(bright upbeat music) >> Good morning fellow cloud community nerds and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of AWS re:Invent, we're here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. You can tell by my sequence. My name's Savannah Peterson and I'm delighted to be here with theCUBE. Joining me this morning is a packed house. We have three fabulous guests from AWS's global startup program. Immediately to my right is Eric. Eric, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> We've also got Jimmy and Jeff. Before we get into the questions, how does it feel? This is kind of a show off moment for you all. Is it exciting to be back on the show floor? >> Always, I mean, you live for this event, right? I mean, we've got 50,000. >> You live for this? >> Yeah, I mean, 50,000 customers. Like we really appreciate the fact that time, money and resources they spend to be here. So, yeah, I love it. >> Savanna: Yeah, fantastic. >> Yeah, everyone in the same place at the same time, energy is just pretty special, so, it's fun. >> It is special. And Jimmy, I know you joined the program during the pandemic. This is probably the largest scale event you've been at with AWS. >> First time at re:Invent. >> Welcome >> (mumbles) Customers, massive. And I love seeing some of the startups that I partner with directly behind me here from theCUBE set as well. >> Yeah, it's fantastic. First time on theCUBE, welcome. >> Jimmy: Thank you. >> We hope to have you back. >> Jimmy: Proud to be here. >> Jimmy, I'm going to keep it on you to get us started. So, just in case someone hasn't heard of the global startup program with AWS. Give us the lay of the land. >> Sure, so flagship program at AWS. We partner with venture backed, product market fit B2B startups that are building on AWS. So, we have three core pillars. We help them co-built, co-market, and co-sell. Really trying to help them accelerate their cloud journey and get new customers build with best practices while helping them grow. >> Savanna: Yeah, Jeff, anything to add there? >> Yeah, I would say we try our best to find the best technology out there that our customers are demanding today. And basically, give them a fast track to the top resources we have to offer to help them grow their business. >> Yeah, and not a casual offering there at AWS. I just want to call out some stats so everyone knows just how many amazing startups and businesses that you touch. We've talked a lot about unicorns here on the show, and one of Adam's quotes from the keynote was, "Of the 1200 global unicorns, 83% run on AWS." So, at what stage are most companies trying to come and partner with you? And Eric we'll go to you for that. >> Yeah, so I run the North American startup team and our mission is to get and support startups as early as inception as possible, right? And so we've got kind of three, think about three legs of stool. We've got our business development team who works really closely with everything from seed, angel investors, incubators, accelerators, top tier VCs. And then we've got a sales team, we've got a BD team. And so really, like we're even looking before customers start even building or billing, we want to find those stealth startups, help them understand kind of product, where they fit within AWS, help them understand kind of how we can support them. And then as they start to build, then we've got a commercial team of solution architects and sales professionals that work with them. So, we actually match that life cycle all the way through. >> That's awesome. So, you are looking at seed, stealth. So, if I'm a founder listening right now, it doesn't matter what stage I'm at. >> No, I mean, really we want to get, and so we have credit programs, we have enablement programs, focus everything from very beginning to hyper scale. And that's kind of how we think about it. >> That's pretty awesome. So Jeff, what are the keys to success for a startup in working with you all? >> Yeah, good question. Highly differentiated technology is absolutely critical, right? There's a lot of startups out there but finding those that have differentiated technology that meets the demands of AWS customers, by far the biggest piece right there. And then it's all about figuring out how to lean into the partnership and really embrace what Jimmy said. How do you do the co build, the co-marketing, co-sell to put the full package together to make sure that your software's going to have the greatest visibility with our customers out there. >> Yeah, I love that. Jimmy, how do you charm them? What do the startups see in working with AWS? (indistinct) >> But that aside, Jeff just alluded to it. It's that better together story and it takes a lot of buy-in from the partner to get started. It is what we say, a partner driven flywheel. And the successful partners that I work with understand that and they're committing the resources to the relationship because we manage thousands and thousands of startups and there's thousands listed on Marketplace. And then within our co-sell ISV Accelerate program, there's hundreds of startups. So startups have to, one, differentiate themselves with their technology, but then two, be able to lean in to do the tactical engagement that myself and my PDM peers help them manage. >> Awesome, yeah. So Eric. >> Yes. >> Let's say I talk to a lot of founders because I do, and how would I pitch an AWS partnership through the global startup program to them? >> Yeah, well, so this... >> Give me my sound back. >> Yeah, yeah, look for us, like it's all about scaling your business, right? And so my team, and we have a partnership. I run the North American startup team, they run the global startup program, okay? So what my job is initially is to help them build up their services and their programs and products. And then as they get to product market fit, and we see synergy with selling with Amazon, the whole idea is to lead them into the go-to market programs, right? And so really for us, that pitch is this, simply put, we're going to help you extend your reach, right? We're going to take what you know about your service and having product market fit understanding your sales cycle, understanding your customer and your value, and then we're going to amplify that voice. >> Sounds good to me, I'm sold. I like that, I mean, I doubt there's too many companies with as much reach as you have. Let's dig in there a little bit. So, how much is the concentration of the portfolio in North America versus globally? I know you've got your fingers all over the place. >> Jimmy: Yeah. >> Go for it, Jeff. >> Jimmy: Well, yeah, you start and I'll... >> On the partnership side, it's pretty balanced between North America and AMEA and APJ, et cetera, but the type of partners is very different, right? So North America, we have a high focus on infrastructure led partners, right? Where that might be a little different in other regions internationally. >> Yeah, so I have North America, I have a peer that has AMEA, a peer that has Latin America and a peer that has APJ. And so, we have the startup team which is global, and we break it up regionally, and then the global startup program, which is partnership around APN, Amazon Partner Network, is also global. So like, we work in concert, they have folks married up to our team in each region. >> Savannah, what I'm hearing is you want do a global startup showcase? >> Yeah. (indistinct) >> We're happy to sponsor. >> Are you reading my mind? We are very aligned, Jimmy. >> I love it, awesome. >> I'm going to ask you a question, since you obviously are in sync with me all ready. You guys see what you mentioned, 50,000 startups in the program? 100, 000, how many? >> Well you're talking about for the global startup program, the ISV side? >> Sure, yeah, let's do both the stats actually. >> So, the global startup program's a lot smaller than that, right? So globally, there might be around 1,000 startups that are in the program. >> Savanna: Very elite little spot. >> Now, a lot bigger world on Eric's side. >> Eric: Yeah, globally over 200,000. >> Savanna: Whoa. >> Yeah, I mean, you think about, so just think about the... >> To keep track, those all in your head? >> Yeah, I can't keep track. North America's quite large. Yeah, no, because look, startups are getting created every day, right? And then there's positive exits and negative exits, right? And so, yeah, I mean, it's impressive. And particularly over the last two years, over the last two years are a little bit crazy, bonkers with the money coming. (mumbles) And yet the creation that's going to happen right now in the market disruption is going to mirror what happened in 2008, 2009. And so, the creation is not going to slow down. >> Savanna: No, hopefully not. >> No. >> No, and our momentum, I mean everyone's doing things faster, more data, it's all that we're talking about, do more and make it easier for everybody in the same central location. Jimmy, of those thousand global startups that you're working with, can you tell us some of the trends? >> Yeah, so I think one of the big things, especially, I cover data analytics startups specifically. So, one moving from batch to real time analytics. So, whether that's IOT, gaming, leader boards, querying data where it sits in an AWS data, like companies need to make operational decisions now and not based off of historic data from a week ago or last night or a month ago. So, that's one. And then I'm going to steal one of John's lines, is data is code. That is becoming that base layer that a lot of startups are building off of and operationalizing. So, I think those are the two big things I'm seeing, but would love... >> Curious to both, Jeff, let's go to you next, I'm curious, yeah. >> Yeah, totally. I think from a broader perspective, the days of completely free money and infinite resources are coming to a close, if not already closed. >> We all work with startups, we can go ahead and just talk about all the well is just a little (indistinct)... >> So, I think it's closed, and so because of that, it's how do you deal with a lot? How do you produce the results on the go to market side with fewer resources, right? And so it's incumbent on our team to figure out how to make it an easier, simpler process to partner with AWS, knowing those constraints are very real now. >> Savanna: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, and to build on that. I think mid stage, it's all about cash preservation, right? And it's in that runway... >> Especially right now. >> Yeah, and so part of that is getting into the right infrastructure, when you had a lot of people, suddenly you don't have as many people moving into managed services, making sure that you can scale at a cost efficient way versus at any cost. That's kind of the latter stage. Now what's really been fascinating more at the at the early stages, I call it the rise of the AIML native. And so, where you say three years ago, you saw customers bolting on AI, now they're building AI from the start, right? And that's pervasive across every industry, whether it's in FinTech, life sciences, healthcare, climate tech, you're starting to see it all the way across the board. And then of course the other thing is, yeah, the other one is just the rise of just large language models, right? And just, I think there's the hype and there's the promise, but you know, over time, like the amount of customers big and small, whom are used in large language models is pretty fascinating. >> Yeah, you must have fascinating jobs. I mean, genuinely, it's so cool to get to not only see and have your finger on the pulse of what's coming next, essentially that's what startups are, but also be able to support them and to collaborate with them. And it's clear, the commitment to community and to the customers that you're serving. Last question for each of you, and then we're talking about your DJing. >> Oh yeah, I definitely, I want to see that. >> No, we're going to close with that as a little pitch for everyone watching this show. So, we make sure the crowd's just packed for that. This is your show, as you said, you live for this show, love that. >> Yeah. >> Give us your 30 second hot take, most important soundbites, think of this as your thought leadership shining moment. What's the biggest takeaway from the show? Biggest trend, thing that has you most excited? >> Oh, that's a difficult one. There's a lot going on. >> There is a lot going on. I mean, you can say a couple things. I'll allow you more than 30 seconds if you want. >> No, I mean, look, I just think the, well, what's fascinating to me in having this is my third or fourth re:Invent is just the volume of new announcements that come out. It's impressive, right? I mean it's impressive in terms of number of services, but then the depth of those services and the building on, I think it's just really amazing. I think that the trend you're going to continue to see and there's going to be more keynotes tomorrow, so, I can't let anything out. But just the AI, ML, real excited about that, analytic space, serverless, just continue to see the maturation of that space, particularly for startups. I think that to me is what's really exciting. And just seeing folks come together, start exchanging ideas, and I think the last piece I'll do is a pitch for my own team, like we have like 18 different sessions from the North American startup team. And so, I mean, shout out to our solution architects putting those sessions together, geared towards startups for startups, and so, that's probably what I'm most excited about. >> Casual, that was good, and you pitched it in time. I think that was great. >> There you go. >> All right, Jeff, you just had a little practice time while he was going. Let's (indistinct). >> No, so it's just exciting to see all the partners that we support here, so many of them have booths here and are showcasing their technology. And being able to connect them with customers to show how advanced their capabilities are that they're bringing to the table to supplement and compliment all the new capabilities that AWS is launching. So, to be able to see all of that in the same place at the same time and really hear what they need from a partnership perspective, that's what's special for us. >> Savanna: This is special. All right, Jimmy. >> My thoughts on re:Invent or? >> Not DJ yet. >> Not DJ. Not DJ, but I mean, your first re:Invent. Probably your first time getting to interact with a lot of the people that you chat with face to face. How does it feel? What's your hot take? Your look through the crystal ball, if you want to take it farther out in front. >> I think it's finally getting FaceTime with some of the relationships that I've built purely over Chime and virtual calls over the past two years has been incredible. And then secondly, to the technical enablement piece, I can announce this 'cause it was already announced earlier, is AWS Security Lake, one of my partners, Cribl, was actually a launch partner for that service. So, a little too to the Horn for Global Startup program, one of the coolest things at the tactical level as a PDM is working with them throughout the year and my partner solution architect finding these unique alignment opportunities with native AWS services and then seeing it build all the way through fruition at the finish line, announced at re:Invent, their logo up on screen, like that's, I can sleep well tonight. >> Job well done. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> That's pretty cool. >> That is cool. >> So, I've already told you before you even got here that you're a DJ and you happen to be DJing at re:Invent. Where can we all go dance and see you? >> So, shout out to Mission Cloud, who has sponsored Tao, Day Beach Club on Wednesday evening. So yes, I do DJ, I appreciate AWS's flexibility work life balance. So, I'll give that plug right here as well. But no, it's something I picked up during COVID, it's a creative outlet for me. And then again, to be able to do it here is just an incredible opportunity. So, Wednesday night I hope to see all theCUBE and everyone that... >> We will definitely be there, be careful what you wish for. >> What's your stage name? >> Oh, stage name, DJ Hot Hands, so, find me on SoundCloud. >> DJ Hot Hands. >> All right, so check out DJ Hot Hands on SoundCloud. And if folks want to learn more about the Global Startup program, where do they go? >> AWS Global Startup Program. We have a website you can easily connect with. All our startups are listed on AWS Marketplace. >> Most of them are Marketplace, you can go to our website, (mumbles) global startup program and yeah, find us there. >> Fantastic. Well, Jeff, Jimmy, Eric, it was an absolute pleasure starting the day. We got startups for breakfast. I love that. And I can't wait to go dance to you tomorrow night or tonight actually. I'm here for the fist bumps. This is awesome. And you all are great. Hope to have you back on theCUBE again very soon and we'll have to coordinate on that global Startup Showcase. >> Jimmy: All right. >> I think it's happening, 2023, get ready folks. >> Jimmy: Here we go. >> Get ready. All right, well, this was our first session here at AWS re:Invent. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, we're theCUBE, the leader in high tech reporting. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat intro music) >> Good afternoon, fellow tech nerds. My name is Savannah Peterson, coming to you from theCube's Remote Studio here in Motown, Detroit, Michigan where we are at KubeCon. John, this is our 12th interview of the day. How are you feeling? >> I'm feeling fresh as the first interview. (Savannah laughs) As always. >> That delivery really implied a level of freshness. >> Let's go! No, this is only Day 1. In three days, reinvent. We go hardcore. These are great events. We get so much great content. The conversations are amazing. The guests are awesome. They're technical, they're smart, and they're making the difference in the future. So, this next segment about Scale MySQL should be awesome. >> I am very excited to introduce our next guest who actually has a Twitter handle that I think most people, at least of my gender in this industry would love to have. She is @ATechGirl. So you can go ahead and tweet her and tell her how great this interview is while we're live. Please welcome Deepthi Sigireddi. Thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're feeding us in. You've got two talks you're giving while we're here. >> Yes, yes. So tomorrow we will be talking about VTR, myself and one of the other maintainers of Vitess and on Friday we have the Vitess Maintainer Talk. All graduated projects get a maintainer talk. >> Wow, so you are like KubeCon VIP celebrity. >> Well, I hope so. >> Well, you're a maintainer and technical lead, also software engineer at the PlanetScale. But talk about the graduation process where that means to the project and the people involved. >> So Vitess graduated in 2019 and there are strict criteria for graduation and you don't just have to meet the minimum, you sort of have to over perform on the graduation criteria. Some of which are like there must be at least two large production deploys and people from those companies have to go in front of the CNCF committee that approves these things and say that, "Yes, this project is critical to our business." >> A lot of peer review, a lot of deployment success. >> Yes. >> Good consistency in the code. >> Deepthi: Community diversity. >> All that. >> All those things. >> Talk about the importance of this project. What is the top story that people should know about around the project? Why it exists, why it's important, why it's relevant, why it's cool. How would you answer that? >> So MySQL is now 30 years old and yet they are still- >> Makes me feel a little sidebar. (Deepthi laughs) Yeah. >> And yet even though there are many other newer databases, it continues to be used at many of the largest internet scale companies. And some of them, for example, Slack, GitHub, Square, they have grown to a level where they could not have if they had tried to do it with Vanilla MySQL that they started with, and the only reason they are where they are is Vitess. So that is I think the number one thing people should know about Vitess. >> And the origination story on notes say "Came from YouTube." >> Yes. So the way Vitess started was that YouTube was having problems with their MySQL deployment and they got tired of dealing with the site being down. So the founders of Vitess decided that they had to do something about it and they started building Vitess which started as a pretty small, relatively code-based with limited features, and over time they built charting and all of the other things that we have today. >> Well, this is exciting Savannah because we've seen this industry. Like with Facebook, when they started, everyone built their own stuff. MySQL was a great- >> Oh gosh, and everyone wanted to build it their way, reinventing the wheel. >> And MySQL was great. And then as it kind of broke when it grew, it got retrofitted. So, it was constantly being scaled up to the point where now you guys, if I get this right, said, "Hey, we're going to work on this. We're going to make it next-gen." So it's kind of like next-gen MySQL. Almost. >> Yes, yes. I would say that's pretty accurate, yeah. So there are still large companies which run their own MySQL and they have scaled it in their own way, but Vitess happens to be an open source way of scaling MySQL that people can adopt without having to build all of their own tooling around it. >> Speaking of that and growing, you just announced a new version today. >> Yes, yes. >> Tell us about that. >> The focus in this version was to make Vitess easier to use and to deploy. So in the past, there was one glaring gap in Vitess which was that Vitess did not automatically detect and repair MySQL level failures. With this release, we've actually closed that gap. And what that means for people using Vitess is that they will actually spend less time dealing with outages manually, or less human intervention, More automated recovery is what it means. The other thing we've released today is a new web UI. Vitess had a very old web UI, ugly, hard to maintain. Nobody liked it. But it was functional, except we couldn't add anything new to it because it was so old. So, the backend functionality kept advancing but the front end was kind of frozen. Now we have a next generation UI to which in upcoming releases we can add more and more functionality. >> So, it's extensible. They add things in. >> Deepthi: Oh yes, of course. Yeah. >> Awesome. What's the biggest thing that you like about the new situation? Is it more contributors are on board the UI? What's the fresh new impact that's happening in the community? What's getting you excited about with the current project? And the UI's great 'cause usability is important. >> Deepthi: Right. >> Scalability is important. >> I think Vitess solved the scalability problem way early and only now we are really grappling with the usability problem. So the hope and the desire is to make Vitess autopilot so that you reduce human intervention to a minimum once you deploy it. Obviously, you have to go through the process of deploying it. But once you've deployed it, it should just run itself. >> Runs at scale. So, the scale's huge? >> Deepthi: Yes. >> How many contributors are involved in the project? Can you give some numbers? Do you have any handy that you can speak to? >> Right. So, CNCF actually tracks these statistics for all the projects and we consolidated some numbers for the last two full calendar years, 2020 and 2021. We had over 400 contributors and 200 plus of them contributed code and the others contributed documentation issues, website changes, and things like that. So that gives- >> How about downloads? Download's good? >> Oh, okay. So we started publishing the current official Vitess Docker Image in 2018. And by October of 2020, we had about 3.8 million downloads. And by August of 2021, we had 5.2 million. And today, we have had over 10 million downloads- >> Wow! >> Of the main image. >> Starting to see a minute of that hockey stick that we all like to see. Seems like you're very clearly a community-first leader and it seems like that's in the PlanetScale and the test's DNA. Is that how the whole company culture views it? Would you say it's community-first business? >> PlanetScale is very much committed to Vitess as an open source project and to serving the Vitess community. So as part of my role at PlanetScale, some of the things I do are helping new contributors whether they are from PlanetScale or from outside PlanetScale. A number of PlanetScale engineers who don't work full-time on Vitess still contribute bug fixes and features to Vitess. We spend a significant amount of our energy helping users in our community Slack. The releases we do are mainly for the benefit of the community and PlanetScale is making those releases because for Planet Scale... Within PlanetScale, we actually do separate releases versus the public ones. >> One of the things that's coming up here at the show is deploying on Kubernetes. How does that look like? Everyone wants ease of use. Are you guys easy to use? >> Yes, yes. So PlanetScale also open sourced a Kubernetes operator for Vitess that people outside PlanetScale are using to run their production deployments of Vitess. Prior to that, there were Vitess users who actually built their own Kubernetes deployments of Vitess and they are still running those, but new users and new adopters of Vitess tend to use the Kubernetes operator that we are publishing. >> And you guys are the managed service for Vitess for the people that that's the business model for PlanetScale. >> Correct. So PlanetScale has a serverless database on demand which is built on Vitess. So if someone's starting something new and they just need a database, you sign up. It takes 30 seconds to get a database. Connect to it and start doing things with it. Versus if you are a large enterprise and you have a huge database deployment, you can migrate to PlanetScale, import all of your existing data, cut over with minimal downtime and then go, and then PlanetScale manages that. >> And why would they do that? What's the use case for that? Save time new development team or refactoring? >> Save time not being able to hire people with the skills to run it in-house. Not wanting to invest engineering resources in what businesses think is not their core competency. They want to focus on their business value. >> So, this database is a service in their whatever they're doing without adding more costs. >> Right. >> And speed. Okay, cool. How's that going? >> It's going well. >> Any feedback from customers in terms of why that there are any benefit statements you seek popping out? What are the big... What's the big aha when they... When people realize what they have here, what's the aha moment for them? Do they go, "Wow, this is awesome. It's so easy. Push a button. Migrate." Or is it... >> All of those. And people have actually seen cost savings when they've migrated from Amazon RDS to PlanetScale and we have testimonials from people who've said that, "It was so easy to use PlanetScale. Why would we try to do it ourselves?" >> It's the best thing a customer could say, right? We're all about being painkillers and solving some sort of problem. I think that that's a great opportunity to let you show off some of your customers. So, who is receiving this benefit? 'Cause I know PlanetScale specifically is for a certain style of business. >> Hmm. We have a list of customers on the website. >> Savannah: I was going to say you have a really- >> John: She's a software engineer. She's not marketing. >> You did sexy. >> You're doing a great job as much as marketing. >> So the reason I am bringing this up is because it's clear this is a solution for companies like Square, SoundCloud, Etsy, Jordan, and other exciting brands. So when you're talking about companies at scale, these companies are very much at scale, which is awesome. >> Yeah. >> What's next? What do you guys see the future for the project? >> I think we talked about that a little bit already. So, usability is a big thing. We did the new UI. It's not complete, right? Because over the last four years we've built more features into the backend which you can't yet access from the UI. So we want to be able for people to use things like online schema changes which is a big feature of Vitess. Doing schema changes without downtime from the UI. So, schema management from the UI. Vitess has something called VReplication which is the core technology that enables charting. And right now you can from the UI monitor your charting status, but you can't actually start charting from the UI. So more of the administrative functions we want to enable from the UI. >> John: Awesome. >> Last question. What are you personally most excited about this week being here with our wonderful community? >> I always enjoy being at KubeCon. This is my fifth or sixth in-person and I've done a couple of virtual ones. >> Savannah: Awesome. >> Because of the energy, because you get to meet people in person whom previously you've only met in Slack or maybe in a monthly community Zoom calls. We always have people come to our project booth. We have a project booth here for Vitess. People come to the company booth. PlanetScale has a booth. People come to our talks, ask questions. We end up having design discussions, architecture discussions. We get feedback on what is important to the people who show up here. That always informs what we do with the project in future releases. >> Perfect answer. I already mentioned that you can get a hold and in touch with Deepthi through her wonderful Twitter handle. Is there any other website or anything you want to shout out here before I do our close? >> vitess.io. V-I-T-E-S-S dot I-O is the Vitess website and planetscale.com is the PlanetScale website. >> Deepthi Sigireddi, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. John, thanks for keeping me company as always. >> You're welcome. >> And thank all of you for tuning into theCUBE. We will be here in Detroit, Michigan all week live from KubeCon and we hope to see you there. (gentle upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. The theme, this showcase is MarTech, the emerging cloud scale customer experiences. Season two of episode three, the ongoing series covering the startups, the hot startups, talking about analytics, data, all things MarTech. I'm your host, John Furrier, here joined by Christian Wiklund, founder and CEO of unitQ here, talk about harnessing the power of user feedback to empower marketing. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you so much, John. Happy to be here. >> In these new shifts in the market, when you got cloud scale, open source software is completely changing the software business. We know that. There's no longer a software category. It's cloud, integration, data. That's the new normal. That's the new category, right? So as companies are building their products, and want to do a good job, it used to be, you send out surveys, you try to get the product market fit. And if you were smart, you got it right the third, fourth, 10th time. If you were lucky, like some companies, you get it right the first time. But the holy grail is to get it right the first time. And now, this new data acquisition opportunities that you guys in the middle of that can tap customers or prospects or end users to get data before things are shipped, or built, or to iterate on products. This is the customer feedback loop or data, voice of the customer journey. It's a gold mine. And it's you guys, it's your secret weapon. Take us through what this is about now. I mean, it's not just surveys. What's different? >> So yeah, if we go back to why are we building unitQ? Which is we want to build a quality company. Which is basically, how do we enable other companies to build higher quality experiences by tapping into all of the existing data assets? And the one we are in particularly excited about is user feedback. So me and my co-founder, Nik, and we're doing now the second company together. We spent 14 years. So we're like an old married couple. We accept each other, and we don't fight anymore, which is great. We did a consumer company called Skout, which was sold five years ago. And Skout was kind of early in the whole mobile first. I guess, we were actually mobile first company. And when we launched this one, we immediately had the entire world as our marketplace, right? Like any modern company. We launch a product, we have support for many languages. It's multiple platforms. We have Android, iOS, web, big screens, small screens, and that brings some complexities as it relates to staying on top of the quality of the experience because how do I test everything? >> John: Yeah. >> Pre-production. How do I make sure that our Polish Android users are having a good day? And we found at Skout, personally, like I could discover million dollar bugs by just drinking coffee and reading feedback. And we're like, "Well, there's got to be a better way to actually harness the end user feedback. That they are leaving in so many different places." So, you know what, what unitQ does is that we basically aggregate all different sources of user feedback, which can be app store reviews, Reddit posts, Tweets, comments on your Facebook ads. It can be better Business Bureau Reports. We don't like to get to many of those, of course. But really, anything on the public domain that mentions or refers to your product, we want to ingest that data in this machine, and then all the private sources. So you probably have a support system deployed, a Zendesk, or an Intercom. You might have a chatbot like an Ada, or and so forth. And your end user is going to leave a lot of feedback there as well. So we take all of these channels, plug it into the machine, and then we're able to take this qualitative data. Which and I actually think like, when an end user leaves a piece of feedback, it's an act of love. They took time out of the day, and they're going to tell you, "Hey, this is not working for me," or, "Hey, this is working for me," and they're giving you feedback. But how do we package these very messy, multi-channel, multiple languages, all over the place data? How can we distill it into something that's quantifiable? Because I want to be able to monitor these different signals. So I want to turn user feedback into time series. 'Cause with time series, I can now treat this the same way as Datadog treats machine logs. I want to be able to see anomalies, and I want to know when something breaks. So what we do here is that we break down your data in something called quality monitors, which is basically machine learning models that can aggregate the same type of feedback data in this very fine grained and discrete buckets. And we deploy up to a thousand of these quality monitors per product. And so we can get down to the root cause. Let's say, passive reset link is not working. And it's in that root cause, the granularity that we see that companies take action on the data. And I think historically, there has been like the workflow between marketing and support, and engineering and product has been a bit broken. They've been siloed from a data perspective. They've been siloed from a workflow perspective, where support will get a bunch of tickets around some issue in production. And they're trained to copy and paste some examples, and throw it over the wall, file a Jira ticket, and then they don't know what happens. So what we see with the platform we built is that these teams are able to rally around the single source of troop or like, yes, passive recent link seems to have broken. This is not a user error. It's not a fix later, or I can't reproduce. We're looking at the data, and yes, something broke. We need to fix it. >> I mean, the data silos a huge issue. Different channels, omnichannel. Now, there's more and more channels that people are talking in. So that's huge. I want to get to that. But also, you said that it's a labor of love to leave a comment or a feedback. But also, I remember from my early days, breaking into the business at IBM and Hewlett-Packard, where I worked. People who complain are the most loyal customers, if you service them. So it's complaints. >> Christian: Yeah. >> It's leaving feedback. And then, there's also reading between the lines with app errors or potentially what's going on under the covers that people may not be complaining about, but they're leaving maybe gesture data or some sort of digital trail. >> Yeah. >> So this is the confluence of the multitude of data sources. And then you got the siloed locations. >> Siloed locations. >> It's complicated problem. >> It's very complicated. And when you think about, so I started, I came to Bay Area in 2005. My dream was to be a quant analyst on Wall Street, and I ended up in QA at VMware. So I started at VMware in Palo Alto, and didn't have a driver's license. I had to bike around, which was super exciting. And we were shipping box software, right? This was literally a box with a DVD that's been burned, and if that DVD had bugs in it, guess what it'll be very costly to then have to ship out, and everything. So I love the VMware example because the test cycles were long and brutal. It was like a six month deal to get through all these different cases, and they couldn't be any bugs. But then as the industry moved into the cloud, CI/CD, ship at will. And if you look at the modern company, you'll have at least 20 plus integrations into your product. Analytics, add that's the case, authentication, that's the case, and so forth. And these integrations, they morph, and they break. And you have connectivity issues. Is your product working as well on Caltrain, when you're driving up and down, versus wifi? You have language specific bugs that happen. Android is also quite a fragmented market. The binary may not perform as well on that device, or is that device. So how do we make sure that we test everything before we ship? The answer is, we can't. There's no company today that can test everything before the ship. In particular, in consumer. And the epiphany we had at our last company, Skout, was that, "Hey, wait a minute. The end user, they're testing every configuration." They're sitting on the latest device, the oldest device. They're sitting on Japanese language, on Swedish language. >> John: Yeah. >> They are in different code paths because our product executed differently, depending on if you were a paid user, or a freemium user, or if you were certain demographical data. There's so many ways that you would have to test. And PagerDuty actually had a study they came out with recently, where they said 51% of all end user impacting issues are discovered first by the end user, when they serve with a bunch of customers. And again, like the cool part is, they will tell you what's not working. So now, how do we tap into that? >> Yeah. >> So what I'd like to say is, "Hey, your end user is like your ultimate test group, and unitQ is the layer that converts them into your extended test team." Now, the signals they're producing, it's making it through to the different teams in the organization. >> I think that's the script that you guys are flipping. If I could just interject. Because to me, when I hear you talking, I hear, "Okay, you're letting the customers be an input into the product development process." And there's many different pipelines of that development. And that could be whether you're iterating, or geography, releases, all kinds of different pipelines to get to the market. But in the old days, it was like just customer satisfaction. Complain in a call center. >> Christian: Yeah. >> Or I'm complaining, how do I get support? Nothing made itself into the product improvement, except for slow moving, waterfall-based processes. And then, maybe six months later, a small tweak could be improved. >> Yes. >> Here, you're taking direct input from collective intelligence. Okay. >> Is that have input and on timing is very important here, right? So how do you know if the product is working as it should in all these different flavors and configurations right now? How do you know if it's working well? And how do you know if you're improving or not improving over time? And I think the industry, what can we look at, as far as when it relates to quality? So I can look at star ratings, right? So what's the star rating in the app store? Well, star ratings, that's an average over time. So that's something that you may have a lot of issues in production today, and you're going to get dinged on star ratings over the next few months. And then, it brings down the score. NPS is another one, where we're not going to run NPS surveys every day. We're going to run it once a quarter, maybe once a month, if we're really, really aggressive. That's also a snapshot in time. And we need to have the finger on the pulse of product quality today. I need to know if this release is good or not good. I need to know if anything broke. And I think that real time aspect, what we see as stuff sort of bubbles up the stack, and not into production, we see up to a 50% reduction in time to fix these end user impacting issues. And I think, we also need to appreciate when someone takes time out of the day to write an app review, or email support, or write that Reddit post, it's pretty serious. It's not going to be like, "Oh, I don't like the shade of blue on this button." It's going to be something like, "I got double billed," or "Hey, someone took over my account," or, "I can't reset my password anymore. The CAPTCHA, I'm solving it, but I can't get through to the next phase." And we see a lot of these trajectory impacting bugs and quality issues in these work, these flows in the product that you're not testing every day. So if you work at Snapchat, your employees probably going to use Snapchat every day. Are they going to sign up every day? No. Are they going to do passive reset every day? No. And these things are very hard to instrument, lower in the stack. >> Yeah, I think this is, and again, back to these big problems. It's smoke before fire, and you're essentially seeing it early with your process. Can you give an example of how this new focus or new mindset of user feedback data can help customers increase their experience? Can you give some examples, 'cause folks watching and be like, "Okay, I love this value. Sell me on this idea, I'm sold. Okay, I want to tap into my prospects, and my customers, my end users to help me improve my product." 'Cause again, we can measure everything now with data. >> Yeah. We can measure everything. we can even measure quality these days. So when we started this company, I went out to talk to a bunch of friends, who are entrepreneurs, and VCs, and board members, and I asked them this very simple question. So in your board meetings, or on all hands, how do you talk about quality of the product? Do you have a metric? And everyone said, no. Okay. So are you data driven company? Yes, we're very data driven. >> John: Yeah. Go data driven. >> But you're not really sure if quality, how do you compare against competition? Are you doing as good as them, worse, better? Are you improving over time, and how do you measure it? And they're like, "Well, it's kind of like a blind spot of the company." And then you ask, "Well, do you think quality of experience is important?" And they say, "Yeah." "Well, why?" "Well, top of fund and growth. Higher quality products going to spread faster organically, we're going to make better store ratings. We're going to have the storefronts going to look better." And of course, more importantly, they said the different conversion cycles in the product box itself. That if you have bugs and friction, or an interface that's hard to use, then the inputs, the signups, it's not going to convert as well. So you're going to get dinged on retention, engagement, conversion to paid, and so forth. And that's what we've seen with the companies we work with. It is that poor quality acts as a filter function for the entire business, if you're a product led company. So if you think about product led company, where the product is really the centerpiece. And if it performs really, really well, then it allows you to hire more engineers, you can spend more on marketing. Everything is fed by this product at them in the middle, and then quality can make that thing perform worse or better. And we developed a metric actually called the unitQ Score. So if you go to our website, unitq.com, we have indexed the 5,000 largest apps in the world. And we're able to then, on a daily basis, update the score. Because the score is not something you do once a month or once a quarter. It's something that changes continuously. So now, you can get a score between zero and 100. If you get the score 100, that means that our AI doesn't find any quality issues reported in that data set. And if your score is 90, that means that 10% will be a quality issue. So now you can do a lot of fun stuff. You can start benchmarking against competition. So you can see, "Well, I'm Spotify. How do I rank against Deezer, or SoundCloud, or others in my space?" And what we've seen is that as the score goes up, we see this real big impact on KPI, such as conversion, organic growth, retention, ultimately, revenue, right? And so that was very satisfying for us, when we launched it. quality actually still really, really matters. >> Yeah. >> And I think we all agree at test, but how do we make a science out of it? And that's so what we've done. And when we were very lucky early on to get some incredible brands that we work with. So Pinterest is a big customer of ours. We have Spotify. We just signed new bank, Chime. So like we even signed BetterHelp recently, and the world's largest Bible app. So when you look at the types of businesses that we work with, it's truly a universal, very broad field, where if you have a digital exhaust or feedback, I can guarantee you, there are insights in there that are being neglected. >> John: So Chris, I got to. >> So these manual workflows. Yeah, please go ahead. >> I got to ask you, because this is a really great example of this new shift, right? The new shift of leveraging data, flipping the script. Everything's flipping the script here, right? >> Yeah. >> So you're talking about, what the value proposition is? "Hey, board example's a good one. How do you measure quality? There's no KPI for that." So it's almost category creating in its own way. In that, this net new things, it's okay to be new, it's just new. So the question is, if I'm a customer, I buy it. I can see my product teams engaging with this. I can see how it can changes my marketing, and customer experience teams. How do I operationalize this? Okay. So what do I do? So do I reorganize my marketing team? So take me through the impact to the customer that you're seeing. What are they resonating towards? Obviously, getting that data is key, and that's holy gray, we all know that. But what do I got to do to change my environment? What's my operationalization piece of it? >> Yeah, and that's one of the coolest parts I think, and that is, let's start with your user base. We're not going to ask your users to ask your users to do something differently. They're already producing this data every day. They are tweeting about it. They're putting in app produce. They're emailing support. They're engaging with your support chatbot. They're already doing it. And every day that you're not leveraging that data, the data that was produced today is less valuable tomorrow. And in 30 days, I would argue, it's probably useless. >> John: Unless it's same guy commenting. >> Yeah. (Christian and John laughing) The first, we need to make everyone understand. Well, yeah, the data is there, and we don't need to do anything differently with the end user. And then, what we do is we ask the customer to tell us, "Where should we listen in the public domain? So do you want the Reddit post, the Trustpilot? What channels should we listen to?" And then, our machine basically starts ingesting that data. So we have integration with all these different sites. And then, to get access to private data, it'll be, if you're on Zendesk, you have to issue a Zendesk token, right? So you don't need any engineering hours, except your IT person will have to grant us access to the data source. And then, when we go live. We basically build up this taxonomy with the customers. So we don't we don't want to try and impose our view of the world, of how do you describe the product with these buckets, these quality monitors? So we work with the company to then build out this taxonomy. So it's almost like a bespoke solution that we can bootstrap with previous work we've done, where you don't have these very, very fine buckets of where stuff could go wrong. And then what we do is there are different ways to hook this into the workflow. So one is just to use our products. It's a SaaS product as anything else. So you log in, and you can then get this overview of how is quality trending in different markets, on different platforms, different languages, and what is impacting them? What is driving this unitQ Score that's not good enough? And all of these different signals, we can then hook into Jira for instance. We have a Jira integration. We have a PagerDuty integration. We can wake up engineers if certain things break. We also tag tickets in your support system, which is actually quite cool. Where, let's say, you have 200 people, who wrote into support, saying, "I got double billed on Android." It turns out, there are some bugs that double billed them. Well, now we can tag all of these users in Zendesk, and then the support team can then reach out to that segment of users and say, "Hey, we heard that you had this bug with double billing. We're so sorry. We're working on it." And then when we push fix, we can then email the same group again, and maybe give them a little gift card or something, for the thank you. So you can have, even big companies can have that small company experience. So, so it's groups that use us, like at Pinterest, we have 800 accounts. So it's really through marketing has vested interest because they want to know what is impacting the end user. Because brand and product, the lines are basically gone, right? >> John: Yeah. >> So if the product is not working, then my spend into this machine is going to be less efficient. The reputation of our company is going to be worse. And the challenge for marketers before unitQ was, how do I engage with engineering and product? I'm dealing with anecdotal data, and my own experience of like, "Hey, I've never seen these type of complaints before. I think something is going on." >> John: Yeah. >> And then engineering will be like, "Ah, you know, well, I have 5,000 bugs in Jira. Why does this one matter? When did it start? Is this a growing issue?" >> John: You have to replicate the problem, right? >> Replicate it then. >> And then it goes on and on and on. >> And a lot of times, reproducing bugs, it's really hard because it works on my device. Because you don't sit on that device that it happened on. >> Yup. >> So now, when marketing can come with indisputable data, and say, "Hey, something broke here." And we see the same with support. Product engineering, of course, for them, we talk about, "Hey, listen, you you've invested a lot in observability of your stack, haven't you?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "So you have a Datadog in the bottom?" "Absolutely." "And you have an APP D on the client?" "Absolutely." "Well, what about the last mile? How the product manifests itself? Shouldn't you monitor that as well using machines?" They're like, "Yeah, that'd be really cool." (John laughs) And we see this. There's no way to instrument everything, lowering the stack to capture these bugs that leak out. So it resonates really well there. And even for the engineers who's going to fix it. >> Yeah. >> I call it like empathy data. >> Yup. >> Where I get assigned a bug to fix. Well, now, I can read all the feedback. I can actually see, and I can see the feedback coming in. >> Yeah. >> Oh, there's users out there, suffering from this bug. And then when I fix it and I deploy the fix, and I see the trend go down to zero, and then I can celebrate it. So that whole feedback loop is (indistinct). >> And that's real time. It's usually missed too. This is the power of user feedback. You guys got a great product, unitQ. Great to have you on. Founder and CEO, Christian Wiklund. Thanks for coming on and sharing, and showcase. >> Thank you, John. For the last 30 seconds, the minute we have left, put a plug in for the company. What are you guys looking for? Give a quick pitch for the company, real quick, for the folks out there. Looking for more people, funding status, number of employees. Give a quick plug. >> Yes. So we raised our A Round from Google, and then we raised our B from Excel that we closed late last year. So we're not raising money. We are hiring across go-to-markets, engineering. And we love to work with people, who are passionate about quality and data. We're always, of course, looking for customers, who are interested in upping their game. And hey, listen, competing with features is really hard because you can copy features very quickly. Competing with content. Content is commodity. You're going to get the same movies more or less on all these different providers. And competing on price, we're not willing to do. You're going to pay 10 bucks a month for music. So how do you compete today? And if your competitor has a better fine tuned piano than your competitor will have better efficiencies, and they're going to retain customers and users better. And you don't want to lose on quality because it is actually a deterministic and fixable problem. So yeah, come talk to us if you want to up the game there. >> Great stuff. The iteration lean startup model, some say took craft out of building the product. But this is now bringing the craftsmanship into the product cycle, when you can get that data from customers and users. >> Yeah. >> Who are going to be happy that you fixed it, that you're listening. >> Yeah. >> And that the product got better. So it's a flywheel of loyalty, quality, brand, all off you can figure it out. It's the holy grail. >> I think it is. It's a gold mine. And every day you're not leveraging this assets, your use of feedback that's there, is a missed opportunity. >> Christian, thanks so much for coming on. Congratulations to you and your startup. You guys back together. The band is back together, up into the right, doing well. >> Yeah. We we'll check in with you later. Thanks for coming on this showcase. Appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. Appreciate it very much. >> Okay. AWS Startup Showcase. This is season two, episode three, the ongoing series. This one's about MarTech, cloud experiences are scaling. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and the its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Seattle for KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2018, with theCUBE's coverage I'm John Furrier for Stu Miniman. We've been there from the beginning watching this community grow into a powerhouse. Almost a Moore's Law like growth, doubling every, actually six months, if you think about it. >> Yeah it's pretty wild. >> Chris Aniszczyk, CTO and COO of the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Super stoked to be here. Thank you for being with us since the beginning. >> So it's been fun to watch you guys, CNCF has done an exceptional job, I thought, a fabulous job of how you guys have built out a great community, open-source community as the main persona target, but brought in the vendor on terms that really work for open-source, Linux foundation, great shepherding this thing through, now you have, basically, looks like a conference. >> Yeah. >> End user conference, vendors are here, still open-source is pure. The growth has been phenomenal. Just take a minute to give us the update on just some of the stats, massive growth. >> Yeah, sure. I mean you know, we're 8,000 people here today, which is absolutely wild. What's actually crazy is when we planned this event, it was about two years ago when we had to start booking a venue, figuring out how many people may be here. And two years ago we thought 5,000 would have been a fantastic number. Well, we got to 8,000. We have about 1500 to 2,000 people on the wait list that could not get in. So, obviously we did not plan properly but sometimes it's hard to predict kind of the uptake of technology these days. Things just move quickly. I think we've kind of benefited from the turnaround that's happening in the industry right now where companies are finally looking to modernize their infrastructure. Whether it's moving to the cloud or just modernizing things, and that's happening everywhere, from traditional enterprises to internet scale companies. Everyone's looking to kind of modernize things and we're kind of at the forefront of that. >> I mean the challenge of events is, some of it is provisioning, over provision. You don't show up, you want elastic, dynamic, agile-- >> I want the Cloud Native events. >> Programmable space that could just go auto scale when you need it. >> Exactly. >> All kidding aside, congratulations on the success. But one thing we've been covering on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, and you guys have been actually executing on, is the growth in China in open-source. And it's been around for a while but just the scale, just pure numbers, tell them about the success in China and the impact to the open-source community and business. >> Yeah. We put on our first event in Shanghai, KubeCon China. It was fantastic. We sold out at 2500 people. Always a little bit difficult to do your first event in China. I have many stories to share on that one, but the amount of scale, in terms of software deployment there are just fascinating. You kind of have these companies like ofo, is like a bike sharing system right. You know in China they have hundreds of millions of these bicycles that they have to kind of manage in an infrastructural way. The software that you use to actually do that has to be built very well. And so the trend that we're actually seeing in CNCF now is about 10%, we have three projects that were born in China, dealing with China-scale problems. So one of those projects is TiKV, which is kind of a very well fine-tuned built distributed key value store that is used by a lot of the Chinese com providers and folks like ofo and LME out there that are just dealing with hundreds of millions of users. It's fascinating. I think the trend you're going to see in the future is there's going to be more technology that is kind of born dealing with China-scale issues, and having those lessons being shared with the rest of the world and collaborate. One of the goals in CNCF for us is to help bridge these communities. In China about 25% of our attendance was international, which was higher then we expected. But we had dual live simultaneous translation for everyone, to kind of try to bridge these... >> It's a big story. The consumption and the contribution side is just phenomenal. >> China is our number two contributor to all CNCF projects, it's very impressive in my opinion. >> So Chris there was a lot in the keynote. I wondered, give us a little insight, it's different for a foundation in open-source communities than it is for company when you talk about the core product being Kubernetes and then all these other projects, you've got the incubating projects, the ones that have been elevated, new FCD comes into it, how do you do the juggling act of this? >> Honestly, the whole goal of the foundation is basically to cultivate and sustain, and kind of grow projects that come in. Some are going to work and be very successful, some may never leave the sandbox, which is our early stage. So today I was very excited to finally have etcd come as an official incubating project. This is our 31st project, which is a little bit wild, since we started, it was just Kubernetes. We had other projects that moved from, say, sandbox to incubating. So in China, one of our big announcements was Harbor, which is a container registry, or actually, technically, we call it a Cloud Native Registry, because it does support things like helm charts, it doesn't only host container-based artifacts. It moved up to the incubating level and that is being embedded. It's in all of Cloud Foundry's and Pivotal's products. It's used by some cloud providers in China as their kind of registry as a service. Like their equivalent to ECR or GCR, essentially. And we've just seen incredible growth across all of our projects. I mean, we have three graduated projects. Envoy recently, which you saw Matt, Constance, and Jose on stage a little bit to talk about. To me, what I really like about Envoy and Prometheus, these are two projects that were not born from a vendor. You know. Envoy came from Lyft because they were just like, you know what? We're not happy with our current kind of reverse proxy, service proxy situation, let's build our own open-source and kind of share our lessons. Prometheus, born from SoundCloud. So I think CNCF has a good mix of, hey, we have some initial vendor-driven projects, like Kubernetes came from Google but now it's used by a ton of people. But then you have other projects that were born from the end-user community. I think having that healthy mix is good for everyone. >> I think the DNA of that early on in the culture has been a successful one for you guys. Not being vendor-led, being end-user led, but vendors can come in and participate. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So talk about the end-user perspective because we're very interested, a lot of people are interested in end-user. What are they doing with it? It used to be a joke. I stood up a bunch Hadoop but what are you using it for? What are people using Kubernetes for? You've got Apple, Uber, Capital One, Comcast, GoDaddy, Airbnb. They're all investing in Kubernetes as their main stack. >> And CNCF projects, not only Kubernetes. >> But what does that mean when they say Kubernetes as a stack? It's kind of been encapsulated to include other things. People are looking at this as a real alternative. Can you explain what that is about? >> So, I think people have to realize that CNCF is essentially more than just Kubernetes. Cloud Native is more than just Kubernetes. So what we'll see is, take a company like Lyft. Lyft did not start using Kubernetes, they are kind of on that migration path now but Lyft started to use Envoy, Prometheus, gRPC, other technologies that kind of lead them to that Cloud Native journey that eventually they're like, you know what? Maybe we don't need our homegrown orchestrator. We'll go use that. And use, (huffs) Everyone falls in differently in kind of a community. Some people start with Kubernetes and eventually subsume the other kind of ancillary projects. >> This is what the project cloud is about. Let me rephrase the question. So when people say, because this is a real trend we've been reporting on this, the CNCF stack, people have language semantics on how that's couched. Oh, on the Kubernetes-- >> I don't like stack because it means there's one proscribed solution, where I think it's more like an a la carte model. >> Well if I quote the CNCF stack, if there was a word for it, as an alternative, as a solution base with Kubernetes at the core of it, right. Okay, cool. What is that usage being looked like? How is that developing? How are end users looking at the CNCF holistically with Kubernetes at the core? >> So we have one of the largest end-user communities out there of any open-source foundation. We have about 80 members. When we talk to them directly, why are they adopting CNCF projects and technology? Most of the time is they want to deploy software faster, right? They want to use modern CICD tools and just development patterns. So it's all about faster time to market and making the developers lives easier so they're actually able to deliver business customer value. And it's basically similar to a whole DevOps mantra, right. If I could ship software faster and it's easier for my developers to get stuff done, I'm delivering value to whatever my end-user customer is at the end of the day. If you go to the CNCF end-user website, we have case studies from Nordstrom, Capital One, I think Lyft is there. Just a bunch of people that, we moved to these technologies because it improved the way we could monitor software, how fast we could ship. It's all about faster time to market, and modernizing their infrastructure. >> Chris, give us a little bit of a view coming forward. We're on 1.13 for Kubernetes, if I read it right. The contribution slowed down a little bit because we're actually reaching a level of maturity. >> Kubernetes is boring and mature. >> What do you see as we come, other than continued growth? >> So I think the wider ecosystem is going to continue to grow. So if you actually look at Kubernetes directly, it has been very focused on moving things out of the core as much as possible and trying to force people to extend things. I don't know if you saw, Tim Hockin had this great talk in terms of how all the Kubernetes components are either being ripped out or turned into custom resource definition of CODs. Basically trying to make Kubernetes as extensible as possible. Instead of trying to ram things into Kubernetes, hey, use the built in extensibility layer. >> Decompose a little bit. >> Decompose and the analogy here would be like kernel space versus user space if you're going to Linux. All the exciting things tend to happen in user space these days but, yeah, the kernel is still important, actively contributed to by a ton of people, very critical, everything. But a lot of the action happens in user space. And I think you'll see the same thing with Kubernetes, where it will kind of become like Linux where the kernel of Kubernetes, very stable, mature, focused on basically not breaking and trying to keep it as simple as possible and built good extensibility mechanisms so folks could plug in whatever systems. We saw this with storage in Kubernetes. A lot of the initial storage drivers, flex volume stuff, was baked into the Kubernetes with a new effort called the container storage interface. They all pulled that out and made they basically built an extensibility mechanism so any company or any project could bring in their storage solution. >> One of the key trends we're seeing, obviously, in cloud is automation. We see serverless around the corner, you see all these things going on around the cool things you guys are building. As automation continues to move down the track, where is that going to impact and create value for customer end-users as they roll with the CNCF? So Kubernetes at some point could be auto, why even be managing clusters? Well, that should be automated at some point. >> I mean, hey, you could do it both ways. A lot of people love the managed service approach. If I could pay a large hyper-scale cloud provider to manage everything, the more the merrier. Some want the freedom to roll their own. Some may want to pay a vendor, I don't know, Red Hat OpenShift looks great, let's pay them to help manage data. Or I just roll alone. And we've seen it all. You know it really depends on the organization. We've seen some very high end banks or financial institutions that have very good technical chops. They're okay rolling on their own. Some may not be as interested in that and just pay a vendor to manage it. >> It's a choice issue. >> For us it's all goodness, whatever you prefer. I think longer term we'll see more people, just for the convenience of managed services, go that route. But for CNCF Kubernetes there's multiple ways to do it; you could go Vanilla, you could go Managed Service, you could go through a vendor like Rancher or OpenShift. The cool thing about all these things is they all are conformant to the Kubernetes certified program, so it means there's no breakage or forking, everyone is compliant. >> So for the people that are watching that couldn't make it here or are on the waiting list, or doing LobbyCon. >> I'm sorry, I'm sorry for the waiting list. >> This is actually a good venue to do LobbyCon, there's places to meet here. I know a lot of people actually in town kind of LobbyCon-ing it. But for the people that aren't here, what's the most important story that's being told? I know we're not being talked about. What is happening here? What should people know about this year? In your mind's eye, in your understanding of the program, and how it's developed early on, what's the most important thing? >> I think in general CNCF, Cloud Native, Kubernetes all have matured a lot in the last three years, especially the last 12-18 months, where you've seen... Earlier it was all about technical-savvy folks scratching their itch. Now the end-users that I'm talking to, you have like Maersk, what does Maersk do? They actually ship containers, right? But now they are using Kubernetes to manage containers on the containers. >> They're in the container business. >> I'm seeing traditional insurance companies. So I think what we're doing is we're basically hitting, we're kind of past that threshold of early adopters and tinkerers, and now we're moving to full-blown mainstream adoption. Part of that is the cloud providers are all offering Managed Kubernetes, so it's convenient for companies that move in the cloud. And then on the distro front, OpenShift, PKS, Rancher, they're all mature products. So there's just a lot of stability and maturity in the ecosystem. >> Just talking about the mature stuff, give us your take on Knative. What should people be looking at that? How does Serverless fit into all this? >> So Serverless, you know we love Serverless in CNCF. We just view it as another kind of programing model that eventually runs on some type of containerized stack. For us at CNCF, we have a Serverless working group that's been putting out whitepapers. We have a spec around cloud events standardized. I think Knative is a fantastic approach of how to basically build a, kind of like CNCF where it's a set of components that you can use to build your own serverless framework. I think the adoption has been great. We've actually been talking to them about potentially bringing in some components of Knative into CNCF. I think, if you want to provide your own serverless offering, you're going to need the components in Knative to make that happen. I've seen SAPs picked up on it. GitLab just announced a serverless offering based on Knative today. I think it's a great technology. It's still very early days. I think serverless is great and will be continually used, but it's one option of many. We're going to have containers, we're going to have serverless, we're going to have mainframes. It's going to be a mix of everything. >> I'm old enough to remember the old client server days when multi-vendor was a big buzz word. Multi-cloud now is a subtext here. I think that one of the big stories in issue of the maturity is that you're starting to see people, I want choice. And hybrid-cloud is the word today but I think ultimately people view it as a multi-cloud environment of resource. >> So one interesting thing about KubeCon, I think one of our reasons that we've grown so much is if you look at it, there's really no other event you can go to that is truly multi-cloud. You have all the HyperScale folks, you've got your end-users and vendors in one area, right? Versus you going to a vendor-specific event. So I think that's kind of been part of our benefit and then luck to kind of stumble in this where everyone is in the same room. I think next year, big push on bringing all the clouds. >> Well, Chris, thanks for spending the time. I know you're super busy. CTO and COO of the CNCF, really making things happen. This is a real, important technology wave, the cloud computing, and having the kind of choices in ecosystem around open-source is making it happen. Congratulations to your success. We're going to continue coverage here. Day one of three days of CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier for Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more after this short break. (light music)