>>mhm >>Welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo alto California. I'm john Kerry host of the cube. We've got a great awesome conversation with the Ceo and co founder of harness a hot startup jodi Benson who is the co founder and Ceo but also the co founder of unusual ventures which is a really awesome venture capital firm, doing some great work investment but also they have great content over there for entrepreneurs and for people in the community And of course he's also the founder of big labs, his playground. If you're building out new applications also well known for being the founder of Ap dynamics of super successful billion dollar exit as a startup, Salto, Cisco now doing a lot of things and driving harness, solving big problems. So joe t mouthful intro there, you've done a lot. Congratulations on your an amazing entrepreneur career and now your next uh next next opportunities harness among other things. So congratulations. Thank you for coming. >>Thank you john and glad to be here. >>You guys are solving a big problem in software delivery. Obviously software changing the world. You're seeing open source projects increasing in order of magnitude enterprises jumping on open source in general adoption, large scale with cloud software is being delivered faster than ever before and with cloud scale and now edge this huge challenges around how software deployed, managed maintained. You got, we're talking about space to how do you do break fix in space, all these things are happening at a massive scale across the world. You are solving a big problem. So take a minute to explain what harnesses doing, why you guys exist, why you jumping in into this venture. >>Sure. Yeah. You know what harness mission is to simplify supper delivery and make it uh top notch for everyone. Like if you look at like you know the likes of google and facebook and netflix and amazon these companies are mastered the process of software delivery like and your engineers write code and the code is shipped to the end users and they can do it like multiple times a day at their scale and you know at the complexity that they have but most other business in the world they all want to be software companies but it's extremely, extremely hard for them to get there and I saw this firsthand when I was at epidemics as you know as Ceo last there we're about 12 1300 employees in the company and we had about about 3 50 or so engineers in the company For every 10 or 12 engineers, we had one person whose job was to write automation and scripting and tooling for trying to ships off you know uh you know all kind of scripting kind of stuff. We'll write scripts and chef and puppet and sensible and to deploy in aws and whatnot. And you know one day we're doing the math were like you know we have you know about overall about 30 people whose job was to do devops engineering by writing automation etc to deploy somewhere and I would do the math like you know, one engineer cost is 200 k loaded cost at six million a year that you're spending six million a year just writing deployment, scripting, you know, and even with that we were nowhere close to world class like world class is in like what you would think you could ship every day, we chip on demand, you could, you know, you could deploy software, ship software all of that right? And that was the, you know, I looked at that as a problem inside of dynamics and all they have done with customers, I would talk to like large banks, insurance companies and retailers and telcos and I would hear the same challenge like you know, we hear about devops, we go to the all these devops conferences and events and we see the same 10 companies, you know presenting how the home grew some kind of a devops system for software delivery etc. And you know, I mean that was like, you know, we just, we cannot survive with this like and as the world we need to have uh the right kind of platforms for software delivery and simplify this so that everyone could become as good as a google netflix amazon etcetera that stand of our mission at harness that can we take every business in the world, you know and in a few weeks or a few months, can we get them as sophisticated and good in terms of their dueling for software delivery as a google facebook amazon, those kind of companies would be and that's, that's what we're doing. So >>It's a great ambition and by the way it's a bold move and it's needed. I'll tell you, it's interesting. You mentioned some of those commentary about shipping code at that speed Facebook Google. They had that they had they were forced to do that and again they have all that benefit the mainstream enterprise doesn't. But if you even go back 20 years ago, 15 years ago, that's when Amazon was born. You see two and S three is celebrating their 15th birthday. Software. Yeah, hyper scale has had some good moves there. But the average business went from craft, you know, waterfall QA department go back a little bit slower. I won't say slow motion but manageable now with the speed of shipping and the speed of the scale, that's a huge issue. What kind of pressure do you see that putting on the developer, the individual, not just the system because you got the system of development and the devil and the developers themselves. >>I think the developers have have done quite well to this. I feel like, you know, if you look at the software development part of itself, you know the agile development has been happening for quite some time. So developers have learned how to ship things fast and like in a week sprint or a two week sprint or in in kind of faster cycles. They have moved off from the waterfall kind of models like many years ago now. So that's the suffering development side of things then you have the infrastructure side of things which is the like any province in infrastructure fast. Can you get hardware fast? That's the, you know, the cloud has done that well where the challenges the process, the developers are writing code fast enough these days and you have the, you know, the infrastructure itself could be prov isn't and maintained and and and change fast enough but how do you bring it all together and there is the entire process around it. That's not moving fast enough. So that's where the bottom language. So I feel the, you know, and the process is not good. The developer experience becomes really bad bad because developers are waiting for the process to go and you know, they write some code and the code is sitting on the shelf and they are waiting for things. >>Uh they get all pissed off and mad. What's the holdup? Why what's the process? And then security shifting left, wait a minute to go back and rewrite code. This is huge. I want to just get back and just nail it quickly if you don't mind honing in on the value proposition. What is the harness value proposition? What is the pitch, what are you, what are you offering? What are you solving? Can you nail in on that real quick? >>Sure. So what harness is swallowing is simplifying that software delivery by plane, so developer writes code and that code goes goes through a bunch of steps so a bunch of steps which is uh you know you build the code then you you know test the code, you know, then you do integration tests, then you you know go through your security checks, then you go through a compliance checks, then you go through more dusting, then you're deploying a staging environment, then you go one to do a bunch of things on it. Then you start deploying in production environment but in production you will deploy on like a small part of production, verify everything is working well, it's not working well, you'll roll it back, it's working well then you deploy two more things. This entire process could take like weeks for people to do and this is mostly automated, you know in kind of uh uh you know this kind of random scripts here and there etcetera. So we simplify the entire process that you could describe your process in the language, I just described like you know in a very descriptive declarative kind of way like this is the process I want to achieve and hardness will automatically create your pipelines for this. This kind of process and most of these pipelines have a lot of heavy use of intelligence and um L two, it could go from one step to another, like, so many times, like when you say, you know, deploy the guard and and and 1% of my production environment and see everything is working well and if everything is working well, go to the next 10%. But how do you figure out if everything is working well and that's where the intelligence and um El comes in like, you know, what we learn, what is a normal behavior of your application, how does a normal part of the code works like, you know, there, what's the performance behavior, what is a functional behavior? What errors it is? And if everything is good then you go to the next step so that entire cycle harness automatically, uh you know, uh managers and its automated, you know, if you get governance, you get like, you know, high degree of automation, you get a high degree of, you know, security, you get high degree of like, you know, uh uh you know, quality around him. And so it's it's think of like the, the Ci cd has a lot of developers know and know this process is is ci cd on steroids available to you, Right? So you >>sound like you're making it easier on the Ci cd pipeline process, standing it up, detecting it, prototyping it, if you will, for lack of a better description, get get used to the pipeline and then move it out, roll it out and build your own in a way >>that, is that what is that what you're doing? It's like, you know, a lot of these complex ci city pipelines, what people need, you know, it can take them like three months, six months to to put it uh you know, put it together the harness, it's like an hour, an hour, you could put it together, you know, very, very sophisticated uh Ci cd pipeline and the pipeline is, you know, automated is is, you know, it's it's intelligent around like, you know, what is the normal behavior of your of your applications? Uh It's it's just so phenomenally different than how people have done ci cd before that we simplify the process. Automate the process, you know, and make it manageable and very ready to get involved. >>It's funny you mentioned the three weeks weeks it could take to do the csd pipeline. Of course, that doesn't factor in the what happens when you roll it out, people start complaining, playing with it, breaking it, then you gotta go back and do it again. I mean, that's real and that's a real problem, I mean, can you just going to give a taste of the scar tissue that goes on there. What's some of the what are some of the what some of the pain points that you solve? >>Yeah. So, I think the that is that really becomes the core of the pain point, like, you know, people need, like high amount of dependability, easy to change things, you know, it's we call it like the lack of intelligent automation, you know, and the and this heavy amount of developer toil that the developers have to do so much work around around making all of this work like you know it has to be simplified. So that's that's where our value product comes in like you know, it's it's you know uh you can get like a visual builder and like minutes you can build out the entire process which is your job stability at city pipeline or you could also do like a declarative Yamil interface and just like you know in a few lines just right up whatever process you would want and we would review should be shipped with all kind of integrations with every cloud environment, every monitoring system, every system, every kind of testing process, every kind of security scanning so you can just drag and drop and in minutes eur, europe and running, it just creates so much velocity in this entire process. And also this manageability that people have struggled with >>morale to I mean you can imagine the morale developers go up significantly when you start seeing that the developer productivity has always been a big thing but this intelligent automation conversations huge. Some people have it, some people don't, people say they have it, what is how can you, how can the company figure out uh if someone's really got the real deal when it comes to intelligent automation because again, automation is the is key into devops. >>Yeah, I think I I almost started like you know like if you look at the generational evolution of things like the the first generation was uh you know developer writes code and then it will give you will give it to some some mighty at men who will go and deploy the code, run some commands and do things like tradition to was writing scripts that you're right, a lot of scripts that was automation but it was kind of dumb our dimension and that's how we have, you know that that's where the industry is so actually break now even most of it, the third generation is when the automation is you don't write scripts to you know uh to automate things, you tell our system what you want to achieve and it generates automation for you, right? And that's what we call intelligent automation. Where it's all declarative and all the you don't have to maintain a lot of you know scripts etcetera because they are, you know, they can't keep up with it. You know, you have to change the process all the time and if you change the process, it doesn't work, it becomes completely, you know, uh you know, it becomes very fragile to manage it. So that's that's really where intelligent automation comes in, you know, I look at like, you know, if you can have like uh like you look at like a wrestler, you know, making cars the entire assembly line is automated, but it's, but it's if you want to change something in the assembly line, even that process is automated and it's very simple. Right? So it's and that's what gives them so much uh you know, uh you know, uh let's say control and manageability around the manufacturing process. So the software delivery, uh you know, by assembly line, which is the software software by ci cd piper and really should be a more sophisticated and more intelligent as well now. And that's that's an exhibition, >>jodi. You're also pointing out something that we cover a lot on the cube and we've been writing about is how modern software practices are changing, where this team makeup or whatever its speed is key, but also getting data. Everyone who's successful with cloud and cloud scale and now you got the edge opening up and like I said, even space is going to be programmable, Everything's programmable. And the key is to get the data from the use cases right, get something deployed, look at it, get some data and then double down and make it better. That's a modern approach, not build it and then rebuild it and tear it down and rebuild it, which you're kind of leaning into this idea of let's get some delivery going, let's structure it and then feed it more so that the developers can iterate with with, with the pipeline and this is this again, can scale, can you talk about that? Can you comment on your reaction to that? >>Yeah, definitely. That's exactly how we look at it. Like, you know, you uh you want developers to kind of like say they want to do a, you know, automated process to deploy in their communities infrastructure in matter of minutes, you should be able to get started, but now it's like, you know, there's so much data that comes into it. Like, you know that you have monitoring systems systems like ab dynamics and you're like and data dog and you're logging systems your Splunk and elastic and you know, some logic, you have your, you know, different kind of testing systems here, your security scanning, so there's so much data in it. They're like, you know, terabytes and terabytes of data from it. So when you start doing your deployments, we could also come seem all of the data and see like what was the impact of those deployments or court changes in each of these monitoring, dusting, logging gonna systems and you know, what, how the data changes and then now is that based on that we can learn like, you know, what should be your ideal process and what will break in your process and that's that's the how harness platform works. That's the core of that intelligent automation networks, they're expanding it now to bring a few more of the devops use cases into it Also like the one is cloud cost management because when you, when you, you know, uh you know when we started shipping, there's a lot of people would tell us like, you know, you're you're doing a great job helping us managing the quality, which we always were concerned about like when we're deploying things so you know, security, you know, functionality etcetera. But cloud cost is a big challenge as well. You have your paying like tens and tens of millions of dollars to the cloud providers. And when developers do things in an automated way, it could increase without cost suddenly and we don't know what to do how to manage that. So that's the, you know, we we introduced a new model called cloud cost management to as part of the develops software delivery process that every time you're shipping code and we also figure out like, you know, what with impact on on your on your podcast, you know, can we automate the, you know, uh if there is there is too much impact, can we automate the, you know, the roll back around it, you know, can you get and you can you can we stop the delivery process at that point, can we help you troubleshoot and, you know, reduce the cost down? So that's, you know, that's cost becomes another another another dimension to it. Uh you know, then we recently just added uh you know, the next level that's managing feature Flags. And a lot of the time software developers are adding feature flags to like this feature would be given to this consumer and like, you know, and this feature will be given to this consumer until you test it out through uh test kind of thing and like, you know, what is the impact of, you know, uh turning a feature on versus off, you know, we're bringing that into the same ci cd pipeline. So it's kind of an integrated approach to this uh you know, our intelligently automated biplane instead of these uh small point approaches that just very hard to manage. >>I mean the level of data involved the creature flag for instance, the great is an amazing thing because that allows you to do things that used to be extremely difficult to provision. I mean just picking the color of icon, for instance, this kind of blue, I mean I was just, you hear about this, these kinds of things happening at scale and the date is pretty accurate when it comes in. So I think that's an example of the kind of speed and agility that developers want and the question I want to ask you though on that point because this opens up the whole next conversation, you guys have a modern approach and so much traction and you've recently raised big rounds of funding as you go to the market place, your experienced entrepreneur and uh and Ceo you've seen the waves before. What's the big wave that you're on now? What's the big momentum tailwind for harness? Is it the fact that you're creating value for developers or is it the system that you're integrating into with the intelligence to make things smarter and more scalable? What's the or is it all the above? Can you just share what that that story is? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's, it's really, really both of them. But you know, what are our business case when you go to people who tell them like say, if you're you know, 200 developers. uh, you know, we can give you the world's best software delivery tooling at the cost of half to one developer. Right? So like, you know, so which is like 44, 200 person organization at like 200 to 200 to $300,000 a year. They will get the best software delivery tooling better than a Google Facebook Amazon kind of companies very, very quickly. So our, our entire value prop is built on that like a developer experience gets much better. The productivity gets much better. Developers on an average are spending like 20-30% of the time on deployment, delivery-related toil, like unnecessary stuff that we deal with. So it's only 30% more efficiency gain for the developers. Their quality of life gets better that they don't need to worry about like weekends and nights to babysit your deployments and you know, things breaking and troubleshooting things all the time. Right? So that's that's a that's a big big value. But as a business you get much more velocity your innovation velocity is much higher. You know your risk on your, you know your consumers is much lower because your quality of the of of you know how your ship becomes becomes better. So our business case of like you know at the past of like 1-2 develops engineers will get you the best develops uh you know tooling in the world possible. You know it's not a hard business case for us to make, right? That's that's what we we we look at, it becomes pretty pretty obvious for you know as people try our product, you know the business case >>you don't have to really pass the I. Q. Test to figure this one out, okay everyone's happier and you have more options to scale and make more money in new opportunities not just existing business. I mean the feature flagging these new features you can build a new value and take more territory if you're a business or whatever your objective is so clear value. Can you give an example of some recent successes you've had or or traction points that you think is worth notable that people can get their arms around. >>Yeah definitely like you know we are we're helping a lot of uh you know a lot of customers you know doing uh like completely changing their uh their uh their process of software delivery, you know, 11 recent example, uh nationwide insurance, you know, nationwide insurance, you know, moving from their data center kind of approach to public cloud and to communities and to microservices, like a major cloud native re architecture and in a very ambitious aggressive project to do it, you know, in a in a in a short period of time and harness becomes a platform for them to kind of, you know, uh to remove all the bottom leg around the process, the software delivery process. You know, they obviously they still have to do the developer side of things and they have to do the cloud infrastructure side of things, which is they're doing. But the entire process of how you bring together, you know, harness becomes accelerated around it. So a lot of these kind of stories that we when we kind of create this fundamental transformation for our for our for our customers, you know, uh you know, moving to to a public cloud, you know, moving to microservices, moving to communities, you know, re architect things, but they become much faster. Cloud native higher, you know, a true software company and you know, I would say that's that's something we we we we take a they can take a lot of pride in, I think are always our biggest challenge is uh is to is to is to evangelize and and convince the market that this is possible to do with the product, because historically people have got told like, you know, the only way you can do this kind of software delivery processes and tooling is by engineering it on your own. So everyone wants us on the path of writing their own, you know, and and it's very hard for every, every company in the world to become very good in writing your own software delivery, tooling and processes and systems, etcetera. Right? So it's uh and that's it. So, you know, there is still that that education and evangelism needs to be done, that, you know, there is uh there is no point, you're trying to do it on your own, you can get a platform that can do it all for you and you can focus on the your core business of, you know, what you want to innovate on. >>And I think the Devil's movement hasn't been pioneered and you have to hand roll everything and that's the way it was. But now, as the mainstream market picks this up, you're standing on the shoulders of those pioneers, you are one of them. It's awesome to see this modern approach because it's really playing out in real time again, you've done that before, joe t so it's impressive and, you know, you've seen the movie and developed and the earlier versions pre devops. So, so as cloud native comes and start scaling it's going to be for the rest of us. So, great, great that you're providing the platform and the tools and software. I got to ask you if you don't mind because a lot of people are looking at ways for modern approaches to organizing their teams, how would you define the modern devops movement? You look at devops one point. Oh, we got here. Okay, cloud, cloud native, cloud scale, modern applications, pipe lining. Now, we're looking at a whole another level of confluence of uh of integration and speed. How would you define the modern devops movement? >>Yeah, I think that's a that's a very good question. I think that the core of modern devops, what I would call it develops to point to me is developers self service. It was like the first generation of develops was they create this kind of a devoPS team and then the developers will give all the, you know, delivery related stuff that develops team and the devops team starts to become a bottle, like everywhere now, like in the developed steam job is to build a ci pipeline and the city pipeline and the deployment scripts and you know, do like, you know, you want to do a canary deployment, they have to figure it out how to do it, they have to do, like, you know, you are uh you know, all sort of things that the that needs to be done, you create a central develops team and you give it to them and they become like, you know, uh become a big bottleneck, we look at the modern develops or the next generation and develops has to be done around focusing on the developer experience that and making it all self service for the developers. So you have, you have, let's say you are definitely in for a micro service and it's like, you know 57 engineers, you know, modeling a micro service you want like that, they can go and say this is for our micro service, you know, in a matter of minutes or hours, they can engineer the process without having to lean on a central deVOPS team and to do all the work for them and that's you know, by by maybe a modeler or in some kind of mammal interface or something. That's very easy for them, their experience is so easy that they can manage it themselves without the central deVOPS team have to write it all or cut it all and manage it all. But at the same time the center deVOPS teams, job becomes a bar and governance that can they define the guardrails, that they can define the guardrails on like, you know, you have to have this level of security before something goes into production, you have to have this level of quality before something goes into production, you have to have like, you know, uh this, your cost could not be more than this, right? So you define, so in this instance, instead of the center develops team is doing all the work themselves on writing all the stuff they define the guard rails and it becomes a very easy cell service experience of the developers should do things within those, those guard rails. This is what the modern never actually, >>that's awesome and also accelerate more business value And you're nailing it joe t thank you for coming on and great. Uh, the Ceo on the cube ceo and co founder harness harness dot IO. You guys got free trials, free downloads. You got a great, uh, by as you go model also. Um, you're an entrepreneur at heart. Uh, co founder of unusual ventures, Big Labs appdynamics. Now harness. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, thank you john. >>Okay, this is a cube conversation. I'm john for here in Palo alto California with the cube. Thanks for watching.