>> Male narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of DockerCon Live 2020 brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone to the DockerCon Virtual Conference. DockerCon 20 being held digitally online is the CUBE's coverage. I'm John for your host of the CUBE. This is the CUBE virtual CUBE digital. We're getting all the remote interviews. We're here in our Palo Alto studio, quarantined crew, all getting the data for you. Got Peter Guangeti who's the Chief Marketing Officer Cockroach Labs, a company that we became familiar with last year. They had the first multicloud event in the history of the industry last year, notable milestone. Hey first, it's always good you're still around. So first you got the first position, Peter. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the CUBE for DockerCon 20. >> Thank you, John. Thanks for having me. >> So it's kind of interesting, I mentioned that tidbit to give you a little bit of love on the fact that you guys ran or were a part of the first multicloud conference in the industry. Okay, now that's all everyone's talking about. You guys saw this early. Take a minute to explain Cockroach Labs. Why you saw this trend? Why you guys took the initiative and took the risk to have the first ever multicloud conference last year? >> So that's news to me that we were the first, actually. That's a bit of a surprise, cause for us we see multicloud and hybrid cloud as the obvious. I think the credit really for this belongs with folks like Gartner and others who took the time to listen to their customer, right? Took the time to understand what was the need in the market, which, you know, what I hear when I talk to CEOs is cloud is a capability, not a place, right? They're looking at us and saying, "yes, I have a go to cloud strategy, "but I also have made massive investments in my data center. "I believe I don't want to be locked in yet again "to another vendor with proprietary PIs, "proprietary systems, et cetera." So, what I hear when I talk to customers is, "I want to be multicloud show me how, "show me how to do that in a way "that isn't just buying from multiple vendors, right?" Where I've cost arbitrage, show me a way where I actually use the infrastructure in a creative way. And that really resonates with us. And it resonates with us for a few reasons. First is, we built a distributed SQL database for a reason, right? We believed that what you really need in the modern age for global applications is something that is truly diverse and distributed, right? You can have a database that behaves like a single database that lives in multiple locations around the world. But then you also have things like data locality. It's okay with German data stays in Germany because of German law. But when I write my application, I never write each of these things differently. Now, the other reason is, customers are coming to us and saying, "I want a single database that I can deploy "in any of the cloud providers." Azure SQL, and that is a phenomenal product. Google Spanner is a phenomenal product. But once I do that, I'm locked in. Then all I have is theirs. But if I'm a large global auto manufacturer, or if I'm a startup, that's trying to enter multiple markets at the same time. I don't want that. I want to be able to pick my infrastructure and deploy where I want, how I want. And increasingly, we talk to the large banks and they're saying, "I spent tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars "on data centers. "I don't want to throw them out. "I just want better utilization. "And the 15 to 20% that I get "from deploying software on bare metal, right? "I want to be able to containerize. "I want to be able to cloudify my data center "and then have ultimately what we see more and more "as what they call a tripod strategy "where your own data center and two cloud providers "behaving as a single unit "for your most important applications." >> That's awesome. I want to thank you for coming on to, for DockerCon 20, because this is an interesting time where developers are going to be called to the table in a very aggressive way because of COVID-19 crisis is going to accelerate until they pull the future forward ahead of most people thought. I mean, we, in the industry, we are inside the ropes, if you will. So we've been talking about stainless applications, stateful databases, and all the architectural things that's got that longer horizon. But this is an interesting time because now companies are realizing from whether it's the shelter in place at scale problems that emerge to the fact that I got to have high availability at a whole nother level. This kind of exposes a major challenge and a major opportunity. We're expecting projects to be funded, some not to be funded, things to move around. I think it's going to really change the conversation as developers get called in and saying, "I really got to look at my resources at scale. "The database is a critical one because you want data "to be part of that, this data plane, if you will, "across clouds." What's your reaction to this? Do you agree with that, the future has been pulled forward? And what's Cockroach doing to help developers do manage this? >> Yeah, John, I think you're exactly right. And I think that is a story that I'm glad that you're telling. Because, I think there's a lot of signal that's happening right now. But we're not really thinking about what the implications are. And we're seeing something that's I think quite remarkable. We're seeing within our existing customer base and the people we've been talking to, feast or famine. And in some cases, feast and famine in the same company. And what does that really mean? We've looked at these graphs for what's going to happen, for example, with online delivery services. And we've seen the growth rates and this is why they're all so valued. Why Uber invested so big in Uber eats and these other vendors. And we've seen these growth rates the same, and this is going to be amazing in the next 10 years, we're going to have this adoption. That five, 10 years happened overnight, right? We were so desperate to hold onto the things that are what mattered to us. And the things that make us happy on any given day. We're seeing that acceleration, like you said. It's all of that, the future got pulled forward, like you had said. >> Yeah. >> That's remarkable, but were you prepared for it? Many people were absolutely not prepared for it, right? They were on a steady state growth plan. And we have been very lucky because we built an architecture that is truly distributed and dynamic. So, scaling and adding more resilience to a database is something we all learned to do over the last 20 years, as data intensive applications matter. But with a distributed SQL and things like containerization on the stateless side, we know we can just truly elastically scale, right? You need more support for the application of something like Cockroach. You literally just add more nodes and we absorb it, right? Just like we did with containerization, where you need more concurrency, you just add more containers. And thank goodness, right, because I think those who were prepared for those things need to be worked with one of the large delivery services. Overnight, they saw a jump to what was their peak day at any point in time now happening every single day. And they were prepared for that because they already made these architectural decisions. >> Yeah. >> But if you weren't in that position, if you were still on legacy infrastructure, you were still trying to do this stuff manually, or you're manually sharding databases and having to increase the compute on your model, you are in trouble and you're feeling it. >> That's interesting Peter to bring that up and reminds me of the time, if you go back in history a little bit, just not too far back, I mean, I'm old enough to go back to the 80s, I remember all the different inflection points. And they all had their key characteristics as a computer revolution, TCP IP, and you pick your spots, there's always been that demarcation point or lions in where things change. But let's go back to around 2004 and then 2008. During that time, those legacy players out there kind of was sitting around, sleeping at the switch and incomes, open-source, incomes, Facebook, incomes, roll your own. Hey, I'm going to just run. I'm going to run open-source. I'm going to build my own database. And that was because there was nothing in the market. And most companies were buying from general purpose vendors because they didn't have to do all the due diligence. But the tech-savvy folks could build their own and scale. And that changed the game that became the hyperscale and the rest is history. Fast forward to today, because what you're getting at is, this new inflection point. There's going to be another tipping point of trajectory of knowledge, skill that's completely different than what we saw just a year ago. What's your reaction to that? >> I think you're exactly right. We saw and I've been lucky enough, same like you, I've been involved in the web since the very early days. I started my career at the beginning. And what we saw with web 1.0 and the shift to web 2.0, web 2.0 would not have happened without source. And I don't think we give them enough credit if it wasn't for the lamp stack, if it wasn't for Linux, if it wasn't for this wave of innovation and it wasn't even necessarily about rolling around. Yeah, the physics of the world to go hire their own engineers, to go and improve my SQL to make it scale. That was of course a possibility. But the democratization of that software is where all of the success really came from. And I lived on both sides of it in my career, as both an app developer and then as a software executive. In that window and got to see it from both sides and see the benefit. I think what we're entering now is yet another inflection point, like you said. We were already working at it. I think, the move from traditional applications with simple logic and simple rules to now highly data intensive applications, where data is driving the experience, models are driving the experience. I think we were already at a point where ML and AI and data intensive decision-making was going to make us rewrite every application we had and not needed a new infrastructure. But I think this is going to really force the issue. And it's going to force the issue at two levels. First is the people who are already innovating in each of these industries and categories, were already doing this. They were already cloud native. They were already built on top of very modern third generation databases, third generation programming languages, doing really interesting things with machine learning. So they were already out innovating, but now they have a bigger audience, right? And if you're a traditional and all of a sudden your business is under duress because substantial changes in what is happening in the market. Retailers still had strength with footprint as of last year, right? We don't be thinking about e-commerce versus traditional retail. Yeah, it was on a slow decline. There were lots of problems, but there was still a strength there, that happened changed overnight. Right now, that new sources have dried up, so what are you going to do? And how are you going to act? If you've built your entire business, for example, on legacy databases from folks like Oracle and old monolithic ways of building out patients, you're simply not adaptable enough to move with changing times. You're going to have to start, we used to talk about every company needed to become a software company. That mostly happened, but they weren't all very good software companies. I would argue that the next generation used to to be a great software company and great data scientists. We'll look at the software companies that have risen to prominence in the last five to 10 years. Folks like Facebook, folks like Google, folks like Uber, folks like Netflix, they use data better than anyone else in their category. So they have this amazing app experience and leverage data and innovate in such a way that allow them to just dominate their category. And I think that is going to be the change we see over the next 10 years. And we'll see who exits what is obviously going to be a jail term. We'll see who exits on top. >> Well, it's interesting to have you on. I love the perspective and the insights. I think that's great for the folks out there who haven't seen those ways before. Again, this wave is coming. Let's go back to the top when we were talking about what's in it for the developer. Because I believe there's going to be not a renaissance, cause it's always been great, but the developers even more are going to be called to the front lines for solutions. I mean, these are first-generation skill problems that are going to be in this whole next generation, modern era. That's upon us. What are some of the things that's going to be that lamp stack, like experience? What are some of the things that you see cause you guys are kind of at a tail sign, in my opinion, Cockroach, because you're thinking about things in a different construct. You're thinking about multicloud. You're thinking about state, which is a database challenge. Stateless has kind of been around restful API, stateless data service measures. Kubernetes is also showing a cloud native and the microservices or service orientation is the future. There's no debate on that. I think that's done. Okay, so now I'm a developer. What the hell am I going to be dealing with for the next five years? What's your thoughts? >> Well, I think the developer knows what they're already facing from an app perspective. I think you see the rapid evolution in languages, and then, in deployment and all of those things are super obvious. You need just need to go and say I'm sure that all the DockerCon sessions to see what the change to deployment looks like. I think there are a few other key trends that developers should start paying attention to, they are really critical. The first one, and only loosely related to us, is ML apps, right? I think just like we saw with dev and ops, suddenly come together so we can actually develop and deploy in a super fast iterative manner. The same things now are going to start happening with data and all of the work that we do around deploying models. And I think that that's going to be a pretty massive change. You think about the rise of tools like TensorFlow, some of the developments that have happened inside of the cloud providers. I think you're seeing a lot there as a developer, you have to start thinking as much like a data scientist and a data engineer as simply somebody writing front end code, right? And I think that's a critical skill that the best developers already building will continue. I think then the data layer has become as important or more important than any other layer in the stack because of this. And you think about once again, how the leaders are using data and the interesting things that they're doing, the tools you use matter, right? If you are spending a lot of your time trying to figure out how to shard something how to make it scale, how to make it durable when instead you should be focused on just the pure capability, that's a ridiculous use of your time, right? That is not a good use of your time. We're still using 20 to 25 year old open-source databases for many of these applications when they gave up their value probably 10 years ago. Honestly, you know, we keep all paper over it, but it's not a great solution. And unfortunately, no SQL will fix some of the issues with scaling elasticity, it's like you and I starting a business and saying, "okay, everyone speaks English, "but because we're global, "everyone's going to learn Esperanto, right?" That doesn't work, right? So works for a developer. But if you're trying to do something where everyone can interact, this is why this entire new third generation of new SQL databases have risen. We took the distributed architecture SQL. >> Hold up for a second. Can you explain what that means? Cause I think a key topic. I want to just call that out. What is this third generation database mean? Sorry, I speak about it. Like everyone sees it. >> I think it's super important. It's just a highlight. Just take a minute to explain it and we can get into it. There is an entire new wave of database infrastructure that has risen in the last five years. And it started actually with Google. So it started with Google Spanner. So Google was the first to face most of these problems, right? They were the first to face web scale. At least at the scale, we now know it. They were the first to really understand the complexity of working with data. They have their own no SQL. They have their own way of doing things internally and they realized it wasn't working. And what they really needed was a relational database that spoke traditional ANSI SQL, but scaled, like there are no SQL counterparts. And there was a white paper that was released. That was the birth of Spanner. Spanner was an internal product for many, many years. They released the thinking into the wild and then they just started this way with innovation. That's where our company came from. And there were others like us who said, "you're right. "Let's go build something that behaves," like we expect a database to behave with structure and this relational model and like anyone can write simple to use it. It's the simplest API for most people with data, but it behaves like all the best distributed software that we've been using. And so that's how we were born. Our company was founded by ex Googlers who had lived in this space and decided to go and scratch the itch, right? And instead of doing a product that would be locked into a single cloud provider, a database that could be open-source, it could be deployed anywhere. It could cross actual power providers without hiccups and that's been the movement. And it's not just us, there were other vendors in this space and we're all focused on really trying to take the best of the both worlds that came before us. The traditional relational structure, the consistency and asset compliance that we all loved from tools like Oracle, right? And Microsoft who we really enjoyed. But then the developer friendly nature and the simple elastic scalability of distributed software and, that's what we're all seeing. Our company, for example, has only been selling a product for the last two years. We found it five years ago, it took us three years just to rank in the software that we would be happy selling to a customer. We're on what we believe is probably a 10 to 15 year product journey to really go and replace things like Oracle. But we started selling the product two years ago and there is 300% growth year over year. We're probably one of the fastest growing software companies in America, right? And it's all because of the latent demand for this kind of a tool. >> Yeah, that's a great point. I'm a big fan of this third wave. Can I see it? If you look at just the macro tailwinds in the industry, billions of edged devices, immersion of all kinds of software. So that means you can't have one database. I always said to someone, in (mumbles) and others. You can't have one database. It's physically impossible. You need data and whatever database fits the scene, wherever you want to have data being stored, but you got to have it real time. You got to have actionable, you have to have software intelligence into how to manage the data. So I think the data control plane or that layer, I think it's the next interoperability wave. Because without data, nothing really works. Machine learning doesn't really work well. You want the most data. I think cybersecurity is a great early use case because they have to leverage data fast. And so you start to see some interesting financial services, cyber, what's your thoughts on this? Can you share from the Cockroach Labs perspective, from your database, you've got a cloud. What are some of the adoption use cases? Who are those leaders? You can name names if you have them, if not, name the use case. What's the Cockroach approach? Who's winning with it? What's it look like? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And you nailed it, right? The data volumes are so large and they're so globally distributed. And then when you start layering again, the data streaming in from devices that then have to be weighed against all of these things. You want a single database. But you need one that will behave in a way that's going to support all of that and actually is going to live at the edge like you're saying. And that's where we have been shining. And so our use cases are, and unfortunate, I can't name any names, but, for example, in retail. We're seeing retailers who have that elasticity and that skill challenge with commerce. And what they're using us for is then, we're in all of the locations where they do business, right? And so we're able to have data locality associated with the businesses and the purchases in those countries. And however, only have single apps that actually bridge across all of those environments. And with the distributed nature, we were able to scale up and scale down truly elastically, right? Because we spread out the data across the nodes automatically. And, what we see there is, you know, retailers do you have up and down moments? Can you talk about people who can leverage the financial structure of the cloud in a really thoughtful way? Retail is a shining example of that. I remember having customers that had 64 times the amount of traffic on cyber Monday that they had on the average day. In the old data center world, that's what you bought for. That was horrendous. In a cloud environment, still horrendous, even public cloud providers. If you're having to go and change your app to ramp every time, that's a problem with something like a distributed database. and with containerization, you could scale much more quickly and scale down much more. That's a big one for streaming media, is another one. Same thing with data locality in each of these countries, you think about it, somebody like Netflix or Hulu, right? They have shows that are unique to specific countries, right? They haven't have that user behavior, all that user data. You know data sovereignty, you know, what you watch on Netflix, there's some very rich personal data. And we all know how that metadata has been used against people. Or so it's no surprise that you now have countries that I know there's going to be regulation around where that data can live and how it can. And so once again, something like Cockroach where you can have that global distribution, but take a locality, or we can lock data to certain nodes in certain locations. That's a big one. >> There's no doubt in my mind. I think there's such a big topic. We probably do more interviews just on the COVID-19 data problem that they have. The impact of getting this right, is a nerd problem today. But it is a technology solution for society globally in the future. Zero doubt in my mind on that. So, Peter, I want you to get the last word and to give a plugin to the developers that are watching out there about Cockroach. Why should they engage with you guys? What can you offer? Is there anything new you want to share about the company to the audience here at DockerCon 2020? Take us home in the next segment. >> Thank you, John. I'll keep the sales pitch to a minimum. I'm a former developer myself. I don't like being sold, so I appreciate it. But we believe we're building, what is the right database for the coming wave of cognitive applications. And specifically we've built what we believe is the ideal database for distributed applications and for containerized applications. So I would strongly encourage you to try it. It is open-source. It is truly cloud native. We have free education, so you can try it yourself. And once you get into it, it is traditional SQL that behaves like Postgres and other tools that you've already known of. And so it should be very familiar, you know, if you've come up through any of these other spaces will be very natural. Postgres compatible integrates with a number of ORM. So as a developer, just plugged right into the tools you use and we're on a rapid journey. We believe we can replace that first generation of technology built by the Oracles of the world. And we're committed to doing it. We're committed to spending the next five to 10 years in hard engineering to build that most powerful database to solve this problem. >> Well, thanks for coming on, sharing your awesome insight and historical perspective. get it out of experience. We believe and we want to share the audience in this time of crisis, more than ever to focus on critical nature of operations, because coming out of this, it is going to be a whole new reality. And I think the best tech will win the day and people will be building new things to grow, whether it's for profit or for societal benefit. The impact of what we do in the next year or two will determine a big trajectory and new technology, new approaches that are dealing with the realities of infrastructure, scale, working at home , sheltering in place to coming back to the hybrid world. We're coming virtualized, Peter. We've been virtualized, the media, the lifestyle, not just virtualization in the networking sense, but, fun times it was going to be challenging. So thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much, John. >> Okay, we're here for DockerCon 20 virtual conferences, the CUBE Virtual Segment. I want to thank you for watching. Stay with me. We've got stream all day today and check out the sessions. Jump in, it's going to be on demand. There's a lot of videos it's going to live on and thanks for watching and stay with us for more coverage and analysis. Here at DockerCon 20, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching >> Narrator: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is the CUBE conversation.