(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)