>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Escape/19. (upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in New York City for the inaugural multicloud event called Escape/19. This is a unique event where industry leaders are coming together to discuss and have conversations around what is multicloud? What does it even mean? How it will be laid out. It's really a foundational set of conversations and talks around it. Our next guest is Spoons, known as Spoons. That's not his real name (laughs), that's his nickname. He's a co-founder and CTO of LightStep, a CUBE alumni of the past. I've interviewed them at KubeCon. Spoons, thanks for coming on. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So first of all, your company really has a lot of tech jobs, we've interviewed your partner Ben before on theCUBE. So much is going on in microservices, you can't keep it straight these days. So, take a minute to give an update on what's going on with LightStep real quick, and why you're here. >> Yeah, I think what we're really trying to see is it's not just microservices, it's different cloud vendors, different third-party vendors that are really adding to the complexity. And that complexity really comes in the form of depth. I think people that are adopting microservices really feel it immediately. But for everyone else it's a bit of a boiling frog situation, it comes on slowly. And I think where LightStep fits in, is offering a simple solution for observing those systems, for understanding what's happening. >> So, multicloud, a conversation which I've called out on theCUBE as bullshit in the past because, we have people kind of spinning it up and hyping it up. I mean I recognize that people have multiple clouds, but there's no multiclouding going on. >> Yeah. >> Per se, but-- >> Yeah, we see a little bit with our customers. It's something where I think they think about it as a way to mitigate risks, it's a way for them to manage costs as well, so. Well, Multi-Vendor, I'm old enough to remember back in the '80s and '90s, where you didn't want just IBM, or you didn't want just DEC, you wanted multiple vendors in there because more inter genius is better. Better IT. So, now we're seeing that with cloud, this is not B.S., this is real. So, this is where I see multicloud being a foundational. How do you see the architecture of enterprises whether small, medium, growing, either born in the cloud, cloud negative, or hybrid IT, hybrid dev, building their own stacks. How should they be thinking about architecting for multicloud? >> Yeah so I think that's one of the choices they have to make. And a lot of what I think they're trying to do is really allow teams to work more independently. So, that might be that they can make their own choices about a cloud, about vendors. It might be that they make their own choices about languages, frameworks, things like that. As they do that they're building up this depth and what that means is that there's a heterogeneity to that system. And really the problem there is that you've got the responsibility for the whole stack. You've got responsibility for everything from your service all the way down, those will all impact your performance. You only got control over your service itself. And so, managing that tension is really where the pain comes in for a lot of developers. >> You know, I got to ask you a question. You're multiple degrees in computer science, entrepreneur, you're in the business, it's certainly a very rapid wave, it's really strong, and more waves are coming, bigger waves. Observability, network management becomes observability, configuration management becomes automation. RPA is the hottest trend, automating everything. So, a lot of action going on with cloud scale, enterprises are trying to vector in and figure that out. Observability has become such a hot area. And we kind of missed it, I mean, we covered it, but we, I missed that whole break out. Whoa, what is this? A whole new category. What's going on? >> I think a lot of people miss it. I think it's easy to think about the orchestration about the automation as the most important thing 'cause that's sort of in the critical path. You have to have that to keep going. And it's easy to kind of think that your monitoring tools from you know, 10, 20 years ago are still working. And I think, what we realized while we were at Google and what we brought to LightStep is that they're not working anymore, that you've really got to re-think, and you've got to put in context that allows you to see that whole stack and not just think about individual machines, individual processes, but really understand it from the user's point of view, from your customer's point of view. >> And I mean you start out you see tracing as a feature, but observability is now almost its own practice. How should we think about holistically? How should people think holistically about observability from a technical standpoint? >> Yeah so really of course you're going to need some logging, you're going to need metrics, but you really need those things to be put in context. You need to understand how they're affecting individual users, individual or segmented users, and so tracing is really the backbone of that context. It allows you to understand how a particular transaction passes through that system. If you don't have that, you're just going to get buried in this sea of data whether that's logs or metrics or whatever. Tracing is really the thing that allows you to understand what's important to filter, to aggregate, and to really hone in on what can-- >> So that rabbit hole, or that net, or the drowning in that you said, I forget how you said it, it was nice, is essentially a rabbit hole, you can almost get stuck down there. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> So you're getting much more real-time, and you also said, you know, the contextual. So when I think of contextual I'm thinking about I have to be integrated to the app and/or have access to data. >> Yeah. So how does that work? >> Yeah so, really data comes from a lot of different sources and you need to get a way to integrate those things that can come from machine layer, from the infrastructure layer, but from the application itself as well. We've partnered with some others to put together OpenTelemetry, which is an open standard for getting the data out of the application. This comes on the heels of open tracing and a couple of other things, but that's really an open standard that allows application developers, allows framework developers to really open that spigot and get the data out of the application. >> Just to get your personal thoughts on the industry. I have a lot of conversations with folks around, we're the control plane for data. I mean, can there ever be a control plane? Is Kubernetes going to be that? I guess abstraction, where everyone kind of has their own little land grab of control plane? 'Cause data horizontal scalability makes sense. >> Yeah there's a lot of different kinds of data and not all data is equally valuable. So the way that you think about data that's driving your revenue, that's one thing, and the way that you're thinking about debugging your application, that's another thing. I think you probably need more than one tool to handle that. It's just not going to be cost-effective for you. >> It's all in the level of context right there. >> Daniel: Exactly, exactly, yeah, yeah. >> So thinking about contextual and having integration points is probably a good starting point for someone who's kind of thinking about re-assembling for multicloud. >> Yep, yep. >> All right so what do you think about this conference, multicloud first inaugural, kind of true multicloud conference, about multicloud only? >> Yeah a lot of great people here, it's exciting. >> Thanks for coming, I appreciate you Spoon. Any updates, give a plug for LightStep. Take a quick second to explain what you guys are looking for, what you do, and give an update. >> Yeah so LightStep, simple observability for Deep Systems. Deep Systems come about through things like microservices, but we have a lot of customers that are still working on a monolith or just stepping away from monolithic architecture and really observability means not just logs, not just metrics, but really providing that context through things like tracing, that allow you to release faster, get those features out there, and at the same time reduce mean time resolution, reduce mean-time-to-innocence, right? Really making sure that your teams are able to understand who's at fault and who can fix the problems that you're seeing in production. >> And you guys recruiting, looking for people? >> Always recruiting on the engineering side, design, product, go to market, all of those things. >> Everyone's hiring, it's hard to get people these days. >> It is, it is. >> Lot of open jobs out there. >> Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. See you around the neighborhood in Silicon Valley. We'll see you at KubeCon. >> Great, thanks, thanks for having me. >> It's CUBE coverage here. I'm John Furrier, we're in New York City for the first inaugural conference, Escape/19. This is the first industry gathering where the leaders of people who are making things happen are having conversations and talks around what is multicloud and laying down that foundation and add room for more solutions. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)