hey everyone this is thecube's live coverage from los angeles of kubecon and cloud native con north america 21 lisa martin with dave nicholson we're going to be talking with the founder and ceo next of cloudnatics rohit seth rohit welcome to the program thank you very much lisa pleasure to meet you good to meet you too welcome so tell the the audience about cloudnatics what you guys do when you were founded and what was the gap in the market that you saw that said we need a solution so just to start uh cloud9x was started in 2019 by me and the reason for starting cloud netex was as i was starting to look at the cloud adoption and how enterprises are kind of almost blindly jumping on this cloud bandwagon i started reading what are the key challenges the market is facing and it started resonating with what i saw in google 15 years before when i joined google the first thing i noticed was of course the scale would just overwhelm anyone but at the same time how good they are utilized at that scale was the key that i was starting to look for and over the next couple of months i did all the scripting and such with my teams and found out that lower teens is the utilization of their computers servers and uh lower utilization means if you're spending a billion dollars you're basically wasting the major portion of that and a tech savvy company like google if that's a state of affair you can imagine what would be happening in other companies so in any case we actually now started work at that time started working on a technology so that more groups more business units could share the same machine in a efficient fashion and that's what led to the invention of containers over the next six years we rolled out containers across the whole google fleet the utilization went up at least three times right fast forward 15 years and you start reading 125 billion dollars are spent on a cloud and 60 billion dollars of waste someone would say 90 billion dollars a waste you know what i don't care whether 60 or 90 billion is a very large number and if tech savvy company google couldn't fix it on its own i bet you it it's not an easy problem for enterprises to fix it so we i started talking to several executives in the valley about is this problem for real or not the worst thing that i found was not only they didn't know how bad the problem was they actually didn't have any means to find out how bad the problem could be right one cfo just ran like headless chicken for about two months to figure out okay i know i'm spending this much but where is that spend going so i started kind of trading those waters and i started saying okay visibility is the first thing that we need to provide to the end customer saying that listen it doesn't need to be rocket science for you to figure out how much is your marketing spending how much your different business units so the first line of action is basically give them the visibility that they need to make the educated business decisions about how good or how bad they are doing their operations once they have the visibility the next thing is what to do if there is a waste there are a thousand different type of vms on aws alone people talk about complexity on multi-cloud hybrid cloud and that's all right but even on a single cloud you have thousand vms the heterogeneity of the vms with dynamic pricing that changes every so often is a killer and so and so rohit when you talk about driving levels of efficiency you're not just you're not just talking about abstraction versus bare metal utilization you're talking about even in environments that have used sort of traditional virtualization yes okay absolutely i think all clouds run in vms but within vms sometimes you have containers sometimes you don't have containers if you don't have containers there is no way for you to securely have a protagonist and antagonist job running on the same machines so containers basically came to the world just so that different applications could share the same resources in a meaningful fashion we are basically extending that landscape to to the enterprises so that that utilization benefit exists for everyone right so first of first order business for cloud natick is basically provide them the visibility on how well or bad they are doing the second is to give them the recommendation if you are not doing well what to do about it to do well and we can actually slice and dice the data based on what is important for you okay we don't tell you that these are the dimensions that you should be looking at of course we have our recommendations but we actually want you to figure out basically do you want to look at your marketing organization or your engineering organization or your product organization to see where they are spending money and you can slice and match that data according and we'll give you recommendations for those organizations but now you have the visibility now you have the recommendations but then what right if you ask a cubernities administrator to go and apply those recommendations i bet you the moment you have more than five cluster which is a kind of a very ordinary thing it'll take at least two hours just to figure out how to go from where you are to be able to log in and to be able to apply those recommendations and then changing back the ci cd pipelines and asking your developers to be cognizant about your resources next time is a month-long ordeal no one follows it that's why those recommendations falls on deaf ears most of the time what we do is we give you the choice you want to apply those recommendations manually or you can put the whole system on autopilot in which case once you have enough confidence in cloud native platform we will actually apply those recommendations for you dynamically on the fly as your workloads are increasing or decreasing in utilization and where are your customer conversations happening you mentioned the cfl you mentioned the billions in cloud waste where do you start having these conversations within an organization because clearly you mentioned marketing services you can give them that visibility across the organization who are you talking to within these customers so we start with mostly the cios ctos vp of engineering but it's very interesting we say it's a waste and i think the waste is most more of an effect than a cause the real cause is the complexity and who is having the complexity is the devops and the developers so in 99 of our customer interactions we basically start from cios and ctos but very soon we have these conversations over a week with developers and devops leads also sitting in the room saying that but this is a challenge on why i cannot do this so what we have done is to address the real cause and waste aspect of cloud computing we have we have what we call the management console through which we reduce the complexity of kubernetes operations themselves so think about how you can log into a crashing pod within two minutes rather than two hours right and this is where cloud native start differentiating from the rest of the competition out there because we provide you not only or do this recommendation do this right sizing of vm here or there but this is how you structurally fix the issue going forward right i'm not going to tell you that your containers are not going to crash loop their failures are regular part of distributed systems how you deal with them how you debug them and how you get it back up and running is a core integral part of how businesses get run that's what we provide in cloud natives platform a lot of this learning that we have is actually coming from our experience in hyperscalers we have a chief architect who is also from google he was a dl of a technology called borg and then we have sonic who was the head of products at mesosphere before so we understand what it takes for an enterprise who's primarily coming from on-prem or even the companies that are starting from cloud to scale in cloud often you hear this trillion dollar paradoxes that hey you're stupid if you don't start from cloud and you're stupid if you scale at cloud we are saying that if you're really careful about how you function on cloud it has a value prop that can actually take you to the web scalar heights without even blinking twice can you share an example of one of your favorite customer stories absolutely even by industry only where you've really shown them tremendous value in savings absolutely so a couple of discussions that happened that led like oh but we are we have already spent a team of four people trying to optimize our operations over the last year and we said that's fine uh you know what our onboarding exercise takes only 20 minutes right let's do the onboarding in about a week we will tell you if we could save you any money or not and put your best devops on this pov prove a value exercise to see if it actually help their daily life in terms of operations or not this particular customer only has 30 clusters so it's not very small but it's not very big in terms of what we are seeing in the market first thing the maximum benefit or the cost optimization that they could do over the past year using some of the tools and using their own top-class engineering shots were about seven to ten percent within a week we told them 38 without even having those engineers spend more than two hours in that week we gave them the recommendations right another two weeks because they did not want to put it on autopilot just because it's a new platform in production within next two hours they were able to apply i think at least close to 16 recommendations to their platform to get that 37 improvement in cost what are some examples of of recommendations um obviously you don't want to reveal too much of the secret sauce behind the scene but but but you know what are some what are some classic recommendations that are made so some of them could be as low-hanging fruit as or you have not right sized your vms right this is what i call a lot of companies you would find that oh you have not right side but for us that's the lowest hanging code you go in and you can tell them that whether you have right size that thing or not but in kubernetes in particular if you really look at how auto scaling up and how auto scaling down happens and particularly when you get a global federated view of the number of losses that's where our secret sources start coming and that's where we know how to load balance and how to scale vertically up or how to scale horizontally within the cluster right those kind of optimization we have not seen anywhere in the market so far and that's where the most of the value prop that our customers are seeing kind of comes out and it doesn't take uh too much time i think within a week we have enough data to to say that this service that has thousands of containers could benefit by about this much and just to kind of give you i wouldn't be able to go into the specific dollar numbers here but we are talking in at least a 5 million ish kind of a range of a spend for this cluster and think about it 37 of that if we could save that that kind of money is a real money that not only helps you save your bottom line but at that level you're actually impacting your top line of the business as well sure right that's our uh value crop that we are going to go in and completely automate you're not going to look for devops that don't exist anymore to hire one of the key challenges i'm pretty sure that you must have already heard 86 percent of businesses are not able to hire the devops and they want to hire 86 percent what happens when you don't have that devops that you want to have your existing devops want to move as fast cutting corners sometimes not because they don't know anywhere but just because there's so much pressure to do so much more they don't scale when things become brittle that's when um the fragility of the system comes up and when the demand goes up that's when the systems break but you're not prepared for that breakage just because you have not really done the all the things that you would have done if you had all the time that you needed to do the right thing it sounds like some of the microservices that are in containers that are that run the convention center here have just crashed i think it's gone hopefully the background noise didn't get picked up too much yeah but you're the so the the time to value the roi that you're able to deliver to customers is significant yes you talked about that great customer use case are there any kind of news or announcements anything that you want to kind of share here that folks can can be like looking forward to without the index absolutely so two things even though this is kubecon and everyone is focused on kubernetes kubernetes is still only about three to five percent of enterprise market okay we differentiate ourselves by saying that it doesn't matter whether you're running kubernetes or you're in running legacy vms we will come on board in your environment without you making a single line of change in less than 20 minutes and either we give you the value prop in one week or we don't all right that's number one number two we have a webinar coming on november 3rd uh please go to cloudnetix.com and subscribe or sign up for that webinar sonic and i will be presenting that webinar giving you the value proposition going through some use cases that oh we have seen with our customers so far so that we can actually educate the broader audience and let them know about this beautiful platform i think that my team has built up here all right cloudnatics.com rohit thank you for joining us sharing with us what you're doing at cloud natives why you founded the company and the tremendous impact and roi that you're able to give to your customers we appreciate learning more about the technology thank you so much and i really believe that cloud is here for stay for a long long time it's a trillion dollar market out there and if we do it right i do believe we will accelerate the adoption of cloud even further than what we have seen so far so thanks a lot lisa it's been a pleasure nice to meet you it's a pleasure we want to thank you for watching for dave nicholson lisa martin coming to you live from los angeles we are at kubecon cloudnativecon north america 21. dave and i will be right back with our next guest thank you you