's awesome. Matt, thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, this has been fantastic. Be sure and check out Matt on Twitter to find out what that next secret project is. John, thank you for joining me this morning. My name is Savannah Peterson and we'll be here all day live from the cube. We hope you'll be joining us throughout the evening until a happy hour today. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. Thanks for watching.

>>Hi, welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John fur, host of the cube here at our headquarters on the west coast in Palo Alto, California. Got a great news guest here. Matt McGill, Wayne managing director of Madrona venture group is here with me on the big news and drone raising their record 690 million fund and partnering with their innovative founders. Matt, thanks for coming on and, and talking about the news and congratulations on the dry powder. >>Well, Hey, thanks so much, John. Appreciate you having me on the show. >>Well, great news here. Oley validation. We're in a new market. Everyone's talking about the new normal, we're talking about a recession inflation, but yet we've been reporting that this is kind of the first generation that cloud hyperscale economic scale and technical benefits have kind of hit any kind of economic downturn. If you go back to to 2008, our last downturn, the cloud really hasn't hit that tipping point. Now the innovation, as we've been reporting with our startup showcases and looking at the results from the hyperscalers, this funding news is kind of validation that the tech society intersection is working. You guys just get to the news 430 million in the Madrona fund nine and 200. And I think 60 million acceleration fund three, which means you're gonna go stay with your roots with seed early stage and then have some rocket fuel for kind of the accelerated expansion growth side of it. Not like late stage growth, but like scaling growth. This is kind of the news. Is that right? >>That's right. You know, we, we've had a long time strategy over 25 years here in Seattle of being early, early stage. You know, it's like our friends at Amazon like to say is, well, we're there at day one and we wanna help build companies for the long run for over 25 years. We've been doing that in Seattle. And I think one of the things we've realized, I mean, this is, these funds are the largest funds ever raised by a Seattle based venture capital firm and that's notable in and of itself. But we think that's the reason is because Seattle has continued to innovate in areas like consumer internet software cloud, of course, where the cloud capital of the world and increasingly the applications of machine learning. And so with all that combination, we believe there's a ton more companies to be built here in the Pacific Northwest and in Seattle in particular. And then through our acceleration fund where we're investing in companies anywhere in the country, in fact, anywhere in the world, those are the kinds of companies that want to have the Seattle point of view. They don't understand how to work with Amazon and AWS. They don't understand how to work with Microsoft and we have some unique relationships in those places and we think we can help them succeed in doing that. >>You know, it's notable that you guys in particular have been very close with Jeff Bayo Andy Jesse, and the success of ABUS as well as Microsoft. So, you know, Seattle has become cloud city. Everyone kind of knows that from a cloud perspective, obviously Microsoft's roots have been there for a long, long time. You go back, I mean, August capital, early days, funding Microsoft. You remember those days not to date myself, but you know, Microsoft kind of went up there and kind of established it a Amazon there as well. Now you got Google here, you got Facebook in the valley. You guys are now also coming down. This funding comes on the heels of you appointing a new managing director here in Palo Alto. This is now the migration of Madrona coming into the valley. Is that right? Is that what we're seeing? >>Well, I think what we're trying to do is bring the things that we know uniquely from Seattle and the companies here down to Silicon valley. We've got a terrific partner in Karama Hend, Andrew he's somebody that we have worked together with over the years, co-investing in companies. So we knew him really well. It was a bit opportunistic for us, but what we're hearing over and over again is a lot of these companies based in the valley, based in other parts of the country, they don't know really how to best work with the Microsoft and Amazons are understand the services that they offer. And, you know, we have that capability. We have those relationships. We wanna bring that to bear and helping build great companies. >>What is your expectation on the Silicon valley presence here? You can kind of give a hint here kind of a gateway to Seattle, but you got a lot of developers here. We just reported this morning that MEA just open source pie, torch to the Linux foundation again, and Mary material kind of trend we are seeing open source now has become there's no debate anymore has become the software industry. There's no more issue around that. This is real. I >>Think that's right. I mean, you know, once, you know, Satya became CEO, Microsoft, and they started embracing open source, you know, that was gonna be the last big tech holdout. We think open source is very interesting in terms of what it can produce and create in terms of next generation, innovative innovation. It's great to see companies like Facebook like Uber and others that have had a long track record of open source capabilities. But what we're also seeing is you need to build businesses around that, that a lot of enterprises don't wanna buy just the open source and stitch it together themselves. They want somebody to do it with them. And whether that's the way that, you know, companies like MongoDB have built that out over time or that's, you know, or elastic or, you know, companies like opt ML and our portfolio, or even the big cloud, you know, hyperscalers, you know, they are increasingly embracing open source and building finished services, managed services on top of it. So that's a big wave that we've been investing in for a number of years now and are highly confident gonna >>Continue. You know, I've been a big fan of Pacific Northwest for a while. You know, love going up there and talking to the folks at Microsoft and Amazon and AWS, but there's been a big trend in venture capital where a lot of the, the later stage folks, including private equity have come in, you seen tiger global even tiger global alumni, that the Cubs they call them, you know, they're coming down and playing in the early state and the results haven't been that good. You guys have had a track record in your success. Again, a hundred percent of your institutional investors have honed up with you on this two fund strategy of close to 700 million. What's this formula says, why aren't they winning what's is it, they don't have the ecosystem? Is it they're spraying and praying without a lot of discipline? What's the dynamic between the folks like Madrona, the Neas of the world who kind of come in and Sequoia who kind of do it right, right. Come in. And they get it done in the right way. The early stage. I just say the private equity folks, >>You know, I think that early stage venture is a local business. It is a geographically proximate business when you're helping incredible founders, try to really dial in that early founder market fit. This is before you even get to product market fit. And, and so the, the team building that goes on the talking to potential customers, the ITER iterating on business strategy, this is a roll up your sleeves kind of thing. It's not a financial transaction. And so what you're trying to do is have a presence and an understanding, a prepared mind of one of the big themes and the kinds of founders that with, you know, our encouragement and our help can go build lasting companies. Now, when you get to a, a, a later stage, you know, you get to that growth stage. It is generally more of a financial, you know, kind of engineering sort of proposition. And there's some folks that are great at that. What we do is we support these companies all the way through. We reserve enough capital to be with them at the seed stage, the series B stage the, you know, the crossover round before you go public, all of those sorts of things. And we love partnering with some of these other people, but there's a lot of heavy lifting at the early, early stages of a business. And it's, it's not, I think a model that everybody's architected to do >>Well, you know, trust becomes a big factor in all this. You kind of, when you talk about like that, I hear you speaking. It makes me think of like trusted advisor meets money, not so much telling people what to do. You guys have had a good track record and, and being added value, not values from track. And sometimes that values from track is getting in the way of the entrepreneur by, you know, running the certain meetings, driving board meetings and driving the agenda that you see to see that trend where people try too hard and that a force function, the entrepreneur we're living in a world now where everyone's talking to each other, you got, you know, there's no more glass door it's everyone's on Twitter, right? So you can see some move, someone trying to control the supply chain of talent by term sheet, overvaluing them. >>You guys are, have a different strategy. You guys have a network I've noticed that Madrona has attracted them high end talent coming outta Microsoft outta AWS season, season, senior talent. I won't say, you know, senior citizens, but you know, people have done things scaled up businesses, as well as attract young talent. Can you share with our audience that dynamic of the, the seasoned veterans, the systems thinkers, the ones who have been there done that built software, built teams to the new young entrepreneurs coming in, what's the dynamic, like, how do you guys look at at those networks? How do you nurture them? Could you share your, your strategy on how you're gonna pull all this together, going forward? >>You know, we, we think a lot about building the innovation ecosystem, like a phrase around here that you hear a lot is the bigger pie theory. How do we build the bigger pie? If we're focusing on building the bigger pie, there'll be plenty of that pie for Madrona Madrona companies. And in that mindset says, okay, how are we gonna invest in the innovation ecosystem? And then actually to use a term, you know, one of our founders who unfortunately passed away this year, Tom Aber, he had just written a book called flywheel. And I think it embodies this mindset that we have of how do you create that flywheel within a community? And of course, interestingly enough, I think Tom both learned and contributed to that. He was on the board of Amazon for almost 20 years in helping build some of the flywheels at Amazon. >>So that's what we carry forward. And we know that there's a lot of value in experiential learning. And so we've been fortunate to have some folks, you know, that have worked at some of those, you know, kind iconic companies, join us and find that they really love this company building journey. We've also got some terrific younger folks that have, you know, some very fresh perspectives and a lot of, a lot of creativity. And they're bringing that together with our team overall. And you know, what we really are trying to do at the end of the day is find incredible founders who wanna build something lasting, insignificant, and provide our kind of our time, our best ideas, our, our perspective. And of course our capital to help them be >>Successful. I love the ecosystem play. I think that's a human capital game too. I like the way you guys are thinking about that. I do wanna get your reaction, cause I know you're close to Amazon and Microsoft, but mainly Jeff Bezos as well. You mentioned your, your partner who passed away was on the board. A lot of great props on and tributes online. I saw that, I know I didn't know him at all. So I really can't comment, but I did notice that Bezos and, and jazz in particular were complimentary. And recently I just saw Bezos comment on Twitter about the, you know, the Lord of the rings movie. They're putting out the series and he says, you gotta have a team. That's kinda like rebels. I'm paraphrasing, cuz these folks never done a movie like this before. So they're, they're getting good props and reviews in this new world order where entrepreneurs gotta do things different. >>What's the one thing that you think entrepreneurs need to do different to make this next startup journey different and successful because the world is different. There's not a lot of press to relate to Andy Jassey even on stage last week in, in, in LA was kind of, he's not really revealing. He's on his talking points, message, the press aren't out there and big numbers anymore. And you got a lot of different go-to market strategies, omnichannel, social different ways to communicate to customers. Yeah. So product market fit is becomes big. So how do you see this new flywheel emerging for those entrepreneurs have to go out there, roll up their sleeves and make it happen. And what kind of resources do you think they need to be successful? What are you guys advocating? >>Well, you know, what's really interesting about that question is I've heard Jeff say many times that when people ask him, what's gotta be different. He, he reminds them to think about what's not gonna change. And he usually starts to then talk about things like price, convenience, and selection. Customer's never gonna want a higher price, less convenience, smaller selection. And so when you build on some of those principles of, what's not gonna change, it's easier for you to understand what could be changing as it relates to the differences. One of the biggest differences, I don't think any of us have fully figured out yet is what does it mean to be productive in a hybrid work mode? We happen to believe that it's still gonna have a kernel of people that are geographically close, that are part of the founding and building in the early stages of a company. >>And, and it's an and equation that they're going to also have people that are distributed around the country, perhaps around the world that are some of the best talent that they attract to their team. The other thing that I think coming back to what remains the same is being hyper focused on a certain customer and a certain problem that you're passionate about solving. And that's really what we look for when we look for this founder market fit. And it can be a lot of different things from the next generation water bottle to a better way to handle deep learning models and get 'em deployed in the cloud. If you've got that passion and you've got some inkling of the skill of how to build a better solution, that's never gonna go away. That's gonna be enduring, but exactly how you do that as a team in a hybrid world, I think that's gonna be different. >>Yeah. One thing that's not changing is that your investor, makeup's not changing a hundred percent of your existing institutional investors have signed back on with you guys and your oversubscribed, lot of demand. What is your flywheel success formula? Why is Tron is so successful? Can you share some feedback from your investors? What are they saying? Why are they re-upping share some inside baseball or anecdotal praise? >>Well, I think it's very kind to you to frame it that way. I mean, you know, it does for investors come back to performance. You know, these are university endowments and foundations that have a responsibility to, to generate great returns. And we understand that and we're very aligned with that. I think to be specific in the last couple years, they appreciated that we were also not holding onto our, our stocks forever, that we actually made some thoughtful decisions to sell some shares of companies like Smartsheet and snowflake and accolade in others, and actually distribute capital back to them when things were looking really, really good. But I think the thing, other thing that's very important here is that we've created a flywheel with our core strategy being Seattle based and then going out from there to try to find the best founders, build great companies with them, roll up our sleeves in a productive way and help them for the long term, which now leads to multiple generations of people, you know, at those companies. And beyond that we wanna be, you know, partner with and back again. And so you create this flywheel by having success with people in doing it in a respectful. And as you said earlier, a trusted way, >>What's the message for the Silicon valley crowd, obviously bay area, Silicon valley, Palo Alto office, and the center of it. Obviously you got them hybrid workforce hybrid venture model developing what's the goals. What's the message for Silicon valley? >>Well, our message for folks in Silicon valley is the same. It's always been, we we're excited to partner with them largely up here again, cause this is still our home base, but there'll be a, you know, select number of opportunities where we'll get a chance to partner together down in Silicon valley. And we think we bring something different with that deep understanding of cloud computing, that deep understanding of applied machine learning. And of course, some of our unique relationships up here that can be additive to what the they've already done. And some of them are just great partners and have built, you know, help build some really incredible companies over >>The years. Matt, I really appreciate you taking the time for this interview, given them big news. I guess the question on everyone's mind, certainly the entrepreneur's mind is how do I get some of that cash you have and put it into work for my opportunity. One what's the investment thesis can take a minute to put the plug in for the firm. What are you looking to invest in? What's the thesis? What kind of entrepreneurs you're looking for? I know fund one is seed fund nine is seed to, to a and B and the second one is beyond B and beyond for growth. What's the pitch. What's the pitch. >>Yeah. Well you can, you can think of us as you know, any stage from pre-seed to series seed. You know, we'll make a new investment in companies in all of those stages. You know, I think that, you know, the, the core pitch, you know, to us is, you know, your passion for the, for the problem that you're trying to, trying to get solved. And we're of course, very excited about that. And you know, at, at, at the end of the day, you know, if you want somebody that has a distinct point of view on the market that is based up here and can roll up their sleeves and work alongside you. We're, we're, we're the ones that are more than happy to do that. Proven track record of doing that for 25 plus years. And there's so much innovation ahead. There's so many opportunities to disrupt to pioneer, and we're excited to be a part of working with great founders to do that. >>Well, great stuff. We'll see you ATS reinvent coming up shortly and your annual get together. You always have your crew down there and, and team engaging with some of the cloud players as well. And looking forward to seeing how the Palo Alto team expands out. And Matt, thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks very much, John. Appreciate you having me look forward to seeing you at reinvent. >>Okay. Matt, Matt here with Madrona venture group, he's the partner managing partner Madrona group raises 690 million to fund nine and, and, and again, and big funds for accelerated growth fund. Three lot of dry powder. Again, entrepreneurship in technology is scaling. It's not going down. It's continuing to accelerate into this next generation super cloud multi-cloud hybrid cloud world steady state. This is the cubes coverage. I'm John for Silicon angle and host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to The Cube. We are covering VMware Explore live in San Francisco. This is our third day of wall to wall coverage. And John Furrier is here with me, Lisa Martin. We are excited to welcome two guests from Kasten by Veeam, please welcome Tom Laden, VP of marketing and Matt LeBlanc, not Joey from friends, Matt LeBlanc, the systems engineer from North America at Kasten by Veeam. Welcome guys, great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Tom-- >> Great, go ahead. >> Oh, I was going to say, Tom, talk to us about some of the key challenges customers are coming to you with. >> Key challenges that they have at this point is getting up to speed with Kubernetes. So everybody has it on their list. We want to do Kubernetes, but where are they going to start? Back when VMware came on the market, I was switching from Windows to Mac and I needed to run a Windows application on my Mac and someone told me, "Run a VM." Went to the internet, I downloaded it. And in a half hour I was done. That's not how it works with Kubernetes. So that's a bit of a challenge. >> I mean, Kubernetes, Lisa, remember the early days of The Cube Open Stack was kind of transitioning, Cloud was booming and then Kubernetes was the paper that became the thing that pulled everybody together. It's now de facto in my mind. So that's clear, but there's a lot of different versions of it and you hear VMware, they call it the dial tone. Usually, remember, Pat Gelter, it's a dial tone. Turns out that came from Kit Colbert or no, I think AJ kind of coined the term here, but it's since been there, it's been adopted by everyone. There's different versions. It's open source. AWS is involved. How do you guys look at the relationship with Kubernetes here and VMware Explore with Kubernetes and the customers because they have choices. They can go do it on their own. They can add a little bit with Lambda, Serverless. They can do more here. It's not easy. It's not as easy as people think it is. And then this is a skill gaps problem too. We're seeing a lot of these problems out there. What's your take? >> I'll let Matt talk to that. But what I want to say first is this is also the power of the cloud native ecosystem. The days are gone where companies were selecting one enterprise application and they were building their stack with that. Today they're building applications using dozens, if not hundreds of different components from different vendors or open source platforms. And that is really what creates opportunities for those cloud native developers. So maybe you want to... >> Yeah, we're seeing a lot of hybrid solutions out there. So it's not just choosing one vendor, AKS, EKS, or Tanzu. We're seeing all the above. I had a call this morning with a large healthcare provider and they have a hundred clusters and that's spread across AKS, EKS and GKE. So it is covering everything. Plus the need to have a on-prem solution manage it all. >> I got a stat, I got to share that I want to get your reactions and you can laugh or comment, whatever you want to say. Talk to big CSO, CXO, executive, big company, I won't say the name. We got a thousand developers, a hundred of them have heard of Kubernetes, okay. 10 have touched it and used it and one's good at it. And so his point is that there's a lot of Kubernetes need that people are getting aware. So it shows that there's more and more adoption around. You see a lot of managed services out there. So it's clear it's happening and I'm over exaggerating the ratio probably. But the point is the numbers kind of make sense as a thousand developers. You start to see people getting adoption to it. They're aware of the value, but being good at it is what we're hearing is one of those things. Can you guys share your reaction to that? Is that, I mean, it's hyperbole at some level, but it does point to the fact of adoption trends. You got to get good at it, you got to know how to use it. >> It's very accurate, actually. It's what we're seeing in the market. We've been doing some research of our own, and we have some interesting numbers that we're going to be sharing soon. Analysts don't have a whole lot of numbers these days. So where we're trying to run our own surveys to get a grasp of the market. One simple survey or research element that I've done myself is I used Google trends. And in Google trends, if you go back to 2004 and you compare VMware against Kubernetes, you get a very interesting graph. What you're going to see is that VMware, the adoption curve is practically complete and Kubernetes is clearly taking off. And the volume of searches for Kubernetes today is almost as big as VMware. So that's a big sign that this is starting to happen. But in this process, we have to get those companies to have all of their engineers to be up to speed on Kubernetes. And that's one of the community efforts that we're helping with. We built a website called learning.kasten.io We're going to rebrand it soon at CubeCon, so stay tuned, but we're offering hands on labs there for people to actually come learn Kubernetes with us. Because for us, the faster the adoption goes, the better for our business. >> I was just going to ask you about the learning. So there's a big focus here on educating customers to help dial down the complexity and really get them, these numbers up as John was mentioning. >> And we're really breaking it down to the very beginning. So at this point we have almost 10 labs as we call them up and they start really from install a Kubernetes Cluster and people really hands on are going to install a Kubernetes Cluster. They learn to build an application. They learn obviously to back up the application in the safest way. And then there is how to tune storage, how to implement security, and we're really building it up so that people can step by step in a hands on way learn Kubernetes. >> It's interesting, this VMware Explore, their first new name change, but VMWorld prior, big community, a lot of customers, loyal customers, but they're classic and they're foundational in enterprises and let's face it. Some of 'em aren't going to rip out VMware anytime soon because the workloads are running on it. So in Broadcom we'll have some good action to maybe increase prices or whatnot. So we'll see how that goes. But the personas here are definitely going cloud native. They did with Tanzu, was a great thing. Some stuff was coming off, the fruit's coming off the tree now, you're starting to see it. CNCF has been on this for a long, long time, CubeCon's coming up in Detroit. And so that's just always been great, 'cause you had the day zero event and you got all kinds of community activity, tons of developer action. So here they're talking, let's connect to the developer. There the developers are at CubeCon. So the personas are kind of connecting or overlapping. I'd love to get your thoughts, Matt on? >> So from the personnel that we're talking to, there really is a split between the traditional IT ops and a lot of the people that are here today at VMWare Explore, but we're also talking with the SREs and the dev ops folks. What really needs to happen is we need to get a little bit more experience, some more training and we need to get these two groups to really start to coordinate and work together 'cause you're basically moving from that traditional on-prem environment to a lot of these traditional workloads and the only way to get that experience is to get your hands dirty. >> Right. >> So how would you describe the persona specifically here versus say CubeCon? IT ops? >> Very, very different, well-- >> They still go ahead. Explain. >> Well, I mean, from this perspective, this is all about VMware and everything that they have to offer. So we're dealing with a lot of administrators from that regard. On the Kubernetes side, we have site reliability engineers and their goal is exactly as their title describes. They want to architect arch applications that are very resilient and reliable and it is a different way of working. >> I was on a Twitter spaces about SREs and dev ops and there was people saying their title's called dev ops. Like, no, no, you do dev ops, you don't really, you're not the dev ops person-- >> Right, right. >> But they become the dev ops person because you're the developer running operations. So it's been weird how dev ops been co-opted as a position. >> And that is really interesting. One person told me earlier when I started Kasten, we have this new persona. It's the dev ops person. That is the person that we're going after. But then talking to a few other people who were like, "They're not falling from space." It's people who used to do other jobs who now have a more dev ops approach to what they're doing. It's not a new-- >> And then the SRE conversation was in site, reliable engineer comes from Google, from one person managing multiple clusters to how that's evolved into being the dev ops. So it's been interesting and this is really the growth of scale, the 10X developer going to more of the cloud native, which is okay, you got to run ops and make the developer go faster. If you look at the stuff we've been covering on The Cube, the trends have been cloud native developers, which I call dev ops like developers. They want to go faster. They want self-service and they don't want to slow down. They don't want to deal with BS, which is go checking security code, wait for the ops team to do something. So data and security seem to be the new ops. Not so much IT ops 'cause that's now cloud. So how do you guys see that in, because Kubernetes is rationalizing this, certainly on the compute side, not so much on storage yet but it seems to be making things better in that grinding area between dev and these complicated ops areas like security data, where it's constantly changing. What do you think about that? >> Well there are still a lot of specialty folks in that area in regards to security operations. The whole idea is be able to script and automate as much as possible and not have to create a ticket to request a VM to be billed or an operating system or an application deployed. They're really empowered to automatically deploy those applications and keep them up. >> And that was the old dev ops role or person. That was what dev ops was called. So again, that is standard. I think at CubeCon, that is something that's expected. >> Yes. >> You would agree with that. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So now translating VM World, VMware Explore to CubeCon, what do you guys see as happening between now and then? Obviously got re:Invent right at the end in that first week of December coming. So that's going to be two major shows coming in now back to back that're going to be super interesting for this ecosystem. >> Quite frankly, if you compare the persona, maybe you have to step away from comparing the personas, but really compare the conversations that we're having. The conversations that you're having at a CubeCon are really deep dives. We will have people coming into our booth and taking 45 minutes, one hour of the time of the people who are supposed to do 10 minute demos because they're asking more and more questions 'cause they want to know every little detail, how things work. The conversations here are more like, why should I learn Kubernetes? Why should I start using Kubernetes? So it's really early day. Now, I'm not saying that in a bad way. This is really exciting 'cause when you hear CNCF say that 97% of enterprises are using Kubernetes, that's obviously that small part of their world. Those are their members. We now want to see that grow to the entire ecosystem, the larger ecosystem. >> Well, it's actually a great thing, actually. It's not a bad thing, but I will counter that by saying I am hearing the conversation here, you guys'll like this on the Veeam side, the other side of the Veeam, there's deep dives on ransomware and air gap and configuration errors on backup and recovery and it's all about Veeam on the other side. Those are the guys here talking deep dive on, making sure that they don't get screwed up on ransomware, not Kubernete, but they're going to Kub, but they're now leaning into Kubernetes. They're crossing into the new era because that's the apps'll end up writing the code for that. >> So the funny part is all of those concepts, ransomware and recovery, they're all, there are similar concepts in the world of Kubernetes and both on the Veeam side as well as the Kasten side, we are supporting a lot of those air gap solutions and providing a ransomware recovery solution and from a air gap perspective, there are a many use cases where you do need to live. It's not just the government entity, but we have customers that are cruise lines in Europe, for example, and they're disconnected. So they need to live in that disconnected world or military as well. >> Well, let's talk about the adoption of customers. I mean this is the customer side. What's accelerating their, what's the conversation with the customer at base, not just here but in the industry with Kubernetes, how would you guys categorize that? And how does that get accelerated? What's the customer situation? >> A big drive to Kubernetes is really about the automation, self-service and reliability. We're seeing the drive to and reduction of resources, being able to do more with less, right? This is ongoing the way it's always been. But I was talking to a large university in Western Canada and they're a huge Veeam customer worth 7000 VMs and three months ago, they said, "Over the next few years, we plan on moving all those workloads to Kubernetes." And the reason for it is really to reduce their workload, both from administration side, cost perspective as well as on-prem resources as well. So there's a lot of good business reasons to do that in addition to the technical reliability concerns. >> So what is those specific reasons? This is where now you start to see the rubber hit the road on acceleration. >> So I would say scale and flexibility that ecosystem, that opportunity to choose any application from that or any tool from that cloud native ecosystem is a big driver. I wanted to add to the adoption. Another area where I see a lot of interest is everything AI, machine learning. One example is also a customer coming from Veeam. We're seeing a lot of that and that's a great thing. It's an AI company that is doing software for automated driving. They decided that VMs alone were not going to be good enough for all of their workloads. And then for select workloads, the more scalable one where scalability was more of a topic, would move to Kubernetes. I think at this point they have like 20% of their workloads on Kubernetes and they're not planning to do away with VMs. VMs are always going to be there just like mainframes still exist. >> Yeah, oh yeah. They're accelerating actually. >> We're projecting over the next few years that we're going to go to a 50/50 and eventually lean towards more Kubernetes than VMs, but it was going to be a mix. >> Do you have a favorite customer example, Tom, that you think really articulates the value of what Kubernetes can deliver to customers where you guys are really coming in and help to demystify it? >> I would think SuperStereo is a really great example and you know the details about it. >> I love the SuperStereo story. They were a AWS customer and they're running OpenShift version three and they need to move to OpenShift version four. There is no upgrade in place. You have to migrate all your apps. Now SuperStereo is a large French IT firm. They have over 700 developers in their environment and it was by their estimation that this was going to take a few months to get that migration done. We're able to go in there and help them with the automation of that migration and Kasten was able to help them architect that migration and we did it in the course of a weekend with two people. >> A weekend? >> A weekend. >> That's a hackathon. I mean, that's not real come on. >> Compared to thousands of man hours and a few months not to mention since they were able to retire that old OpenShift cluster, the OpenShift three, they were able to stop paying Jeff Bezos for a couple of those months, which is tens of thousands of dollars per month. >> Don't tell anyone, keep that down low. You're going to get shot when you leave this place. No, seriously. This is why I think the multi-cloud hybrid is interesting because these kinds of examples are going to be more than less coming down the road. You're going to see, you're going to hear more of these stories than not hear them because what containerization now Kubernetes doing, what Dockers doing now and the role of containers not being such a land grab is allowing Kubernetes to be more versatile in its approach. So I got to ask you, you can almost apply that concept to agility, to other scenarios like spanning data across clouds. >> Yes, and that is what we're seeing. So the call I had this morning with a large insurance provider, you may have that insurance provider, healthcare provider, they're across three of the major hyperscalers clouds and they do that for reliability. Last year, AWS went down, I think three times in Q4 and to have a plan of being able to recover somewhere else, you can actually plan your, it's DR, it's a planned migration. You can do that in a few hours. >> It's interesting, just the sidebar here for a second. We had a couple chats earlier today. We had the influences on and all the super cloud conversations and trying to get more data to share with the audience across multiple areas. One of them was Amazon and that super, the hyper clouds like Amazon, as your Google and the rest are out there, Oracle, IBM and everyone else. There's almost a consensus that maybe there's time for some peace amongst the cloud vendors. Like, "Hey, you've already won." (Tom laughs) Everyone's won, now let's just like, we know where everyone is. Let's go peace time and everyone, then 'cause the relationship's not going to change between public cloud and the new world. So there's a consensus, like what does peace look like? I mean, first of all, the pie's getting bigger. You're seeing ecosystems forming around all the big new areas and that's good thing. That's the tides rise and the pie's getting bigger, there's bigger market out there now so people can share and share. >> I've never worked for any of these big players. So I would have to agree with you, but peace would not drive innovation. And in my heart is with tech innovation. I love it when vendors come up with new solutions that will make things better for customers and if that means that we're moving from on-prem to cloud and back to on-prem, I'm fine with that. >> What excites me is really having the flexibility of being able to choose any provider you want because you do have open standards, being cloud native in the world of Kubernetes. I've recently discovered that the Canadian federal government had mandated to their financial institutions that, "Yes, you may have started all of your on cloud presence in Azure, you need to have an option to be elsewhere." So it's not like-- >> Well, the sovereign cloud is one of those big initiatives, but also going back to Java, we heard another guest earlier, we were thinking about Java, right once ran anywhere, right? So you can't do that today in a cloud, but now with containers-- >> You can. >> Again, this is, again, this is the point that's happening. Explain. >> So when you have, Kubernetes is a strict standard and all of the applications are written to that. So whether you are deploying MongoDB or Postgres or Cassandra or any of the other cloud native apps, you can deploy them pretty much the same, whether they're in AKS, EKS or on Tanzu and it makes it much easier. The world became just a lot less for proprietary. >> So that's the story that everybody wants to hear. How does that happen in a way that is, doesn't stall the innovation and the developer growth 'cause the developers are driving a lot of change. I mean, for all the talk in the industry, the developers are doing pretty good right now. They've got a lot of open source, plentiful, open source growing like crazy. You got shifting left in the CICD pipeline. You got tools coming out with Kubernetes. Infrastructure has code is almost a 100% reality right now. So there's a lot of good things going on for developers. That's not an issue. The issue is just underneath. >> It's a skillset and that is really one of the biggest challenges I see in our deployments is a lack of experience. And it's not everyone. There are some folks that have been playing around for the last couple of years with it and they do have that experience, but there are many people that are still young at this. >> Okay, let's do, as we wrap up, let's do a lead into CubeCon, it's coming up and obviously re:Invent's right behind it. Lisa, we're going to have a lot of pre CubeCon interviews. We'll interview all the committee chairs, program chairs. We'll get the scoop on that, we do that every year. But while we got you guys here, let's do a little pre-pre-preview of CubeCon. What can we expect? What do you guys think is going to happen this year? What does CubeCon look? You guys our big sponsor of CubeCon. You guys do a great job there. Thanks for doing that. The community really recognizes that. But as Kubernetes comes in now for this year, you're looking at probably the what third year now that I would say Kubernetes has been on the front burner, where do you see it on the hockey stick growth? Have we kicked the curve yet? What's going to be the level of intensity for Kubernetes this year? How's that going to impact CubeCon in a way that people may or may not think it will? >> So I think first of all, CubeCon is going to be back at the level where it was before the pandemic, because the show, as many other shows, has been suffering from, I mean, virtual events are not like the in-person events. CubeCon LA was super exciting for all the vendors last year, but the attendees were not really there yet. Valencia was a huge bump already and I think Detroit, it's a very exciting city I heard. So it's going to be a blast and it's going to be a huge attendance, that's what I'm expecting. Second I can, so this is going to be my third personally, in-person CubeCon, comparing how vendors evolved between the previous two. There's going to be a lot of interesting stories from vendors, a lot of new innovation coming onto the market. And I think the conversations that we're going to be having will yet, again, be much more about live applications and people using Kubernetes in production rather than those at the first in-person CubeCon for me in LA where it was a lot about learning still, we're going to continue to help people learn 'cause it's really important for us but the exciting part about CubeCon is you're talking to people who are using Kubernetes in production and that's really cool. >> And users contributing projects too. >> Also. >> I mean Lyft is a poster child there and you've got a lot more. Of course you got the stealth recruiting going on there, Apple, all the big guys are there. They have a booth and no one's attending you like, "Oh come on." Matt, what's your take on CubeCon? Going in, what do you see? And obviously a lot of dynamic new projects. >> I'm going to see much, much deeper tech conversations. As experience increases, the more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn more. >> And the sharing's going to increase too. >> And the sharing, yeah. So I see a lot of deep conversations. It's no longer the, "Why do I need Kubernetes?" It's more, "How do I architect this for my solution or for my environment?" And yeah, I think there's a lot more depth involved and the size of CubeCon is going to be much larger than we've seen in the past. >> And to finish off what I think from the vendor's point of view, what we're going to see is a lot of applications that will be a lot more enterprise-ready because that is the part that was missing so far. It was a lot about the what's new and enabling Kubernetes. But now that adoption is going up, a lot of features for different components still need to be added to have them enterprise-ready. >> And what can the audience expect from you guys at CubeCon? Any teasers you can give us from a marketing perspective? >> Yes. We have a rebranding sitting ready for learning website. It's going to be bigger and better. So we're not no longer going to call it, learning.kasten.io but I'll be happy to come back with you guys and present a new name at CubeCon. >> All right. >> All right. That sounds like a deal. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me breaking down all things Kubernetes, talking about customer adoption, the challenges, but also what you're doing to demystify it. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> Our pleasure. >> Thanks Matt. >> For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching The Cube's live coverage of VMware Explore 2022. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe. (gentle music)

(Intro Music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to this special cube conversation with Matt Burr who is the general manager of FlashBlade at Pure Storage. Matt, how you doing? Good to see you. >> I'm doing great. Nice to see you again, Dave. >> Yeah. You know, welcome back. We're going to be broadcasting this is at accelerate. You guys get big news. Of course, FlashBlade S we're going to dig into it. The famous FlashBlade now has new letter attached to it. Tell us what it is, what it's all about. >> (laughing) >> You know, it's easy to say. It's just the latest and greatest version of the FlashBlade, but obviously it's a lot more than that. We've had a lot of success with FlashBlade kind of across the board in particular with Meta and their research super cluster, which is one of the largest AI super clusters in the world. But, it's not enough to just build on the thing that you had, right? So, with the FlashBlade S, we've increased modularity, we've done things like, building co-design software and hardware and leveraging that into something that increases, or it actually doubles density, performance, power efficiency. On top of that, you can scale independently, storage, networking, and compute, which is pretty big deal because it gives you more flexibility, gives you a little more granularity around performance or capacity, depending on which direction you want to go. And we believe that, kind of the end of this is fundamentally the, I guess, the way to put it is sort of the highest performance and capacity optimization, unstructured data platform on the market today without the need for, kind of, an expensive data tier of cash or expected data cash and tier. So we're pretty excited about, what we've ended up with here. >> Yeah. So I think sometimes people forget, about how much core engineering Meta does. Facebook, you go on Facebook and play around and post things, but yeah, their backend cloud is just amazing. So talk a little bit more about the problem targets for FlashBlade. I mean, it's pretty wide scope and we're going to get into that, but what's the core of that. >> Yeah. We've talked about that extensively in the past, the use cases kind of generally remain the same. I know, we'll probably explore this a little bit more deeply, but you know, really what we're talking about here is performance and scalability. We have written essentially an unlimited Metadata software level, which gives us the ability to expand, we're already starting to think about computing an exabyte scale. Okay. So, the problem that the customer has of, Hey, I've got a Greenfield, object environment, or I've got a file environment and my 10 K and 7,500 RPM disc is just spiraling out of control in my environment. It's an environmental problem. It's a management problem, we have effectively, simplified the process of bringing together highly performant, very large multi petabyte to eventually exabyte scale unstructured data systems. >> So people are obviously trying to inject machine intelligence, AI, ML into applications, bring data into applications, bringing those worlds closer together. Analytics is obviously exploding. You see some other things happening in the news, read somewhere, protection and the like, where does FlashBlade fit in terms of FlashBlade S in some terms of some of these new use cases. >> All those things, we're only going wider and broader. So, we've talked in the past about having a having a horizontal approach to this market. The unstructured data market has often had vertical specificity. You could see successful infrastructure companies in oil and gas that may not play median entertainment, where you see, successful companies that play in media entertainment, but don't play well in financial services, for example. We're sort of playing the long game here with this and we're focused on, bringing an all Q L C architecture that combines our traditional kind of pure DFM with the software that is, now I guess seven years hardened from the original FlashBlade system. And so, when we look at customers and we look at kind of customers in three categories, right, we have customers that sort of fit into a very traditional, more than three, but kind of make bucketized this way, customers that fit into kind of this EDA HPC space, then you have that sort of data protection, which I believe kind of ransomware falls under that as well. The world has changed, right? So customers want their data back faster. Rapid restore is a real thing, right? We have customers that come to us and say, anybody can back up my data, but if I want to get something back fast and I mean in less than a week or a couple days, what do I do? So we can solve that problem. And then as you sort of accurately pointed out where you started, there is the AI ML side of things where the Invidia relationship that we have, right. DGX is are a pretty powerful weapon in that market and solving those problems. But they're not cheap. And keeping those DGX's running all the time requires an extremely efficient underpinning of a flash system. And we believe we have that market as well. >> It's interesting when pure was first coming out as a startup, you obviously had some cool new tech, but you know, your stack wasn't as hard. And now you've got seven years under your belt. The last time you were on the cube, we talked about some of the things that you guys were doing differently. We talked about UFFO, unified fast file and object. How does this new product, FlashBlade S, compare to some previous generations of FlashBlade in terms of solving unstructured data and some of these other trends that we've been talking about? >> Yeah. I touched on this a little bit earlier, but I want to go a little bit deeper on this concept of modularity. So for those that are familiar with Pure Storage, we have what's called the evergreen storage program. It's not as much a program as it is an engineering philosophy. The belief that everything we build should be modular in nature so that we can have essentially a chassi that has an a 100% modular components inside of it. Such that we can upgrade all of those features, non disruptively from one version to the next, you should think about that as you know, if you have an iPhone, when you go get a new iPhone, what do you do with your old iPhone? You either throw it away or you sell it. Well, imagine if your iPhone just got newer and better each time you renewed your, whatever it is, two year or three year subscription with apple. That's effectively what we have as a core philosophy, core operating engineering philosophy within pure. That is now a completely full and robust program with this instantiation of the FlashBlade S. And so kind of what that means is, for a customer I'm future proofed for X number of years, knowing that we have a run rate of being able to keep customers on the flash array side from the FA 400 all the way through the flash array X and Excel, which is about a 10 year time span. So, that then, and of itself sort of starts to play into customers that have concerns around ESG. Right? Last time I checked power space and cooling, still mattered in data center. So although I have people that tell me all the time, power space clearly doesn't matter anymore, but I know at the end of the day, most customers seem to say that it does, you're not throwing away refrigerator size pieces of equipment that once held spinning disc, something that's a size of a microwave that's populated with DFMs with all LC flash that you can actually upgrade over time. So if you want to scale more performance, we can do that through adding CPU. If you want to scale more capacity, we can do that through adding more And we're in control of those parameters because we're building our own DFM, our direct fabric modules on our own storage notes, if you will. So instead of relying on the consumer packaging of an SSD, we're upgrading our own stuff and growing it as we can. So again, on the ESG side, I think for many customers going into the next decade, it's going to be a huge deal. >> Yeah. Interesting comments, Matt. I mean, I don't know if you guys invented it, but you certainly popularize the idea of, no Fort lift upgrades and sort of set the industry on its head when you guys really drove that evergreen strategy and kind of on that note, you guys talk about simplicity. I remember last accelerate went deep with cause on your philosophy of keeping things simple, keeping things uncomplicated, you guys talk about using better science to do that. And you a lot of talk these days about outcomes. How does FlashBlade S support those claims and what do you guys mean by better science? >> Yeah. You know, better science is kind of a funny term. It was an internal term that I was on a sales call actually. And the customer said, well, I understand the difference between these two, but could you tell me how we got there and I was a little stumped on the answer. And I just said, well, I think we have better scientists and that kind of morphed into better science, a good example of that is our Metadata architecture, right? So our scalable Metadata allows us to avoid having that cashing tier, that other architectures have to rely on in order to anticipate, which files are going to need to be in read cash and read misses become very expensive. Now, a good follow up question there, not to do your job, but it's the question that I always get is, well, when you're designing your own hardware and your own software, what's the real material advantage of that? Well, the real material advantage of that is that you are in control of the combination and the interaction of those two things you don't give up the sort of the general purpose nature, if you will, of the performance characteristics that come along with things like commodity, you get a very specific performance profile. That's tailored to the software that's being married to it. Now in some instances you could say, well, okay, does that really matter? Well, when you start to talking about 20, 40, 50, 100, 500, petabyte data sets, every percentage matters. And so those individual percentages equate to space savings. They equate to power and cooling savings. We believe that we're going to have industry best dollars per lot. We're going to have industry best, kind of dollar PRU. So really the whole kind of game here is a round scale. >> Yeah. I mean, look, there's clearly places for the pure software defined. And then when cloud first came out, everybody said, oh, build the cloud and commodity, they don't build custom art. Now you see all the hyper scalers building custom software, custom hardware and software integration, custom Silicon. So co-innovation between hardware and software. It seems pretty as important, if not more important than ever, especially for some of these new workloads who knows what the edge is going to bring. What's the downside of not having that philosophy in your view? Is it just, you can't scale to the degree that you want, you can't support the new workloads or performance? What should customers be thinking about there? >> I think the downside plays in two ways. First is kind of the future and at scale, as I alluded to earlier around cost and just savings over time. Right? So if you're using a you know a commodity SSD, there's packaging around that SSD that is wasteful both in terms of- It's wasteful in the environmental sense and wasteful in the sort of computing performance sense. So that's kind of one thing. On the second side, it's easier for us to control the controllables around reliability when you can eliminate the number of things that actually sit in that workflow and by workflow, I mean when a right is acknowledged from a host and it gets down to the media, the more control you have over that, the more reliability you have over that piece. >> Yeah. I know. And we talked about ESG earlier. I know you guys, I'm going to talk a little bit about more news from accelerate within Invidia. You've certainly heard Jensen talk about the wasted CPU cycles in the data center. I think he's forecasted, 25 to 30% of the cycles are wasted on doing things like storage offload, or certainly networking and security. So now it sort of confirms your ESG thought, we can do things more efficiently, but as it relates to Invidia and some of the news around AIRI's, what is the AI RI? What's that stand for? What's the high level overview of AIRI. >> So the AIRI has been really successful for both us and Invidia. It's a really great partnership we're appreciative of the partnership. In fact, Tony pack day will be speaking here at accelerate. So, really looking forward to that, Look, there's a couple ways to look at this and I take the macro view on this. I know that there's a equally as good of a micro example, but I think the macro is really kind of where it's at. We don't have data center space anymore, right? There's only so many data centers we can build. There's only so much power we can create. We are going to reach a point in time where municipalities are going to struggle against the businesses that are in their municipalities for power. And now you're essentially bidding big corporations against people who have an electric bill. And that's only going to last so long, you know who doesn't win in that? The big corporation doesn't win in that. Because elected officials will have to find a way to serve the people so that they can get power. No matter how skewed we think that may be. That is the reality. And so, as we look at this transition, that first decade of disc to flash transition was really in the block world. The second decade, which it's really fortunate to have a multi decade company, of course. But the second decade of riding that wave from disk to flash is about improving space, power, efficiency, and density. And we sort of reach that, it's a long way of getting to the point about iMedia where these AI clusters are extremely powerful things. And they're only going to get bigger, right? They're not going to get smaller. It's not like anybody out there saying, oh, it's a Thad, or, this isn't going to be something that's going to yield any results or outcomes. They yield tremendous outcomes in healthcare. They yield tremendous outcomes in financial services. They use tremendous outcome in cancer research, right? These are not things that we as a society are going to give up. And in fact, we're going to want to invest more on them, but they come at a cost and one of the resources that is required is power. And so when you look at what we've done in particular with Invidia. You found something that is extremely power efficient that meets the needs of kind of going back to that macro view of both the community and the business. It's a win-win. >> You know and you're right. It's not going to get smaller. It's just going to continue to in momentum, but it could get increasingly distributed. And you think about, I talked about the edge earlier. You think about AI inferencing at the edge. I think about Bitcoin mining, it's very distributed, but it consumes a lot of power and so we're not exactly sure what the next level architecture is, but we do know that science is going to be behind it. Talk a little bit more about your Invidia relationship, because I think you guys were the first, I might be wrong about this, but I think you were the first storage company to announce a partnership with Invidia several years ago, probably four years ago. How is this new solution with a AIRI slash S building on that partnership? What can we expect with Invidia going forward? >> Yeah. I think what you can expect to see is putting the foot on the gas on kind of where we've been with Invidia. So, as I mentioned earlier Meta is by some measurements, the world's largest research super cluster, they're a huge Invidia customer and built on pure infrastructure. So we see kind of those types of well reference architectures, not that everyone's going to have a Meta scale reference architecture, but the base principles of what they're solving for are the base principles of what we're going to begin to see in the enterprise. I know that begin sounds like a strange word because there's already a big business in DGX. There's already a sizable business in performance, unstructured data. But those are only going to get exponentially bigger from here. So kind of what we see is a deepening and a strengthening of the of the relationship and opportunity for us to talk, jointly to customers that are going to be building these big facilities and big data centers for these types of compute related problems and talking about efficiency, right? DGX are much more efficient and Flash Blades are much more efficient. It's a great pairing. >> Yeah. I mean you're definitely, a lot of AI today is modeling in the cloud, seeing HPC and data just slam together all kinds of new use cases. And these types of partnerships are the only way that we're going to solve the future problems and go after these future opportunities. I'll give you a last word you got to be excited with accelerate, what should people be looking for, add accelerate and beyond. >> You know, look, I am really excited. This is going on my 12th year at Pure Storage, which has to be seven or eight accelerates whenever we started this thing. So it's a great time of the year, maybe take a couple off because of because of COVID, but I love reconnecting in particular with partners and customers and just hearing kind of what they have to say. And this is kind of a nice one. This is four years or five years worth of work for my team who candidly I'm extremely proud of for choosing to take on some of the solutions that they, or excuse me, some of the problems that they chose to take on and find solutions for. So as accelerate roles around, I think we have some pretty interesting evolutions of the evergreen program coming to be announced. We have some exciting announcements in the other product arenas as well, but the big one for this event is FlashBlade. And I think that we will see. Look, no one's going to completely control this transition from disc to flash, right? That's a that's a macro trend. But there are these points in time where individual companies can sort of accelerate the pace at which it's happening. And that happens through cost, it happens through performance. My personal belief is this will be one of the largest points of those types of acceleration in this transformation from disc to flash and unstructured data. This is such a leap. This is essentially the equivalent of us going from the 400 series on the block side to the X, for those that you're familiar with the flash array lines. So it's a huge, huge leap for us. I think it's a huge leap for the market. And look, I think you should be proud of the company you work for. And I am immensely proud of what we've created here. And I think one of the things that is a good joy in life is to be able to talk to customers about things you care about. I've always told people my whole life, inefficiency is the bane of my existence. And I think we've rooted out ton of inefficiency with this product and looking forward to going and reclaiming a bunch of data center space and power without sacrificing any performance. >> Well congratulations on making it into the second decade. And I'm looking forward to the orange and the third decade, Matt Burr, thanks so much for coming back in the cubes. It's good to see you. >> Thanks, Dave. Nice to see you as well. We appreciate it. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (outro music)

>> Instructor: "theCUBE" presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain and we're at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. I'm Keith Townsend, and my co-host, Enrico Signoretti. Enrico's really proud of me. I've called him Enrico instead of Enrique every session. >> Every day. >> Senior IT analyst at GigaOm. We're talking to fantastic builders at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 about the projects and their efforts. Enrico, up to this point, it's been all about provisioning, insecurity, what conversation have we been missing? >> Well, I mean, I think that we passed the point of having the conversation of deployment, of provisioning. Everybody's very skilled, actually everything is done at day two. They are discovering that, well, there is a security problem. There is an observability problem a and in fact, we are meeting with a lot of people and there are a lot of conversation with people really needing to understand what is happening. I mean, in their cluster work, why it is happening and all the questions that come with it. And the more I talk with people in the show floor here or even in the various sessions is about, we are growing so that our clusters are becoming bigger and bigger, applications are becoming bigger as well. So we need to now understand better what is happening. As it's not only about cost, it's about everything at the end. >> So I think that's a great set up for our guests, Matt Provo, founder and CEO of StormForge and Patrick Brixton? >> Bergstrom. >> Bergstrom. >> Yeah. >> I spelled it right, I didn't say it right, Bergstrom, CTO. We're at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon where projects are discussed, built and StormForge, I've heard the pitch before, so forgive me. And I'm kind of torn. I have service mesh. What do I need more, like what problem is StormForge solving? >> You want to take it? >> Sure, absolutely. So it's interesting because, my background is in the enterprise, right? I was an executive at UnitedHealth Group before that I worked at Best Buy and one of the issues that we always had was, especially as you migrate to the cloud, it seems like the CPU dial or the memory dial is your reliability dial. So it's like, oh, I just turned that all the way to the right and everything's hunky-dory, right? But then we run into the issue like you and I were just talking about, where it gets very very expensive very quickly. And so my first conversations with Matt and the StormForge group, and they were telling me about the product and what we're dealing with. I said, that is the problem statement that I have always struggled with and I wish this existed 10 years ago when I was dealing with EC2 costs, right? And now with Kubernetes, it's the same thing. It's so easy to provision. So realistically what it is, is we take your raw telemetry data and we essentially monitor the performance of your application, and then we can tell you using our machine learning algorithms, the exact configuration that you should be using for your application to achieve the results that you're looking for without over-provisioning. So we reduce your consumption of CPU, of memory and production which ultimately nine times out of 10, actually I would say 10 out of 10, reduces your cost significantly without sacrificing reliability. >> So can your solution also help to optimize the application in the long run? Because, yes, of course-- >> Yep. >> The lowering fluid as you know optimize the deployment. >> Yeah. >> But actually the long-term is optimizing the application. >> Yes. >> Which is the real problem. >> Yep. >> So, we're fine with the former of what you just said, but we exist to do the latter. And so, we're squarely and completely focused at the application layer. As long as you can track or understand the metrics you care about for your application, we can optimize against it. We love that we don't know your application, we don't know what the SLA and SLO requirements are for your app, you do, and so, in our world it's about empowering the developer into the process, not automating them out of it and I think sometimes AI and machine learning sort of gets a bad rap from that standpoint. And so, at this point the company's been around since 2016, kind of from the very early days of Kubernetes, we've always been, squarely focused on Kubernetes, using our core machine learning engine to optimize metrics at the application layer that people care about and need to go after. And the truth of the matter is today and over time, setting a cluster up on Kubernetes has largely been solved. And yet the promise of Kubernetes around portability and flexibility, downstream when you operationalize, the complexity smacks you in the face and that's where StormForge comes in. And so we're a vertical, kind of vertically oriented solution, that's absolutely focused on solving that problem. >> Well, I don't want to play, actually. I want to play the devils advocate here and-- >> You wouldn't be a good analyst if you didn't. >> So the problem is when you talk with clients, users, there are many of them still working with Java, something that is really tough. I mean, all of us loved Java. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Maybe 20 years ago. Yeah, but not anymore, but still they have developers, they have porting applications, microservices. Yes, but not very optimized, et cetera, cetera, et cetera. So it's becoming tough. So how you can interact with this kind of old hybrid or anyway, not well engineered applications. >> Yeah. >> We do that today. We actually, part of our platform is we offer performance testing in a lower environment and stage and we, like Matt was saying, we can use any metric that you care about and we can work with any configuration for that application. So perfect example is Java, you have to worry about your heap size, your garbage collection tuning and one of the things that really struck me very early on about the StormForge product is because it is true machine learning. You remove the human bias from that. So like a lot of what I did in the past, especially around SRE and performance tuning, we were only as good as our humans were because of what they knew. And so, we kind of got stuck in these paths of making the same configuration adjustments, making the same changes to the application, hoping for different results. But then when you apply machine learning capability to that the machine will recommend things you never would've dreamed of. And you get amazing results out of that. >> So both me and Enrico have been doing this for a long time. Like, I have battled to my last breath the argument when it's a bare metal or a VM, look, I cannot give you any more memory. >> Yeah. >> And the argument going all the way up to the CIO and the CIO basically saying, you know what, Keith you're cheap, my developer resources are expensive, buy bigger box. >> Yeah. >> Yap. >> Buying a bigger box in the cloud to your point is no longer a option because it's just expensive. >> Yeah. >> Talk to me about the carrot or the stick as developers are realizing that they have to be more responsible. Where's the culture change coming from? Is it the shift in responsibility? >> I think the center of the bullseye for us is within those sets of decisions, not in a static way, but in an ongoing way, especially as the development of applications becomes more and more rapid and the management of them. Our charge and our belief wholeheartedly is that you shouldn't have to choose. You should not have to choose between costs or performance. You should not have to choose where your applications live, in a public private or hybrid cloud environment. And so, we want to empower people to be able to sit in the middle of all of that chaos and for those trade offs and those difficult interactions to no longer be a thing. We're at a place now where we've done hundreds of deployments and never once have we met a developer who said, "I'm really excited to get out of bed and come to work every day and manually tune my application." One side, secondly, we've never met, a manager or someone with budget that said, please don't increase the value of my investment that I've made to lift and shift us over to the cloud or to Kubernetes or some combination of both. And so what we're seeing is the converging of these groups, their happy place is the lack of needing to be able to make those trade offs, and that's been exciting for us. >> So, I'm listening and looks like that your solution is right in the middle in application performance, management, observability. >> Yeah. >> And, monitoring. >> Yeah. >> So it's a little bit of all of this. >> Yeah, so we want to be, the intel inside of all of that, we often get lumped into one of those categories, it used to be APM a lot, we sometimes get, are you observability or and we're really not any of those things, in and of themselves, but we instead we've invested in deep integrations and partnerships with a lot of that tooling 'cause in a lot of ways, the tool chain is hardening in a cloud native and in Kubernetes world. And so, integrating in intelligently, staying focused and great at what we solve for, but then seamlessly partnering and not requiring switching for our users who have already invested likely, in a APM or observability. >> So to go a little bit deeper. What does it mean integration? I mean, do you provide data to this, other applications in the environment or are they supporting you in the work that you do. >> Yeah, we're a data consumer for the most part. In fact, one of our big taglines is take your observability and turn it into action ability, right? Like how do you take that, it's one thing to collect all of the data, but then how do you know what to do with it, right? So to Matt's point, we integrate with folks like Datadog, we integrate with Prometheus today. So we want to collect that telemetry data and then do something useful with it for you. >> But also we want Datadog customers, for example, we have a very close partnership with Datadog so that in your existing Datadog dashboard, now you have-- >> Yeah. >> The StormForge capability showing up in the same location. >> Yep. >> And so you don't have to switch out. >> So I was just going to ask, is it a push pull? What is the developer experience when you say you provide developer this resolve ML learnings about performance, how do they receive it? Like, what's the developer experience. >> They can receive it, for a while we were CLI only, like any good developer tool. >> Right. >> And, we have our own UI. And so it is a push in a lot of cases where I can come to one spot, I've got my applications and every time I'm going to release or plan for a release or I have released and I want to pull in observability data from a production standpoint, I can visualize all of that within the StormForge UI and platform, make decisions, we allow you to set your, kind of comfort level of automation that you're okay with. You can be completely set and forget or you can be somewhere along that spectrum and you can say, as long as it's within, these thresholds, go ahead and release the application or go ahead and apply the configuration. But we also allow you to experience the same, a lot of the same functionality right now, in Grafana, in Datadog and a bunch of others that are coming. >> So I've talked to Tim Crawford who talks to a lot of CIOs and he's saying one of the biggest challenges or if not, one of the biggest challenges CIOs are facing are resource constraints. >> Yeah. >> They cannot find the developers to begin with to get this feedback. How are you hoping to address this biggest pain point for CIOs-- >> Yeah.6 >> And developers? >> You should take that one. >> Yeah, absolutely. So like my background, like I said at UnitedHealth Group, right. It's not always just about cost savings. In fact, the way that I look about at some of these tech challenges, especially when we talk about scalability there's kind of three pillars that I consider, right? There's the tech scalability, how am I solving those challenges? There's the financial piece 'cause you can only throw money at a problem for so long and it's the same thing with the human piece. I can only find so many bodies and right now that pool is very small, and so, we are absolutely squarely in that footprint of we enable your team to focus on the things that they matter, not manual tuning like Matt said. And then there are other resource constraints that I think that a lot of folks don't talk about too. Like, you were talking about private cloud for instance and so having a physical data center, I've worked with physical data centers that companies I've worked for have owned where it is literally full, wall to wall. You can't rack any more servers in it, and so their biggest option is, well, I could spend $1.2 billion to build a new one if I wanted to, or if you had a capability to truly optimize your compute to what you needed and free up 30% of your capacity of that data center. So you can deploy additional name spaces into your cluster, like that's a huge opportunity. >> So I have another question. I mean, maybe it doesn't sound very intelligent at this point, but, so is it an ongoing process or is it something that you do at the very beginning, I mean you start deploying this. >> Yeah. >> And maybe as a service. >> Yep. >> Once in a year I say, okay, let's do it again and see if something change it. >> Sure. >> So one spot, one single.. >> Yeah, would you recommend somebody performance test just once a year? Like, so that's my thing is, at previous roles, my role was to do performance test every single release, and that was at a minimum once a week and if your thing did not get faster, you had to have an executive exception to get it into production and that's the space that we want to live in as well as part of your CICD process, like this should be continuous verification, every time you deploy, we want to make sure that we're recommending the perfect configuration for your application in the name space that you're deploying into. >> And I would be as bold as to say that we believe that we can be a part of adding, actually adding a step in the CICD process that's connected to optimization and that no application should be released, monitored, and sort of analyzed on an ongoing basis without optimization being a part of that. And again, not just from a cost perspective, but for cost and performance. >> Almost a couple of hundred vendors on this floor. You mentioned some of the big ones Datadog, et cetera, but what happens when one of the up and comings out of nowhere, completely new data structure, some imaginative way to click to telemetry data. >> Yeah. >> How do, how do you react to that? >> Yeah, to us it's zeros and ones. >> Yeah. >> And, we really are data agnostic from the standpoint of, we're fortunate enough from the design of our algorithm standpoint, it doesn't get caught up on data structure issues, as long as you can capture it and make it available through one of a series of inputs, one would be load or performance tests, could be telemetry, could be observability, if we have access to it. Honestly, the messier the better from time to time from a machine learning standpoint, it's pretty powerful to see. We've never had a deployment where we saved less than 30%, while also improving performance by at least 10%. But the typical results for us are 40 to 60% savings and 30 to 40% improvement in performance. >> And what happens if the application is, I mean, yes Kubernetes is the best thing of the world but sometimes we have to, external data sources or, we have to connect with external services anyway. >> Yeah. >> So, can you provide an indication also on this particular application, like, where the problem could be? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, and that's absolutely one of the things that we look at too, 'cause it's, especially when you talk about resource consumption it's never a flat line, right? Like depending on your application, depending on the workloads that you're running it varies from sometimes minute to minute, day to day, or it could be week to week even. And so, especially with some of the products that we have coming out with what we want to do, integrating heavily with the HPA and being able to handle some of those bumps and not necessarily bumps, but bursts and being able to do it in a way that's intelligent so that we can make sure that, like I said, it's the perfect configuration for the application regardless of the time of day that you're operating in or what your traffic patterns look like, or, what your disc looks like, right. Like 'cause with our low environment testing, any metric you throw at us, we can optimize for. >> So Matt and Patrick, thank you for stopping by. >> Yeah. >> Yes. >> We can go all day because day two is I think the biggest challenge right now, not just in Kubernetes but application re-platforming and transformation, very, very difficult. Most CTOs and EASs that I talked to, this is the challenge space. From Valencia, Spain, I'm Keith Townsend, along with my host Enrico Signoretti and you're watching "theCube" the leader in high-tech coverage. (whimsical music)

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22, brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to Melissa Spain. And we're at cuon cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend. And my co-host en Rico senior Etti en Rico's really proud of me. I've called him en Rico and said IK, every session, senior it analyst giga, O we're talking to fantastic builders at Cuban cloud native con about the projects and the efforts en Rico up to this point, it's been all about provisioning insecurity. What, what conversation have we been missing? >>Well, I mean, I, I think, I think that, uh, uh, we passed the point of having the conversation of deployment of provisioning. You know, everybody's very skilled, actually everything is done at day two. They are discovering that, well, there is a security problem. There is an observability problem. And in fact, we are meeting with a lot of people and there are a lot of conversation with people really needing to understand what is happening. I mean, in their classroom, what, why it is happening and all the, the questions that come with it. I mean, and, uh, the more I talk with, uh, people in the, in the show floor here, or even in the, you know, in the various sessions is about, you know, we are growing, the, our clusters are becoming bigger and bigger. Uh, applications are becoming, you know, bigger as well. So we need to know, understand better what is happening. It's not only, you know, about cost it's about everything at the >>End. So I think that's a great set up for our guests, max, Provo, founder, and CEO of storm for forge and Patrick Britton, Bergstrom, Brookstone. Yeah, I spelled it right. I didn't say it right. Berg storm CTO. We're at Q con cloud native con we're projects are discussed, built and storm forge. I I've heard the pitch before, so forgive me. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of torn. I have service mesh. What do I need more like, what problem is storm for solving? >>You wanna take it? >>Sure, absolutely. So it it's interesting because, uh, my background is in the enterprise, right? I was an executive at United health group. Um, before that I worked at best buy. Um, and one of the issues that we always had was, especially as you migrate to the cloud, it seems like the CPU dial or the memory dial is your reliability dial. So it's like, oh, I just turned that all the way to the right and everything's hunky Dory. Right. Uh, but then we run into the issue like you and I were just talking about where it gets very, very expensive, very quickly. Uh, and so my first conversations with Matt and the storm forge group, and they were telling me about the product and, and what we're dealing with. I said, that is the problem statement that I have always struggled with. And I wish this existed 10 years ago when I was dealing with EC two costs, right? And now with Kubernetes, it's the same thing. It's so easy to provision. So realistically, what it is is we take your raw telemetry data and we essentially monitor the performance of your application. And then we can tell you using our machine learning algorithms, the exact configuration that you should be using for your application to achieve the results that you're looking for without over provisioning. So we reduce your consumption of CPU of memory and production, which ultimately nine times outta 10, actually I would say 10 out of 10 reduces your cost significantly without sacrificing reliability. >>So can your solution also help to optimize the application in the long run? Because yes, of course, yep. You know, the lowing fluid is, you know, optimize the deployment. Yeah. But actually the long term is optimizing the application. Yes. Which is the real problem. >>Yep. So we actually, um, we're fine with the, the former of what you just said, but we exist to do the latter. And so we're squarely and completely focused at the application layer. Um, we are, uh, as long as you can track or understand the metrics you care about for your application, uh, we can optimize against it. Um, we love that we don't know your application. We don't know what the SLA and SLO requirements are for your app. You do. And so in, in our world, it's about empowering the developer into the process, not automating them out of it. And I think sometimes AI and machine learning sort of gets a bad wrap from that standpoint. And so, uh, we've at this point, the company's been around, you know, since 2016, uh, kind of from the very early days of Kubernetes, we've always been, you know, squarely focused on Kubernetes using our core machine learning, uh, engine to optimize metrics at the application layer, uh, that people care about and, and need to need to go after. And the truth of the matter is today. And over time, you know, setting a cluster up on Kubernetes has largely been solved. Um, and yet the promise of, of Kubernetes around portability and flexibility, uh, downstream when you operationalize the complexity, smacks you in the face. And, uh, and that's where, where storm forge comes in. And so we're a vertical, you know, kind of vertically oriented solution. Um, that's, that's absolutely focused on solving that problem. >>Well, I don't want to play, actually. I want to play the, uh, devils advocate here and, you know, >>You wouldn't be a good analyst if you didn't. >>So the, the problem is when you talk with clients, users, they, there are many of them still working with Java with, you know, something that is really tough. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, I mean, we loved all of us loved Java. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe 20 years ago. Yeah. But not anymore, but still they have developers. They are porting applications, microservices. Yes. But not very optimized, etcetera. C cetera. So it's becoming tough. So how you can interact with these kind of yeah. Old hybrid or anyway, not well in generic applications. >>Yeah. We, we do that today. We actually, part of our platform is we offer performance testing in a lower environment and stage. And we like Matt was saying, we can use any metric that you care about and we can work with any configuration for that application. So the perfect example is Java, you know, you have to worry about your heap size, your garbage collection tuning. Um, and one of the things that really struck, struck me very early on about the storm forage product is because it is true machine learning. You remove the human bias from that. So like a lot of what I did in the past, especially around SRE and, and performance tuning, we were only as good as our humans were because of what they knew. And so we were, we kind of got stuck in these paths of making the same configuration adjustments, making the same changes to the application, hoping for different results. But then when you apply machine learning capability to that, the machine will recommend things you never would've dreamed of. And you get amazing results out of >>That. So both me and an Rico have been doing this for a long time. Like I have battled to my last breath, the, the argument when it's a bare metal or a VM. Yeah. Look, I cannot give you any more memory. Yeah. And the, the argument going all the way up to the CIO and the CIO basically saying, you know what, Keith you're cheap, my developer resources expensive, my bigger box. Yep. Uh, buying a bigger box in the cloud to your point is no longer a option because it's just expensive. Talk to me about the carrot or the stick as developers are realizing that they have to be more responsible. Where's the culture change coming from? So is it, that is that if it, is it the shift in responsibility? >>I think the center of the bullseye for us is within those sets of decisions, not in a static way, but in an ongoing way, especially, um, especially as the development of applications becomes more and more rapid. And the management of them, our, our charge and our belief wholeheartedly is that you shouldn't have to choose, you should not have to choose between costs or performance. You should not have to choose where your, you know, your applications live, uh, in a public private or, or hybrid cloud environment. And so we want to empower people to be able to sit in the middle of all of that chaos and for those trade-offs and those difficult interactions to no, no longer be a thing. You know, we're at, we're at a place now where we've done, you know, hundreds of deployments and never once have we met a developer who said, I'm really excited to get outta bed and come to work every day and manually tune my application. <laugh> One side, secondly, we've never met, uh, you know, uh, a manager or someone with budget that said, uh, please don't, you know, increase the value of my investment that I've made to lift and shift us over mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, to the cloud or to Kubernetes or, or some combination of both. And so what we're seeing is the converging of these groups, um, at, you know, their happy place is the lack of needing to be able to, uh, make those trade offs. And that's been exciting for us. So, >>You know, I'm listening and looks like that your solution is right in the middle in application per performance management, observability. Yeah. And, uh, and monitoring. So it's a little bit of all of this. >>So we, we, we, we want to be, you know, the Intel inside of all of that, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, we don't, you know, we often get lumped into one of those categories. It used to be APM a lot. We sometimes get a, are you observability or, and we're really not any of those things in and of themselves, but we, instead of invested in deep integrations and partnerships with a lot of those, uh, with a lot of that tooling, cuz in a lot of ways, the, the tool chain is hardening, uh, in a cloud native and, and Kubernetes world. And so, you know, integrating in intelligently staying focused and great at what we solve for, but then seamlessly partnering and not requiring switching for, for our users who have already invested likely in a APM or observability. >>So to go a little bit deeper. Sure. What does it mean integration? I mean, do you provide data to this, you know, other applications in, in the environment or are they supporting you in the work that you >>Yeah, we're, we're a data consumer for the most part. Um, in fact, one of our big taglines is take your observability and turn it into actionability, right? Like how do you take the it's one thing to collect all of the data, but then how do you know what to do with it? Right. So to Matt's point, um, we integrate with folks like Datadog. Um, we integrate with Prometheus today. So we want to collect that telemetry data and then do something useful with it for you. >>But, but also we want Datadog customers. For example, we have a very close partnership with, with Datadog, so that in your existing data dog dashboard, now you have yeah. This, the storm for capability showing up in the same location. Yep. And so you don't have to switch out. >>So I was just gonna ask, is it a push pull? What is the developer experience? When you say you provide developer, this resolve ML, uh, learnings about performance mm-hmm <affirmative> how do they receive it? Like what, yeah, what's the, what's the, what's the developer experience >>They can receive it. So we have our own, we used to for a while we were CLI only like any good developer tool. Right. Uh, and you know, we have our own UI. And so it is a push in that, in, in a lot of cases where I can come to one spot, um, I've got my applications and every time I'm going to release or plan for a release or I have released, and I want to take, pull in, uh, observability data from a production standpoint, I can visualize all of that within the storm for UI and platform, make decisions. We allow you to, to set your, you know, kind of comfort level of automation that you're, you're okay with. You can be completely set and forget, or you can be somewhere along that spectrum. And you can say, as long as it's within, you know, these thresholds, go ahead and release the application or go ahead and apply the configuration. Um, but we also allow you to experience, uh, the same, a lot of the same functionality right now, you know, in Grafana in Datadog, uh, and a bunch of others that are coming. >>So I've talked to Tim Crawford who talks to a lot of CIOs and he's saying one of the biggest challenges, or if not, one of the biggest challenges CIOs are facing are resource constraints. Yeah. They cannot find the developers to begin with to get this feedback. How are you hoping to address this biggest pain point for CIOs? Yeah. >>Development? >>Just take that one. Yeah, absolutely. That's um, so like my background, like I said, at United health group, right. It's not always just about cost savings. In fact, um, the way that I look about at some of these tech challenges, especially when we talk about scalability, there's kind of three pillars that I consider, right? There's the tech scalability, how am I solving those challenges? There's the financial piece, cuz you can only throw money at a problem for so long. And it's the same thing with the human piece. I can only find so many bodies and right now that pool is very small. And so we are absolutely squarely in that footprint of, we enable your team to focus on the things that they matter, not manual tuning like Matt said. And then there are other resource constraints that I think that a lot of folks don't talk about too. >>Like we were, you were talking about private cloud for instance. And so having a physical data center, um, I've worked with physical data centers that companies I've worked for have owned where it is literally full wall to wall. You can't rack any more servers in it. And so their biggest option is, well, I could spend 1.2 billion to build a new one if I wanted to. Or if you had a capability to truly optimize your compute to what you needed and free up 30% of your capacity of that data center. So you can deploy additional name spaces into your cluster. Like that's a huge opportunity. >>So either out of question, I mean, may, maybe it, it doesn't sound very intelligent at this point, but so is it an ongoing process or is it something that you do at the very beginning mean you start deploying this. Yeah. And maybe as a service. Yep. Once in a year I say, okay, let's do it again and see if something changes. Sure. So one spot 1, 1, 1 single, you know? >>Yeah. Um, would you recommend somebody performance tests just once a year? >>Like, so that's my thing is, uh, previous at previous roles I had, uh, my role was you performance test, every single release. And that was at a minimum once a week. And if your thing did not get faster, you had to have an executive exception to get it into production. And that's the space that we wanna live in as well as part of your C I C D process. Like this should be continuous verification every time you deploy, we wanna make sure that we're recommending the perfect configuration for your application in the name space that you're deploying >>Into. And I would be as bold as to say that we believe that we can be a part of adding, actually adding a step in the C I C D process that's connected to optimization and that no application should be released monitored and sort of, uh, analyzed on an ongoing basis without optimization being a part of that. And again, not just from a cost perspective, yeah. Cost end performance, >>Almost a couple of hundred vendors on this floor. You know, you mentioned some of the big ones, data, dog, et cetera. But what happens when one of the up and comings out of nowhere, completely new data structure, some imaginable way to click to elementry data. Yeah. How do, how do you react to that? >>Yeah. To us it's zeros and ones. Yeah. Uh, and you know, we're, we're, we're really, we really are data agnostic from the standpoint of, um, we're not, we we're fortunate enough to, from the design of our algorithm standpoint, it doesn't get caught up on data structure issues. Um, you know, as long as you can capture it and make it available, uh, through, you know, one of a series of inputs, what one, one would be load or performance tests, uh, could be telemetry, could be observability if we have access to it. Um, honestly the messier, the, the better from time to time, uh, from a machine learning standpoint, um, it, it, it's pretty powerful to see we've, we've never had a deployment where we, uh, where we saved less than 30% while also improving performance by at least 10%. But the typical results for us are 40 to 60% savings and, you know, 30 to 40% improvement in performance. >>And what happens if the application is, I, I mean, yes, Kubernetes is the best thing of the world, but sometimes we have to, you know, external data sources or, or, you know, we have to connect with external services anyway. Mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah. So can you, you know, uh, can you provide an indication also on, on, on this particular application, like, you know, where the problem could >>Be? Yeah, yeah. And that, that's absolutely one of the things that we look at too, cuz it's um, especially when you talk about resource consumption, it's never a flat line, right? Like depending on your application, depending on the workloads that you're running, um, it varies from sometimes minute to minute, day to day, or it could be week to week even. Um, and so especially with some of the products that we have coming out with what we want to do, you know, partnering with, uh, you know, integrating heavily with the HPA and being able to handle some of those bumps and not necessarily bumps, but bursts and being able to do it in a way that's intelligent so that we can make sure that, like I said, it's the perfect configuration for the application regardless of the time of day that you're operating in or what your traffic patterns look like. Um, or you know, what your disc looks like, right? Like cuz with our, our low environment testing, any metric you throw at us, we can, we can optimize for. >>So Madden Patrick, thank you for stopping by. Yeah. Yes. We can go all day. Because day two is I think the biggest challenge right now. Yeah. Not just in Kubernetes, but application replatforming and re and transformation. Very, very difficult. Most CTOs and S that I talked to, this is the challenge space from Valencia Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my host en Rico senior. And you're watching the queue, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>We're back at the red hat summit, 2022, the Cube's continuous coverage. This is day one. We're here all day tomorrow as well. My name is Dave LAN. I'm here with Paul Gillon. Matt Hicks is here. He's executive vice president of products and technologies at red hat. Matt. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Nice to see you face to >>Face. Thanks. Thanks Dave. Thanks fall. It's uh, good to be here. >>So you took a different tack with your, uh, keynote today, had a homage to ate a love lace and Serena VA Ramian, which was kind of cool. And your, your point was they weren't noted at their time and nobody was there to build on their early ideas. I mean, ate a lovely, I think it was a century before, right. Ram illusion was a, you know, decade plus, but, and you tied that to open source. You can give us your kind of bumper sticker of your premise there. >>Yeah. You know, I think I have a unique seat in this from red hat where we see, we see new engineers that come in that sort of compete on a world stage and open source and the, the best, which is easy to track just in contributions are not necessarily from the background you would expect them from. And, and it, for me, it's always really inspiring. Like you have this potential in, in people and open source is a great model for getting that out. We told the history story, cuz it, I think when you look over history, just some of that potential that's been ignored before. Um, sure. It's happening right now. But getting that tied into open source models, we think can hopefully let us tap into a little more than, than we have in the past. So >>Greatly. So when you're thinking about innovation and specific to open source, is it a case where I wonder, I really know the history here of open source. Maybe you can educate me. Is it the case where open source observes, uh, a de factacto standard let's say, or some other proprietary approach and says, Hey, we can build that in open and that's so the, the inspiration, or is it an innovation flywheel that just invents? >>I think it's both at this stage. So in the, in the early days, if you take something like Linux, it was a little more of, you know, there was the famous memo of like, this is gonna be a hobbyist project. We're just gonna light up X 86 hardware and have an operating system we can work with. That was a little more of like this standards were there, but it was, can we just build a better operating system with it, be >>Better than Unix cuz would live up to the promise of units. >>That's right. Where in Unix you had some standardization to models, but it wasn't open in that same sense. Uh, Linux has gone well beyond a hobbyist project at this point. Uh, but that was maybe that clone model, um, to units these days though, if you take something like Kubernetes or take something like Ansible, that's just more pure innovation, you didn't necessarily have a Kubernetes model that you're building a better version of it was distributed computing and how can we really make that tick and, um, bring a lot of great minds into that to build it. Um, so I think you see both of 'em, which is it's one of the things that makes open source fun. Like it, it has a broad reach at this point. >>There's one major area of software that opensource has not penetrated yet. And that is applications. I mean, we, there have been, you know, sugar CRM there have been open E R P applications and, and such, none of them really taken off and in fact tend to be drawn back to being proprietary. Why do you suppose opensource has been limited to infrastructure and has hasn't branched out further? >>Yeah, I think part of it is, uh, where can you find a, a model where lots of different companies are, are comfortable contributing into, if you have one solution and one domain from one company you're gonna struggle more getting a real vibrant community built around that. When you pick an area like infrastructure or core platforms, you have a lot of hardware providers, the use cases span from traditional apps to AI. You have a lot of places to run that it's a massive companies. So >>Volume really, it, >>It really is. You just have an interest that spans beyond companies and that's where we've seen open source projects really pick up and build critical mass. How about crypto >>Dows? I mean, that's right. Isn't that the, a form of open source? I mean, is it, isn't that the application really what exactly what you're talking about? It is true or >>It, well, if you look at cryptography encryption algorithms even go to, um, quantum going forward, I think a lot of quantum access will be driven in an open source model. The machines themselves, uh, will be machines, but things like kids kit, uh, that is how most people will access that. So it is a powerful model for getting into areas that are, um, pretty bleeding edge on it as well. >>We were talking, go ahead. We were talking before Andy mentioned that hardware and software increasingly intersecting. That was the theme we heard at the, at the keynote this morning. Yeah. Why do you believe that's happening and how do you see that? How does that affect what you do? >>Uh, I, I think the reason that's happening is there is a push to make decisions closer and closer to users on it because on one side, like law of physics and then on the other of it's just a better experience for it. And so whether that is in transportation or it's in telecommunications, so you see this push outside of data centers to be able to get at that data locally for it. Uh, but if that's the draw, I think also we're seeing hardware architectures are changing. There are, um, standards like arm that are lower power that lets you run pretty powerful compute at the edge as well. And I think it's that combination saying we can do a lot at the edge now and that actually benefits us building user experiences in a lot of different domains is, is making this pull to the edge, uh, really quickly. But it's, it's a, it's an exciting time to be seeing that happening >>And, and, and pretty powerful is almost an understatement. When you think about what the innovations that are going on. Right. I mean, in, in, in, in particular, at the edge mm-hmm, <affirmative>, I mean, you're seeing Moore's law be blown. Everybody says Moore's law is dead, but you're seeing the performance of when you combine the GPU and the CPU and the NPU and the Excel. I mean, it blows away anything we've historically known. Yeah. So you think about the innovations in software that occurred as a result of Moore's law. What are the new beachheads that we could potentially see in open source? >>I think when you start taking the, um, AI patterns on this and AI is a broad space, but if you go even to like machine learning of optimization type use cases, you start, uh, leveraging how you're gonna train those models, which gets you into, you know, CPUs and GPU and TPUs in that world. And then you also have the, how am I gonna take that train model, put it on a really lightweight device and efficiently ask that model questions. And that gets you into a different architecture design. Uh, but that combination, I think we're gonna see these domains build differently where you have mass compute training type capabilities, and then push that as close to the user, as you can, to make decisions that are more dynamic than traditional codes. >>So a lot of the AI that's done today is modeling that's done in the cloud. Yep. And what you're talking about at the edge, and you think about, you know, vehicles is real time influencing. Yep. And that's, that's massive amounts of data. It's a different architecture. Right. And requires different hardware presumably and different software. So, and you guys, well, Linux is obviously there. Yeah. >>That's, that is the, where we get excited about things like the GM announcement you are in the square, in that, um, aspect of running compute right at the end user and actually dealing with sensor and data, that's changing there to help, you know, in this case, like driver's assistance capabilities with it. But I think that the innovation we'll see in that space will be limitless on it. So it's, it's a nice combination of it too. And you'll still have traditional applications that are gonna use those models. I think of it almost as it's like the new middleware, we have our traditional middleware techniques that we know and patterns. Um, they will actually be augmented with things like, um, machine learning models and those capabilities to just be more dynamic. So it's a fun time right now seeing >>That conversion a lot of data too. And again, I wonder how much of that is even gonna be persisted prob probably enough, cuz there's gonna be so much of it, how much it'll come back to the cloud a lot, but maybe not most of it, but it's still massive amounts relative to what we've seen before >>It is. And this is, you know, you've heard our announcement around OpenShift streams in those capabilities. So in red hat, what we do, we will always focus on hybrid with it because a lot of that data it'll be dropped at the edge cuz you won't need it, but the data you act on and the data you need, you will probably need at your indice and in your cloud. And maybe even on premise and capabilities like Kafka and the ability to pick and stream and stay consistent. We think there's a set of really exciting services to be able to enable that class of development where, um, hopefully we'll be at the center of, of that. >>You, you announced, uh, today an agreement with GM, uh, to, to build on their all to five platform, uh, auto industry, very proprietary historically, uh, with their technology. Do you think that this is an opportunity to crank that open? >>A absolutely. I think in, I've been involved with opensource for, for a while, but I think all of them started in a very proprietary model. And then you get to a tipping point where open source models can just unlock more innovation than proprietary models and you see 'em tip and flip. And I think in the automotive industry and actually in a lot of other industries, the capabilities of being able to combine hardware and software fast with the latest capabilities, it'll drive more innovation than just sticking to proprietary models. So yeah, I believe it will be one of many things to come there. >>You've been involved in open surf for a while. Like how long of a while people must joke about when they look at you, Matt, they must say, oh, did you start when you were five? Yeah. >>It's >>Uh, you get that a lot. >>I, I do, uh, it's my, my children, I think aged me a bit, but uh, but yeah, for me it was the mid nineties. That's when I started with, uh, with open source. >>It was uh, wow. So >>It's been a long, long >>Run. You made the statement in your keynote, that software development is, is, is messy. I presumably part of your job is to make it less messy. But now we talk about all this, these new beachheads, this new new innovations, a lot of it's unknown. Yeah. And it could be really messy. So who are the, who is there a new breed of developer that's emerging? Are they gonna come over from the cloud developers or is it the, is it the OT crowd and the, and the OT crowd? That's gonna be the new developers. >>I, I wish I knew, but I would say, I think you, I do think you'll get to almost like a laws of physics type challenge where you won't learn everything. You're not gonna know, uh, the depths of 5g implementation and Kubernetes and Linux on that. And so for us, this is where ecosystem providers are really, really critical where you have to know your intersection points, but you also have to partner really well to actually drive innovation in some of these spaces cuz uh, the domains themselves are massive on it. So our areas we're gonna know hybrid, we're gonna know, you know, open source based platforms to enable hybrid. And then we're gonna partner with companies that know their domains and industries really well to bring solutions to customers. So >>I'm curious about partnering, uh, cuz Paul cor may mentioned that as well as, as being critical, do you have sort of a template for partnering or is each partnership unique? >>Um, >>I think at this point, uh, the market's changing so fast that, uh, we do have templates of, uh, who are you going to embed solutions with? Who are you going to co-sell with? And co-create uh, the challenge in technology though, is it shifts so quickly. If you go back five years, maybe even 10 years, public cloud probably wasn't as dominant. Um, as it is now, now we're starting to see the uptick of edge solutions, probably being, having as much draw as public cloud. And so I think for us, the partnership follows the innovation on those curves and finding the right model where that works for customers is the key thing for us. But I wish there was more of a pattern. We could say it stays stable for decades, but I think it changes with the market on, we do that. >>But you know, it's funny cuz you you've, you see every 15 years or so the industry gets disrupted. I mean we certainly saw it with mainframes and PC and then the internet and then the cloud, uh, you guys have kind of been there. Well Linux throughout, I mean, okay. It built the, built the internet, built the cloud, it's building the edge. So it's almost, I don't wanna say your disruption proof cause that's just, that's gonna jinx you, but, but in, but you've architected the products in a way that they're compatible with these new errors. Mm-hmm <affirmative> of industry, >>Everything needs an operating >>System. Everything needs an operating system, but you've seen operating systems come and go, you know, and, and Linux has survived so many different waves. Why, how >>You know, I, I think for us, when you see open source projects, they definitely get to a critical mass where you have so much contribution, so much innovation there that they're gonna be able to follow the trends pretty well. If you look at a Linux, whatever the next hardware innovation that comes out is Linux has enough gravity that, um, it's open, it's successful, you're gonna design to it. The capability will be there. I think you're seeing similar things in Kubernetes now where if you're going to try to drive application innovation, it is a model that gives you a ton of reach. You have thousands of contributors. That's been our model though is find those projects be influential in, 'em be able to drive value in life cycles. But I think it's that open source model that gives us the durability where it can keep changing and tracking to new patterns. So, so >>Yeah, there's been a lot of open source that wasn't able to sustain. So I think you guys obviously have a magic formula. That's true. >>We, there is a, there is some art to picking, I think millions of projects. Uh, but you've gotta watch for that. >>Yeah. Open source is also a place place where failed products go to die. Yeah. <laugh> so you have to be sure you're not, you're not in that corner. >>Yeah. Well >>Look at Kubernetes. I mean the fact that that actually happened is it's astounding to me when you think about it, I mean even red hat was ready to go on a different path. What if that had happened? Who knows? Maybe it never would've maybe to your point about Ava Lovelace, maybe it would've taken a decade to, or run revolution. >>You know, I think in some of these you have to, you have to watch really closely. We obviously have a lot of signals of what will make good long term health. And I, I don't think everyone looks at those the same. We look at 'em from trademark controls and how foundations are structured and um, who the contributors are and the spread of that. And it's not perfect. But I think for us, you have to have those that longevity built in there where you will have a spike of popularity that has the tendency to just, um, fall apart on it. So we've been yeah. Doing that pretty >>Well conditions for a long life is something that's a that's maybe it's an art form. I don't know if it's a data form. It's a culture. Maybe, maybe it's >>Cultural. Yeah. Probably a combination some days I think I'm like this could part art, part science. Yeah. But, uh, but it's certainly a fun space to be in and see that happen. It, um, yeah, it's inspiring to me. Yeah. >>Matt Hicks. Great to have you back on the cube and uh, good job on the keynote really, um, interesting angle that you took. So >>Congratulations. Thanks for having me. >>Yeah. You're very welcome. All right. Keep it right there. Dave ante for Paul Gillon red hat summit, 2022 from Boston. You're watching the cube.

(gentle melody) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Summit in San Francisco, California. Events are back. AWS Summit in New York City this summer, theCUBE will be there as well. Check us out there. I'm glad to have events back. It's great to have of everyone here. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Dr. Matt Wood is with me, CUBE alumni, now VP of Business Analytics Division of AWS. Matt, great to see you. >> Thank you, John. It's great to be here. I appreciate it. >> I always call you Dr. Matt Wood because Andy Jackson always says, "Dr. Matt, we would introduce you on the arena." (Matt laughs) >> Matt: The one and only. >> The one and only, Dr. Matt Wood. >> In joke, I love it. (laughs) >> Andy style. (Matt laughs) I think you had walk up music too. >> Yes, we all have our own personalized walk up music. >> So talk about your new role, not a new role, but you're running the analytics business for AWS. What does that consist of right now? >> Sure. So I work. I've got what I consider to be one of the best jobs in the world. I get to work with our customers and the teams at AWS to build the analytics services that millions of our customers use to slice dice, pivot, better understand their data, look at how they can use that data for reporting, looking backwards. And also look at how they can use that data looking forward, so predictive analytics and machine learning. So whether it is slicing and dicing in the lower level of Hadoop and the big data engines, or whether you're doing ETL with Glue, or whether you're visualizing the data in QuickSight or building your models in SageMaker. I got my fingers in a lot of pies. >> One of the benefits of having CUBE coverage with AWS since 2013 is watching the progression. You were on theCUBE that first year we were at Reinvent in 2013, and look at how machine learning just exploded onto the scene. You were involved in that from day one. It's still day one, as you guys say. What's the big thing now? Look at just what happened. Machine learning comes in and then a slew of services come in. You've got SageMaker, became a hot seller right out of the gate. The database stuff was kicking butt. So all this is now booming. That was a real generational change over for database. What's the perspective? What's your perspective on that's evolved? >> I think it's a really good point. I totally agree. I think for machine learning, there's sort of a Renaissance in machine learning and the application of machine learning. Machine learning as a technology has been around for 50 years, let's say. But to do machine learning right, you need like a lot of data. The data needs to be high quality. You need a lot of compute to be able to train those models and you have to be able to evaluate what those models mean as you apply them to real world problems. And so the cloud really removed a lot of the constraints. Finally, customers had all of the data that they needed. We gave them services to be able to label that data in a high quality way. There's all the compute you need to be able to train the models. And so where you go? And so the cloud really enabled this Renaissance with machine learning. And we're seeing honestly a similar Renaissance with data and analytics. If you look back five to ten years, analytics was something you did in batch, your data warehouse ran an analysis to do reconciliation at the end of the month, and that was it. (John laughs) And so that's when you needed it. But today, if your Redshift cluster isn't available, Uber drivers don't turn up, DoorDash deliveries don't get made. Analytics is now central to virtually every business, and it is central to virtually every business's digital transformation. And being able to take that data from a variety of sources, be able to query it with high performance, to be able to actually then start to augment that data with real information, which usually comes from technical experts and domain experts to form wisdom and information from raw data. That's kind of what most organizations are trying to do when they kind of go through this analytics journey. >> It's interesting. Dave Velanta and I always talk on theCUBE about the future. And you look back, the things we're talking about six years ago are actually happening now. And it's not hyped up statement to say digital transformation is actually happening now. And there's also times when we bang our fists on the table saying, say, "I really think this is so important." And David says, "John, you're going to die on that hill." (Matt laughs) And so I'm excited that this year, for the first time, I didn't die on that hill. I've been saying- >> Do all right. >> Data as code is the next infrastructure as code. And Dave's like, "What do you mean by that?" We're talking about how data gets... And it's happening. So we just had an event on our AWS startups.com site, a showcase for startups, and the theme was data as code. And interesting new trends emerging really clearly, the role of a data engineer, right? Like an SRE, what an SRE did for cloud, you have a new data engineering role because of the developer onboarding is massively increasing, exponentially, new developers. Data science scientists are growing, but the pipelining and managing and engineering as a system, almost like an operating system. >> Kind of as a discipline. >> So what's your reaction to that about this data engineer, data as code? Because if you have horizontally scalable data, you've got to be open, that's hard (laughs), okay? And you got to silo the data that needs to be siloed for compliance and reason. So that's a big policy around that. So what's your reaction to data's code and the data engineering phenomenon? >> It's a really good point. I think with any technology project inside of an organization, success with analytics or machine learning, it's kind of 50% technology and then 50% cultural. And you have often domain experts. Those could be physicians or drug design experts, or they could be financial experts or whoever they might be, got deep domain expertise, and then you've got technical implementation teams. And there's kind of a natural, often repulsive force. I don't mean that rudely, but they just don't talk the same language. And so the more complex a domain and the more complex the technology, the stronger their repulsive force. And it can become very difficult for domain experts to work closely with the technical experts to be able to actually get business decisions made. And so what data engineering does and data engineering is, in some cases a team, or it can be a role that you play. It's really allowing those two disciplines to speak the same language. You can think of it as plumbing, but I think of it as like a bridge. It's a bridge between the technical implementation and the domain experts, and that requires a very disparate range of skills. You've got to understand about statistics, you've got to understand about the implementation, you got to understand about the data, you got to understand about the domain. And if you can put all of that together, that data engineering discipline can be incredibly transformative for an organization because it builds the bridge between those two groups. >> I was advising some young computer science students at the sophomore, junior level just a couple of weeks ago, and I told them I would ask someone at Amazon this question. So I'll ask you, >> Matt: Okay. since you've been in the middle of it for years, they were asking me, and I was trying to mentor them on how do you become a data engineer, from a practical standpoint? Courseware, projects to work on, how to think, not just coding Python, because everyone's coding in Python, but what else can they do? So I was trying to help them. I didn't really know the answer myself. I was just trying to kind of help figure it out with them. So what is the answer, in your opinion, or the thoughts around advice to young students who want to be data engineers? Because data scientists is pretty clear on what that is. You use tools, you make visualizations, you manage data, you get answers and insights and then apply that to the business. That's an application. That's not the standing up a stack or managing the infrastructure. So what does that coding look like? What would your advice be to folks getting into a data engineering role? >> Yeah, I think if you believe this, what I said earlier about 50% technology, 50 % culture, the number one technology to learn as a data engineer is the tools in the cloud which allow you to aggregate data from virtually any source into something which is incrementally more valuable for the organization. That's really what data engineering is all about. It's about taking from multiple sources. Some people call them silos, but silos indicates that the storage is kind of fungible or undifferentiated. That's really not the case. Success requires you to have really purpose built, well crafted, high performance, low cost engines for all of your data. So understanding those tools and understanding how to use them, that's probably the most important technical piece. Python and programming and statistics go along with that, I think. And then the most important cultural part, I think is... It's just curiosity. You want to be able to, as a data engineer, you want to have a natural curiosity that drives you to seek the truth inside an organization, seek the truth of a particular problem, and to be able to engage because probably you're going to some choice as you go through your career about which domain you end up in. Maybe you're really passionate about healthcare, or you're really just passionate about transportation or media, whatever it might be. And you can allow that to drive a certain amount of curiosity. But within those roles, the domains are so broad you kind of got to allow your curiosity to develop and lead you to ask the right questions and engage in the right way with your teams, because you can have all the technical skills in the world. But if you're not able to help the team's truth seek through that curiosity, you simply won't be successful. >> We just had a guest, 20 year old founder, Johnny Dallas who was 16 when he worked at Amazon. Youngest engineer- >> Johnny Dallas is a great name, by the way. (both chuckle) >> It's his real name. It sounds like a football player. >> That's awesome. >> Rock star. Johnny CUBE, it's me. But he's young and he was saying... His advice was just do projects. >> Matt: And get hands on. Yeah. >> And I was saying, hey, I came from the old days where you get to stand stuff up and you hugged on for the assets because you didn't want to kill the project because you spent all this money. And he's like, yeah, with cloud you can shut it down. If you do a project that's not working and you get bad data no one's adopting it or you don't like it anymore, you shut it down, just something else. >> Yeah, totally. >> Instantly abandon it and move on to something new. That's a progression. >> Totally! The blast radius of decisions is just way reduced. We talk a lot about in the old world, trying to find the resources and get the funding is like, all right, I want to try out this kind of random idea that could be a big deal for the organization. I need $50 million and a new data center. You're not going to get anywhere. >> And you do a proposal, working backwards, documents all kinds of stuff. >> All that sort of stuff. >> Jump your hoops. >> So all of that is gone. But we sometimes forget that a big part of that is just the prototyping and the experimentation and the limited blast radius in terms of cost, and honestly, the most important thing is time, just being able to jump in there, fingers on keyboards, just try this stuff out. And that's why at AWS, we have... Part of the reason we have so many services, because we want, when you get into AWS, we want the whole toolbox to be available to every developer. And so as your ideas develop, you may want to jump from data that you have that's already in a database to doing realtime data. And then you have the tools there. And when you want to get into real time data, you don't just have kinesis, you have real time analytics, and you can run SQL against that data. The capabilities and the breadth really matter when it comes to prototyping. >> That's the culture piece, because what was once a dysfunctional behavior. I'm going to go off the reservation and try something behind my boss' back, now is a side hustle or fun project. So for fun, you can just code something. >> Yeah, totally. I remember my first Hadoop projects. I found almost literally a decommissioned set of servers in the data center that no one was using. They were super old. They're about to be literally turned off. And I managed to convince the team to leave them on for me for another month. And I installed Hadoop on them and got them going. That just seems crazy to me now that I had to go and convince anybody not to turn these servers off. But what it was like when you- >> That's when you came up with Elastic MapReduce because you said this is too hard, we got to make it easier. >> Basically yes. (John laughs) I was installing Hadoop version Beta 9.9 or whatever. It was like, this is really hard. >> We got to make it simpler. All right, good stuff. I love the walk down memory Lane. And also your advice. Great stuff. I think culture is huge. That's why I like Adam's keynote at Reinvent, Adam Selipsky talk about Pathfinders and trailblazers, because that's a blast radius impact when you can actually have innovation organically just come from anywhere. That's totally cool. >> Matt: Totally cool. >> All right, let's get into the product. Serverless has been hot. We hear a lot of EKS is hot. Containers are booming. Kubernetes is getting adopted, still a lot of work to do there. Cloud native developers are booming. Serverless, Lambda. How does that impact the analytics piece? Can you share the hot products around how that translates? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> Aurora, SageMaker. >> Yeah, I think it's... If you look at kind of the evolution and what customers are asking for, they don't just want low cost. They don't just want this broad set of services. They don't just want those services to have deep capabilities. They want those services to have as low an operating cost over time as possible. So we kind of really got it down. We got built a lot of muscle, a lot of services about getting up and running and experimenting and prototyping and turning things off and turning them on and turning them off. And that's all great. But actually, you really only in most projects start something once and then stop something once, and maybe there's an hour in between or maybe there's a year. But the real expense in terms of time and operations and complexity is sometimes in that running cost. And so we've heard very loudly and clearly from customers that running cost is just undifferentiated to them. And they want to spend more time on their work. And in analytics, that is slicing the data, pivoting the data, combining the data, labeling the data, training their models, running inference against their models, and less time doing the operational pieces. >> Is that why the service focuses there? >> Yeah, absolutely. It dramatically reduces the skill required to run these workloads of any scale. And it dramatically reduces the undifferentiated heavy lifting because you get to focus more of the time that you would have spent on the operations on the actual work that you want to get done. And so if you look at something just like Redshift Serverless, that we launched a Reinvent, we have a lot of customers that want to run the cluster, and they want to get into the weeds where there is benefit. We have a lot of customers that say there's no benefit for me, I just want to do the analytics. So you run the operational piece, you're the experts. We run 60 million instant startups every single day. We do this a lot. >> John: Exactly. We understand the operations- >> I just want the answers. Come on. >> So just give me the answers or just give me the notebook or just give me the inference prediction. Today, for example, we announced Serverless Inference. So now once you've trained your machine learning model, just run a few lines of code or you just click a few buttons and then you got an inference endpoint that you do not have to manage. And whether you're doing one query against that end point per hour or you're doing 10 million, we'll just scale it on the back end. I know we got not a lot of time left, but I want to get your reaction on this. One of the things about the data lakes not being data swamps has been, from what I've been reporting and hearing from customers, is that they want to retrain their machine learning algorithm. They need that data, they need the real time data, and they need the time series data. Even though the time has passed, they got to store in the data lake. So now the data lake's main function is being reusing the data to actually retrain. It works properly. So a lot of post mortems turn into actually business improvements to make the machine learnings smarter, faster. Do you see that same way? Do you see it the same way? >> Yeah, I think it's really interesting >> Or is that just... >> No, I think it's totally interesting because it's convenient to kind of think of analytics as a very clear progression from point A to point B. But really, you're navigating terrain for which you do not have a map, and you need a lot of help to navigate that terrain. And so having these services in place, not having to run the operations of those services, being able to have those services be secure and well governed. And we added PII detection today. It's something you can do automatically, to be able to use any unstructured data, run queries against that unstructured data. So today we added text queries. So you can just say, well, you can scan a badge, for example, and say, well, what's the name on this badge? And you don't have to identify where it is. We'll do all of that work for you. It's more like a branch than it is just a normal A to B path, a linear path. And that includes loops backwards. And sometimes you've got to get the results and use those to make improvements further upstream. And sometimes you've got to use those... And when you're downstream, it will be like, "Ah, I remember that." And you come back and bring it all together. >> Awesome. >> So it's a wonderful world for sure. >> Dr. Matt, we're here in theCUBE. Just take the last word and give the update while you're here what's the big news happening that you're announcing here at Summit in San Francisco, California, and update on the business analytics group. >> Yeah, we did a lot of announcements in the keynote. I encourage everyone to take a look at, that this morning with Swami. One of the ones I'm most excited about is the opportunity to be able to take dashboards, visualizations. We're all used to using these things. We see them in our business intelligence tools, all over the place. However, what we've heard from customers is like, yes, I want those analytics, I want that visualization, I want it to be up to date, but I don't actually want to have to go from my tools where I'm actually doing my work to another separate tool to be able to look at that information. And so today we announced 1-click public embedding for QuickSight dashboard. So today you can literally as easily as embedding a YouTube video, you can take a dashboard that you've built inside QuickSight, cut and paste the HTML, paste it into your application and that's it. That's what you have to do. It takes seconds. >> And it gets updated in real time. >> Updated in real time. It's interactive. You can do everything that you would normally do. You can brand it, there's no power by QuickSight button or anything like that. You can change the colors, fit in perfectly with your application. So that's an incredibly powerful way of being able to take an analytics capability that today sits inside its own little fiefdom and put it just everywhere. Very transformative. >> Awesome. And the business is going well. You got the Serverless detail win for you there. Good stuff. Dr. Matt Wood, thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> Anytime. Thank you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit 2022 in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Stay with us for more coverage of day two after this short break. (gentle music)

(bright upbeat music) >> According to the latest survey from Enterprise Technology Research, container orchestration is the number one category as measured by customer spending momentum. It's ahead of AIML, it's ahead of cloud computing, and it's ahead of robotic process automation. All of which also show highly elevated levels of customer spending velocity. Now, we drill deeper into the survey of more than 1200 CIOs and IT buyers, and we find that a whopping 70% of respondents are spending more on Kubernetes initiatives in 2022 as compared to last year. The rise of Kubernetes came about through a series of improbable events that change the way applications are developed, deployed and managed. Very early on Kubernetes committers chose to focus on simplicity in massive adoption rather than deep enterprise functionality. It's why initially virtually all activity around Kubernetes focused on stateless applications. That has changed. As Kubernetes adoption has gone mainstream, the need for stronger enterprise functionality has become much more pressing. You hear this constantly when you attend the various developer conference, and the talk is all around, let's say, shift left to improve security and better cluster management, more complete automation capabilities, support for data-driven workloads and very importantly, vastly better application performance in visibility and management. And that last topic is what we're here to talk about today. Hello, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation where we invite into our East Coast Studios Matt Provo, who's the founder and CEO of StormForge and Chandler Hoisington, the general manager of EKS Edge in Hybrid at AWS. Gentlemen, welcome, it's good to see you. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> So Chandler, you have this convergence, you've got application performance, you've got developer speed and velocity and you've got cloud economics all coming together. What's driving that convergence and why is it important for customers? >> Yeah, yeah, great question. I think it's important to kind of understand how we got here in the first place. I think Kubernetes solves a lot of problems for users, but the complexity of Kubernetes of just standing up a cluster to begin with is not always simple. And that's where services like EKS comes in and where Amazon tried to solve that problem for users saying, "Hey the control plane, it's made up of 10, 15 different components, standing all these up, patching them, you know, handling the CBEs for it et cetera, et cetera, is a very complicated process, let me help you do that." And where EKS has been so successful and with EKS Anywhere which we launched last year, that's what we're helping customers do, a very similar thing in their own data centers. So we're kind of solving this problem of bringing the cluster online and helping customers launch their first application on it. But then what do you do once your application's there? That's the question. And so now you launched your application and does it have enough resources? Did you tune the right CPU? Did you tune the right amount of memory for it? All those questions need to be answered and that's where working with folks like StormForge come in. >> Well, it's interesting Matt because you're all about optimization and trying to maximize the efficiency which might mean people's lower their AWS bill, but that's okay with Amazon, right? You guys have shown the cheaper it is, the more they buy, well. >> Yeah. And it's all about loyalty and developer experience. And so when you can help create or add to the developer experience itself, over time that loyalty's there. And so when we can come alongside EKS and services from Amazon, well, number one StormForge is built on Amazon, on AWS, and so it's a nice fit, but when we don't have to require developers to choose between things like cost and performance, but they can focus on, you know, innovation and connecting the applications that they're managing on Kubernetes as they operationalize them to the actual business objectives that they have, it's a pretty powerful combination. >> So your entry into the market was in pre-production. >> Yeah. >> You can kind of simulate what performance is going to look like and now you've announced optimized live. >> Yep. >> So that should allow you to turn the crank a little bit more. >> Yeah. >> Get a little bit more accurate and respond more quickly. >> Yeah. So we're the only ones that give you both views. And so we want to, you know, we want to provide a view in what we call kind of our experimentation side of our platform, which is pre-production, as well as on ongoing and continuous view which we kind of call our observation, the observation part of our solution, which is in production. And so for us, it's about providing that view, it's also about taking an increased number of data inputs into the platform itself so that our machine learning can learn from that and ultimately be able to automate the right kinds of tasks alongside the developers to meet their objectives. >> So, Chandler, in my intro I was talking about the spending velocity and how Kubernetes was at the top. But when we had other survey questions that ETR did, and this is post pandemic, it was interesting. We asked what's the most important initiative? And the two top ones were security, no surprise, and it popped up really after the pandemic hit in the lockdown even more prominent and cloud migration, >> Right. >> was number two. And so how are you working with StormForge to effect cloud migrations? Talk about that relationship. >> Yeah. I think it's, you know, different enterprises to have different strategies on how they're going to get their workloads to the cloud. Some of 'em want to have modernize in place in their data centers and then take those modernized applications and move them to the cloud, and that's where something like I mentioned earlier, EKS Anywhere comes into play really nicely because we can bring a consistent experience, a Kubernetes experience to your data center, you can modernize your applications and then you can bring those to EKS in the cloud. And as you're moving them back and forth you have a more consistent experience with Kubernetes. And luckily StormForge works on prem as well even in air gapped environments for StormForge. So, you know, that's, you can get your applications tuned correctly for your data center workloads, and then you're going to tune them differently when you move them to the cloud and you can get them tuned correctly there but StormForge can run consistently in both environments. >> Now, can you add some color as to how you optimize EKS? >> Yeah, so I think from a EKS standpoint, when you, again, when the number of parameters that you have to look at for your application inside of EKS and then the associated services that will go alongside that the packages that are coming in from a Kubernetes standpoint itself, and then you start to transition and operationalize where more and more of these are in production, they're, you know, connected to the business, we provide the ability to go beyond what developers typically do which is sort of take the, either the out of the box defaults or recommendations that ship with the services that they put into their application or the any human's ability to kind of keep up with a couple parameters at a time. You know, with two parameters for the typical Kubernetes application, you might have about a 100 different possible combinations that you could choose from. And sometimes humans can keep up with that, at least statically. And so for us, we want to blow that wide open. We want developers to be able to take advantage of the entire footprint or environment itself. And, you know, by using machine learning to help augment what the developers themselves are doing, not replacing them, augmenting them and having them be a part of that process. Now this whole new world of optimization opens up to them, which is pretty fantastic. And so how the actual workloads are configured, you know, on an ongoing basis and predictively based on upcoming business events, or even unknowns many times is a pretty powerful position to be in. >> I mean, you said not to replace development. I mentioned robotic process automation in my intro, and of course in the early days, I was like, oh, it's going to replace my job. What's actually happened is it's replacing all the mundane tasks. >> Yeah. >> So you can actually do your job. >> Yeah. >> Right? We're all working 24/7, 365 these days, so that the extent that you can automate the things that I hate doing, >> Yeah. >> That's a huge win. So Chandler, how do people get started? You mentioned EKS Anywhere, are they starting on prem and then kind of moving into the cloud? If I'm a customer and I'm interested and I'm sort of at the beginning, where do I start? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really depends on your workload. Any workload that can run in the cloud should run in the cloud. I'm not just saying that because I work at Amazon but I truly think that that is the case. And I think customers think that as well. More and more customers are trying to move workloads to the cloud for that elasticity and all the benefits of using these huge platforms and, you know, hundreds of services that you have advantage of in the cloud but some workloads just can't move to the cloud yet. You have workloads that have latency requirements like some gaming workloads, for example, where we don't have regions close enough to the consumers yet. So, you know, you want to put workloads in Turkey to service Egypt customers or something like this. You also have workloads that are, you know, on cruise ships and they lose connectivity in the middle of the Atlantic, or maybe you have highly secure workloads in air gapped environments or something like this. So there's still a lot of use cases that keep workloads on prem and sometimes customers just have existing investments in hardware that they don't want to eat yet, right? And they want to slowly phase those out as they move to the cloud. And again, that's where EKS Anywhere really plays well for the workloads that you want to keep on prem, but then as you move to the cloud you can take advantage of obviously EKS. >> I'll put you in the spot. >> Sure. >> And don't hate me for doing this, but so Andy Jassy, Adam Selipsky, I've certainly heard Maylan Thompson Bukavek talk about this, and in fullness of time, all workloads will be in the cloud. >> Yeah. >> And I've said the cloud is expanding. We're going to bring the cloud to the edge. Edge is in your title. >> Yeah. >> Is that a correct interpretation and obvious it relates >> Absolutely. >> to Kubernetes. >> And you'll see that in Amazon strategy. I mean, without posts and wavelengths and local zones, like we're, at the end of the day, Amazon tries to satisfy customers. And if customers are saying, "Hey, I need workloads in San, I want to run a workload in San Francisco. And it's really important to me that it's close to those users, the end users that are in that area," we're going to help them do that at Amazon. And there's a variety of options now to do that. EKS Anywhere is actually only one piece of that kind of whole strategy. >> Yeah. I mean, here you have your best people working on the speed of light problem, but until that's solved, sure, sure. >> That's right. >> We'll give you the last word. >> How do you know about that? >> Yeah. Yeah. (all laughing) >> It's a top secret. Sorry. You heard it on the CUBE first. Matt, we'll give you the last word, bring us home. >> I, so I couldn't agree more. The, you know, the cloud is where workloads are going. Whether what I love is the ability to look at, you know, for the same enterprises, a lot of the ones we work with, want a, they want a public and a private view, public cloud, private cloud view. And they want that flexibility to, depending on the nature of the applications to be able to shift between from time to time where, you know, really decide. And I love EKS Anywhere. I think it's a fantastic addition to the, you know, to the ecosystem. And, you know, I think for us, we're about staying focused on the set of problems that we solve. No developer that I've ever met and probably neither of you have met, gets super excited about getting out of bed to manually tune their applications. And so what we find is that, you know, the time spent doing that, literally just is, there's like a one-to-one correlation. It means they're not innovating and they're not doing what they love to be doing. And so when we can come alongside that and automate away the manual task to your point, I think there are a lot of parallels to RPA in that case, it becomes actually a pretty empowering process for our users, so that they feel like they're, again, meeting the business objectives that they have, they get to innovate and yet, you know, they're exploring this whole new world around not having to choose between something like cost and performance for their applications. >> Well, and we're entering an entire new era of scale. >> Yeah. >> We've never seen before and human just are not going to be able to keep up with that. >> Yep. >> And that affect quality and speed and everything else. Guys, hey, thanks so much for coming in a great conversation. And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's special showcase with Unstoppable Domains. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. And Matt Gould who's the founder and CEO of Unstoppable Domains. Matt, great to come on. Congratulations on the success of your company, Unstoppable Domains. Thanks for kicking off this showcase. >> Well, thank you, happy to be here. >> So first of all, love the story you've got going on here. Love the approach, very innovative, but you're also on the big Web3 wave, which we know that leads into, metaverse unlimited new ways, people are consuming information, content, applications are being built differently. This is a major wave and it's happening. Some people are trying to squint through the hype versus reality, but you don't have to be a rocket science to realize that it's a cultural shift and a technical shift going on with Web3. So this is kind of what's happening in the market. So give us your take. What's your reaction? You're in the middle of it. You're on this wave. >> Yeah, well, I would say it's a torrent of change that got unleashed just over a decade ago with Bitcoin coming out and giving people the ability to have digital items that they could actually own themselves online. And this is a new thing. And people coming, especially from my generation of millennials, they spend their time online in these digital spaces and they've wanted to be able to own these items and you see it from, you know Gaming and Fortnite and Skins and Warcraft and all these other places. But this is really being enabled by this new crypto technology to just extend to a whole lot more applications, from money, which everyone's familiar with, to NFT projects like Board Apes or CryptoBucks. >> You know, I was listening to your podcast. You guys got a great pod. I think you're on 117 episodes now and growing. You guys do a deep dive, so people watching check out the Unstoppable Podcast. But on the last podcast, Matt, you mentioned some of the older generations like me, I grew up with IP addresses and before the web, they called it information super highway. It wasn't even called the web yet, but IP was generated by the United States Department of Commerce and R&D, that became the internet, the internet became the web. Back then it was just get some web pages up and find what you're looking for. Very analog compared to what's now today, now you mentioned gaming. You mentioned how people are changing. Can you talk about your view of this cultural shift? And we've been talking about the queue for many, many years now, but it's at actually happening now where the expectation of the audience and the users and the people consuming and communicating and bonding in groups, whether it's gaming or communities are expecting new behaviors, new applications, and it's a forcing function. This shift is having now, what's your reaction to that? What's your explanation? >> Yeah, well, I think it just goes back to the shift of people's where are they spending their time? And if you look today, most people spend 50% plus of their time in front of a screen. And that's just a tremendous amount of effort. But if you look at how much of their assets are digital, it's like less than 1% of their portfolio would be some sort of digital asset compared to literally 50% of every day sitting in front of a screen. And simultaneously what's happening is these new technologies are emerging around cryptocurrencies, blockchain systems, ways for you to track digital ownership of things, and then kind of bring that into your different applications. So one of the big things that's happening with Web3 is this concept of data portability, meaning that I can own something on one application and then I could potentially take that with me to several other applications across the internet. And so this is like the emerging digital property rights that are happening right now as we transition from a model in Web2, where you are on a hosted service like Facebook, it's a walled garden, they own and control everything. You are the product, they're mining you for data and they're just selling ads, right? To a system where it's much more open. You can go into these worlds and experiences. You can take things with you and you can leave with them. And most people are doing this with cryptocurrency. Maybe you earn an end-game currency, you can leave and take that to a different game, and you can spend it somewhere else. So the user is now enable to bring their data to the party. Whereas before now, you couldn't really do that. And that data includes their money or that includes their digital items. And so I think that's the big shift that we're seeing and that changes a lot in how applications serve up to users. It's going to change their user experiences for instance. >> I think the script has flipped and you're right on. I agree with you. I think you guys are smart to see it. And I think everyone who's on this wave will see it. Let's get into that because this is happening. People are saying, "I'm done with being mined "and being manipulated by the big Facebook "and the LinkedIns of the world who are using the user." Now, the contract was a free product and you gave up your data, but then it got too far. Now people want to be in charge of their data. They want to broker their data. They want to collect their digital exhaust, maybe collect some things in a game, or maybe do some commerce in an application or marketplace. So these are the new use cases. How does a digital identity architecture work with Unstoppable? How would you guys enabling that? Can you take us through the vision of where you guys came on this because it's unique, you had an NFT and kind of the domain name concept coming together, can you explain? >> Yeah, so we think we approach the problem for if we're going to rebuild the way that people interact online, what are kind of the first primitives that they're going to need in order to make that possible? And we thought that one of the things that you have on every network, like when you log on Twitter, you have a Twitter handle, when you log on Instagram, you have an Instagram handle. It's your name, right? You have that name that's on those applications. And right now what happens is if users get kicked off the platform, they lose a 100% of their followers, right? And they also, in some cases, they can't even directly contact their followers on some of these platforms. There's no way for them to retain this social network. So you have all these influencers, who are today's small businesses, who build up these large, you know profitable, small businesses online, being key opinion leaders to their demographic. And then they could be deplatformed, or they're unable to take this data and move to another platform if that platform raises their fees. You've seen several platforms increase their take rates. You have 10, 20, 30, 40%, and they're getting locked in and they're getting squeezed, right? So we just said, "You know what, "the first thing you're going to want to own "that this is going to be your piece of digital property "is going to be your name across these applications." If you look at every computing network in the history of computing networks, they end up with a naming system. And when we looked back at DNS, you know which came out in the 90s, it was just a way for people to find these webpages much easier instead of mapping these IP addresses. And then we said to ourselves, "What's going to happen in the future?" Is just like everyone has an email address that they use in their Web2 world in order to identify themselves as they log into all these applications. They're going to have an NFT domain in the Web3 world in order to authenticate and bring their data with them across these applications. So we saw a direct correlation there between DNS and what we're doing with NFT domain name systems. And the bigger breakthrough here is that NFT domain systems all of these NFT assets that live on a blockchain. They are owned by users. They're built on these open systems so that multiple applications could read data off of them and that makes them portable. So we were looking for an infrastructure play like a picks and shovels play for the emerging Web3 metaverse. And we thought that names were just something that if we wanted a future to happen, where all 3.5 billion people with cell phones are sending crypto and digital assets back and forth, they're going to need to have a name to make this a lot easier instead of these long IP addresses or hex addresses in the case of crypto. >> Yeah, and also people have multiple wallets too. It's not like there's all kinds of wallet, variations, name verification, you see the link tree is everywhere. You know, that's essentially just an app. I mean, doesn't really do anything. I mean, so you're seeing people trying to figure it out. I got a github handle. I got a LinkedIn handle. I mean, what do you do with it? >> Yeah, and then specific to crypto, there was a very hair on fire use case for people who buy their first Bitcoin. And for those in the audience who haven't done this yet, when you go in and you go into an app and you buy your first Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever cryptocurrency, and then the first time you try to send it, there's this field where you want to send it and it's this very long hex address. And it looks like an IP address from the 1980s, right? And it's like a bank number and no one's going to use that to send money back and forth to each other. And so just like domain names and the D apps system replace IP addresses, NFT domains on blockchain systems replace hex addresses for sending and receiving cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever. And that's its first use case is it really plugs in there. So when you want to send money to someone, you can just instead of sending money to a large hex address that you have to copy and paste, you could have an error, or you could send it to the wrong place, it's pretty scary. You could send it to johnfurrier.nft. And so we thought that you're just not going to get global adoption without better UX, same thing it worked with .com domains. And this is the same thing for Bitcoin and other crypto. >> It's interesting, look at the Web2 or trend one to two, Web1 went to two, it was all about use, ease of use, right? And making things simpler, clutter, more pages can't find things that was search, that was Google. Since then, has there actually been an advancement? >> Hmm. >> Facebook certainly is not an advancement, they're hoarding all the data. So I think we're broken between that step of a free search to all the resources in the world, to which by the way, they're mining a lot of data too, with the Toolbar and Chrome. But now where's that Web3 crossover? So take us through your vision on digital identity on Web2, Google searching, Facebook's broken, democracy's broken, users aren't in charge to Web3? >> Got it. Well, we can start at Web1. So the way that I think about it is if you go to Web1, it was very simple, just text web pages. So it was just a way for someone to like put up a billboard and here's a piece of information and here's some things that you could read about it, right? And then what happened with Web2, was you started having applications being built that had backend infrastructure to provide services. So if you think about Web2, these are all websites or web portals that have services attached to them, whether that's a social network service or a search engine or whatever. And then as we move to Web3, the new thing that's happening here, is the user is coming onto that experience and they're able to connect in their wallet or their Web3 identity to that app and they can bring their data to the party. So it's kind of like Web1, you just have a static web page, Web2, you have a static webpage with a service, like a server back here, and then Web3, the user can come in and bring their database with them in order to have much better app experiences. So how does that change things? Well, for one, that means that you want data to be portable across apps. So we touched on gaming earlier and maybe if I have an in-game item for one game that I'm playing for a certain company, I can take it across two or three different games. It also impacts money. Money is just digital information. So now I can connect to a bunch of different apps and I can just use cryptocurrency to make those payments across those things instead of having to use a credit card. But then another thing that happens is I can bring unlimited amount of additional information about myself when I plug in my wallet. And as an example, when I plug into Google search, for instance, they could take a look at my wallet that I've connected and they could pull information about me that I enable that I share with them. And this means that I'm going to get a much more personalized experience on these websites and I'm also going to have much more control over my data. There's a lot of people out there right now who are worried about data privacy, especially in places like Europe. And one of the ways to solve that is simply to not store the data and instead have the user bring it with them. >> You know, I've always thought about this and always debated it with Dave a lot and my co-host, does top down governance privacy laws outweigh the organic bottoms up innovation? So what you're getting at here is, "Hey, if you can actually have that solved "(laughing) before it even starts." It was almost as if those services were built for the problem of Web2. >> Yes. >> Not three. >> Right. >> What's your reaction to that? >> I think that is right on the money. And if you look at it as a security, like if I put my security researcher hat on, I think the biggest problem we have with security and privacy on the web today is that we have these large organizations that are collecting so much data on us and they just become these honeypots and there have been huge breaches. Like Equifax, you know a few years back is a big one and this all your credit card data got leaked, right? And all your credit information got leaked. And we just have this model where these big companies silo your data, they create a giant database, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, to be attack. And then someone eventually is going to hack that in order to pull that information. Well, if instead, and you can look at this at Web3. So for those in the audience who have used, a Web3 application, one of these D app, to trade cryptocurrencies or something, you'll know that when you go there, you actually connect your wall. So when you're working with these web, you connect, you bring your information with you and you connect it. That means that the app has none of that stored, right? So these apps that people are using for crypto trading cryptocurrency on apps or whatever, they have no stored information. So if someone hacks one of these defi exchanges, for instance, there's nothing to steal. And that's because the only time the information is being accessed is when the user is actively using the site. And so as someone who cares about security and privacy, I go, "Wow, that's a much better or data model." And that gives so much more control of user 'cause the user just permissions access to the data only during the time period in which they're interacting with the application. And so I think you're right and like we are very excited to be building these tools, right? Because I see it like if you look at Europe, they basically pass GDPR and then all the companies are going, "We can't comply with that." They keep postponing it or like changing it a little bit and trying to make it easier to comply with. But honestly we just need to switch the data models. So the companies aren't even taking the data and then they're going to be in a much better spot. >> And GDPR is again a nightmare. I think it's the wrong approach. I always said it was screwed up because most companies don't even know where stuff is stored and nevermind how they delete someone's entry in a database. They don't even know what they're collecting. Some at some level they become so complicated. So right on the money there good, good call out. There question for you. Is this then? Okay, so do you decouple the wallet from the ID or are they together and is it going to be a universal wallet? Do you guys see yourselves as universal domains? Take me through the thinking around how you're looking at the wallet and the actual identity of the user, which obviously is important on the identity side, wallet is that just universal or is that going to be coming together? >> Well, I think so. The way that we kind of think about it is that wallets are where people have their financial interactions online. And then identity is much more about, it's kind of like being your passport. So it's like your driver's license for the internet. So these are two kind of separate products we see longer term and actually work together. So, if you have a domain name, it actually is easier to make deposits into your wallet because it's easier to remember to send money to mattgloud.crypto. And that way it's easier for me to receive payments or whatever. And then inside my wallet, I'm going to be doing defi trades or whatever. And that doesn't really have an interaction with names necessarily in order to do those transactions. But then if I want to sign into a website or something, I could connect that with my NFT domain. And I do think that these two things are kind of separate. I think we're going to... Still early, so figuring out exactly how the industry is going to shake out over like a five to 10 year time horizon and maybe a little bit more difficult and we could see some other emerging... What you would consider like cornerstones of the crypto ecosystem. But I do think identity and reputation is one of those. And I also think that your financial applications of defi are going to be another. So those are the two areas where I see it. And just a note on this, when you have a wallet that usually has multiple cryptocurrency addresses, so you're going to have like 50 cryptocurrency addresses in a wallet. You're going to want to have one domain name that links back to all those, because you're just not going to remember those 50 different addresses. So that's how I think that they collaborate and we collaborate with several large wallets as well, like blockchain.com and another 30 plus of these to make it easier for sending out and receiving cryptocurrency. >> So the wallet basically is a D app, the way you look at it, the integrated. >> Yeah. >> Whatever you want, just integrate in. How do I log into decentralized application with my NFT domain name? Because this becomes okay. I got to love the idea, love my identity. I'm an my own NFT. I mean, how this video's going to be an NFT soon. We get on board with the program here, but how do I log into my app? I'm going to have a D app and I got my domain name. Do I have to submit is there benchmarking? Is there approval process? Is there APIs and SDK kind of thinking around it? How are you thinking about dealing with the apps? >> Yeah, so all of the above. And what we're trying to do here is build like an SSO solution, but it's consumer based. So what we've done is adapted some SSO protocols that other people have used, the standard ones, in order to connect that back to an NFT domain in this case. And that way you GET the best of both worlds. So you can use these authorization protocols for data permissioning that are, you know, standard Web2 APIs, but then the permissioning system is actually based on the user-controlled NFT. So they're assigning it that with their private public key pair in order to make those updates. So that allows you to connect into both of these systems. We think that that's how technology typically impacts the world is it's not like you have something that just replaces something overnight. You have an integration of these technologies over time. And we really see these Web3 components and net two domains integrating nicely into regular apps. So as an example in the future, when you log in right now, you see Google off, Facebook off, or you can type in an email address, you could see NFT, Unstoppable Domains or NFT authorization. And you can SSO in to that website. When you go to a website like an e-commerce website, you could share information about yourself, 'cause you've connected your wallet now. So you could say, "Yes, I am a unique individual. "I do live in New York and I just bought a new house." And then when you permission all that information about yourself to that application, you can serve up a new user experience for you. And we think it's going to be very interesting for doing rewards and discounts online for e-commerce specifically in the future because that opens up a whole new market. 'Cause they can ask you questions about yourself and you can deliver that information directly to the app. >> I really think that the gaming market has totally nailed the future use case, which is in game currency, in game end engagement, in game data. And now bringing that to kind of a horizontally scalable like surface areas is huge, right? So, you know, I think that's a huge success on the concept. The question I have to ask you is you getting any pushback from, ICANN, the International Corporation of Naming and Numbers, they got dot everything now.club, 'cause the clubhouse, they got dot, party.live. I mean the real domain name people are over here, Web2, you guys are coming out with the Web3. Where is that connect for people who are not following along the Web3 trend? How do you rationalize the domain angle here? >> Yeah, well, so I would say that NFT domains are what domains on DNS were always meant to be 30 plus years ago. And they just didn't have blockchain systems back in the nineties when they were building these things. So there's no way to make them for individuals. So what happened was for DNS, it actually ended up being business. So if you look at DNS names, there's about 350 million registrations. They're basically all small business. And it's like, 20 to 50 million small businesses who own the majority of these.com or these regular DNS domain names. And that's their focus. NFT domains, because all of a sudden you have the wallet, you have them in your wallet and your crypto wallet, they're actually for individuals. So that market, instead of being for small businesses is actually end users. So instead of being for 20 to 50 million small businesses, we're talking about being useful for three to four billion people who have an internet connection. And so we actually think that the market size for NFT domains is somewhere 50 to a hundred X, the market size for traditional domain names. And then the use cases are going to be much more for individuals on a day to day basis. So it's like people are going to want you on a use them for receiving cryptocurrency or receiving dollars or payments or USCC coin, where they're going to want to use them as identifiers on social networks, where they're going to want to use them for SSO. And they're not going to want to use them as much for things like websites, which is what Web2 is. And if I'm being perfectly honest, if I'm looking out 10 years from now, I think that these traditional domain name systems are going to want to work with and adopt this new NFT technology, 'cause they're going to want to have these features for the domain names. So like in short, I think NFT domain names are domain names with superpowers. This is the next generation of naming systems. And naming systems were always meant to be identity networks. >> Yeah, they hit a glass ceiling. I mean they just can't, they're not built for that. And having people, having their own names, is essentially what decentralization is all about. 'Cause we, what is a company? It's a collection of humans that aren't working in one place, they're decentralized. So then you decentralize the identity and everything's been changed. So completely love it. I think you guys are onto something really huge here. You pretty much laid out what's next for Web3, but you guys are in this state of growth. You've seen people signing up for names. That's great. What are the best practices? What are the steps are people taking? What's the common use case for folks who are putting this to work right now for you guys? Why do you see, what's the progression? >> Yeah, so the thing that we want to solve for people most immediately, is we want to make it easier for sending and receiving crypto payments. And I know that sounds like a niche market, but there's over 200 million people right now who have some form of cryptocurrency, right? And 99.9% of them are still sending crypto using these really long hex addresses. And that market is growing at 60 to 100% year over year. So first we need to get crypto into everybody's pocket and that's going to happen over the next three to five years. Let's call it, if it doubles every year for the next five years, we'll be there. And then we want to make it easier for all those people to send crypto back and forth. And I will admit I'm a big fan of these stable coins and these like... I would say utility focused tokens that are coming out just to make it easier for transferring money from here to Turkey and back or whatever. And that's the really the first step for NFT domain names. But what happens is when you have an NFT domain and that's what you're using to receive payments, and then you realize, oh, I can also use this to log into my favorite apps. It starts building that identity piece. And so we're also building products and services to make it more like your identity. And we think that it's going to build up over time. So instead of like doing an identity network top down where you're like a government or corporation, you say, oh, you have to have ID, here's your password, you have to have it. We're going to do it, bottoms up. We're going to give everyone on the planet and up to you domain name, it's going to give them some utility to make it easier to send, receive cryptocurrency. And we're going to say, "Hey, do you want to verify your Twitter profile?" Yes. Okay, great. You just attach that back. Hey, you want to verify your Reddit? Yes, Instagram? Yes, TikTok, yes. You want to verify your driver's license? Okay, yeah, we can attach that back. And then what happens is you end up building up organically digital identifiers for people using these blockchain naming systems. And once they have that, they're going to just... They're going to be able to share that information and that's going to lead to better experiences online for both commerce, but also just better user experiences in general. >> Every company when they web came along first, everyone pro proved the web once. Oh, it's terrible. A bad idea. Oh, it's so, unreliable, so slow. Hard to find things. Web2, everyone bought a domain name for their company, but then as they added webpages, these premalinks became so long, the webpage address fully qualified, permalink string, they bought keywords. And then that's another layer on top. So you started to see that evolution in the web. Now it's kind of hit ceiling. Here, everyone gets their NFT, they start doing more things. Then it becomes much more of a use case where it's more usable, not just for one thing. So we saw that movie before, so it's like a permalink, permanent. >> Yeah. >> Excellent. >> Yes indeed. I mean, if we're lucky it will be a decentralized bottoms up global identity that appreciates user privacy and allows people to opt in. And that's what we want to build. >> And the gas prices thing that's always come out always an objection here that, I mean, blockchain's perfect for this 'cause it's, imitable, it's written on the chain. All good, totally secure. What about the efficiency? How do you see that evolving real quick? >> Well, so a couple comments on efficiency. First of all, we picked domains as first product to market. 'Cause you need to take a look and see if the technology is capable of handling what you're trying to do and for domain names, you're not updating that every day. So like, if you look at traditional domain names, you only update it a couple times per year. So, the usage for that to set this up and configure it, most people set it up and configure it and then they only have a few changes per year. First of all, the overall you, it's not like a game. >> An IO problem. >> Right, right, right. So that part's good. So we picked a good place to start for going to market. And then the second piece is like, you're really just asking, are computer systems going to get more efficient over time? And if you know, the history of that has always been yes. And I remember the 90s, I had a modem and it was 14 kilobits and then it was 28 and then 56 and then 100. And now I have a hundred megabits up and down. And I look at blockchain systems and I don't know if anyone has a law for this yet, but throughput of blockchains is going up over time and there's going to be continued improvements over this over the next decade. We need them. We're going to use all of it. And you just need to make sure you're planning a business makes sense for the current environment. Just as an example, if you would try to launch Netflix for online streaming in 1990, you would've had a bad time because no one had bandwidth. So yeah, some applications are going to be wait to be a little bit later on in the cycle, but I actually think identity is perfectly fine to go ahead and get off the ground now. >> Yeah, the motivated parties for innovations here, I mean a point cast failed miserably that was like, they tried to stream video over T1 lines, but back in the days, nothing. So again, we've seen those speeds, double, triple in homes right now. Matt, congratulations, great stuff. Final, TikTok moment here. How would you summarize in a short clip, the difference between digital identity and Web2 and Web3. >> In Web2, you don't get to own your own online presidence, and in Web3 you do get to own it. So I think if you were going to simplify it, really Web3 is about ownership and we're excited to give everyone on the planet a chance to own their name and choose when and where and how they want to share information about themselves. >> So now users are in charge. >> Exactly, you got it. >> They're not the product anymore. If you got to be the product you might as well monetize the product, and that's the data. Real quick thoughts just to close out the roll of data and all this, your view. >> We haven't enabled users to own their data online since the beginning of the internet. And we're now starting to do that. It's going to have profound changes for how every application on the planet interacts with their users. >> Awesome stuff, Matt, take a minute to give a plug for the company. How many employees you got? What are you guys looking for for hiring, fundraising? Give a quick commercial for what's going on Unstoppable Domains. >> Yeah, so if you haven't already, check us out at unstoppabledomains.com, we're also on Twitter at Unstoppable web. And we have a wonderful podcast as well that you should check out if you haven't already. And we are just crossed a hundred people. We're growing, three to five hundred percent year over year. We're basically hiring every position across the company right now. So if you're interested in getting into Web3, even if you're coming from a traditional to background, please reach out. We love teaching people about this new world and how you can be a part of it. >> And you're a virtual company. You have a little headquarters or is it all virtual? What's the situation there? >> Yeah, I actually just assumed we are 100% remote and asynchronous and we're currently in five countries across the planet in mostly concentrated in the US and the EU areas. >> I heard a rumor too. Maybe you can confirm or admit or deny this rumor. I heard a rumor that you have mandatory vacation policy. >> This is true. And that's because we are a team of people who like to get things done. But we also know that recovery is an important part of any organization. So if you push too hard, we want to remind people we're on a marathon, right? This is not a sprint. And so we want people to be with us long term, and we do think that this is a 10 year move. And so yeah, do force people. We'll unplug you at the end of the year, if you- >> That's what I was going to ask you. So what's the consequence of, I don't take vacation. >> Yeah, we literally unplug you. (both laughing) >> You won't be able to get into slack. Right, and that's (indistinct). >> Well, when people start having their avatars be their bought and you don't even know what you're unplugging at some point, that's where you guys come in with the NFT saying that that's not the real person, it's not the real human. >> Yeah, exactly. We'll be able to check. >> NFT is great innovation, great use case, Matt congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story to kick off this showcase with theCUBE. Thanks for sharing all that great insight. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, John had a wonderful time. >> All right, this is theCUBE Unstoppable Domains showcasing. We've got 10 great pieces of content we're dropping all today. Check them out. Stay with us for more coverage. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)