>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation, from our Boston area studio, I'm Stu Miniman, happy to welcome to the program, first of all we have a first time guest, always love when we have a founder on the program, Anurag Goel is the founder and CEO of Render, and we've brought along a longtime friend of the program, Dr. Steve Herrod, he is a managing director at General Catalyst, a investor in Render. Anurag and Steve, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, thanks, Stu. >> All right, so Anurag, Render, your company, the tagline is the easiest cloud for developers and startups. It's a rather bold statement, most people feel that the first generation of cloud has happened and there were certain clear winners there. The hearts and minds of developers absolutely has been a key thing for many many companies, and one of those drivers in the software world. Why don't you give us a little bit of your background, and as the founder of the company, what was it, the opportunity that you saw, that had you create Render? >> Yeah, so I was the fifth engineer at Stripe, and helped launch the company and grow it to five billion dollars in revenue. And throughout that period, I saw just how much money we were spending on just hiring DevOps engineers, AWS was a huge huge management headache, really, there's no other way to describe it. And even after I left Stripe, I was thinking hard about what I wanted to do next, and a lot of those ideas required some form of development and deployment, and putting things in production, and every single time I had to do the same thing over and over and over again, as a developer, so despite all the advancements in the cloud, it was always repetitive work, that wasn't just for my projects, I think a lot of my friends felt the same way. And so, I decided that we needed to automate some of these new things that have come about, as part of the regular application deployment process, and how it evolves, and that's how Render was born. >> All right, so Steve, remember in the early days, cloud was supposed to be easy and inexpensive, I've been saying on theCUBE it's like well, I guess it hasn't quite turned out that way. Love your viewpoint a little bit, because you've invested here, to really be competitive in the cloud, tens of billions of dollars a year, that need to go into this, right? >> Yeah, I had the fortunate chance to meet Anurag early on, General Catalyst was an investor in Stripe, and so seeing what they did sort of spurred us to think about this, but I think we've talked about this before, also, on theCUBE, even back, long ago in the VMware days, we looked very seriously at buying Heroku, one of the early players, and still around, obviously, at Salesforce in this PaaS space, and every single infrastructure conversation I've had from the start, I have to come back to myself and come back to everyone else and just say, don't forget, the only reason any infrastructure even exists is to run applications. And as we talked about, the first generation of cloud, it was about, let's make the infrastructure disappear, and make it programmatic, but I think even that, we're realizing from developers, that is just still way too low of an abstraction level. You want to write code, you want to have it in GitHub, and you want to just press go, and it should automatically deploy, automatically scale, automatically secure itself, and just let the developer focus purely on the app, and that's a idea that people have been talking about for 20 years, and should continue to talk about, but I really think with Render, we found a way to make it just super easy to deploy and run, and certainly it is big players out there, but it really starts with developers loving the platform, and that's been Anurag's obsession since I met him. >> Yeah, it's interesting, when I first was reading I'm like "Wait," reminds me a lot of somebody like DigitalOcean, cloud for developers who are, Steve, we walked through, the PaaS discussion has gone through so many iterations, what would containerization do for things, or serverless was from its name, I don't need to think about that underlying layer. Anurag, give us a little bit as to how should we think of Render, you are a cloud, but you're not so much, you're not an infrastructure layer, you're not trying to compete against the laundry list of features that AWS, Azure, or Google have, you're a little bit different than some of the previous PaaS players, and you're not serverless, so, what is Render? >> Yeah, it is actually a new category that has come about because of the advent of containers, and because of container orchestration tools, and all of the surrounding technologies, that make it possible for companies like Render to innovate on top of those things, and provide experiences to developers that are essentially serverless, so by serverless you could mean one of two things, or many things really, but the way in which Render is serverless is you just don't have to think about servers, all you need to do is connect your code to GitHub, and give Render a quick start command for your server and a build command if needed, and we suggest a lot of those values ourselves, and then every push to your GitHub repo deploys a new version of your service. And then if you wanted to check out pull requests, which is a way developers test out code before actually pushing it to deployment, every pull request ends up creating a new instance of your service, and you can do everything from a single static site, to building complex clusters of several microservices, as well as managed Postgres, things like clustered Kafka and Elasticsearch, and really one way to think about Render, is it is the platform that every company ends up building internally, and spends a lot of time and money to build, and we're just doing it once for everyone and doing it right, and this is what we specialize in, so you don't have to. >> Yeah, just to add to that if I could, Stu, what's I think interesting is that we've had and talked about a lot of startups doing a lot of different things, and there's a huge amount of complexity to enable all of this to work at scale, and to make it work with all the things you look for, whether it's storage or CDNs, or metrics and alerting and monitoring, all of these little startups that we've gone through and big companies alike, if you could just hide that entirely from the developer and just make it super easy to use and deploy, that's been the mission that Anurag's been on to start, and as you hear it from some of the early customers, and how they're increasing the usage, it's just that love of making it simple that is key in this space. >> All right, yeah, Anurag, maybe it would really help illustrate things if you could talk a little bit about some of your early customers, their use case, and give us what stats you can about how your company's growing. >> Certainly. So, one of our more prominent customers was the Pete Buttigieg campaign, which ran through most of 2019, and through the first couple of months of 2020. And they moved to us from Google Cloud, because they just could not or did not want to deal with the complexity in today's standard infrastructure providers, where you get a VM and then you have to figure out how to work with it, or even Managed Kubernetes, actually, they were trying to run on Managed Kubernetes on GKE, and that was too complex or too much to manage for the team. And so they moved all of their infrastructure over to Render, and they were able to service billions of requests over the next few months, just on our platform, and every time Pete Buttigieg went on stage during a debate and said "Oh, go to PeteForAmerica.com," there's a huge spike in traffic on our platform, and it scaled with every debate. And so that's just one example of where really high quality engineering teams are saying "No, this stuff is too complex, it doesn't need to be," and there is a simpler alternative, and Render is filling in that gap. We also have customers all over, from single indie hackers who are just building out their new project ideas, to late stage companies like Stripe, where we are making sure that we scale with our users, and we give them the things that they would need without them having to "mature" into AWS, or grow into AWS. I think Render is built for the entire lifecycle of a company, which is you start off really easily, and then you grow with us, and that is what we're seeing with Render where a lot of customers are starting out simple and then continuing to grow their usage and their traffic with us. >> Yeah, I was doing some research getting ready for this, Anurag, I saw, not necessarily you're saying that you're cheaper, but there are some times that price can help, performance can be better, if I was a Heroku customer, or an AWS customer, I guess what might be some of the reasons that I'd be considering Render? >> So, for Heroku, I think the comparison of course, there's a big difference in price, because we think Heroku is significantly overpriced, because they have a perpetual free tier, and so their paid customers end up footing the bill for that. We don't have a perpetual free tier that way, we make sure that our paid customers pay what's fair, but more importantly, we have features that just haven't been available in any platform as a service up until now, for example, you cannot spin up persistent storage, block storage, in Heroku, you cannot set up private networking in Heroku as a developer, unless you pay for some crazy enterprise tier which is 1500, 3000 dollars a month. And Render just builds all of that into the platform out of the box, and when it comes to AWS, again, there's no comparison in terms of ease of use, we'll never be cheaper than AWS, that's not our goal either, it's our goal to make sure that you never have to deal with the complexity of AWS while still giving you all of the functionality that you would need from AWS, and when you think about applications as applications and services as opposed to applications that are running on servers, that's where Render makes it much easier for developers and development teams to say "Look, we don't actually need "to hire hundreds of DevOps people," we can significantly reduce our DevOps team and the existing DevOps team that we have can focus on application-level concerns, like performance. >> All right, so Steve, I guess, a couple questions for you, number one is, we haven't talked about security yet, which I know is a topic near and dear to your heart, was one of the early concerns about cloud, but now often is a driver to move to cloud, give us the security angle for this space. >> Yeah, I mean the key thing in all of the space is to get rid of the complexity, and complexity and human error is often, as we've talked about, that is the number one security problem. So by taking this fresh approach that's all about just the application, and a very simple GitOps-based workflow for it, you're not going to have the human error that typically has misconfigured things and coming into there, I think more broadly, the overall notion of the serverless world has also been a very nice move forward for security. If you're only bringing up and taking down the pieces of the application as needed, they're not there to be hacked or attacked. So I think for those two reasons, this is really a more modern way of looking at it, and again, I think we've talked about many times, security is the bane of DevOps, it's the slowest part of any deployment, and the more we get rid of that, the more the extra value proposition comes safer and also faster to deploy. >> The question I'd like to hear both of you is, the role of the developer has changed an awful lot. Five years ago, if I talked to companies, and they were trying to bring DevOps to the enterprise, or anything like that, it seemed like they were doomed, but things have matured, we all understand how important the developer is, and it feels like that line between the infrastructure team and the developer team is starting to move, or at least have tools and communication happening between them, I'd love, maybe Steve if you can give us a little bit your macroview of it, and Anurag, where that plays for Render too. >> Yeah, and Anurag especially would be able to go into our existing customers. What I love about Render, this is a completely clean sheet approach to thinking about, get rid of infrastructure, just make it all go away, and have it be purely there for the developers. Certainly the infrastructure people need to audit and make sure that you're passing the certifications and make sure that it has acceptable security, and data retention and all those other pieces, but that becomes Anurag's problem, not the developer problem. And so that's really how you look at it. The second thing I've seen across all these startups, you don't typically have, especially, you're not talking about startups, but mid-sized companies and above, they don't convert all the way to DevOps. You typically have people peeling off individual projects, and trying to move faster, and use some new approach for those, and then as those hopefully go successful, more and more of the existing projects will begin to move over there, and so what Render's been doing, and what we've been hoping from the start, is let's attract some of the key developers and key new projects, and then word will spread within the companies from there, but so the answer, and a lot of these companies make developers love you, and make the infrastructure team at least support you. >> Yeah, and that was a really good point about developers and infrastructure, DevOps people, the line between them sort of thinning, and becoming more of a gray area, I think that's absolutely right, I think the developers want to continue to think about code, but then, in today's environment, outside of Render when we see things like AWS, and things like DigitalOcean, you still see developers struggling. And in some ways, Render is making it easy for smaller companies and developers and startups to use the same best practices that a fully fledged DevOps team would give them, and then for larger companies, again, it makes it much easier for them to focus their efforts on business development and making sure they're building features for their users, and making their apps more secure outside of the infrastructure realm, and not spending as much time just herding servers, and making those servers more secure. To give you an example, Render's machines aren't even accessible from the public internet, where our workloads run, so there's no firewall to configure, really, for your app, there's no DMZ, there's no VPN. And then when you want to make sure that you're just, you want a private network, that's just built into Render along with service discovery. All your services are visible to each other, but not to anyone else. And just setting those things up, on something like AWS, and then managing it on an ongoing basis, is a huge, huge, huge cost in terms of resources, and people. >> All right, so Anurag, you just opened your first region, in Europe, Frankfurt if I remember right. Give us a little bit as to what growth we should expect, what you're seeing, and how you're going to be expanding your services. >> Yeah, so the expansion to Europe was by far our most requested feature, we had a lot of European users using Render, even though our servers were, until now, based in the US. In fact, one of, or perhaps the largest recipe-sharing site in Italy was using Render, even though the servers were in the US, and all their users were in Italy, and when we moved to Europe, that was like, it was Christmas come early for them, and they just started moving over things to our European region. But that's just the start, we have to make sure that we make compute as accessible to everyone, not just in the US or Europe but also in other places, so we're looking forward to expanding in Asia, to expanding in South America, and even Africa. And our goal is to make sure that your applications can run in a way that is completely transparent to where they're running, and you can even say "Look, I just want my application to run "in these four regions across the globe, "you figure out how to do it," and we will. And that's really the sort of dream that a lot of platforms as service have been selling, but haven't been able to deliver yet, and I think, again, Render is sort of this, at this point in time, where we can work on those crazy crazy dreams that we've been selling all along, and actually make them happen for companies that have been burned by platforms as a service before. >> Yeah, I guess it brings up a question, you talk about platforms, and one of the original ideas of PaaS and one of the promises of containerization was, I should be able to focus on my code and not think about where it lives, but part of that was, if I need to be able to run it somewhere else, or want to be able to move it somewhere else, that I can. So that whole discussion of portability, in the Kubernetes space, it definitely is something that gets talked quite a bit about. And can I move my code, so where does multicloud fit into your customers' environments, Anurag, and is it once they come onto Render, they're happy and it's easy and they're just doing it, or are there things that they develop on Render and then run somewhere else also, maybe for a region that you don't have, how does multicloud fit into your customers' world? >> That's a great question, and I think that multicloud is a reality that will continue to exist, and just grow over time, because not every cloud provider can give you every possible service you can think of, obviously, and so we have customers who are using, say, Redshift, on AWS, but they still want to run their compute workloads on Render. And as a result, they connect to AWS from their services running on Render. The other thing to point out here, is that Render does not force you into a specific paradigm of programming. So you can take your existing apps that have been containerized, or not, and just run them as-is on Render, and then if you don't like Render for whatever reason, you can take them away without really changing anything in your app, and run them somewhere else. Now obviously, you'll have to build out all the other things that Render gives you out of the box, but we don't lock you in by forcing you to program in a way that, for example, AWS Lambda does. And when it comes to the future, multicloud, I think Render will continue to run in all the major clouds, as well as our own data centers, and make sure that our customers can run the appropriate workloads wherever they are, as well as connect to them from the Render services with ease. >> Excellent. >> And maybe I'll make one more point if I could, Stu, which is one thing I've been excited to watch is the, in any of these platform as a services, you can't do everything yourself, so you want the opensource package vendors and other folks to really buy into this platform too, and one exciting thing we've seen at Render is a lot of the big opensource packages are saying "Boy, it'd be easier for our customers to use our opensource "if it were running on Render." And so this ecosystem and this set of packages that you can use will just be easier and easier over time, and I think that's going to lead to, at the end of the day people would like to be able to move their applications and have it run anywhere, and I think by having those services here, ultimately they're going to deploy to AWS or Google or somewhere else, but it is really the right abstraction layer for letting people build the app they want, that's going to be future-proof. >> Excellent, well Steve and Anurag, thank you so much for the update, great to hear about Render, look forward to hearing more updates in the future. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Thanks, Stu, good to talk to you. >> All right, and stay tuned, lots more coverage, if you go to theCUBE.net you can see all of the events that we're doing with remote coverage, as well as the back catalog of what we've done. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

(upbeat music playing) >> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego, I am Stu Miniman John Troyer is my co-host and joining us is one of our esteemed Cube alumni multi-time guests. Steve Herrod who is the managing director at General Catalyst. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. Always great to see you. >> It's good to see you again. >> Stu: All right I'm having >> And John. >> A flashback meeting with the two of you at a certain campus in Palo Alto and the like. But, you know it's interesting Steve, before we get into this technology, we kicked off this morning talking about a company, Docker. We knew Docker from the early on. I said, look Docker had the opportunity to be this generation's VM-ware. It has had a huge impact on the market. You know, we wouldn't have 12 thousand people here if it wasn't for them. Give us your take kind of as to, you know, this wave of technology and we'll start there. >> Yeah, well I guess I'll start with Docker the company. I mean, it just shows you boy, it's hard to build big companies these days and I think there will be plenty of people talking about why that didn't work out or did work out. Maybe there was too much stuff given to open source. Maybe not enough, maybe there isn't enough community. But I do think, I think that's the tale of just how hard it is to be out in this world. But on the flip side they certainly moved for the idea of containers and got things going. We always have a saying in the venture business, actually in the startup business, which is it's sometimes the second mouse that gets the cheese. Someone's got to break a little glass and then sometimes someone else comes in afterwards and gets some of the reward for it. >> Well Steve this is a sprawling ecosystem. We went from 8 thousand people last year, 4 thousand the year before to over 12 thousand, and this ecosystem keeps growing. You've got a portfolio company that launched this week. You're checking out the show floor. Maybe let's start with the new one coming out from your side. >> Yeah you know I have several startups that are here but I think what's been interesting is the opportunity to create new companies. If you look at the, I'm sure you've covered a lot of them. But if you look at the sponsor sheets here, there's literally hundreds of booths that you can go see and many of which are in similar areas, many of which are open source. So it's really a challenge, like as you all trained interviewers and me trained looking at the space. Think how complex it is to a customer right now. Do that, think about like which service mesh do I pull together with this and that and which command line and which API tool, so I think that's both the challenge and the opportunity you often see this early on. One company that we just had coming out is called Render and their idea is to build an application platform service kind of on top of all this and just to hide it all from the user which I think is, I think that's what always happens in these ecosystems. You get so many players and then someone will be the bundler and make a suite out of it. Or someone will write a service on top of it all and take it away from you. So I think it's sort of a healthy part of a rapidly changing ecosystem. And Render will be doing some interesting things, but they talk to Application developers, not to infrastructure people. App developers don't want to know about any of this. >> Well we're sitting here at KubeCon in the midst of kind of, right at that margin, right at that boundary between from one perspective it looks very developer-y, But from another perspective, this seems very operator-y here. How do you see, in the market in the place, with the buyers, the CIOs or the technical buyers out there. I mean how are you looking at infrastructure versus developers and cloud et cetera? >> It's funny, you know we're all infrastructure people for the most part. What I often say, I know you all know that as well, like at the end of the day infrastructure is only there to run applications. It has no other purpose in life except to be a great place to run applications. But it's also accountable for doing a lot of the things you need. It has to make it run fairly at a certain performance. It has to make sure it's safe from attack. It needs to make sure the data is backed up. So I always just try to think about that when I'm looking at these startups, and we were just talking about this before the show. When I go up to one of the booths and I ask, I usually ask, how do you make someone's life better? Sometimes you get someone who's not the most senior person at the company and they'll quickly go into the technology on how it's this or that. But if you can't frame it in the context of how some enterprises' applications are better, faster, safer then it's really not that interesting, I think, to a CIO that has all these decision making. So, anyway I keep coming back to that with what ever infrastructure or application companies out there and try to wonder what's going on. >> Yeah, no I do really like that as we often frame it, it's what is the business value? It's, you know, nobody really has a problem that I need to rub Kubernetes on. Yes, I need agility, I need you know, the result of what having a distributed architecture drives from my business is what I need. Not the niggling little details there. Um, so I love that piece of what you do better for a company. The other thing, I walk around and I talk to some of these companies and some of them, I scratch my head a little bit as to the oh well I created a cool project, and we've open sourced it and that's my business. And as you know we've talked about the cautionary tale of Docker. Where are we with open source and business model and what's your latest take on that? >> Boy, that is ever evolving. It's funny though, if you look at even just the last ten years since you've been covering things. The go to model for most open source companies has shifted from maybe supportive subscription to really, some of them are open core meaning that parts of it are closed source. But, more and more that the really well to do ones are running them as a service. So that tends to be what we look for now is, whether you're running it directly, or you're doing something with a Microsoft, Google, Amazon where you get some of the revenue from it, which is a big, a big if. That seems to be one of the better ways to consume it and the people who have control over the software should be the best at operationalizing it. So that's kind of the change that we've seen as of late. >> Yeah, quick follow up on that, when we look at the hyper scale, the public clouds. Their marketplaces are getting more and more, you know, it's just a big force in the marketplace. Especially AWS, but Azure's pushing that way and Google to some extent there. Do you give any advice to your portfolio customers? How they should think about their relationships with the big cloud players? >> Well yeah, I mean that's one of the biggest discussions, not even just for our tech companies, but our commerce companies and everywhere else. But I do think what's kind of interesting, in many cases we're seeing the companies talk about maybe Amazon or someone is running that software as a service and it's maybe it's a little older version or maybe it's not all the bells and whistles. So there's certainly a case where good enough is good enough and it kind of crushes the startup, but you also hear a fair amount of tales of where it introduces them to this concept for the first time and then they're going to move over to perhaps the best of breed case, so obviously getting that right is a big job for the founder as well as for an investor. But, um I really see it as a mixed bag. The notion of being introduced to a customer at a lower cost than ever before matters a lot if they then switch to you. >> Well Steve, another boundary that you're sitting at is the boundary between all these technology providers and the customer. Any particular observations on trends over in the customer side? Are people looking to save money, are people feeling good, are the techies really leading the adoption? Is CIO down? Digital transformation? I mean, you're sitting right there in the middle. >> Yeah I mean the good news for I think all startups are that software matters and the digital transformation that's been going on for many, many years continues in a broad way. I would say at the end of the day though, the one question that I almost ask just back to your point on business value. I ask any startup, tell me why you are at least 10 times better than everyone else in this space. And because it is, the bad news of so many startups and so many cool ideas is how's anyone to choose? So if you ask any of your CIOs, they're just massively confused. They try to look for a bigger vendor who could possibly bundle it all together and make it a suite. That's super enticing as you know to all these guys. But when you have this much churn and change going on, you know someone has to step into that role, so I would just say that the ideal thing is you have smaller number of vendors, that never works with a lot of rapid innovation so somewhere in the middle you need to have startups that are really good at bundling in with other folks and fitting into APIs and doing that. >> Alright, so Steve, we've had an interesting view on what's going on in the security industry this week and I know you've got a perspective on it. Our team did the AWS reinforce show in Boston and it was generally upbeat, talking about all the great things that cloud's doing and you know, modernize everything we're doing. Pat Gelsinger from VMware, you know, banging on the table at VMware saying you know, we need a do-over, we need to start over with security. Here at this show, if some people are very cautiously optimistic that we've solved a bunch of the problems of security. You know, where in your view are we, and where are we going? >> I think we'll never be done with security. However, I do think we've reached a maturity level, if you, well, you were here. A couple years ago, there were so many security companies just for containers and I think, you know that's interesting to some extent, but, every CIO is going to have a mixed environment. And so I think what you see this year and what you saw with Palo Alto's acquisitions, so my companies Alumio I know you've talked to. It's really saying let's have one master policy and have it actually then go out and talk to Amazon, talk to my local infrastructure, talk to containers, talk to server lists. That will be the next wave of things going on. But, um, I think whenever you see a maturing of a company like this, the management tools and the security tools that have to inter operate start to really make a showing. And I actually see that quite a bit in this show, so that's a sign of a little bit of maturity going on here. >> Okay, last thing, Steve, I guess, what's catching your eye? Anything interesting or spaces there that you'd call out that we haven't already touched on? >> Well, I spend a lot of time these days actually on, and I hesitate to say it, but on AI. And I mean specifically it is such a hyped term and it's used in many ways like cloud used to be used, so it's just sort of a marketing term in many ways. But specifically, the picks and shovels that are enabling that, many of which show up here too because it is being deployed in containers, that sort of thing. So certainly the tools, but more importantly the vertical applications that can have a meaningful benefit from it. And I'll say, same thing as with infrastructure. AI is a means to an end, it's not the actual thing you're trying to do. But there's real, there's been a real advance there and so I'm really enjoying watching where you get these 10x improvements because you're using the data and AI there. So I continue to love infrastructure and developer tools and I think especially as they get applied to some of these new areas, like AI. That's where I'm excited about what we'll be seeing. >> Well, Steve, really appreciate you coming by. Congrats to the Demon Render, definitely look to catch up there if we don't catch him this week, we'll get him to our Palo Alto studios sometime. >> Yeah, Render is cool. You can go try it out. Render.com >> All right. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Getting towards the end of day 1 of 3 days. Wall to wall coverage. Check out theCUBE.net for all of the coverage, and as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music playing)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Docker, Docker, Docker. No, you're in the right place. This is KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 here in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman kicking off three days of live, wall to wall coverage. My co-host for most of the week this week is John Troyer. Justin Warren's also in the house. He'll be hosting for me. And a big shout out to John Furrier who's back at the corporate ranch in Palo Alto keeping an eye on all the CloudNative stuff with us. The reason that I actually mentioned Docker is because it is the first thing that is on our lips this week. Just this week, Docker, which is the company that, if it wasn't for Docker, we wouldn't have 12,500 people here at this event. Really democratized containers. But the company itself built out a platform, millions and millions of companies using containers. But when the orchestration layer came in there was some contention, there's lots of politics. I'm waiting for Docker the Broadway musical to come out to talk about all the ins and outs there because Kubernetes really sucked the air out of the CloudNative world. Spawned tons of projects here. As you can see behind us, this ecosystem is massive and swelling. Last year it was 8,000 people, year before it was 4,000 people, so many people here, so. And John, so, let's start. This is your first time at this show, you've done many shows with us, definitely covered some of the cloud-native, you've worked with many of the companies that are in this ecosystem here. Give me your first impressions here of KubeCon CloudNativeCon. >> Sure, sure. Well, I mean Stu, 12,000 people, it's pretty crowded here. We're right by the t-shirt line, on day one of the conference. Look, a conference this big, especially an open source conference, there's several jobs to be done, right. This is an active set of open source projects and open source communities. So a lot of the keynote this morning was updating people on details about the latest releases, the latest features, what's in, what's out, what's going on. CNCF is a very broad umbrella for a very broad number of projects, not a coherent opinionated stack, it's a lot of different things that all contribute to a set of CloudNative technologies. So, that's job one. Job two, it's a trade show, and it's an industry show, and people are coming here to figure out how to build and learn and operate. So, that wasn't particularly well served by the keynote this morning. There was certainly a lot of hands-on this week. There's a huge number of breakouts, there's a huge number of tracks. Even day zero, which is a set of specialty breakout workshops and sessions, everything was packed. There were over a dozen of those. So, what strikes me is the breadth here is that it's a mile wide. I won't say it's an inch deep, because there's some, but it is a mile wide. >> Yeah, yeah, John you are right, there's so much going on. The day zero tracks are amazing. I think there were over two dozen, maybe even more of the sessions where, you know, half-day or full day deep dives. Even talk, there was some other small events even that went on for two or three days leading up to this. So, sprawling ecosystem. Last year at this show in Seattle, I actually said that this show is the independent cloud show that we've been looking for. John, I was at Microsoft Ignite just a couple of weeks ago, and absolutely, Satya Nadella, they're not talking about the bits and the bytes. It's a, you know, Microsoft is your trusted partner for everything you're going to do, including building 50 billion new applications. Amazon Reinvent will just be right after Thanksgiving, and we will hear a very different message from Amazon and where they play. But this is not a company, it is a lot of different projects. The CNCF is the steward of this, and so Kubernetes is the one that gets all the attention. I think for this group to even grow more, it needs to be focused more on the CloudNativeCon, because how do we do cloud-native? You know, what does that mean? We heard, you know, Sugu was up on stage talking about Vitess, and he said, look, if you bake your database directly in fully Kubernetes cloud-native, that means that when you want to move between clouds you bring your data with you. So, data, security, networking, messaging, there's so many pieces here. It's a lot of work to be done to mature this stack, but it definitely is getting more mature. You start hearing many of these projects with a million or more downloads a month. So many pieces. John, what are you looking to dig into this week, what are you most excited for, what questions do you want answered? >> Well, here on theCUBE I'm always excited when we get to talk to people in production, customers, really see what's going on. There's a lot of stuff in production right now, which is not to say a lot of stuff isn't bleeding edge, right. I hear a lot of stuff, just out of the woodwork, about things that are fragile, things that aren't ready, things that are not quite updated, and I think Kubernetes is an architectural as well as a spiritual home for everything. But there's a lot of pieces that plug in, and there are opinionated ways of doing it, there are best of breed way, there are vertically integrated stacks. What's the best approach, it's not clear to me. I mean if you have to look at it from a company perspective, who are the winners and losers, I don't think that's a very productive way of looking at it. I'm interested in some projects like, we're going to be talking with Rancher, and they've got some announcements, but I'm also interested in K3s, which is their project there. I'm been hearing some really interesting things on the storage front. You know, all these things are really necessary. It's not all just magic containers moving around. You got to actually get the bits and bytes into the right place at the right time and backed up. >> Yeah, I love that you brought up K3s. Edge is definitely something that I hear talking a lot, because if you talk about cloud-native, it's not just about public cloud. Many of these things can run in my on-premises data centers and everything like that. >> And Edge fits in all of these environments, so. Right, winners and losers, I remember two years ago, first time I got a chance to interview Kelsey Hightower, who we do have on the program. He had actually taken a couple shows off, but he's back here at the show. I said Kelsey, why are we spending so much talking about Kubernetes? Doesn't this just get baked into every platform? And he's like, yeah totally, that's not the importance of it. It's not about distributions, and not about who's who, any of the software companies, it's how do they pull all of the pieces together. How do they add value on top of it. One of the terms I've heard mentioned a lot is, we need to think a lot about day two. Heck, there was even one of the companies that was heavy in this space, Mesosphere, they renamed the company Day Two IQ, spelled D2IQ. No relation to R2D2. But you know, that's what they are focused on to help these things really go together. So yeah, we talk about multicloud, and how do I get my arms around all of these pieces, how do I manage a sprawling environment. You add Edge into it. I've got a huge surface of attack for security issues. So, John, remember cloud was supposed to be simple and cheap, and it really isn't either of those things anymore, so yeah, a lot for us to dig into. >> Yeah, it'll be an interesting mix. Developers, experts, people brand new, probably half the people here they're the first time, and people coming over from the IT space as well as people coming from the open source space and I even saw this morning this is the biggest conference I've ever been to. So it's a many, it's different parts of the elephant, I'd say. >> Yeah, absolutely. It is a good sized conference, especially for open source it probably is the largest. But Salesforce Dreamforce is going on this week, which is more than an order of magnitude bigger, so my condolences to anybody in San Francisco right now, because we know the BART and everything else completely swamped with too many people. One other thing, you know, CNCF, what's really interesting for me always is when you look at a lot of these projects, the people that we saw up on stage were companies, it was the person that oh, I started this project and I'm the technical lead on it, and that's where I'm going. We've interviewed many of the people that start these projects, and they come many times out of industry. It's not a vendor that said, hey, I built something and I'm selling it. It is companies like Uber and Lyft that said, we did things at massive scale, we had a problem, we built something, we thought it was useful for us. Open source seemed a good way to help us get broader visibility and maybe everybody could help, and other people not only pitch in, but say this is hugely valuable, and that's where we go with it. So, it's something we, a narrative I've heard for years about everybody's going to be a software company, well, almost everybody at this conference is building software. We've heard about 30 to 40% of the people attending this show are developers, and therefore many of them are going to build products. A question I have and I'll give you is, with Docker, we just kicked off talking about Docker. You know, Docker created this huge wave of what happens there, but to put it bluntly, Docker the business failed. So, they are not dead, there's the piece that's in Mirantis, there's the piece doing the developer piece. We wish all of them the best of luck, but they had the opportunity to be the next VMware, and instead they are the company that gave us this wave, but did not capitalize on it. So, I look around and I see so many companies, and you say, "Hey, what are you?" "Oh, we're the creators of X technology in this project," and my question is, are you actually going to be able to make money and do a business, or is this just something that gets fit into the overall ecosystem. John, any thoughts and advice for those kind of companies. >> Well, I mean we are here, even though there's 12,000 people here, this is still very leading edge, right. There's a lot of pieces, parts here. We're not sure how they're all going to fit together. A lot of the projects have come out of real use cases, like you say, but they're, it's commercial viability is a different beast than utility. Docker was very good at developer experience, but the DNA of actually selling an enterprise management stack is a whole different beast, and there are a lot of those too. So I mean I think a lot of the companies here may not be around, but their technologies will live on. I think if you're here, and the interviews here at the show I think will be a, you'll want to have your antenna out to see like, okay, does this give you a feeling like this is solving a real problem and is incorporated in a real ecosystem. You know, the big company, it cuts both ways, right. Some of the times those technologies get absorbed and become the standard, sometimes they disappear. So the advice is you just put one foot in front of the other and try to find people in production. That's the only way at the end of the day that you could move ahead as a small company. >> All right, John, I gave you one piece of advice when we came here and I said, you know one thing we don't talk about at this show, we don't talk about OpenStack. So, I'm going to break that rule for a second here, just 'cause I feel we have as an industry learned some of the lessons. There is some of the irrational exuberance around some of these. There's lots of money being thrown at these environments, but I do feel that we are reaching maturity and adoption so much faster, because we are not trying to replacing something. The early days of OpenStack was, you know, we're your alternative for AWS, and we're going to get you off of VMware licensing. And both of those things were, they didn't happen for the most part. And OpenStack did fit in certain environments, especially outside of North America there's lots of OpenStack deployments. The telecommunications environment OpenStack is used a bunch. Telecom, another area, talk about Edge, that plays in here and we have a number of conversations. But there are both the big and the small companies when I look at our list of people we're going to be talking on the program. You know, I love first the customers. We've got Fidelity, Bloomberg, Red Cross, and Ford Motor Company all on the program, and we've got big companies, mega giants like Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as well as couple of companies that came out of stealth like in the last week, including Render and Chronosphere. So, you know, broad spectrum of what's going on. You've done some of the OpenStack shows with me. You've got a long community and ecosystem viewpoint, John. What do you think and what do you hear, yeah. >> You know, this is, I guess yeah, this is a next generation, you could look at it that way. Anytime you bring together one of these open source foundations, you know, it is kind of a new style of development. You do have differing agendas. People do again have to have their antenna up to see, is this person promoting this open source project and what is their commercial interest in it. Because there are different agendas here. But it looks pretty healthy. Look, there's probably a million engineers worldwide that are going to have to know the guts of Kubernetes, but it's a different job to be done than OpenStack. OpenStack community is actually, that exists, is still thriving. It is good for the job to be done there. This job to be done's a little different. I think it's going to be an engine, you know, the engine that's embedded in everything else. So there's going to be a hundred million engineers that don't need to know anything about Kubernetes, but people here are the people that pop the hood open and start to you know, mess with the carburetor and this is a carburetor show. And so for the coverage here we're going to try to up level it to talk about the business a little bit, but this feels important. It feels cross-cloud, it feels outside of any one silo, and I'm really interested to see what we're going to learn this week. >> Okay, and thank you John. I really appreciate it to get it right final. It's like what is our job here? We are an independent media organization. Yes, we did bring our own stickers here to be able to, you know, we know everybody here loves stickers, so we've got theCUBE and we've got the fun gopher one, our friends at Women Who Go that support this, because, you know, inclusion, diversity, something that this community definitely embraces, we are huge supporters of their, but right, we want to be able to give that broad viewpoint of everything. We're not going to be able to get into every project. We're not going to go as deep as the day zero content web, but give a good flavor for everything going on in the show. I've found of all the shows I've gone to in recent years, this is some of the biggest brains in the industry. There's a lot of really important stuff, so I appreciate bringing my PHD holding co-host with me, John. Looking forward to three days with you to dig into all the environment. All right, so we will be wall to wall coverage, three days. If you're at the event, we are here in the expo hall. You can't miss us, we've got the big lights right next to the CloudNativeCon store. If you're online of course reach out to us. I'm @stu, S-T-U on Twitter. He's @jtroyer, and hit us up, see us in person, come grab some stickers, let us know who you want to talk to and what question you have, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> And we're back, here on the show floor in the exhibit hall at Sands Expo, live at re:Invent for AWS along with Justin Warren. I'm John Walls. We're joined by a couple of executives now from Weka IO, to my immediate right is Liran Zvibel, who is the co-founder and CEO and then Maor Ben Dayan who's the chief architect at IO. Gentleman thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate you being here on theCube. First off tell the viewers a little bit about your company and I think a little about the unusual origination of the name. You were sharing that with me as well. So let's start with that, and then tell us a little bit more about what you do. >> Alright, so the name is Weka IO. Weka is actually a greek unit, like mega and terra and peta so it's actually a trillion exobytes, ten to the power of thirty, it's a huge capacity, so it works well for a storage company. Hopefully we will end up storing wekabytes. It will take some time. >> I think a little bit of time to get there. >> A little bit. >> We're working on it. >> One customer at a time. >> Give a little more about what you do, in terms of your relationship with AWS. >> Okay, so at Weka IO we create the highest performance file system, either on prem or in the cloud. So we have a parallel file system over NVME. Like no previous generation file system did parallel work over hard drives. But these are 20 years old technology. We're the first file system to bring new paralleled rhythms to NVME so we get you lowest latency, highest throughput either on prem or in the cloud. We are perfect for machine learning and life sciences applications. Also you've mentioned media and entertainment earlier. We can run on your hardware on prem, we can run on our instances, I3 instances, in AWS and we can also take snapshots that are native performance so they don't take away performance and we also have the ability to take these snapshots and push them to S3 based object storage. This allows you to have DR or backup functionality if you look on prem but if your object storage is actually AWSS3, it also lets you do cloud bursting, so it can take your on prem cluster, connect it to AWSS3, take a snapshot, push it to AS3 and now if you have a huge amount of computation that you need to do, your local GPU servers don't have enough capacity or you just want to get the results faster, you would build a big enough cluster on AWS, get the results and bring them back. >> You were explaining before that it's a big challenge to be able to do something that can do both low latency with millions and millions of small files but also be able to do high throughput for some large files, like media and entertainment tends to be very few but very, very large files with something like genomics research, you'll have millions and millions of files but they're all quite tiny. That's quite hard, but you were saying it's actually easier to do the high throughput than it is for low latency, maybe explain some of that. >> You want to take it? >> Sure, on the one hand, streaming lots of data is easy when you distribute the data over many servers or instances in the AWS like luster dust or other solutions, but then doing small files becomes really hard. Now this is where Weka innovated and really solved this bottleneck so it really frees you to do whatever you want with the storage system without hitting any bottlenecks. This is the secret sauce of Weka. >> Right and you were mentioning before, it's a file system so it's an NFS and SMB access to this data but you're also saying that you can export to S3. >> Actually we have NFS, we have SMB, but we also have native posits so any application that you could up until now only run on the local file system such as EXT4 or ZFS, you can actually run in assured manner. Anything that's written on the many pages we do, so adjust works, locking, everything. That's one thing we're showing for life sciences, genomic workflows that we can scale their workflows without losing any performance, so if one server doing one kind of transformation takes time x, if you use 10 servers, it will take 10x the time to get 10x the results. If you have 100 servers, it's gonna take 100x servers to get 100x the results, what customers see with other storage solutions, either on prem or in the cloud, that they're adding servers but they're getting way less results. We're giving the customers five to 20 times more results than what they did on what they thought were high performance file systems prior to the Weka IO solution. >> Can you give me a real life example of this, when you talk about life sciences, you talk about genomic research and we talk about the itty bitty files and millions of samples and whatever, but exactly whatever, translate it for me, when it comes down to a real job task, a real chore, what exactly are you bringing to the table that will enable whatever research is being done or whatever examination's being done. >> I'll give you a general example, not out of specifically of life sciences, we were doing a POC at a very large customer last week and we were compared head to head with best of breed, all flash file system, they did a simple test. They created a large file system on both storage solutions filled with many many millions of small files, maybe even billions of small files and they wanted to go through all the files, they just ran the find command, so the leading competitor finished the work in six and a half hours. We finished the same work in just under two hours. More than 3x time difference compared to a solution that is currently considered probably the fastest. >> Gold standard allegedly, right? Allegedly. >> It's a big difference. During the same comparison, that customer just did an ALS of a directory with a million files that other leading solution took 55 seconds and it took just under 10 seconds for us. >> We just get you the results faster, meaning your compute remains occupied and working. If you're working with let's say GPU servers that are costly, but usually they are just idling around, waiting for the data to come to them. We just unstarve these GPU servers and let's you get what you paid for. >> And particularly with something like the elasticity of AWS, if it takes me only two hours instead of six, that's gonna save me a lot of money because I don't have to pay for that extra six hours. >> It does and if you look at the price of the P3 instances, for reason those voltage GPUs aren't inexpensive, any second they're not idling around is a second you saved and you're actually saving a lot of money, so we're showing customers that by deploying Weka IO on AWS and on premises, they're actually saving a lot of money. >> Explain some more about how you're able to bridge between both on premises and the cloud workloads, because I think you mentioned before that you would actually snapshot and then you could send the data as a cloud bursting capability. Is that the primary use case you see customers using or is it another way of getting your data from your side into the cloud? >> Actually we have a slightly more complex feature, it's called tiering through the object storage. Now customers have humongous name spaces, hundreds of petabytes some of them and it doesn't make sense to keep them all on NVME flash, it's too expensive so a big feature that we have is that we let you tier between your flash and object storage and let's you manage economics and actually we're chopping down large files and doing it to many objects, similarly to how a traditional file system treat hard drives so we treat NVMEs in a parallel fashion, that's world first but we also do all the tricks that a traditional parallel file system do to get good performance out of hard drives to the object storage. Now we take that tiering functionality and we couple it with our highest performance snapshotting abilities so you can take the snapshot and just push it completely into the object storage in a way that you don't require the original cluster anymore >> So you've mentioned a few of the areas that you're expertise now and certainly where you're working, what are some other verticals that you're looking at? What are some other areas where you think that you can bring what you're doing for maybe in the life science space and provide equal if not superior value? >> Currently. >> Like where are you going? >> Currently we focus on GPU based execution because that's where we save the most money to the customers, we give the biggest bang for the buck. Also genomics because they have severe performance problems around building, we've shown a huge semiconductor company that was trying to build and read, they were forced to building on local file system, it took them 35 minutes, they tried their fastest was actually on RAM battery backed RAM based shared file system using NFS V4, it took them four hours. It was too long, you only got to compile the day. It doesn't make sense. We showed them that they can actually compile in 38 minutes, show assured file system that is fully coherent, consistent and protected only took 10% more time, but it didn't take 10% more time because what we enabled them to do is now share the build cache, so the next build coming in only took 10 minutes. A full build took slightly longer, but if you take the average now their build was 13 or 14 minutes, so we've actually showed that assured file system can save time. Other use cases are media and entertainment, for rendering use cases, you have these use cases, they parallelize amazingly well. You can have tons of render nodes rendering your scenes and the more rendering nodes you have, the quicker you can come up with your videos, with your movies or they look nicer. We enable our customers to scale their clusters to sizes they couldn't even imagine prior to us. >> It's impressive, really impressive, great work and thanks for sharing it with us here on theCube, first time for each right? You're now Cube alumni, congratulations. >> Okay, thanks for having us. >> Thank you for being with us here. Again, we're live here at re:Invent and back with more live coverage here on theCube right after this time out.