>>Hey, welcome back to live coverage in San Francisco, California, the cubes coverage of 80 west summit, 2022 here in SF and NYC New York city. Summit's coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. Check it out. Okay. We've got a great guest here. C Bhan co and CEO RAI systems. Welcome to the cube, hot startup and growing company. And Kubernetes is great to see you. >>Yeah, John, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Great to have you on. So Cubans coming up, you got cloud native here at AWS. You guys in the middle of it, take a minute to explain what your company does. Sure. >>So 50,000 enterprises are going to modernize in the next five to 10 years. They're all going to run into the exact same problem, which is they're gonna choose Kubernetes as the orchestra platform. And then they're gonna invest in building a platform essentially on top of Kubernetes so that their internal consumers, that developers can consume it. That requires a lot, a lot of effort. We, lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of effort, what we did was we thought about entire journey for Kubernetes operations that a team would go through and we package that as an offering. It's a SaaS product that you can consume. You can make it work with Amazon's Kubernetes, Azures Kubernetes, Googles, Kubernetes, upstream, Kubernetes, but then you can move significantly faster so that the goal of modernization can be achieved now versus two years more. >>What's the big, uh, opportunity that Kubernetes brings. And what are some of the pain points that are being removed or solved or blockers being removed and pain being reduced? Is it standing up Kubernetes? Is it running it in production? Is it the new revisions? I mean, honestly, it's huge. Yeah. What's the pain point. The customers that you guys solve. >>Yeah. Look, the, the paradox with Kubernetes is when it's working. It's awesome. It's great. And we can move it fast, but to get there, it's hard. Yeah. So simple things as a starting point, how do I provision my infrastructure repeatedly in the same way with the right blueprints? How do I make sure they all look the same? How do I make sure John can access certain things? And he cannot, how do I make sure the right policies are set up? How do I make sure consistent deployment is happening? Can I watch every we think, and I measure everything and we are not beyond basic things, right? Yeah. I need to back this up, you know, on and on. I need to do cost management. I need to network policy management. I need service management. You already built the team now. Right? Each of these is, is, is multiple people's jobs sometimes. Right? So it's really complicated. But again, everybody is investing. This is complexity. It's complexity. Yes. But people are investing in this because everybody understands now that once this is all working, the beauty, the, the P the pace at which you can run is exactly what we were promised five, six years ago when we were all told about modernization. Yeah. So the, when you get there, it's awesome. And we are helping companies get there significantly faster. Then they would've had, were they not working with a company? >>It's it really is a holy grail kind of orchestration layer if it works. And a lot of people, even myself, which a big fan of Kubernetes, caution, cautions over the oo problem, which is the clusters are up. I can't find talent to run them. They're too hard. Um, that's kind of in the back of people's minds and there's a lot of scar tissue around that. Uh, and then a little bit of open stack, you know, is it too hard, too hard? So the question is, is that what needs to happen to be successful with Kubernetes to make that go faster? So that's easy to deploy. Exactly. Yeah. And what what's your product do? Is it software open source? Yeah. What's, what's your product? >>The, the key here is repeatably usable automation. It's automation that it can use again and again, and it's flexible enough that it solves for many companies problem. You know, the funny thing is, and this is something that took me a while to figure out whether we have a financial services customer or an insurance company, or a healthcare company, or a high tech company, you know, what their problems are exactly the same. <laugh> when it comes to Kubernetes, it's all the same, right? So we figured out what it takes to build that automation in a repeatable fashion so that we could essentially sell it as a product. Our product is a SaaS product. Um, and once you have the right automation in place that you can ideally consume as a service, then now the beauty is that the people who are using it on a day to day basis, they don't need to be as expert at Kubernetes as today. Yeah. And that's the issue today? The issue is, you know, people, I've seen ads now where people say, you know, looking for Kubernetes expertise, 10 years, minimum experience, okay, that's ridiculous. Right. But you see these ads out there, right? Because people are rude about it, a tool like this makes it easy for you to take your existing skillset, existing resources and allow them to become Kubernetes. >>That's the key. I think that's the key in my mind is like hiring talent for these, I call DevOps glass eating projects, cuz it's hard. Yep. Some of this stuff's hard when you get down to the early stuff. And even in the hyperscalers, you look at the early hyperscalers, they were rolling their own and they were rock stars. And they were like the 1% of top developers. Right? Yep. And now you have general audiences who just want to code. Yep. They want abstractions. They want Kubernetes as a service. Uh, and they want all the benefits. And even if they could hire the Oddsly hiring the low level core people yeah. Is hard. Yeah. >>It takes time. Yeah. >>Absolutely. That's a core problem you guys solve. >>Absolutely. I think look, the, the one thing that every enterprise you think about is when the, the big companies, the hyperscale is that you mentioned that build this themselves when they us out 5, 6, 7, whatever years ago, when, you know, even some, some of them pre Kubernetes, it was a competitive advantage to roll this out because nobody else was doing it now as, as an enterprise who is trying to use software to move faster. Yeah. It's actually a competitive disadvantage because now you're building your own product. And now you're building this thing called Kubernetes that doesn't make any sense, focus your application, focus on your products, roll them out faster, and then essentially reuse the learnings from the market. Right. That's what we are doing. Really? What, what are we doing? We're taking the best practices of this industry and packaging that up into an easy to consume platform. That's awesome. That's it? >>Well, we'll see you in Cooper, Cuban, not Kubernetes contest in Valencia. Yep. Uh, and thanks for coming on. I know we didn't have a lot of time to drill into it, um, here, but great to meet you and the company. Final question as a co-founder what's your north star, you got, you got a company to run in. Bill got employees, you're managing and hiring inspiring. What's the north star for the company. >>So I'd say, I mean, the phrase that I, that, that I think about when, when you say north star is, is loyalty with urgency. >>So loyalty to whom? Yeah. It's to my team, right? My team comes first beyond before anything else. Right? And then my customers, right? My customers, many, many of our, our customers even now, right? We a four old company, they have my cell phone number and people call me at odd hours and I will show up. I will get people on a call. I will show up. Right. That's critical. But with urgency now my customer needs help. It needs to happen now. Not tomorrow, not next week. My team has heard me say this a thousand times, by the way, not tomorrow, not next week now. And this, if you do this in a startup, you will be successful. >>Yeah. I mean, you gotta make the market as the founder, inspiring people, product market fits huge. Yep. Getting that scale point. Yep. Where you're got the value proposition in position you're in mode to scale, you got visibility on unit economics. It's hard. Yep. It's super hard look. Good news is you get in a good area. Cloud native Kubernetes, automation, cloud, native modernization of apps. Super hot right now. Yeah. Big >>Time. Yeah. Look, I mean, you know, of course you, you want your teams to be topnotch. Right. But I gotta tell you there's a lot of luck and timing to everything. >>Exactly. >>Timing is in hindsight, nobody times anything. Right. So we have, time is perfect, but it's luck. Yeah. Right. We're very lucky. We're we have the right team. We're doing a great job. I think our customers are very happy. What we've rebuilt and uh, you know, look forward >>To Steve. You're humble. And you're a humble person. I can tell. I don't believe in luck. I think you make luck. I think luck is just part of the hustle, making those phone calls, doing those calls, doing the right things, grinding. And then when you get the shot, you're ready. Yeah. Yeah. So congratulations. Thanks for coming the queue. Appreciate it. Appreciate your time, sir. Nice to meet you coverage here in San Francisco, back with more day, two coverage. After this short break, stay with us.

(light music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a special CUBE Conversation here in SiliconANGLE Media's, Palo Alto Studio. Happy to bring back to the program Haseeb Budhani who, last time I talked to Haseeb, Haseeb worked at a number of interesting startups, been a Chief Product Officer, had many various roles, and today, is a founder and CEO. So, we always love to have back CUBE alums, especially doing interesting things, getting out there with that entrepreneurial spirit, so, Haseeb, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to see you and the first time you and I met, the stage was not as nice as this. That was many, many, many years ago. >> You know, we've been growing up a bit, just like the ecosystems around us. You and I talked about things like replication, changing with data and storage and everything else in various roles so, Rafay Systems, tell us a little bit. What was the inspiration? Tell us a little bit about the founding team, the why the company first. >> Sure. As you know, right before Rafay Systems, I started a company called Soha. Soha was acquired by Akamai 18 odd months ago. I think we all, we learn by failing. There was one specific thing we did very poorly at Soha, which was how we ran operations, how we thought about getting closer to our users and so on, that once we left Akamai, so my co-founder from Soha and I are doing this company again together, he was our VP of Attorney there, he's our VP of Attorney here. When we left Akamai after our stint there, we spent time thinking about what kind of applications have, when you kind of think in terms of an application stack, some microservices in an application stack are always going to need to be as close to the end point as possible. So we were trying to figure out who has that problem and how do they solve it. So, here's what we found. Many, many applications have this problem, nobody knows how to solve it well. I mean, if you think Siri, there's an edge that Apple is running for that. If you think eBay, there's transactions happening in region and so on. Or when you think IoT, there are edges being created in the IoT world, and we wanted to come up with a framework or a platform to solve these problems well for all these different application developers. So we came up with the concept that we call the Programmable Edge. The idea is that we want to help our customers run certain microservices, the ones that are latency sensitive, as close to their end points as possible. And an end point could be a car, it could be a phone, it could be a sensor, doesn't matter what it is, but we want to help them get their applications out as quickly as possible. >> Yeah. Before we get into some of the technology, Rafay Systems, Soha Systems, where did the names for these come from? >> Soha is my daughter's name. Rafay is my son's name. We have two kids. I don't know what I'm going to do after this. I need a job. I don't know what I'm going to do after this company. But, actually, our VP Marketing at Soha, he was the one who wanted to use his name. So when we started the previous company, I called it Bubble Wrap, because I thought we were wrapping apps in a bubble, I thought that was really cool. Everybody hated it. (laughs) >> Yeah, there are too many puns on popping the bubble or things like that, it would be challenging. >> I thought it was, I still think it's awesome, but nobody liked it. So, he was looking for a name and we had hired a new agency, they were ready to roll out a new website, we didn't have a name. So, in, like, a four hour window, we had to come up with something. He says, "That's a short enough name "and looks like you own the domain anyway, "let's just use that." Of course, my kids love it. Then once we started the second company, it had to be named after my son. >> Your daughter wasn't a little upset that you sold off the company and now have nothing to do with it? >> It was a pretty healthy outcome so I think she's fine. (both laughing) >> Excellent. Talking about microservices applications around the globe. I was at the Adobe Summit recently and, you're right, it's a very different conversation than, say, ZDNs in the past. But it's, "How many instances do I have? "How do I manage that? "What's their concern?" Networking's always been one of those underlying challenges. Think back to the failed XSPs in the 90s, (Haseeb laughs) and when Cloud started 10 plus years ago, it was like, "Oh, are we going to be able to handle that today?" Think back to Citrix and their NetScaler product is one of those secret sauce things in there that those of us in the networking space really understand it but most people, "Oh, SAS is going to be great "and things will just work anywhere on any device anywhere." But there's some real challenges there. >> Haseeb: Absolutely. >> What's that big gap in the market and are there other companies that are trying to help solve this? >> I used to work in NetScaler a long time ago. I don't know if you brought it up because of that, but I think it's an incredibly amazing product that became the foundation of many things. I think two things are happening in our industry that allow companies like ours to exist, at least from an applications perspective. One is containers, the fact that we are now able to package things not as big, fat VMs, but smaller, essentially, process level things. And then microservices, the fact that we have this notion of loose coupling between services and you can have certain APIs that expose things to each other. And if you at least thematically think about it, if there's a loose coupling it can extend them out so long as I get more value out of doing so. And that, fundamentally, is what we think is an interesting thing happening out there. The fact that there are loose couplings, the fact that applications are no longer monolithic allows us to make better decisions about what needs to run where. The challenge is how do you make that happen? The example I always share with people is, let's say, let's imagine for a second that you have access to 100,000 regions all around the world. You have edges everywhere, 100,000 locations where you can run your code. What do you do next? How do you decide which ones you need? Do you need 5,000? Do you need 80,000? That needs to be solved by the platform. We are at a point now, particularly when it comes to locations, that these are no longer decisions that an Ops Team can make. That has to be driven by the platform and the platform that we are envisioning is going to help our customers, basically, in terms of where the code goes, how they think about performance, et cetera. These are things that will be expressed as a policy to our platform and we help them determine where the location should be and so on. >> Alright. Haseeb, I think many of us lost too many hours fighting in the industry of, what was cloud, What wasn't cloud, various definitions, those ontological discussions, academically they make sense. Heck, when I talk to customers today it's not like, "Well, I'm figuring out my public cloud strategy," or this and that. They have a cloud strategy because there's various pieces in there to connect. Edge is one of those. I haven't heard that people don't like the term, but if I'll talk to seven different companies, Edge means a very different thing to all of them. You and I reconnected actually when we'd both written similar articles that said, "Well, Edge does not kill the public cloud." Peter Levine wrote a very interesting piece with that eye-catching title that was like, "Well, Edge is going to have trillions of devices "and there'll be more data at the Edge than anywhere else." And it's like, okay, yes, yes, yes, but that does not mean that public cloud evaporates tomorrow, right? Nice try, Amazon, good luck on your next business. (laughs) Maybe give us a little bit your definition of Edge, but, more importantly, who are the type of customers that you're talking to and what is the opportunity and challenges of that Edge environment? >> Sure. So let's talk about what Edge means. I think we both agree that the word edge is a misnomer and depends. There are many kinds of edges, if you will. A car for a Tesla, that's an edge, right? Because they are running compute jobs on the car. I use the phrase device edge to describe that thing, the car is a device edge. You're also going to have the car talking to things out there somewhere. If two cars are interacting with each other, you don't want that interaction or the rendezvous point for that interaction being very, very far away, you want to be somewhere close by. I call that the infrastructure edge. Now, infrastructure edge, since you asked, I'm going to go down that rabbit hole, you could be running at the edge of the internet. So think Equanex or Digital or anybody who's got massive pairing presence and so on. So that's the internet edge, as far as infrastructure is concerned. But if you talk to an AT&T, because you said depending on who you talk to their idea is different, in AT&T's mind or Verizon's mind, maybe the base station is the edge, so I call that the wireless edge. Again, infrastructure. So, at a very high level, there is the device edge, there is the infrastructure edge, and then there's a cloud. Applications will span all of these things. It's not one or the other, that doesn't make any sense. Any application will have workloads that are best run in Amazon or, of course, now I think we use Amazon like TiVo, Amazon means public cloud. >> Stu: Like Kleenex. (laughs) >> Like Kleenex. >> Exactly. >> Some things will run in the core, and some things will run in the middle, and then some things will run at the edge. Now in this kind of discussion, I didn't describe another kind of edge which is the IoT edge. Within a factory, or some gas location or some oil and gas facility out there where maybe you don't even have good connectivity back to the internet. They're going to probably have an edge on prem at the factory edge. That too is a necessity. So you have lots of data being generated, they're going to put it in that location. So we should maybe stop thinking in terms of an edge, it just depending on the application that you're targeting, that application's sub-components may need to run in different places, but that makes it so much harder. We couldn't even figure out how to run things in a single region in Amazon, or two, people still have trouble running across availability zones in Amazon. Now we're saying, "Hey, you're going to have four edges, "or five edges, and you're going to have 100 locations," how is this going to work? And that is the challenge. That's, of course, the opportunity as well, because there are applications out there, I talked about the car use case, which seems to be a real use case for many car companies, particularly the ones who are going autonomous with their fleets. They have this challenge. Lots of data being generated and they need to process it as quickly as possible because there's lots of noise on the wire. This data problem, data is gravity, you want to, instead of moving data to a location where there is compute, you want to move compute as close to the data as possible. That's the trend I look for when we're looking for customers. Who has lots of data/traffic being generated at the edge? That could be a sensor company, probably do a number of IoT companies that are pushing data up and it turns out that it's a lot of data or they have compliance challenges, they're going to have PAI come out of a region. So these are some of the use cases we were looking at. These use cases are new use cases, even in older applications, there are needs that can be fulfilled with an edge. Here's an example I tend to use to describe the problem, not that this is a use case. When I talk to OVC and I'm trying to explain to them why an edge matters, at least thematically, I ask the question; if you go to an e-commerce site, how much time do you spend buying versus browsing? What is your answer? >> The buying is a very small piece of it. >> Yeah. >> But it's the most important part. >> 99% of the time is spent looking at read-only stuff. Why do we need to go back to the core if you're not buying? What if the inventory could be pushed to the edge and you can just interact and look at the inventory, and when you make a purchase decision that goes to the core? That's what's possible with the edge. In fact, I believe that some number of years down the line, that's how all applications are going to behave. The things that are read-only, state management, state validation, cookie validation for example, for authentication, these are things that are going to happen at the edge of the internet or wherever the edge happens to be, and then actual purchase decisions or state change decisions will happen in the core. >> Alright. Haseeb, explain to us where in the stack your solution fits. You mentioned everything from the hyper-scale clouds to Equanex out to devices in cars and the like, so where is your layer? Where is your secret sauce? >> So we expect to sit at the internet edge, once the wireless edge is a real thing 5G becomes out there, we expect to sit somewhere there, somewhere between the internet edge. We are, the way we think about this is there are aggregation points, on the internet, in the network, where you have need to put compute so you can make aggregate decisions across multiple devices. That's where we are building our company. In terms of the stack, we are essentially helping our customers run their compute. Think of us as a platform where customers can bring their code, if you will. Because at the end of the day it's computing. Yes, it's about traffic and data but you still need to run compute somewhere, so we are helping our customers run that compute at the internet edge or the wireless edge. >> Okay. Are your customers some of the Telcos, MSPs cloud providers and the enterprise or how does that relationship work? >> The ideal customers for us are SAS companies who are running applications on the internet that generate money. They care about performance. And they will pay money if we can cut their performance by whatever factor it happens to be. Providers, service providers, in our mind, are partners for us. So we're engaged actually with a number of providers out there who are trying to figure out how to, basically, monetize their existing infrastructure investments better. And edge is a new concept that has been introduced to them and they, as you know, a lot of providers already have edge strategies and we're trying to getting involved with them to see how we can bring more SAS companies to engage with service providers. Which is a really hard thing today. >> It sounds like you solve problem for some Fortune 1,000 customers too, though? >> Yes. >> So do they get involved also? >> Yes, look, the best way to build a startup is you come up with a thesis and very quickly go find four or five people who absolutely believe in the same thing, and they work with you. So, we've been fortunate enough to find a few folks who say, "Look, this is a problem we've been thinking "about for a while, "let's partner together to build a better solution." That's been going really well. >> Great. So, the company itself, I believe you just launched a few months ago, so. >> Haseeb: We started a few months ago. >> Where is the product? What's the state of the funding? >> How many people do you have? >> Sure. >> How many customers? >> We raised a seed round in November. Seed rounds have gotten larger as well these days. They're like the ACE from 10 years ago. We are at a point now where we are demonstrating our platform to our early customers and by early summer we expect to have people on the platform. So, things are moving fast, but I think this problem is becoming more and more clear to many people. Sometimes people don't call it edge computing, people have all kinds of phrases for it, but when it comes to helping customers get better performance out of their existing stacks, that is a very promising concept to many people running applications on the internet. So we are approaching it from that perspective. Edge happens to be the way we solve the problem, so I guess we're an edge computing company, but end of the day we're trying to make applications run faster on the internet. >> Okay. Last thing, give us a viewpoint the next year or two out, what do you expect to see in this space and how should we be measuring success for your firm? >> Sure. Things always take longer than we think they will. I never want to forget that lesson I learned many years ago. I think, look, it's still early days for edge computing. I think a lot of companies who have been bruised by the problem, in that they've tried to build up pops, or tried to get their logic as close to their end points as possible, are going to be adopting it sooner than others. I think in terms of broader option where any developers tZero thinking of core plus edge, that's a five year out thing, and we should, I mean, that's just out there somewhere. But there's enough companies out there, there's enough new use cases out there in the next couple of years that allow company like ours to exist. In fact, I am quite confident that there are probably five other smart people, smarter than me doing this already. This is a real problem, it needs to be solved. >> Alright, well, Haseeb Budhani, it's great to catch up. Thank you so much for helping us interact with our community, understand where these emerging trends in Edge and everything that happens. Distributed architecture is absolutely our biggest challenges of our time, and I look forward to seeing where you and your customers go in the future. >> Absolutely. Thank you so much, Stu. Appreciate your time. >> Alright. And thank you for joining us. Of course, check out theCUBE.net for all of the videos. Check out wikibon.com where it is absolutely digging in deep to how edge is impacting architectures. Peter Burris, David Floyer and the team digging in deep to understand that more and always love your feedback so feel free to give us any comments back. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent. Friends, it's good to see you. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is our fourth day of CUBE wall-to-wall coverage, Dave. I can't believe it. And the expo hall is still going incredibly strong. >> Yeah, it is. It feels like the biggest re:Invent ever. I'm told it's almost as big as 2019. I don't know, maybe I was half asleep at 2019. That's very possible. But I'm excited because in 2017 Andy Jassy came on theCUBE and he said if Amazon had to do it all over again, if it knew then what it had now, we would've done the whole thing in containers or using Lambda, using serverless and using containers. Didn't have that opportunity back then. And I'm excited 'cause Rafay Systems is someone we've worked with a lot as an innovator in this space. >> Yep, and we're going to be talking with Rafay again. I think it's your 10th time Haseeb on the show >> Like once or twice. >> And a great customer who's going to talk about their serverless journey. Haseeb Budhani joins us once again, the CEO of Rafay. Great to see you. Rakesh Singh is here as well, the Head of Cloud and DevOps at Regeneron. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. How you feeling on day four of re:Invent? >> Excitement is as high as ever basically. >> Isn't it amazing? >> Rakesh: That's true. >> Haseeb: I just need some sleep. >> I'm with you on that. Caffeine and sleep. >> So many parties. So many meetings, oh my God. >> But the great thing is, Haseeb, that people want to engage with you. They're loving what Rafay is doing. You guys are a great testament to that, which we're going to uncover on the show. What are some of the things that you're hearing in the booth from customers? What's been some of the feedback? >> So firstly, as I said, it feels like the biggest one ever. I've been coming to re:Invent a long time and I mean, I know the numbers say it's not, but oh my God, this is a lot of people. Every time we've spoken over the last year and the point I always make to you, and we've spoken enough time about this is that enterprises are truly adopting this idea of Kubernetes containers, serverless, et cetera. And they're all trying to figure out what is the enterprise strategy for these things? They're thinking beyond technology and thinking operationalization of these technologies. And that's not the same thing. There's a toy and then there's the real thing. And that's not the same thing. And that's the gap that every enterprise customer I talked to and the booth traffic has been just amazing. I mean, but coming here I was thinking, my God, this is really expensive. And I'm thinking, wow, this is a great investment. Because we met such amazing companies who all essentially are saying exactly the same thing, which is as we go and productize and bring our high value applications to the modern infrastructure space, like Kubernetes, Lambda, et cetera, solving for the automation governance is really, really hard because, well, at one point, I guess when the economy was doing crazy well, I could keep hiring people, but I can't do that anymore either. So they're out looking for automation strategies that allow them to do more with the teams they have. And that's exactly what Rafay is here for. >> Yeah. Lisa, Adam Selipsky in his keynote, I love the, he said, "If you want to save money, the cloud is the place to do it." >> Exactly. Yep. Let's talk about Regeneron. Everyone knows it's a household word especially over the last couple of years, but talk about, Rakesh, Regeneron as a technology company that delivers life-saving pharmaceuticals. And where does cloud and Rafay fit into your strategy? >> So cloud has been a backbone of our compute strategy within Regeneron for a very long time now. The evolution from a traditional compute structure to more serverless compute has been growing at a rapid pace. And I would say like we are seeing exponential growth within the adaption of the compute within containers and Kubernetes world. So we've been on this journey for a long time and I think it's not stopping anytime soon. So we have more and more workload, which is running on Kubernetes containers and we are looking forward to our partnership with Rafay to further enhance it, as Haseeb mentioned, the efficiency is the key. We need to do more with less. Resourcing is critical and cloud is evolved from that journey that do more things in a more efficient manner. >> That was the original catalyst as we got to help our development team, be more productive. >> That's correct. >> Eliminate the heavy lifting. And then you started presumably doing some of the less heavy, but still heavy lifting and we talked off camera and then you're increasingly moving toward serverless. >> Rakesh: That's correct. >> Can you describe that journey? What that's like? >> So I think like with the whole adoption that things are taking a much faster pace. Basically we are putting more compute onto containers and the DevOps journey is increasingly getting more, more faster. >> Go ahead. 'Cause I want to understand where Rafay sits in this whole equation. I was talking about, I'm not a developer, but I was talking to developer yesterday trying to really understand the benefits of containers and serverless and I said, take me through what you have to do when you're using containers. He said, I got to build the container image then I got to deploy an EC2 instance where I got to choose and I got to allocate memory of the fence the app in a VM then I got to run the computing instance against the app. And then, oh by the way, I got to pay 'cause all that EC2 that whole time. Depending on how you approach serverless you're going to eliminate a lot of those steps. >> That is correct. So what we do is basically like in a traditional sense, the computer is sitting idle at quite a lot basically. >> But you're paying. >> And you're still paying for that. Serverless technologies allows us to use the compute as needed basis. So whenever you need it, it is available. You run your workload on that and after that it shuts down or goes to minimal state and you don't need to pay as much as your paying. >> And then where do you guys fit in that whole equation? >> Look, serverless has a paradigm. If you step back from the idea of containers versus Lambda or whatever functions. The idea should be that the list you just read out of what developers have to do. Here's what they really should do. They should write their code, they should check it in, and they never have to think about it again. That should be the case. If they want to debug their application, there should be a nice front end where they go and they interact with their application and that's it. What is Kubernetes? I don't care. That's the right answer. And we did not start this journey as an industry there because usually the initial adopters are developers who do the heavy lifting. Developers want to learn, they want to solve these problems. But then eventually the expectation is that the platform organization and an enterprise is going to own this platform for me so I can go back to doing my job, which is writing code. And that's where Rakesh's team comes in. So Rakesh team is building the standard at Regeneron. Whether you're writing a long-lasting app, which is going to run in a container or you're going to write an event-driven application, which is going to be a function, whatever. You write your app, we will give you the necessary tooling and plumbing to take care of all these things. And this is my problem. My being Rakesh. Rakesh is my customer. He has his customers. We as Rafay, A, we have to make Rakesh's system successful because we have to give them right automation to do all these things so that he can service hundred, or in his case, thousands and thousands of different individuals. But then collectively, we have to make sure that the developer experience is optimal so that truly they just write their code and EC2, they don't want to deal with this. In fact, on Monday evening, in the Kubernetes keynote by Barry Cooks, one of the things he said was that in a CIO sort of survey they did, CIO said, 80% of the time of developers is wasted on infrastructure stuff and not on innovation. We need to bring that 80% back so that a hundred percent of the work is on innovation and today it's not. >> And that's what you do. >> That's what we do. >> In your world as a developer, I only have to worry about my writing my code and what functions I'm going to call. >> That is correct. And it is important because the efficiencies of a developer need to be focused on doing the things which business is asking for. The 80% of the work like to make sure the things are secure, they're done the right way, the standards are followed, scanning part of it, that work if we can offload to a platform, for example, Rafay, saves a lot of works, a lot of work cycles from the developers perspective. >> Thank you for that. It was nice little tutorial on the benefits. >> Absolutely. So you transform the developer experience. >> That's correct. >> How does that impact Regeneron overall business? We uplevel that. Give me that view. >> So with that, like what happens, the key thing is the developers productivity increases. We are able to do more with less. And that is the key thing to our strategy that like with the increase in business demand, with the increase in lot of compute things, which we are doing, we need to do and hiring resources is getting more difficult than ever. And we need to make sure that we are leveraging platforms and tools basically to do, enable our developers to focus on key business activity rather than doing redundant things and things which we can leverage some other tooling and platform for that business. >> Is this something in terms of improving the developer experience and their productivity faster time to market? Is this accelerating? >> That's correct. >> Is this even like accelerating drug discovery in some cases? >> So COVID is like a great example for that. Like we were able to fast track our drug discovery and like we were able to turn it into an experience where we were able to discover new drugs and get it to the market in a much faster pace. That whole process was expedited using these tools and processes basically. So we are very proud of that. >> So my understanding is you're running Rafay with EKS. A lot of choices out there. Why? Why did you choose to go in that direction? >> So Regeneron has heavily invested in cloud recently, over the years basically. And then we are focusing on hybrid cloud now that we we are like, again, these multiple cloud providers of platforms which are coming in are strategies to focus on hybrid cloud and Rafay is big leader in that particular space where we felt that we need to engage or partner with Rafay to enable those capabilities, not just on AWS, but across the board. One single tool, one single process, one single knowledge base helps us achieve more efficiencies. >> Less chaos, less complexity. >> That's correct. Let's say when you're in customer conversations, which I know you've had many this week, but you probably do that all the time. Regeneron is a great use case for Rafay. It's so tangible, life sciences. We all get that, especially coming out of the pandemic. What do you say to customers are the top three differentiators of Rafay and why they should go Rafay on top of EKS? >> What's really interesting about these conversations is that, look, we have some pretty cool features in our product. Obviously we must have something interesting otherwise nobody would buy our product. And we have access management and zero trust models and cluster provisioning, all these very nice things. But it always comes down to exactly the same thing, which is every large enterprise that started a journey, independent or Rafay because they didn't know who we were, it's fine. Last year we were a young company, now we are a larger company and they all are basically building towards a roadmap which Rafay truly understands. And in my opinion, and I'm confident when I say this, we understand their life, their journey better than any other company in the market. The reason why we have the flurry of customers we have, the reason why the product has the capacity that it does is because for whatever reason, look, it's scale lock. That's for the history books. But we have complete clarity on what a pharmaceutical company or financial customers company or a high tech company the journey they will take to the cloud and automation for modern infrastructure, we get it. And what I'm selling them is the is the why, not the what. There's a lot of great answers for the what? What do we do? Rakesh doesn't care. I mean, he's trying to solve a bigger problem. He's trying to get his researchers to go faster. So then when they want to run a model, they should be able to do it right now. That's what he cares about. Then he looks for a tool to solve the business problem. And we figured out how to have that conversation and explain why Rafay helps him, essentially multiply the bandwidth that he has in his organization. And of course to that end we have some great technology/ But that's a secondary issue, the first, to me the why is more important than the what. And then we talk about how, which he has to pay us money. That's the how. But yeah, we get there too. But look, this is the important thing. Every enterprise is on exactly the same journey, Lisa. And that if you think about it from just purely economic efficiencies perspective that is not a good investment for our industry. If everybody's solving the same problem that's a waste of resources. Let's find a way to do, what is the point of the cloud? We used to all build data centers. That was not efficient. We all went to the cloud because it's more efficient to have somebody else, AWS, solve this problem for us so we can now focus on the next level problem. And then Rafay solving that problem so that he can focus on his drug discovery, not on Kubernetes. >> That's correct. It's all about efficiencies. Like doing things, learn from each other's experience and build upon it. So the things have been solved. One way you need to leverage that, reuse it. So the principles are the same. >> So then what's next? You had done an amazing job transforming the company. You're facilitating drug discovery faster than ever before. From an infrastructure perspective, what's next on your journey? >> So right now the roadmap what we have is basically talking about making sure that the workload are running more efficient, they're more secure. As we go into these expandable serverless technology, there are more challenging opportunities for us to solve. Those challenges are coming up. We need to make sure that with the new, the world we are living in, we are more securely doing stuff what we were doing previously. More efficiencies is also the key and more distributed. Like if we can leverage the power of cloud in doing more things on demand is on our roadmap. And I think that is where we are all driving. >> And when you said hybrid, you're talking about connecting to your on-prem tools and data? How about cross cloud? >> We are invested in multiple cloud platform itself and we are looking forward to leveraging a technology, which is truly cloud native and we can leverage things together on that. >> And I presume you're helping with that, obviously. >> Last question for both of you. We're making an Instagram reel. Think of this as a sizzle reel, like a 32nd elevator pitch. Question, first one goes to you, Rakesh. If you had a bumper sticker, you put it on, I don't know, say a DeLorean, I hear those are coming back. What would it say about Regeneron as a technology company that's delivering therapeutics? >> It's a tough question, but I would try my best. The bumper sticker would say, discover drug more faster, more efficient. >> Perfect. Haseeb, question about Rafay. What's the bumper sticker? If you had a billboard in on Highway 101 in Redwood City about Rafay and what it's enabling organizations enterprises across the globe to achieve, what would it say? >> I'll tell you what our customers say. So our customers call us the vCenter for Kubernetes and we all know what a vCenter is. We all know why vCenter's so amazingly successful because it takes IT engineers and gives them superpowers. You can run a data center. What is the vCenter for this new world? It us. So vCenter is obviously a trademark with our friends at VMware, so that's why I'm, but our customers truly call us the vCenter for Kubernetes. And I think that's an incredible moniker because that truly codifies our roadmap. It codifies what we are selling today. >> There's nothing more powerful and potent in the voice of the customer. Thank you both for coming on. Thank you for sharing the Regeneron story. Great to have you back on, Haseeb. You need a pin for the number of times you've been on theCUBE. >> At least a gold star. >> We'll work on that. Guys, thank you. We appreciate your time. >> Haseeb: Thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Well, welcome back here to the Venetian. We're in Las Vegas. It is Wednesday, Day 2 of our coverage here of AWS re:Invent, 22. I'm your host, John Walls on theCUBE and it's a pleasure to welcome in two more guests as part of our AWS startup showcase, which is again part of the startup program globally at AWS. I've got Anant Verma, who is the Vice President of Engineering at Elation. Anant, good to see you, sir. >> Good to see you too. >> Good to be with us. And Haseeb Budhani, who is the CEO and co-founder of Rafay Systems. Good to see you, sir. >> Good to see you again. >> Thanks for having, yeah. A cuber, right? You've been on theCUBE? >> Once or twice. >> Many occasions. But a first timer here, as a matter of fact, glad to have you aboard. All right, tell us about Elation. First for those whom who might not be familiar with what you're up to these days, just give it a little 30,000 foot level. >> Sure, sure. So, yeah, Elation is a startup and a leader in the enterprise data intelligence space. That really includes a lot of different things including data search, data discovery, metadata management, data cataloging, data governance, data policy management, a lot of different things that companies want to do with the hoards of data that they have and Elation, our product is the answer to solve some of those problems. We've been doing pretty good. Elation is in running for about 10 years now. We are a series A startup now, we just raised around a few, a couple of months ago. We are already a hundred million plus in revenue. So. >> John: Not shabby. >> Yeah, it's a big benchmark for companies to, startup companies, to cross that milestone. So, yeah. >> And what's the relationship? I know Rafay and you have worked together, in fact, the two of you have, which I find interesting, you have a chance, you've been meeting on Zoom for a number of months, as many of us have it meeting here for the first time. But talk about that relationship with Rafay. >> Yeah, so I actually joined Elation in January and this is part of the move of Elation to a more cloud native solution. So, we have been running on AWS since last year and as part of making our solution more cloud native, we have been looking to containerize our services and run them on Kubernetes. So, that's the reason why I joined Elation in the first place to kind of make sure that this migration or move to a cloud native actually works out really well for us. This is a big move for the companies. A lot of companies that have done in the past, including, you know, Confluent or MongoDB, when they did that, they actually really reap great benefits out of that. So to do that, of course, you know, as we were looking at Kubernetes as a solution, I was personally more looking for a way to speed up things and get things out in production as fast as possible. And that's where I think, Janeb introduced us... >> That's right. >> Two of us. I think we share the same investor actually, so that's how we found each other. And yeah, it was a pretty simple decision in terms of, you know, getting the solution, figuring it out if it's useful for us and then of course, putting it out there. >> So you've hit the keyword, Kubernetes, right? And, so if you would to honestly jump in here, there are challenges, right? That you're trying to help them solve and you're working on the Kubernetes platform. So, you know, just talk about that and how that's influenced the work that the two of you are doing together. >> Absolutely. So, the business we're in is to help companies who adopt Kubernetes as an orchestration platform do it easier, faster. It's a simple story, right? Everybody is using Kubernetes, but it turns out that Kubernetes is actually not that easy to to operationalize, playing in a sandbox is one thing. Operationalizing this at a certain level of scale is not easy. Now, we have a lot of enterprise customers who are deploying their own applications on Kubernetes, and we've had many, many of them. But when it comes to a company like Elation, it's a more complicated problem set because they're taking a very complex application, their application, but then they're providing that as a service to their customers. So then we have a chain of customers we have to make happy. Anant's team, the platform organization, his internal customers who are the developers who are deploying applications, and then, the company has customers, we have to make sure that they get a good experience as they consume this application that happens to be running on Kubernetes. So that presented a really interesting challenge, right? How do we make this partnership successful? So I will say that, we've learned a lot from each other, right? And, end of the day, the goal is, my customer, Anant's specifically, right? He has to feel that, this investment, 'cause he has to pay us money, we would like to get paid. >> John: Sure. (John laughs) >> It reduces his internal expenditure because otherwise he'd have to do it himself. And most importantly, it's not the money part, it's that he can get to a certain goalpost significantly faster because the invention time for Kubernetes management, the platform that you have to build to run Kubernetes is a very complex exercise. It took us four and a half years to get here. You want to do that again, as a company, right? Why? Why do you want to do that? We, as Rafay, the way I think about what we deliver, yes, we sell a product, but to what end? The product is the what, the why, is that every enterprise, every ISV is building a Kubernetes platform in house. They shouldn't, they shouldn't need to. They should be able to consume that as a service. They consume the Kubernetes engine the EKS is Amazon's Kubernetes, they consume that as an engine. But the management layer was a gap in the market. How do I operationalize Kubernetes? And what we are doing is we're going to, you know, the Anant said. So the warden saying, "Hey you, your team is technical, you understand the problem set. Would you like to build it or would you rather consume this as a service so you can go faster?" And, resoundingly the answer is, I don't want to do this anymore. I wouldn't allow to buy. >> Well, you know, as Haseeb is saying, speed is again, when we started talking, it only took us like a couple of months to figure out if Rafay is the right solution for us. And so we ended up purchasing Rafay in April. We launched our product based on Rafay in Kubernetes, in EKS in August. >> August. >> So that's about four months. I've done some things like this before. It takes a couple of years just to sort of figure out, how do you really work with Kubernetes, right? In a production at a large scale. Right now, we are running about a 600 node cluster on Rafay and that's serving our customers. Like, one of the biggest thing that's actually happening on December 8th is we are running what we call a virtual hands on lab. >> A virtual? >> Hands on lab. >> Okay. >> For Elation. And they're probably going to be about 500 people is going to be attending it. It's like a webinar style. But what we do in that hands on lab is we will spin up an Elation instance for each attendee, right on the spot. Okay? Now, think about this enterprise software running and people just sign up for it and it's there for you, right on the spot. And that's the beauty of the software that we have been building. There's the beauty of the work that Rafay has helped us to do over the last few months. >> Okay. >> I think we need to charge them more money, I'm getting from this congregation. I'm going to go work on that. >> I'm going to let the two of you work that out later. All right. I don't want to get in the way of a big deal. But you mentioned that, we heard about it earlier that, it's you that would offer to your cert, to your clients, these services. I assume they have their different levels of tolerance and their different challenges, right? They've got their own complexities and their own organizational barriers. So how are you juggling that end of it? Because you're kind of learning as, well, not learning, but you're experiencing some of the thing. >> Right. Same things. And yet you've got this other client base that has a multitude of experiences that they're going through. >> Right. So I think, you know a lot of our customers, they are large enterprise companies. They got a whole bunch of data that they want work with us. So one of the thing that we have learned over the past few years is that we used to actually ship our software to the customers and then they would manage it for their privacy security reasons. But now, since we're running in the cloud, they're really happy about that because they don't need to juggle with the infrastructure and the software management and upgrades and things like that, we do it for them, right? And, that's the speed for them because now they are only interested in solving the problems with the data that they're working with. They don't need to deal with all these software management issues, right? So that frees our customers up to do the thing that they want to do. Of course it makes our job harder and I'm sure in turn it makes his job harder. >> We get a short end of the stick, for sure. >> That's why he is going to get more money. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, this is a great conversation. >> No, no, no. We'll talk about that. >> So, let's talk about the cloud then. How, in terms of being the platform where all this is happening and AWS, about your relationship with them as part of the startup program and what kind of value that brings to you, what does that do for you when you go out and are looking for work and what kind of cache that brings to you >> Talk about the AWS? >> Yes, sir. >> Okay. Well, so, the thing is really like of course AWS, a lot of programs in terms of making sure that as we move our customers into AWS, they can give us some, I wouldn't call it discount, but there's some credits that you can get as you move your workloads onto AWS. So that's a really great program. Our customers love it. They want us to do more things with AWS. It's a pretty seamless way for us to, as we were talking about or thinking about moving into the cloud, AWS was our number one choice and that's the only cloud that we are in, today. We're not going to go to any other place. >> That's it. >> Yeah. >> How would you characterize? I mean, we've already heard, from one side of the fence here, but. >> Absolutely. So for us, AWS is a make or break partner, frankly. As the EKS team knows very well, we support Azure's Kubernetes and Google's Kubernetes and the community Kubernetes as well. But the number of customers on our platform who are AWS native, either a hundred percent or a large percentage is, you know, that's the majority of our customer base. >> John: Yeah. >> And AWS has made it very easy for us in a variety of ways to make us successful and our customers successful. So Anant mentioned the credit program they have which is very useful 'cause we can, you know, readily kind of bring a customer to try things out and they can do that at no cost, right? So they can spin up infrastructure, play with things and AWS will cover the cost, as one example. So that's a really good thing. Beyond that, there are multiple programs at AWS, ISV accelerate, et cetera. That, you know, you got to over time, you kind of keep getting taller and taller. And you keep getting on bigger and bigger. And as you make progress, what I'm finding is that there's a great ecosystem of support that they provide us. They introduce us to customers, they help us, you know, think through architecture issues. We get access to their roadmap. We work very, very closely with the guest team, for example. Like the, the GM for Kubernetes at AWS is a gentleman named Barry Cooks who was my sponsor, right? So, we spend a lot of time together. In fact, right after this, I'm going to be spending time with him because look, they take us seriously as a partner. They spend time with us because end of the day, they understand that if they make their partners, in this case, Rafay successful, at the end of the day helps the customer, right? Anant's customer, my customer, their AWS customers, also. So they benefit because we are collectively helping them solve a problem faster. The goal of the cloud is to help people modernize, right? Reduce operational costs because data centers are expensive, right? But then if these complex solutions this is an enterprise product, Kubernetes, at the enterprise level is a complex problem. If we don't collectively work together to save the customer effort, essentially, right? Reduce their TCO for whatever it is they're doing, right? Then the cost of the cloud is too high. And AWS clearly understands and appreciates that and that's why they are going out of their air, frankly, to make us successful and make other companies successful in the startup program. >> Well. >> I would just add a couple of things there. Yeah, so, you know, cloud is not new. It's been there for a while. You know, people used to build things on their own. And so what AWS has really done is they have advanced technology enough where everything is really simple as just turning on a switch and using it, right? So, just a recent example, and I, by the way, I love managed services, right? So the reason is really because I don't need to put my own people to build and manage those things, right? So, if you want to use a search, they got the open search, if you want to use caching, they got elastic caching and stuff like that. So it's really simple and easy to just pick and choose which services you want to use and they're ready to be consumed right away. And that's the beautiful, and that that's how we can move really fast and get things done. >> Ease of use, right? Efficiency, saving money. It's a winning combination. Thanks for sharing this story, appreciate. Anant, Haseeb thanks for being with us. >> Yeah, thank you so much having us. >> We appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. >> You have been a part of the global startup program at AWS and startup showcase. Proud to feature this great collaboration. I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE, which is of course the leader in high tech coverage.

(gentle upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone, to "theCUBE"'s live stage performance here in Palo Alto, California at "theCUBE" Studios. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, kicking off our first inaugural Supercloud event. It's an editorial event, we wanted to bring together the best in the business, the smartest, the biggest, the up-and-coming startups, venture capitalists, everybody, to weigh in on this new Supercloud trend, this structural change in the cloud computing business. We're about to run the Ecosystem Speaks, which is a bunch of pre-recorded companies that wanted to get their voices on the record, so stay tuned for the rest of the day. We'll be replaying all that content and they're going to be having some really good commentary and hear what they have to say. I had a chance to interview and so did Dave. Dave, this is our closing segment where we kind of unpack everything or kind of digest and report. So much to kind of digest from the conversations today, a wide range of commentary from Supercloud operating system to developers who are in charge to maybe it's an ops problem or maybe Oracle's a Supercloud. I mean, that was debated. So so much discussion, lot to unpack. What was your favorite moments? >> Well, before I get to that, I think, I go back to something that happened at re:Invent last year. Nick Sturiale came up, Steve Mullaney from Aviatrix; we're going to hear from him shortly in the Ecosystem Speaks. Nick Sturiale's VC said "it's happening"! And what he was talking about is this ecosystem is exploding. They're building infrastructure or capabilities on top of the CapEx infrastructure. So, I think it is happening. I think we confirmed today that Supercloud is a thing. It's a very immature thing. And I think the other thing, John is that, it seems to me that the further you go up the stack, the weaker the business case gets for doing Supercloud. We heard from Marianna Tessel, it's like, "Eh, you know, we can- it was easier to just do it all on one cloud." This is a point that, Adrian Cockcroft just made on the panel and so I think that when you break out the pieces of the stack, I think very clearly the infrastructure layer, what we heard from Confluent and HashiCorp, and certainly VMware, there's a real problem there. There's a real need at the infrastructure layer and then even at the data layer, I think Benoit Dageville did a great job of- You know, I was peppering him with all my questions, which I basically was going through, the Supercloud definition and they ticked the box on pretty much every one of 'em as did, by the way Ali Ghodsi you know, the big difference there is the philosophy of Republicans and Democrats- got open versus closed, not to apply that to either one side, but you know what I mean! >> And the similarities are probably greater than differences. >> Berkely, I would probably put them on the- >> Yeah, we'll put them on the Democrat side we'll make Snowflake the Republicans. But so- but as we say there's a lot of similarities as well in terms of what their objectives are. So, I mean, I thought it was a great program and a really good start to, you know, an industry- You brought up the point about the industry consortium, asked Kit Colbert- >> Yep. >> If he thought that was something that was viable and what'd they say? That hyperscale should lead it? >> Yeah, they said hyperscale should lead it and there also should be an industry consortium to get the voices out there. And I think VMware is very humble in how they're putting out their white paper because I think they know that they can't do it all and that they do not have a great track record relative to cloud. And I think, but they have a great track record of loyal installed base ops people using VMware vSphere all the time. >> Yeah. >> So I think they need a catapult moment where they can catapult to the cloud native which they've been working on for years under Raghu and the team. So the question on VMware is in the light of Broadcom, okay, acquisition of VMware, this is an opportunity or it might not be an opportunity or it might be a spin-out or something, I just think VMware's got way too much engineering culture to be ignored, Dave. And I think- well, I'm going to watch this very closely because they can pull off some sort of rallying moment. I think they could. And then you hear the upstarts like Platform9, Rafay Systems and others they're all like, "Yes, we need to unify behind something. There needs to be some sort of standard". You know, we heard the argument of you know, more standards bodies type thing. So, it's interesting, maybe "theCUBE" could be that but we're going to certainly keep the conversation going. >> I thought one of the most memorable statements was Vittorio who said we- for VMware, we want our cake, we want to eat it too and we want to lose weight. So they have a lot of that aspirations there! (John laughs) >> And then I thought, Adrian Cockcroft said you know, the devs, they want to get married. They were marrying everybody, and then the ops team, they have to deal with the divorce. >> Yeah. >> And I thought that was poignant. It's like, they want consistency, they want standards, they got to be able to scale And Lori MacVittie, I'm not sure you agree with this, I'd have to think about it, but she was basically saying, all we've talked about is devs devs devs for the last 10 years, going forward we're going to be talking about ops. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things I learned from this day and looking back, and some kind of- I've been sauteing through all the interviews. If you zoom out, for me it was the epiphany of developers are still in charge. And I've said, you know, the developers are doing great, it's an ops security thing. Not sure I see that the way I was seeing before. I think what I learned was the refactoring pattern that's emerging, In Sik Rhee brought this up from Vertex Ventures with Marianna Tessel, it's a nuanced point but I think he's right on which is the pattern that's emerging is developers want ease-of-use tooling, they're driving the change and I think the developers in the devs ops ethos- it's never going to be separate. It's going to be DevOps. That means developers are driving operations and then security. So what I learned was it's not ops teams leveling up, it's devs redefining what ops is. >> Mm. And I think that to me is where Supercloud's going to be interesting- >> Forcing that. >> Yeah. >> Forcing the change because the structural change is open sources thriving, devs are still in charge and they still want more developers, Vittorio "we need more developers", right? So the developers are in charge and that's clear. Now, if that happens- if you believe that to be true the domino effect of that is going to be amazing because then everyone who gets on the wrong side of history, on the ops and security side, is going to be fighting a trend that may not be fight-able, you know, it might be inevitable. And so the winners are the ones that are refactoring their business like Snowflake. Snowflake is a data warehouse that had nothing to do with Amazon at first. It was the developers who said "I'm going to refactor data warehouse on AWS". That is a developer-driven refactorization and a business model. So I think that's the pattern I'm seeing is that this concept refactoring, patterns and the developer trajectory is critical. >> I thought there was another great comment. Maribel Lopez, her Lord of the Rings comment: "there will be no one ring to rule them all". Now at the same time, Kit Colbert, you know what we asked him straight out, "are you the- do you want to be the, the Supercloud OS?" and he basically said, "yeah, we do". Now, of course they're confined to their world, which is a pretty substantial world. I think, John, the reason why Maribel is so correct is security. I think security's a really hard problem to solve. You've got cloud as the first layer of defense and now you've got multiple clouds, multiple layers of defense, multiple shared responsibility models. You've got different tools for XDR, for identity, for governance, for privacy all within those different clouds. I mean, that really is a confusing picture. And I think the hardest- one of the hardest parts of Supercloud to solve. >> Yeah, and I thought the security founder Gee Rittenhouse, Piyush Sharrma from Accurics, which sold to Tenable, and Tony Kueh, former head of product at VMware. >> Right. >> Who's now an investor kind of looking for his next gig or what he is going to do next. He's obviously been extremely successful. They brought up the, the OS factor. Another point that they made I thought was interesting is that a lot of the things to do to solve the complexity is not doable. >> Yeah. >> It's too much work. So managed services might field the bit. So, and Chris Hoff mentioned on the Clouderati segment that the higher level services being a managed service and differentiating around the service could be the key competitive advantage for whoever does it. >> I think the other thing is Chris Hoff said "yeah, well, Web 3, metaverse, you know, DAO, Superclouds" you know, "Stupercloud" he called it and this bring up- It resonates because one of the criticisms that Charles Fitzgerald laid on us was, well, it doesn't help to throw out another term. I actually think it does help. And I think the reason it does help is because it's getting people to think. When you ask people about Supercloud, they automatically- it resonates with them. They play back what they think is the future of cloud. So Supercloud really talks to the future of cloud. There's a lot of aspects to it that need to be further defined, further thought out and we're getting to the point now where we- we can start- begin to say, okay that is Supercloud or that isn't Supercloud. >> I think that's really right on. I think Supercloud at the end of the day, for me from the simplest way to describe it is making sure that the developer experience is so good that the operations just happen. And Marianna Tessel said, she's investing in making their developer experience high velocity, very easy. So if you do that, you have to run on premise and on the cloud. So hybrid really is where Supercloud is going right now. It's not multi-cloud. Multi-cloud was- that was debunked on this session today. I thought that was clear. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think- >> It's not about multi-cloud. It's about operationally seamless operations across environments, public cloud to on-premise, basically. >> I think we got consensus across the board that multi-cloud, you know, is a symptom Chuck Whitten's thing of multi-cloud by default versus multi- multi-cloud has not been a strategy, Kit Colbert said, up until the last couple of years. Yeah, because people said, "oh we got all these multiple clouds, what do we do with it?" and we got this mess that we have to solve. Whereas, I think Supercloud is something that is a strategy and then the other nuance that I keep bringing up is it's industries that are- as part of their digital transformation, are building clouds. Now, whether or not they become superclouds, I'm not convinced. I mean, what Goldman Sachs is doing, you know, with AWS, what Walmart's doing with Azure connecting their on-prem tools to those public clouds, you know, is that a supercloud? I mean, we're going to have to go back and really look at that definition. Or is it just kind of a SAS that spans on-prem and cloud. So, as I said, the further you go up the stack, the business case seems to wane a little bit but there's no question in my mind that from an infrastructure standpoint, to your point about operations, there's a real requirement for super- what we call Supercloud. >> Well, we're going to keep the conversation going, Dave. I want to put a shout out to our founding supporters of this initiative. Again, we put this together really fast kind of like a pilot series, an inaugural event. We want to have a face-to-face event as an industry event. Want to thank the founding supporters. These are the people who donated their time, their resource to contribute content, ideas and some cash, not everyone has committed some financial contribution but we want to recognize the names here. VMware, Intuit, Red Hat, Snowflake, Aisera, Alteryx, Confluent, Couchbase, Nutanix, Rafay Systems, Skyhigh Security, Aviatrix, Zscaler, Platform9, HashiCorp, F5 and all the media partners. Without their support, this wouldn't have happened. And there are more people that wanted to weigh in. There was more demand than we could pull off. We'll certainly continue the Supercloud conversation series here on "theCUBE" and we'll add more people in. And now, after this session, the Ecosystem Speaks session, we're going to run all the videos of the big name companies. We have the Nutanix CEOs weighing in, Aviatrix to name a few. >> Yeah. Let me, let me chime in, I mean you got Couchbase talking about Edge, Platform 9's going to be on, you know, everybody, you know Insig was poopoo-ing Oracle, but you know, Oracle and Azure, what they did, two technical guys, developers are coming on, we dig into what they did. Howie Xu from Zscaler, Paula Hansen is going to talk about going to market in the multi-cloud world. You mentioned Rajiv, the CEO of Nutanix, Ramesh is going to talk about multi-cloud infrastructure. So that's going to run now for, you know, quite some time here and some of the pre-record so super excited about that and I just want to thank the crew. I hope guys, I hope you have a list of credits there's too many of you to mention, but you know, awesome jobs really appreciate the work that you did in a very short amount of time. >> Well, I'm excited. I learned a lot and my takeaway was that Supercloud's a thing, there's a kind of sense that people want to talk about it and have real conversations, not BS or FUD. They want to have real substantive conversations and we're going to enable that on "theCUBE". Dave, final thoughts for you. >> Well, I mean, as I say, we put this together very quickly. It was really a phenomenal, you know, enlightening experience. I think it confirmed a lot of the concepts and the premises that we've put forth, that David Floyer helped evolve, that a lot of these analysts have helped evolve, that even Charles Fitzgerald with his antagonism helped to really sharpen our knives. So, you know, thank you Charles. And- >> I like his blog, by the I'm a reader- >> Yeah, absolutely. And it was great to be back in Palo Alto. It was my first time back since pre-COVID, so, you know, great job. >> All right. I want to thank all the crew and everyone. Thanks for watching this first, inaugural Supercloud event. We are definitely going to be doing more of these. So stay tuned, maybe face-to-face in person. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante now for the Ecosystem chiming in, and they're going to speak and share their thoughts here with "theCUBE" our first live stage performance event in our studio. Thanks for watching. (gentle upbeat music)

(gentle music) (upbeat music) (crowd chattering) >> Welcome back to The City That Never Sleeps. Lisa Martin and John Furrier in New York City for AWS Summit '22 with about 10 to 12,000 of our friends. And we've got two more friends joining us here today. We're going to be talking with Haseeb Budhani, one of our alumni, co-founder and CEO of Rafay Systems, and Kevin Coleman, senior manager for Go-to Market for EKS at AWS. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you very much for having us. Excited to be here. >> Isn't it great to be back at an in-person event with 10, 12,000 people? >> Yes. There are a lot of people here. This is packed. >> A lot of energy here. So, Haseeb, we've got to start with you. Your T-shirt says it all. Don't hate k8s. (Kevin giggles) Talk to us about some of the trends, from a Kubernetes perspective, that you're seeing, and then Kevin will give your follow-up. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I think the biggest trend I'm seeing on the enterprise side is that enterprises are forming platform organizations to make Kubernetes a practice across the enterprise. So it used to be that a BU would say, "I need Kubernetes. I have some DevOps engineers, let me just do this myself." And the next one would do the same, and then next one would do the same. And that's not practical, long term, for an enterprise. And this is now becoming a consolidated effort, which is, I think it's great. It speaks to the power of Kubernetes, because it's becoming so important to the enterprise. But that also puts a pressure because what the platform team has to solve for now is they have to find this fine line between automation and governance, right? I mean, the developers, you know, they don't really care about governance. Just give me stuff, I need to compute, I'm going to go. But then the platform organization has to think about, how is this going to play for the enterprise across the board? So that combination of automation and governance is where we are finding, frankly, a lot of success in making enterprise platform team successful. I think, that's a really new thing to me. It's something that's changed in the last six months, I would say, in the industry. I don't know if, Kevin, if you agree with that or not, but that's what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, definitely agree with that. We see a ton of customers in EKS who are building these new platforms using Kubernetes. The term that we hear a lot of customers use is standardization. So they've got various ways that they're deploying applications, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud and region. And they're really trying to standardize the way they deploy applications. And Kubernetes is really that compute substrate that they're standardizing on. >> Kevin, talk about the relationship with Rafay Systems that you have and why you're here together. And two, second part of that question, why is EKS kicking ass so much? (Haseeb and Kevin laughing) All right, go ahead. First one, your relationship. Second one, EKS is doing pretty well. >> Yep, yep, yep. (Lisa laughing) So yeah, we work closely with Rafay, Rafay, excuse me. A lot of joint customer wins with Haseeb and Co, so they're doing great work with EKS customers and, yeah, love the partnership there. In terms of why EKS is doing so well, a number of reasons, I think. Number one, EKS is vanilla, upstream, open-source Kubernetes. So customers want to use that open-source technology, that open-source Kubernetes, and they come to AWS to get it in a managed offering, right? Kubernetes isn't the easiest thing to self-manage. And so customers, you know, back before EKS launched, they were banging down the door at AWS for us to have a managed Kubernetes offering. And, you know, we launched EKS and there's been a ton of customer adoption since then. >> You know, Lisa, when we, theCUBE 12 years, now everyone knows we started in 2010, we used to cover a show called OpenStack. >> I remember that. >> OpenStack Summit. >> What's that now? >> And at the time, at that time, Kubernetes wasn't there. So theCUBE was present at creation. We've been to every KubeCon ever, CNCF then took it over. So we've been watching it from the beginning. >> Right. And it reminds me of the same trend we saw with MapReduce and Hadoop. Very big promise, everyone loved it, but it was hard, very difficult. And Hadoop's case, big data, it ended up becoming a data lake. Now you got Spark, or Snowflake, and Databricks, and Redshift. Here, Kubernetes has not yet been taken over. But, instead, it's being abstracted away and or managed services are emerging. 'Cause general enterprises can't hire enough Kubernetes people. >> Yep. >> They're not that many out there yet. So there's the training issue. But there's been the rise of managed services. >> Yep. >> Can you guys comment on what your thoughts are relative to that trend of hard to use, abstracting away the complexity, and, specifically, the managed services? >> Yeah, absolutely. You want to go? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, look, it's important to not kid ourselves. It is hard. (Johns laughs) But that doesn't mean it's not practical, right. When Kubernetes is done well, it's a thing of beauty. I mean, we have enough customer to scale, like, you know, it's like a, forget a hockey stick, it's a straight line up, because they just are moving so fast when they have the right platform in place. I think that the mistake that many of us make, and I've made this mistake when we started this company, was trivializing the platform aspect of Kubernetes, right. And a lot of my customers, you know, when they start, they kind of feel like, well, this is not that hard. I can bring this up and running. I just need two people. It'll be fine. And it's hard to hire, but then, I need two, then I need two more, then I need two, it's a lot, right. I think, the one thing I keep telling, like, when I talk to analysts, I say, "Look, somebody needs to write a book that says, 'Yes, it's hard, but, yes, it can be done, and here's how.'" Let's just be open about what it takes to get there, right. And, I mean, you mentioned OpenStack. I think the beauty of Kubernetes is that because it's such an open system, right, even with the managed offering, companies like Rafay can build really productive businesses on top of this Kubernetes platform because it's an open system. I think that is something that was not true with OpenStack. I've spent time with OpenStack also, I remember how it is. >> Well, Amazon had a lot to do with stalling the momentum of OpenStack, but your point about difficulty. Hadoop was always difficult to maintain and hiring against. There were no managed services and no one yet saw that value of big data yet. Here at Kubernetes, people are living a problem called, I'm scaling up. >> Yep. And so it sounds like it's a foundational challenge. The ongoing stuff sounds easier or manageable. >> Once you have the right tooling. >> Is that true? >> Yeah, no, I mean, once you have the right tooling, it's great. I think, look, I mean, you and I have talked about this before, I mean, the thesis behind Rafay is that, you know, there's like 8, 12 things that need to be done right for Kubernetes to work well, right. And my whole thesis was, I don't want my customer to buy 10, 12, 15 products. I want them to buy one platform, right. And I truly believe that, in our market, similar to what vCenter, like what VMware's vCenter did for VMs, I want to do that for Kubernetes, right. And that the reason why I say that is because, see, vCenter is not about hypervisors, right? vCenter is about hypervisor, access, networking, storage, all of the things, like multitenancy, all the things that you need to run an enterprise-grade VM environment. What is that equivalent for the Kubernetes world, right? So what we are doing at Rafay is truly building a vCenter, but for Kubernetes, like a kCenter. I've tried getting the domain. I couldn't get it. (Kevin laughs) >> Well, after the Broadcom view, you don't know what's going to happen. >> Ehh. (John laughs) >> I won't go there! >> Yeah. Yeah, let's not go there today. >> Kevin, EKS, I've heard people say to me, "Love EKS. Just add serverless, that's a home run." There's been a relationship with EKS and some of the other Amazon tools. Can you comment on what you're seeing as the most popular interactions among the services at AWS? >> Yeah, and was your comment there, add serverless? >> Add serverless with AKS at the edge- >> Yeah. >> and things are kind of interesting. >> I mean, so, one of the serverless offerings we have today is actually Fargate. So you can use Fargate, which is our serverless compute offering, or one of our serverless compute offerings with EKS. And so customers love that. Effectively, they get the beauty of EKS and the Kubernetes API but they don't have to manage nodes. So that's, you know, a good amount of adoption with Fargate as well. But then, we also have other ways that they can manage their nodes. We have managed node groups as well, in addition to self-managed nodes also. So there's a variety of options that customers can use from a compute perspective with EKS. And you'll continue to see us evolve the portfolio as well. >> Can you share, Haseeb, can you share a customer example, a joint customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Rafay and AWS are doing together? >> Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we announced a customer very recently on this very show, which is MoneyGram, which is a joint AWS and Rafay customer. Look, we have enough, you know, the thing about these massive customers is that, you know, not everybody's going to give us their logo to use. >> Right. >> But MoneyGram has been a Rafay plus EKS customer for a very, very long time. You know, at this point, I think we've earned their trust, and they've allowed us to, kind of say this publicly. But there's enough of these financial services companies who have, you know, standardized on EKS. So it's EKS first, Rafay second, right. They standardized on EKS. And then they looked around and said, "Who can help me platform EKS across my enterprise?" And we've been very lucky. We have some very large financial services, some very large healthcare companies now, who, A, EKS, B, Rafay. I'm not just saying that because my friend Kevin's here, (Lisa laughs) it's actually true. Look, EKS is a brilliant platform. It scales so well, right. I mean, people try it out, relative to other platforms, and it's just a no-brainer, it just scales. You want to build a big enterprise on the backs of a Kubernetes platform. And I'm not saying that's because I'm biased. Like EKS is really, really good. There's a reason why so many companies are choosing it over many other options in the market. >> You're doing a great job of articulating why the theme (Kevin laughs) of the New York City Summit is scale anything. >> Oh, yeah. >> There you go. >> Oh, yeah. >> I did not even know that but I'm speaking the language, right? >> You are. (John laughs) >> Yeah, absolutely. >> One of the things that we're seeing, also, I want to get your thoughts on, guys, is the app modernization trend, right? >> Yep. >> Because unlike other standards that were hard, that didn't have any benefit downstream 'cause they were too hard to get to, here, Kubernetes is feeding into real app for app developer pressure. They got to get cloud-native apps out. It's fairly new in the mainstream enterprise and a lot of hyperscalers have experience. So I'm going to ask you guys, what is the key thing that you're enabling with Kubernetes in the cloud-native apps? What is the key value? >> Yeah. >> I think, there's a bifurcation happening in the market. One is the Kubernetes Engine market, which is like EKS, AKS, GKE, right. And then there's the, you know, what, back in the day, we used to call operations and management, right. So the OAM layer for Kubernetes is where there's need, right. People are learning, right. Because, as you said before, the skill isn't there, you know, there's not enough talent available to the market. And that's the opportunity we're seeing. Because to solve for the standardization, the governance, and automation that we talked about earlier, you know, you have to solve for, okay, how do I manage my network? How do I manage my service mesh? How do I do chargebacks? What's my, you know, policy around actual Kubernetes policies? What's my blueprinting strategy? How do I do add-on management? How do I do pipelines for updates of add-ons? How do I upgrade my clusters? And we're not done yet, there's a longer list, right? This is a lot, right? >> Yeah. >> And this is what happens, right. It's just a lot. And really, the companies who understand that plethora of problems that need to be solved and build easy-to-use solutions that enterprises can consume with the right governance automation, I think they're going to be very, very successful here. >> Yeah. >> Because this is a train, right? I mean, this is happening whether, it's not us, it's happening, right? Enterprises are going to keep doing this. >> And open-source is a big driver in all of this. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> And I'll tag onto that. I mean, you talked about platform engineering earlier. Part of the point of building these platforms on top of Kubernetes is giving developers an easier way to get applications into the cloud. So building unique developer experiences that really make it easy for you, as a software developer, to take the code from your laptop, get it out of production as quickly as possible. The question is- >> So is that what you mean, does that tie your point earlier about that vertical, straight-up value once you've set up it, right? >> Yep. >> Because it's taking the burden off the developers for stopping their productivity. >> Absolutely. >> To go check in, is it configured properly? Is the supply chain software going to be there? Who's managing the services? Who's orchestrating the nodes? >> Yep. >> Is that automated, is that where you guys see the value? >> That's a lot of what we see, yeah. In terms of how these companies are building these platforms, is taking all the component pieces that Haseeb was talking about and really putting it into a cohesive whole. And then, you, as a software developer, you don't have to worry about configuring all of those things. You don't have to worry about security policy, governance, how your app is going to be exposed to the internet. >> It sounds like infrastructure is code. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> Come on, like. >> (laughs) Infrastructure's code is a big piece of it, for sure, for sure. >> Yeah, look, infrastructure's code actually- >> Infrastructure's sec is code too, the security. >> Yeah. >> Huge. >> Well, it all goes together. Like, we talk about developer self-service, right? The way we enable developer self-service is by teaching developers, here's a snippet of code that you write and you check it in and your infrastructure will just magically be created. >> Yep. >> But not automatically. It's going to go through a check, like a check through the platform team. These are the workflows that if you get them right, developers don't care, right. All developers want is I want to compute. But then all these 20 things need to happen in the back. That's what, if you nail it, right, I mean, I keep trying to kind of pitch the company, I don't want to do that today. But if you nail that, >> I'll give you a plug at the end. >> you have a good story. >> But I got to, I just have a tangent question 'cause you reminded me. There's two types of developers that have emerged, right. You have the software developer that wants infrastructures code. I just want to write my code, I don't want to stop. I want to build in shift-left for security, shift-right for data. All that's in there. >> Right. >> I'm coding away, I love coding. Then you've got the under-the-hood person. >> Yes. >> I've been to the engines. >> Certainly. >> So that's more of an SRE, data engineer, I'm wiring services together. >> Yeah. >> A lot of people are like, they don't know who they are yet. They're in college or they're transforming from an IT job. They're trying to figure out who they are. So question is, how do you tell a person that's watching, like, who am I? Like, should I be just coding? But I love the tech. Would you guys have any advice there? >> You know, I don't know if I have any guidance in terms of telling people who they are. (all laughing) I mean, I think about it in terms of a spectrum and this is what we hear from customers, is some customers want to shift as much responsibility onto the software teams to manage their infrastructure as well. And then some want to shift it all the way over to the very centralized model. And, you know, we see everything in between as well with our EKS customer base. But, yeah, I'm not sure if I have any direct guidance for people. >> Let's see, any wisdom? >> Aside from experiment. >> If you're coding more, you're a coder. If you like to play with the hardware, >> Yeah. >> or the gears. >> Look, I think it's really important for managers to understand that developers, yes, they have a job, you have to write code, right. But they also want to learn new things. It's only fair, right. >> Oh, yeah. >> So what we see is, developers want to learn. And we enable for them to understand Kubernetes in small pieces, like small steps, right. And that is really, really important because if we completely abstract things away, like Kubernetes, from them, it's not good for them, right. It's good for their careers also, right. It's good for them to learn these things. This is going to be with us for the next 15, 20 years. Everybody should learn it. But I want to learn it because I want to learn, not because this is part of my job, and that's the distinction, right. I don't want this to become my job because I want, I want to write my code. >> Do what you love. If you're more attracted to understanding how automation works, and robotics, or making things scale, you might be under-the-hood. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, look under the hood all day long. But then, in terms of, like, who keeps the lights on for the cluster, for example. >> All right, see- >> That's the job. >> He makes a lot of value. Now you know who you are. Ask these guys. (Lisa laughing) Congratulations on your success on EKS 2. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Quick, give a plug for the company. I know you guys are growing. I want to give you a minute to share to the audience a plug that's going to be, what are you guys doing? You're hiring? How many employees? Funding? Customer new wins? Take a minute to give a plug. >> Absolutely. And look, I come see, John, I think, every show you guys are doing a summit or a KubeCon, I'm here. (John laughing) And every time we come, we talk about new customers. Look, platform teams at enterprises seem to love Rafay because it helps them build that, well, Kubernetes platform that we've talked about on the show today. I think, many large enterprises on the financial service side, healthcare side, digital native side seem to have recognized that running Kubernetes at scale, or even starting with Kubernetes in the early days, getting it right with the right standards, that takes time, that takes effort. And that's where Rafay is a great partner. We provide a great SaaS offering, which you can have up and running very, very quickly. Of course, we love EKS. We work with our friends at AWS. But also works with Azure, we have enough customers in Azure. It also runs in Google. We have enough customers at Google. And it runs on-premises with OpenShift or with EKS A, right, whichever option you want to take. But in terms of that standardization and governance and automation for your developers to move fast, there's no better product in the market right now when it comes to Kubernetes platforms than Rafay. >> Kevin, while we're here, why don't you plug EKS too, come on. >> Yeah, absolutely, why not? (group laughing) So yes, of course. EKS is AWS's managed Kubernetes offering. It's the largest managed Kubernetes service in the world. We help customers who want to adopt Kubernetes and adopt it wherever they want to run Kubernetes, whether it's in region or whether it's on the edge with EKS A or running Kubernetes on Outposts and the evolving portfolio of EKS services as well. We see customers running extremely high-scale Kubernetes clusters, excuse me, and we're here to support them as well. So yeah, that's the managed Kubernetes offering. >> And I'll give the plug for theCUBE, we'll be at KubeCon in Detroit this year. (Lisa laughing) Lisa, look, we're giving a plug to everybody. Come on. >> We're plugging everybody. Well, as we get to plugs, I think, Haseeb, you have a book to write, I think, on Kubernetes. And I think you're wearing the title. >> Well, I do have a book to write, but I'm one of those people who does everything at the very end, so I will never get it right. (group laughing) So if you want to work on it with me, I have some great ideas. >> Ghostwriter. >> Sure! >> But I'm lazy. (Kevin chuckles) >> Ooh. >> So we got to figure something out. >> Somehow I doubt you're lazy. (group laughs) >> No entrepreneur's lazy, I know that. >> Right? >> You're being humble. >> He is. So Haseeb, Kevin, thank you so much for joining John and me today, >> Thank you. >> talking about what you guys are doing at Rafay with EKS, the power, why you shouldn't hate k8s. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you as well. >> Yeah, thank you very much for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate it. With John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from New York City at the AWS NYC Summit. John and I will be right back with our next guest, so stick around. (upbeat music) (gentle music)