(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)