>> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and it's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of KubeCon 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, my cohost this week. Our next guest Shiv Ramji, VP of Product at DigitalOcean, fast growing startup, now growing company. Congratulations, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> So you guys got some hard news, you got product, Kubernetes product, and you guys just upgraded your status on CNCF. Let's jump into the product news real quick. What's the hard news? >> Yeah, so we just announced a Kubernetes product and service on our platform. And you know, we've had a lot of customers who've actually have been deploying Kubernetes on our platform, either themselves or through a managed provider. And a lot of customers, specifically businesses, have been asking us to provide native support for Kubernetes. So now this is native support for Kubernetes on the DigitalOcean platform. >> What does native support for customers mean specifically? Is it managing the workload down to, how, what level of granularity, I guess, is the question. Be specific about this support. >> Yeah, yeah. So essentially, typically developers who are deploying container workloads or Kubernetes workloads do this themselves. Now we make it very, very easy. So you can come into our platform and, within a few clicks, deploy a Kubernetes cluster with your typical integrations of monitoring or container registry and the Kubernetes dashboard. >> So you basically just select a couple features and they can go from there? It's just run a gun? >> It's just a few clicks and you are running. And the reason why we did that, and sort of the history of the company has really focused on removing friction for developers to get started. So we make it very, very easy from a product experience perspective, and also from a cost perspective. So we remove all the barriers for any team size to get started. And so that's why we've made the product very, very easy to use, very simple. And then we also plan to have a lot of tutorials around containers or containerizing an application and scaling in the microservices work. >> Lauren: That's great. >> Talk about the security aspect of it. It's been a big topic here. We were talking about it on our intro, Lauren and I, around, you know, that it's evolving in real time. Things are moving fast. Up front work needs to get done. How do your customers think about security in context of the Kubernetes offering? >> So we have a story for that. We are trying to essentially deploy some native integrations and some open source projects that help us do security scanning, so the goal is to essentially let our customers know of vulnerabilities that they may have based on the images that they are deploying. And you know, all of us are guilty of it. We will get a public container image and launch it, and then realize that there are some security flaws. So that's something we do want to address as we continue to roll out additional features throughout this year. >> I know we've interviewed you guys before, but I want you to just take a minute and explain, for the folks watching who might not know DigitalOcean, what you guys do, your value proposition, who you guys target, how you sell the product, what's the service, all that good stuff. Share a one minute update on what you guys do. >> So we are a New York based company that were founded in 2012 out of Techstars. And the value proposition is very simple in that we want to be the cloud platform for developers and their teams, so that they're focused on software that changes the world. And what that means is we take all the complexity in our product development process, essentially to make it very easy for a developer to go from concept or idea to production as fast as they can. Once they get there, we want to also enable them to scale reliably on our platform. And essentially, all of the features that we've launched have been driven by customer demand. So they tell us that, hey, we're scaling on your platform, we really need these additional features, and that's how we respond. So we're very developer-obsessed, and focus on that specific persona, and help them get to the cloud as quickly as possible. >> So you're solving the problem for the developer. Bait pain points are, what? >> So there are three. We think of learning as the first one, as a barrier to developers. So this is why we've built a library of tutorials. There are about 1400 plus tutorials. We get about three million unique visitors on our platform. And about 80% of our customers actually came from one of the tutorials. Right, so that's such a great source of >> Lauren: Documentation is so important. >> Documentation. So important. So that's our first one. The second one is building. This idea of let's remove all friction for you to go from zero, essentially an idea, to production as fast as possible. So there're two things we do there. One, we try to make the product very simple and easy to use. And two, we are very price competitive. So we have a very competitive price to performance ratio in the market, with the idea that, if you want to keep your total cost of operations as low as possible. And so, that's another reason why developers, teams, and also businesses are now, we are in their consideration set, because they're like, well developers love this product, and I can get a cost benefit. Why would I not do that? And then the last one is scaling, which is once you're growing your application, you're going to need ability to scale and support. And so we provide free support to all of our customers, regardless of the size of your workload or size of customer or business. And I think that's a very important value proposition for us. >> So who do you compete against? Like, who are a couple of your competitors? >> So, the best way to answer that is to see, so we go to our customers and see who they compare us with. And typically we are compared against AWS and Google. >> Lauren: Okay, okay. >> And so, they are the ones who will come to us and say, "Hey, we're about to launch an app, or we're considering moving our workloads, you know, here's what our setup looks like in Google or AWS. You know, can you provide us similar capabilities?" And a lot of the times tends to be, you know, our developers already love you. If you have this capabilities and features set, we would love to move our workloads. >> Well I think you've got a tremendous amount of active developers as well, correct? >> Yes, yes. >> So, and you're growing that exponentially. What is, kind of your growth look like, year over year? >> Yeah, so last year we signed the one millionth developer on our platform. There's essentially one million developers that have created an account on our platform. And we sometimes have developers who come in and out of our platforms, if you're done with your project, right, if you're a student. But we have about half a million active developers on our platform, and growing rapidly. And we also foster a community which is growing tremendously. So we've got about three and a half million active developers in our communities, reading articles, and going through Q&A, and posting very interesting projects. >> Those are some great numbers. I mean, they're up there with Salesforce growth. So that's tremendous. >> And also the other news is you're upgrading your membership. Cloud Native Compute Foundation, CNCF. Talk about that dynamic, why? Size, did you fall into new bucket or you guys are increasing your participation? What's the news? >> Yeah, I mean, we were founded really on this idea of we believe in helping the community, and so free and open source software is what we've built our business on. And so, as we got active with Kubernetes ourselves, and we've been using Kubernetes for two years internally, so we have lots of lessons of our own. And as we were bringing this product to market, it was only the right, it was the right time for us to really upgrade our membership to gold with the CNCF, with the goal of getting to their platinum level where we can contribute to standards and bodies and really influence the evolution of all the tooling around containers and microservices. So, it was the right, the timing was right, and it's the right evolution of us continuing to support the community. >> Making some good profit, contribute that, and help out CNCF. >> Shiven: Absolutely. >> As the VP of Product, you have the keys to the kingdom as they say, in the product management world. (laughing) You got to balance engineering management with product, and you got to look to the market for the, you know, the needs of the customers, and of course they're helping you. Big time developers aren't afraid to share their opinion of what they need. >> Shiven: Never. >> Pain points, that's a good, good, good, good job there. What is on the road map for you? What's next? How are you looking at short, mid, long-term evolution of DigitalOcean's product strategy? >> Yeah, so I'll break it down in three different areas. The first part is really having a core complete feature set for a modern application that's being built in the cloud. So this is where, over the last 12 months, we've developed, we've deployed, developed and deployed load balancers, cloud firewalls, object storage, block storage, a new control panel experience, and a bunch of networking features that we have released. And so, we have some new features coming this year, which allow you to do, you know, the VPC feature, specifically, that allows businesses to have private networking and peering. That's been a top requested feature, so that's something that's going to come later this year to round out our core platform. And then, beyond that, we have two or three different things that we're doing. So the first category is just having a better developer experience. So this is everything from the experience you have when you are launching any cloud resource, whether it's for a control panel, or API, or CLI. So, continue to make that frictionless. So we have a few updates coming there to our control panel, improvements to our API, and adding a bunch of integrations so that, if you're using different products to manage your cloud infrastructure, we make that very, very easy. The second thing is marketplaces. So, a lot of, as you know, lots of other providers have marketplaces and different versions of marketplaces. A lot of our customers and vendors are now coming to us saying, "You have a really big audience and customer base. We really want to integrate our products so we can make it easy for them to spin up those resources." So marketplaces is the second large category that we're working on later this year. We'll have a lot of updates on that. And the third one is tied to developer experience, but it's essentially the Kubernetes product that we're launching. We also have plans to enable a marketplace-like integrations, and a lot of the CICD integrations, so that once you're up and running with your cluster, you got to get your CICD pipelines and tooling working, so that's an area. >> I want to ask you about multicloud, and where you guys are at with multicloud, and kind of connecting to the other cloud providers that are competitors, but, you know, your users are going to want to use as well as your solution. >> Yeah, this is where I think Kubernetes fits really, really well with the multicloud story for us, which is why, sort of, why now for us. If your workloads are in Kubernetes, and this is why we are going to support all of the latest community versions that are available. If your workloads are in Kubernetes, it becomes very easy for you to move those over to our platform, and so. I think we're going to see a combination of sometimes customers will have split workloads, sometimes they'll run different types of workloads in our platform, and so I think Kubernetes really opens up that possibility >> Lauren: That's great. To do that. There's still some more tooling to be done, but that's essentially where we're at. >> How many employees you guys have now? What's the number? >> We are roughly north of 400. So still very small. >> Well, congratulations. You guys are a growing company. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for sharing the news. >> Thank you very much. >> Absolutely. >> Great job. DigitalOcean. You know, hot startup, growing rapidly, I'm sure they're hiring like crazy. >> We are. >> So go check 'em out. The news here at KubeCon is positive industry. Rising tide floats all boats. That's a philosophy we have seen on theCUBE and great ecosystems, of course that's happening here. More live coverage here in Copenhagen, Denmark after this short break. Stay with us. (upbeat music)