>>Welcome back to Vienna on 2021 you're watching the Cube and my name is Dave Volonte. You know, the last 10 years of cloud, they were largely about spinning up virtualized compute infrastructure and accessing cheap and simple object storage and some other things like networking. The cloud was largely though a set of remote resources that simplify deployment and supported the whole spate of native applications that have emerged to power the activity of individuals and businesses the next decade, however, promises to build on the troves of data that live in the cloud, make connections to on premises applications and support new application innovations that are agile, iterative, portable and span resources in all in all the clouds, public clouds, private clouds, cross cloud connections all the way out to the near and far edge. In a linchpin of this new application development model is container platforms and container orchestration, which brings immense scale and capability to technology driven organizations, especially as they have evolved from supporting stateless applications to underpinning mission critical workloads as such containers bring complexities and risks that need to be addressed, not the least of which is protecting the massive amounts of data that are flowing through these systems. And with me to discuss these exciting and challenging trends or Danny Allen, who's the ceo of in and Niraj Tolia, the president at Kasten Bivins gentlemen welcome to the cube. >>Thank you delighted to be here with you Dave. >>Likewise, very excited to be a Dave. >>Okay, so Danny big M and a move. Great little acquisition. You're now seeing others try to make similar moves. Why what did you see in cast in? What was the fit? Why'd you make that move? >>Well, I think you nailed it. Dave's. We've seen an evolution in the infrastructure that's being used over the last two decades. So if you go back 20 years, there was a massive digital transformation to enable users to be self service with digital applications. About 2000 or so, 2010, everything started being virtualized. I know virtualization came along before that but virtualization really started to take off because it gave return on investment and gave flexibility all kinds of benefits. But now we're in a third wave which is built on containers. And the amazing thing about containers is that as you said, it allows you to connect multi cloud, hybrid cloud the edge to the core. And they're designed for the consumption world. If you think about the cloud, you can provision things deep provisions things. That's the way that containers are designed the applications and so because they're designed for a consumption based world because they are designed for portability across all of these different infrastructures, it only made sense for us to invest in the industry's leading provider of data protection for kubernetes. And that of course is costume, >>there's some garage, I mean take us back. I mean, you know, container has been around forever. But then, you know, they started to, you know, hit go mainstream and and and and at first, you know, they were obviously ephemeral, stateless apps, kind of lightweight stuff. But but you at the time you and the team said, okay, these are gonna become more complex microservices. Maybe so micro, but you had to have the vision and you made a bet uh maybe take us back to sort of how you saw that and where where's containers have have come from? >>Sure. So let's rewind the clock right. As you said, containers, old technology in the same way virtualization started with IBM mainframes, right, containers in different forms have been around for a while. But I think when the light bulb went off for me was very early days in 2015 when my engineering team, a previous company started complaining. And the reason they were complaining about different other engineering groups and the reason they were complaining was because the right things, things were coming together sooner. We're identifying things sooner. And that's when I said, this is going to be the next wave of infrastructure. The same way watch a light virtualization revolutionized how people built deployed apps. We saw that with containers and in particular in those days we made that bet on commodities. Right? So we said from first Principles and that's where you know, you had other things like Docker, swarm esos, etcetera and we said community, that's going to be the way to go because it is just so powerful and it is, you know, at the end of the day, what we all do is infrastructure. But what we saw was that containers optimizing for the developer, they were optimizing for the people that really build applications, deliver value to all of their and customers. And that is what made us see that even though the initially we only saw stateless applications state will was going to happen because there's just so much momentum behind it And the writing for us at least was on the wall. And that's how we started off on this journey in 2017. >>What are the unique nuances and differences really in terms of protecting containers from a, from a technical standpoint, what what's different? >>So there are a couple of subtle things. Right again, the jokers, you know, I say, is that I'm a recovering infrastructure person have always worked in infrastructure systems in the past and recovering them. But in this case we really had to flip things around right. I've come at it from the cloud disks volumes. VMS perspective, in this case to do the right thing by the customer needed a clean slate approach of coming out from the application down. So what we look at is what does the application look like? And that means protecting, not just the stuff that sits on disk, what your secrets in networking information, all those hundreds of pieces that make up a cloud native application and that involves scale challenges, work, visualisation challenges for admins, KPI So all of that shifts in a very dramatic way. >>So Danny, I mean typically VM you guys haven't done a ton of acquisitions, uh, you've grown organically. So now you, you, you poppin cast in, what does that mean for you from a platform perspective? You know, IBM has this term blue washing when they buy a company did you green wash cast and how did that all work? And again, what does what does it mean from the, from the platform perspective? >>Well, so our platform is designed for this type of integration and the first type of integration we do with any of our technologies because we do have native technologies, if you think about what we do being back up for AWS for Azure, for G C p, we have backup for Acropolis Hyper Visor. These are all native purpose built solutions for those environments and we integrate with what we call being platform services. And one of the first steps that we do of course is we take the data from those native solutions and send it into the repository and the benefit that you get from that is that you have this portable, self describing format that you can move around the vein platform. And so the platform was already designed for this Now. We already showed this at demon. You saw this on the main stage where we have this integration at a data level but it goes beyond that beam platform services allows us to do not just day one operations, but day two operations. Think about um updating the components of those infrastructures or those software components that also allows reporting. So for example you can report on what is protected, what's not protected. So the platform was already designed for this integration model. But the one thing I want to stress is we will always have that stand alone product for kubernetes for uh you know, for the container world. And the reason for that is the administrator for Kubernetes wants their own purpose build solution. They want it running on kubernetes. They want to protect the uniqueness of their infrastructure. If you think about a lot of the container based systems there, They're using structured data. Non structured data. Sure. But they're also using object based storage. They're using message queues. And so they have their nuances. And we want to maintain that in a stand alone product but integrated back into the Corvin platform. >>So we do these we have a data partner called GTR Enterprise Technology Research. They do these quarterly surveys and and they have this metric called net score is a measure of spending momentum and for the last, I don't know, 8, 10, 12 quarters the big four have been robotic process automation. That's hot space. Cloud obviously is hot and then A I of course. And but containers and container orchestration right up there. Those are the Big four that outshine everything else, even things like security and other infrastructure etcetera. So that's good. I mean you guys skating to the puck back in 2015 rush, you've made some announcements and I'm and I'm wondering sort of how they fit into the trends in the industry. Uh, what what's, what's significant about those announcements and you know, what's new that we need to know about. >>Sure. So let me take that one day. So we've made a couple of big interesting announcement. The most recent one of those was four dot release after casting by women platform, right? We call it kitten and right. We've known rate since a couple of weeks colonial pipeline ransom. Where has been in the news in the US gas prices are being driven up because of that. And that's really what we're seeing from customers where we are >>seeing this >>increase in communities adoption today. We have customers from the world's largest banks all the way to weakly connected cruise ships that one could burn. It is on them. People's data is precious. People are running a large fleet of notes for communities, large number of clusters. So what we said is how do you protect against these malicious attacks that want to lock people out? How do you bring in mutability so that even someone with keys to the kingdom can't go compromise your backups and restores, right? So this echoes a lot of what we hear from customers and what we hear about in the news so well protected that. But we still help through to some of the original vision behind cast. And that is, it's not just saying, hey, I give you ransomware protection. We'll do it in such an easy way. The admin barely notices. This new feature has been turned on if they wanted Do it in a way that gives them choice right. If you're running in a public cloud, if you're running at the edge you have choice of infrastructure available to you and do it in a way that you have 100% automation when you have 100 clusters when you deploy on ships, right, you're not going to be able to have we spoke things. So how do you hook into CHED pipelines and make the job of the admin easier? Is what we focused on in that last >>night. And and that's because you're basically doing this at the point of writing code and it's essentially infrastructure as code. We always talk about, you know, you want to you don't want to bolt on data protection as an afterthought, but that's what we've done forever. Uh This you can't >>so in fact I would say step before that day, right are the most leading customers we work with. Right to light up one of the U. S. Government's largest contractors. Um Hey do this before the first line of code is written right there on the scalp cloud as an example. But with the whole shift left that we all hear the cube talks a lot about. We see at this point where as you bring up infrastructure, you bring up a complete development environment, a complete test environment. And within that you want to deploy security, you want to deploy backup your to deploy protection at day zero before the developer in so it's the first line of cordon. So you protected every step of the journey while trying to bolt it on the sound. Seemingly yes, I stitched together a few pieces of technology but it fundamentally impacts how we're going to build the next generation of secure applications >>Danny, I think I heard you say or announced that this is going to be integrated into Wien backup and replication. Um can you explain what that took? Why? That's important. >>Yeah. So the the timeline on this and when we do integrations from these native solutions into the core platform, typically it begins with the data integration, in other words, the data being collected by the backup tool is sent to a repository and that gives us all the benefits of course of things like instant recovery and leveraging, de doop storage appliances and all of that step to typically is around day to operations, things like pushing out updates to that native solutions. So if you look at what we're doing with the backup for AWS and Azure, we can deploy the components, we can deploy the data proxies and data movers. And then lastly there's also a reporting aspect to this because we want to centralize the visibility for the organization across everywhere. So if your policy says hey I need two weeks of backups and after two weeks and I need weekly backups for X amount of time. This gives you the ability to see and manage across the organization. So what we've demonstrated already is this data level integration between the two platforms and we expect this to continue to go deeper and deeper as we move forward. The interesting thing right now is that the containers team often is different than the standard data center I. T. Team but we are quickly seeing the merge and I think the speed of that merging will also impact how quickly we integrate them within our platform. >>Well I mean obviously you see this for cloud developers and now you're bringing this to any developers and you know, if I'm a developer and I'm living in an insurance company, I've been, you know, writing COBOL code for a while, I want to be signed me up. I want to get trained on this, right? Because it's gonna I'm gonna become more valuable. So this is this is where the industry is headed. You guys talk about modern data protection. I wondered if you could you could paint a picture for us of sort of what what this new world of application development and deployment and and data protection looks like and how it's different from the old world. >>Mhm. So I think that if you mentioned the most important word, which is developer, they come first, they are the decision makers in this environment, the other people that have the most bull and rightly so. Oh, so I think that's the biggest thing at the cultural level that is, developers are saying this is what we want and this is what we need to get the job done, we want to move quickly. So some of the things are let's not slow them down. Let's enable them, let's give them any P I to work with. Right? No. Where in bulk of production, use will be api based versus EY base. Let's transparently integrate into the environment. So therefore protection for security, they need zero lines have changed code. Mm So those are some of the ways we approach things. Now when you go look at the requirements of the developers, they said I have a Ci cd pipeline to integrate into that. I have a development pipeline to integrate into that. I deploy across multiple clouds sometimes. Can you integrate into that and work seamlessly across all those environments? And we see those category of us coming up over and over again from people. >>So the developer rights once and it doesn't have to worry about where it's running. Uh it's got the right security, there are a protection and those policies go with it, so that's that's definitely a different world. Um Okay, last question. Uh maybe you guys could each give your opinion on sort of where we're headed, uh what we can expect from the the acquisition, the the integration, what should we look forward to and what should we pay attention to? >>Well, the one obvious thing that you're going to see is tremendous growth on the company's side and that's because Kubernetes is taking off cloud is taking off um SaAS is taking off and so there's obvious growth there. And one of the things that were clearly doing is um we're leveraging the power of of, you know, a few 1000 sales people to bring this out to market. Um, and so there is emerging of of sales and marketing activities and leveraging that scale. But what you shouldn't expect to see anything different on is this obsessive focus on the product, on quality, on making sure that we're highly differentiated that we have a product that the company that our customers and companies actually need no garage. >>Yeah. So I'll agree with everything down, he said. But a couple of things. Excite me a lot. Dave we've been roughly eight months or so since acquisition and I particularly love how last what in this quarter have gone in terms of how we focuses on solving customer problems. All right. So we'll always have that independent support for a cloud date of customers, but I'm excited about not just working with the broadest side of customers and as we scale the team that's going to happen, but providing a bridge to all the folks that grew up in the virtualization world, right? Grew up in the physical wall of physical service, etcetera and saying, how do we make it easy for you to come over to this new container Ization world? What is the on ramps bridging that gap serving as the on ramp? And we're doing a lot of work there from the product integration and independent product features that just make it easy. Right? And we're already seeing feel very good feedback for that from the field right now. >>I really like your position. I just dropped my quarterly cloud update. I focused, I look at the Big Four, the Big Four last year, spent $100 billion on Capex. And I always say that is a gift to companies like yours because you can be that connection point between the virtualization crowd, the on prem cloud, any cloud. Eventually we'll be, we'll be more than just talking about the Edge will actually be out there, you know, doing real work. Uh, and I just see great times ahead for you guys. So thanks so much for coming on the cube explaining this really exciting new area. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you everybody for watching this day. Volonte for the Cube and our continuous coverage of the mon 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there. >>Mm mm mm

>> Hello everyone, welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of theCUBE. We are in our studio with special guest Niraj Tolia who is the CEO and co-founder of Kasten, hot start-up in the cloud-native space. Doing some very interesting things. Really kind of a modern approach to bringing software development, data, and cloud all together. Welcome to this conversation. >> Great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. >> Congratulations on all your success. I know you guys have done a lot with your seed funding. Take a second before we get into some of the things I think are the most important stories in cloud-native, which is Kubernetes, obviously the heart of it, coming back from that CubeCon. What's going on with Kasten? Tell me about the company, when you were formed, how many employees, I know you did a seed round, so just talk about what you guys do. >> Okay, great, so Kasten is a company where, for those of you who are curious, it's actually a German word, it means "container," so it's very apropos for what we're doing. We were founded over a year ago at this point in time. We're based here in California, in the Bay Area. We did a $3 million dollar seed round, it was Angel only, so no institutional, a lot of interest from people that are working with other entrepreneurs in the cloud-native ecosystem. >> It's people in the industry. >> People in the industry. >> Kind of inside the ropes. Like the individuals. >> Yeah, so personal investments from all the top five cloud companies, as an example, folks that have been funding other co-founders for a while. So we're very happy to have them in our corner, in particular, Amarjit Gill sits on our board, so he's had multiple successes, both with investments and personally, so we're so happy to have him as one of our backers. And right, so we're roughly nine people right now, all local people, with a lot of both start-up and enterprise experience. So it's the right set of people, it's a very diverse group of people, so we're very happy with the team we've put together, too. >> Yeah, diversity, this was at Sundance, and even on the film side, some of the most successful virtual reality companies are Stanford systems majors, and huge diversity interdisciplinary dynamic, and I want to drill into that. Okay, so no series A yet, no board members from VCs, I'm sure they're knocking on your doors, clamoring down to get some of the success you have, but what's different about your approach you guys are taking? Is the positioning, assess, what's the product, how you guys make money? Where are you seeing that? >> Okay, great question. So, at the very high level you're focused on making it very easy for enterprises to deploy, manage, build stable applications in the cloud-native way. In terms of how we see people adopting it, I think that there's been a tremendous mind shift, as well as an ecosystem shift, where we see this blurring of lines between applications and infrastructures. So one of the unique insights we saw ourselves was that to approach this problem, we need to come at it from a developer-first point of view, and application-first point of view, instead of, like, I'm a recovering infrastructure person coming at it from the bottom up, where you think disks, and volumes, and storage arrays. This is really about the application, it's about the cloud, it's about the deployment model, it's about how we enable and empower developers, but also operators in these large-scale environments, and get through to the right balance of responsibility between the two, and that's really what's resonating with the customers we work with today. >> Yeah, and certainly the cloud-native trend has been the hottest thing, it's exciting for me, because the early days of the "clouderati," you know, the 2008, 2009 timeframe, you saw the first generation dev ops, and these were folks who were open source guys and gals who had to build their own stuff from scratch. I used to say, eating glass and spitting out nails, you know, hardcore techies. Then, as it goes mainstream with cloud computing, this is the modus operandi that people want to program in. Just, infrastructure is code, as it's been called. This now is mainstream. So okay, given that, we've been covering that until the cows come home. But now, you're talking about orchestration, you're talking about some of the next level thinking, which is how to make things easier, how to automate, how to make it so the developer doesn't have to do the provisioning, all that stuff. This is key, okay, I get that. Now everyone goes, "Oh no, where's my data?" That seems to be something that you guys seem to be taking in tact. What are you guys doing specifically around data management, because data is now not only part of the app, it's a critical lynch pin to the value creation in, whether it's collecting intelligence, or any kind of coolness at the app level is data-driven. What do you guys do? >> So, a great question. So when you talk about data management, somewhat of a nebulous term, but to make it more concrete, we really care about protecting your data, making sure it is safe, in particular, when you're working across multiple environments, multiple clusters, multiple clouds, but we care a lot more, as you talked about, enabling and making it simple. So what does data mobility look like? What does data manipulation look like? So whether you're talking entire application stacks with the data across clusters in the same cloud, or across multiple clouds, those are some of the things we make it very easy for people to do, because it is highly relevant, and these are the apps they come for, and it's not just the CICD environment, but also talking about production environments, and operator challenges there. So, more concretely, when we look at the use cases for our product involving disaster recovery, involving data protection, backup and recovery, multi-cloud migration, that's where we come in with our customers today. Okay, so to go back in my generation, when I was growing up in the business, when we had to build all of our own stuff, build our own stacks, that's how old I am, I remember those glory days, we had data architects. And those silo base, your app was your database, and schemas, and all that good stuff, but now data is horizontally scalable to client, a beautiful thing, right? So this is a key dynamic. What do companies, and developers specifically have to think about when they think about being a data architect? Because every conversation I go into, it's like, oh, what's our data layer strategy going to be? This is important, because now workloads are sharing data, so you might have two workloads, A and B, sharing data. That's kind of outside the current old guard mentality. What are you guys doing there? Do you see that as something that's important? >> It's important, right? So, what's happened is a lot of power and responsibility has shifted to the developer from the former data architectural, sometimes, it would be a database engineering team, etc. And we want to empower that. There's still challenges, especially when you look at things like compliance auditing, when you have sensitive data at play. So we make some of those things easier from having auditing compliance features in there, but what we really care about is, and some of this we also do it in an open source manner, and that is we work with people to make sure the developers don't slow down, they can pick their own technology stacks, where to store the data, and it's all really part of code for them, but from the operator, from the architect point of view, they have visibility into that. >> Who's the operator? Define operator in that context. >> It's a good question. The operator tends to be one of two people. It tends to be the people that care about infrastructure, about keeping the lights on, that's what they worry about. >> Like an IT guy. >> Yeah, it used to be IT guys, now it tends the dev ops team, the SRE team, etc. So they're transitioning into this role, as you see skills change over time, too. Or sometime they will be the team that used to be former database engineering teams, as an example, they supervisioned this, but now their goal is, and we hear this from customers, is that we care about developer experiences, not about shipping binaries and patches anymore. This is about making sure for our users we can make our developers fast and empower them. So how do they deliver that, without getting in the way, but still getting some of the things they used to do earlier, is being able to make sure all the data's stored in the same manner, that is it services the need of the broader business, whether other groups using it, whether it be disaster recovery, business continuity. So all of those, so we want to be able to empower both sides of this party so they feel comfortable moving into this new world today. >> You know, I go back to the open stack days, and still going on now, you see it more in the cloud-native, the distinction between stateful and stateless applications. What's your reaction to the growth of stateful applications? Is it growing? How is it growing? What are some of the characteristics of how that is shaping out with stateful applications? >> Okay, so let's talk about sometimes the misconceptions the community has today, that platforms are just communities and not ready for stateful workloads. We definitely believe that is not true, and it's not just us, there are a plethora of companies using stateful applications in production today. It was late, initially we saw the compute part handled, and more advanced scheduling orchestration that you saw on top of the multiple frameworks with Kubernetes vending again. We saw a lot of networking innovation in there, including service mesh, which I know you have covered a lot in detail earlier, but now we are seeing data come into play, and that is the third leg of the stool that we believe it will be important for real life large scale production workloads in these environments. With new features being GA'd in Kubernetes 1.9, such as the whole workloads category, with other open source frameworks popping up to support that, that out of tree, we see a lot more people feeling comfortable when deploying stateful applications, but what they really want is the same ease of use and flexibility that they had with stateless applications. And that is a gap that still needs to be bridged, and the multiple people working on that. >> I got to ask, since you're an expert here, we have a lot of our audience is learning about this space, so we talk and we're having some fun here about some of the support services in cloud-native, but some people just don't even understand the difference between stateless and stateful, in context to unlocking business value. So there's a lot of now people coming in and saying, "Okay, I get dev ops. "Where's the business value?" There's some context here, so what is, in your definition, the difference between stateless and stateful applications? >> So, the way I look at it is, when I look at stateless applications, it is much easier to blow them away, bring them back anywhere you want because they might have some cache stay, but nothing persistent, right? And generally, all those apps depend on persistence, but it's stored outside of the cloud-native environment. We want to bring that in, when you talk about stateful applications. But it's not just that, it's also the model of building stateful applications is changing, where you get polyglot persistence, with people using, if you use GitHub, as an example, they use, Stratus, postscripts, and other data services all in the same app. You want it as a part of being embedded within the application, and you're also getting sharding of data, what used to be a large monolith database, the same way we see microservice evolution on the stateless sided of things, we're seeing the same thing on the stateful side, where datasets are getting broken up logically into multiple distinct components that are managed and operated independently. >> So let's talk about that a second, because stateless applications was an approach people took because it was easier, right? And it was relevant at that time, but it's been said, certainly on theCUBE many times, it's hard to do stateful applications. Why is it hard, and what are the benefits of doing it? >> Okay, it's hard to do stateful applications because, A, it is a greater risk of losing your customer's data, so you treat it with slightly more care. Some of the primitives, especially when you look at the cloud-native world, weren't ready 18 months ago, as an example. Whether you talk about things like container storage interface, whether you talk about things like stateful sets, whether you talk about applications that come with a notion of permanence, sometimes they remember the host name, the IP address. And we see a lot of traditional applications moving into this environment, too. But that is being fixed by the community, which is a very amazing thing, and they approach it with a developer-first focus. The benefits of bringing it into this environment are tremendous, because you get this business agility side of things, not just developer agility, where you can move much faster because you don't depend on external resources anymore. You get the advantage of being able to clone application stacks at a click or at an API call level. You get the advantage of being able to take these applications and port them across multiple places because these primitives that are provided by underlying container orchestration layer make it so much easier to do so. So, there's a lot of advantages to bringing it into the fold, so to speak, than leaving it outside right now. >> I was talking to someone in the industry, I won't say their name, outing them, but, "Oh man, it's so hard, it's complete bullshit, "stateful applications never going to happen. "Can't scale," the scale is the problem, So I got to ask you if you can address that, because if you go down this road, enterprises are going to start thinking about the most important thing, which is scale. What are the challenges that enterprises have with stateful, at scale. >> That's a good question, so there are two or three different kinds of things. The obvious thing, especially, that jumps into a developer's mind when it comes to scale is things like performance. But I think that is only one aspect of things, and there are scale out system when you think of Cassandra, etc, that are getting a better handle on some of those issues. But more importantly, we deal with scale, especially from the enterprise point of view, as far as data's concerned, people care about visibility, right. Show me about my status, as developers are constantly changing architectures, constantly deploying, they have scale issues when you spread across multiple clouds, with multiple clusters. So help me manage some of those things. They have issues that are in compliance of the state, which is much larger, especially as it gets segmented out. Because it's not just, we know customers are running hundreds of instances of MongoDB, as an example, in some of these environments, and just trying to wrap the mind around managing all of that at scale is another issue. So these are all the things that enterprises think about when they talk about scale, and not just performance scale, or I-OPS scale, but it's about management scale. >> How do you guys solve that problem? >> So, we solve it in a number of different ways. First of all, we believe in treating the problem with the application-first approach. So we think of the application first, so it doesn't matter how many volumes you're using, or how many disks, if you're not using shared storage, because you have no single point of failure in modern cloud-native database systems. So there is that. And then that's the UNIF encapsulation that we provide high levels of abstraction on to get people an easy view to see what's unmanaged, what's managed in the system, where do I have workloads, did something new show up, and simply so we can notify about that. So those are all the things that we make it easy, apart from this, monitoring things like health of the system, validating things, which are table stakes right now. >> So I got to ask you, as you see this evolution happening, and you guys are at the forefront of it, with your startup, and again, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Like what you guys are doing, about the challenges in the enterprise are, "We already have a data management solution." You must get that a lot, so I got to ask you, when you roll into a customer, a potential customer that you have now, and you say, hey, we got this covered, we can do stable applications, we're application-centric, we're doing dev ops, we're doing, the lines are blurring, you should look at us. And the client says, whoa, hey, you know what? I already got a data management provider for my application. What do you say to that? >> It's a good thing, so we see that not across a large fraction of our customers, we definitely see that across some. The majority reason why sometimes we don't see it, or how we respond to this is the large fraction of tools out there used to cater to what we now say legacy environments, but they tend to be very server or VM-centric thing, things that don't move, things that are constantly on scaling up and down, things that are quite static. When you go look at tools that come from large companies and storage vendor space, as an example. So one of the things that we help provide this is tools that are cloud-native themselves, that can adapt to cloud-native workloads, that are built first for a cloud-native world. So in that way, that easily resonates with customers. And the other thing we talk about is extensibility. Again, when you talk about data management solutions right now, they don't really, they operate at the infrastructure level, but they can't figure out what it means to take a consistent view of a large distributed Cassandra system, as an example, or how to stitch together things to stay consistent across multiple data stores. We have an extensible framework that allows people to inject their own code into our system that says, I want to do things in a custom manner, I want to do things that's particularly to my context, my enterprise, and we help enable that, which again, none of the existing data management tools can do today. >> Okay, so you guys have, this is what you call the K10 platform? >> It's a K10 platform, and the extensibility part I talked about is called Kanister. It's an open source project, you can find it on GitHub. >> Did you guys sponsor that, or is that a different one? >> That is sponsored by us, so we did involve that. It's all based on what customer needs came out to be, and we said this is something that doesn't make sense for us to hold, we would like to build a community around it, we would like to see people contribute to it, and be the common place where people can share recipes or blueprints for managing. >> So Kanister's a community approach you guys are taking. How's it going, what's the uptake on that? >> It's good, right, so apart from GitHub's stores, we have people on the Slack channel, we have people we can have independently, we have people that have asked us how to develop their own blueprints for more complicated workflows. So even though we released it roughly a month ago, at this point in time, the input we've got in both public and private channels has been really good. >> Great, okay, that's awesome. Well, I want to shift views a little bit, talk about multi-cloud, it's the hottest story in tech. Some even are arguing what the hell is multi-cloud? Just so it happened, I have 365 on Azure, and doing something on Google TensorFlow, and I'm running some stuff in Amazon, that's multiple clouds, but it's not the same workload. I don't consider that multi-cloud per se, I think that's multiple clouds having a workload from a company. So, with that, what are the biggest problems customers are facing with multi-cloud, in your opinion? Because you guys are kind of teasing this out, you got Kubernetes and all this stuff going on, what are the challenges with multi-cloud? >> So because we help customers in multiple public clouds, right, we see a lot of this. In terms of a target carrier for enterprises, the vast majority, I'm talking 85% plus, are in multiple public clouds. Different reasons, we can talk about that why, but they're multiple public clouds. And what we see for them is there's a spectrum, the multi-cloud doesn't mean one thing. We see people at different degrees on the spectrum. Small minority care about check boxes and insurance, that is, push come to shove, help me move to a different cloud, but really the majority of these cases we see is not about moving on a daily basis with an application between cloud A to B, but they see problems in terms of, I want this application to run on cloud A and B, and sometimes and C, because they have a Google footprint, and they might not always have the cloud provider of choice in the region they want to expand into. >> Before you go further, I want to just double down on that, because that seems really easy to just go, oh, we just go on all three clouds. But you know, you get S3 on AWS, Azure's got a different storage, so each stack has its own coding. And that's a problem. >> Yes. >> So, is it a problem, or how bad is it? >> It is a problem, so let's talk about two or three things happening that help solve this. So some of it's a problem, Kubernetes has done a great job, in particular, of abstracting some of those things away, not all of them, but some of them away. There are other new abstractions coming out, such as the OpenService broker that originated in the Cloud Foundry movement, and now has been picked up by multiple different platforms, that's again helping abstract some of these differences away. We help with some of the management, as well as portability across these environments, because we can take care in making sure policies management, all of that looks the same no matter what cloud provider you're working on, and we understand the underlying infrastructure, and we translate the business level or operator level objectives into infrastructure level objectives, so there's some that we do to also help in that space. So overall, I think the situation is much better than it was, say, three years ago in terms of being able to do some of this. Obviously, the devil's sometime in the details, but now we are, it's getting... >> The goal is not to hire a whole development team with each stack. >> Exactly. >> That's kind of the end game everyone's trying to get to. >> Yeah, you want a small delta vs a large delta. >> Yeah, some customization, I mean you could look at the open source distribution, maybe 10% and 90% were used, or using abstractions. >> Exactly, and that is a realistic goal that, I believe, most people are pragmatic actually. >> How is Kubernetes, and Kasten helping specifically solve multi-cloud problems? >> That's a good question, again. Right, so Kubernetes, again, so let's talk about a customer base, right? A lot of people are picking Kubernetes, even though sometimes they're squarely on-prem, because they know they will be moving to public clouds, sometimes a compliance issue, sometimes a road map issue, but they know they're moving there, and this gives them the abstractions that they're not tied under particular infrastructure underneath, whether it be a VM-based platform, or open stack internal, or some public cloud render, they're picking that with the goal in mind. Because a lot of the concepts are cloud-neutral. What we do is we help take also some of the data around it, data that might be sitting on a storage provider of choice, and make that cross-cloud portable, either by doing it at the application layer, which is a great thing, or by being able to understand the differences between clouds, if you just click a button or call up an API, you can say, I want to migrate this entire application stack, including services, configuration, your state, your container images, all of that into a cloud, into a different cloud in a different region. So we take off all the complexity for our users, for the developers, for the operators. >> So I got to ask you the cloud question that I always like, going through all the marketing hype from the cloud vendors, and that is, regions matter, right? So when you're talking about regions, there's some locality issues that need to come up, that could impact, say, code, and services, GDPR in Europe is one, and even in Asia-specific, there's also some geopolitical things going on, and hackers, and malware out there, so you get security and whatnot. How should a company look at the region, and the multi-region approach on each cloud? Which, again, is complicated, is even more complicated when you do that across multiple clouds. That's the future that's coming down the street very fast. What's your view on that? >> So, there is a lot of buzz around this, a lot of things being proposed. I think people need to take a more nuanced look at this, compared to some of the things I see out there, where speed of light is an issue, especially when dealing with multiple regions. So either we architect applications correctly to be able to handle that, and sometimes again, some of these newer cloud-native data stores have the ability to hide some of that performance gap in there, but overall, when we look into architecting things, this is about how do you deploy different application stacks at different clusters, and maybe use global load balancing to, you know, shard across them, as an example. But we see a number of newer emerging patterns of building applications that's making it much more feasible to do as things go over. So I do not think enterprises should be scared into adopting some of these approaches. I think multi-region within the same cloud provider is definitely the first thing people should try, and then moving out across, which is again, the adoption pattern we see within the enterprises we work with. >> So, let's talk about the entrepreneurial journey of your company, obviously, you're the co-founder. You're in an environment now where it's been pretty brutal, and you can almost see a lot of trends really jumping out now. And we've been doing theCUBE, on our 10th year at SiliconANGLE, doing our 9th year at theCUBE, and I've covered all those companies that were formed before 2012, go big or go home. A lot of them, that was pre-cloud. If you think about it, they didn't have, they didn't see the visibility, mocking Amazon, or using Amazon, didn't see Amazon, and now the cloud has that disruptive of an enabler. So the wave is getting sucked out with the big tsunami coming, so it exposes that water that now is, you see all the clams and crabs running around. What's different? I mean, 'cause now you can get things faster done, you got nine people. A lot of entrepreneurs are trying to crack the code of how to be successful in this environment. With cloud, with data, new dynamics, never seen before. >> Yep, so I think from the entrepreneurial side of things, the thing I would recommend wisest to figure out what is the unfair advantage that small things have, there's always this challenge, right? This is equal in five, eight years ago, people would say what if Google did this, and before this, what if Microsoft did this? I think, where does the unfair advantage for small companies come from in these environments? Now a traditional go big or go home approach doesn't work anymore. What we have found, a lot of success with this, concentrating very hard on customer needs and their pain points. Before a first line of code was written, we really spoke to customers to say, what are your pain points? And that's when we also started latching onto this multi-cloud thing, where generally we see a lot of solutions working, being provided by some of these cloud providers, but they're tailored for the particular cloud. They do not fit the enterprise model of working across different providers, so helping with that pain point, helping with the portability has been really good for us in particular. But it's also, I do not treat public clouds as competition, I do look at them as partners, because I think there is a win-win situation. We've been very, very happy with some of the conversations we've had with some of the bigger cloud providers out there, we have joint customers, things of that nature, and that has been very successful in terms of that operating model, because I think, a lot of people realize this is not a zero sum game. If you're looking at just on-prem environments, it's less than a zero sum game these days, but being a part of a rapidly expanding system, I think the pie is growing larger, and I think there are less incentives to be seen as strictly competitive, vs a partnership play there. >> Well, great to chat with you, I wanted to get your perspective, because yeah, I think it's completely changed, it's interesting, but as an entrepreneur now, you optimize for something different, so it sounds like a lot of product management going on, really early, really fast, a lot of iteration. You're funded by Angels and friends in the network, so you have a good advisory funders, or backers, and three, the role of the community. These are new dynamics that are accelerated in the front end, all kind of going on at the same time. Just react to that, and share what you think of that, those dynamics, any examples, do you agree with it? And how important are they? >> So let's see, I think, in particular, community is one of the most important things. And it's not just paying lip service to that. But I believe the community has been very empowering for the end user, the developers, people everyone really cares about. It definitely impacts us, as to how we build for it, you know, having empathy for other people. A lot of those things make a very significant difference, and community is something we start thinking of first. And even when we were in start, we wanted to make sure that no matter what we did was... >> Define community, open source community, customer community, peers? >> There's a strong overlap between those things right now, right? Our peers are colleagues at different companies, trying to tackle the same space, a part of of the open source community, a part of the cloud-native community. So I think when you look at the Venn diagram, there's actually a very large intersection in the middle, so all of those really are more, have come together a lot closer than they used to be a few years ago, where open source was different from commercial vendors, now there's a very strong mixing, and the thing is, how do we move the community forward? And that's also how we think about things here. And so that's a very big thing. The support system around you, and in particular, it's amazing in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, I've known people working in different places trying to get a company off the ground, the support system is amazing, and not just from our investors, but the number of people that have no financial ties to us, have no vested interests in us, that benefit and help we've gotten from them, has been amazing, off the charts. >> Well, I got to ask you, Niraj, Silicon Valley is supposed be like the cesspool, it's the worst place on the planet, it's evil. You're obviously an example of what's going good in Silicon Valley. Share, in your opinion, if people asked you, hey, what's going in Silicon Valley these days? Is action happening there, and what's it like there? >> So, it's a good point to make. We see a lot of stuff in the press, and a lot of the articles are not complimentary. And I'm not trying to say that those aren't real problems, but I'm very glad that we are talking about those problems, and we're diving into this, and we're making sure that the next generation of companies that emerge hopefully do not suffer from that. We care a lot about that at Kasten, we've build a very diverse team, even though it's small right now, people that are underrepresented, and I've always had that history of doing that, even in the previous groups I've led. Because it creates a stronger team. So I see people, more people being aware of the challenges we face, and we are working together to also solve and address some of this. So it's one of those things where you can't throw the baby with the bathwater, but we have to figure out what's wrong, what isn't working, go work on fixing that, while retaining the things that have given the Valley a unique edge, and I'm very proud of being a part of that generation. >> You can lead by example, rather than being a social justice warrior, throwing mud around, and now seeing highlighting what everyone already knows, of being aware of it, something that we've been promoting. And it's also, too, humanizing, making it human, and having proper conversations, rather than people putting their head in the sand, or running from it. >> Exactly. >> Running from these problems, okay, so I got to ask you, on a personal question, we're kind of older, you're a lot younger than I am, obviously you can tell that difference, but there's a lot of great young guns coming up. Men, women, all kinds of great talent, they're coming in, they don't know what local host is. They don't even know what, they've never installed a patch. A new set of programmers, developers, artists, creatives are coming into the software business, changing the game, because it's really interesting, dev ops is happening. What's that culture look like, in your observation, when you recruit people, when you talk to people, what are these young developers interested in, and what are they good at, what are they gravitating towards? What are some of the observations you can share? >> So sometimes, there's an overlap between young developers and millennials, and sometimes I believe millennials get a bad rap. When working with this community, I see a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of passion, a lot of ambition. I see a lot of community-driven stuff, they care about how they make an impact outside of the particular role they're playing. And I think those are all things that it makes sense for companies to help enable, as well as leverage. So when we see these new breed of developers coming in, I think it's about, if someone doesn't want them, please send them my way, more than happy to take them, because they're just so passionate about getting stuff done. >> What are they coding, what languages? Can they write C, can they write lines of C? Are they writing in C, or what language they program in? >> So do we. We look at it as a problem is I think programming language is a secondary. They worry about what does it take to get the job done. >> So they're adaptive. >> Exactly. So when you talk about just because they don't know what local host means today doesn't mean they can't pick it up if they discover they need to figure that out, as an example. So, sometimes they'll come at it with other high languages focus, but then they will quickly adapt to either new different styles they really want to learn to, or they'll adapt to a new programming languages. So if I give you an example, in our company, we use Go as an example, it's very popular, especially for doing application infrastructure focused stuff, but the majority of people, when they came in, did not know Go, as an example. I think maybe one person is really well-versed with it, and the rest of the people just picked it up, because it's the right tool for the job. >> They learn, they learn the basic data structure, they can jump in, it seems to be something that they pride themselves on. Be multi-code, multi-coders. Alright, another personal question for you, to end the segment. If you could talk to your 23-year-old self now, if you were 23 now, knowing what you know, what would you tell yourself right now, as motivation, observations, rules of the road, how to be successful, what would you say to your own 23-year-old self who is coding away all those great opportunities. >> Oh, I know very well what I would tell my 23-year-old person, because I've learned it the hard way. So, I came out with a strong technical background, but I think what I'd tell my 23-year-old is concentrate on two things. That is concentrate on the soft skills, which will really, really help in terms of making a greater impact on people around you, on the industry no matter what it is. Involves things like communication, leadership, we've talked about community, so the soft skills that help you leverage that. And optimize for growth. That is, and this is something people sometimes tend to... >> Personal growth. >> Personal growth in particular, where people tend to fool themselves, where they get comfortable in a place, and they're like, yeah, I'm learning, but in reality, I think taking more risks, taking more chances, making sure an environment that you can learn from people, and this is not about small company, this is large company here, just to make it very clear. >> Always be learning. >> Yes, always be learning. And I think those are the two concrete things I would tell myself. I would also tell myself to move to the Bay Area, but I already did that. (laughs) Because of just, it's being in the technology service. >> And raising money, what would your advice be to yourself? Obviously you're doing a good job right now, but. >> So raising money, start five years before you want to go raise money. You don't want to show up at someone's door and ask for money, and that be the first time you interact with them, because, and this is about being genuine, this is about being authentic, but it is about making sure you build those relationships. People have a chance to know you, people have a chance to see what you've done. And being a part of that ecosystem, I think, will really help when it actually comes down to you wanting to do something, and that has really helped me. >> Yeah, the other advice we hear a lot, in theCUBE is, the successful entrepreneurs have paid it forward. >> Yes. >> They always are giving back, and always be learning. Great to have you on theCUBE, Niraj Tolia, co-founder and CEO of Kasten, hot new start-up. You're getting a new round of funding, what's happening? You want to announce that here, or is that happening? >> We'll talk again in a few months from now, thank you. >> I'm sure you got a lot of VCs now, you're going to do a great success on the hot space. Cloud-native, it's the hottest market in cloud computing, as we all know what's going on in cloud, that is really, really shaping up to be a really, really big market. Real impact across the board, from data analytics, application development, down to the infrastructure. And creating new opportunities for wealth creation, and innovation, and invention, and AI, entertainment, you name it, it's happening. It's theCUBE. Conversation here in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.