(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back here, buddy. Jeff Frick here from theCube. We're in our Palo Alto studios for a Cube Conversation and we've talked about it time and time again, right? It's the big companies that have the big shows. We do a lot of those big shows, but it's really the startups that really makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley. They're constantly starting, people are leaving companies, starting new companies, and this is a great story, a company who actually visited in 2016 or had a quick catch up at RSA and we're excited to get an update two years later. And so to welcome to the studio, Amiram Shachar, he's the founder and CEO of Spotinst. Amiram, great to see you again. >> Absolutely, great seeing you again, as well. >> I couldn't believe it's been since 2016 when I looked it up and that was in spring, I guess, so a lot of stuff has happened in the last two years. Give us an update on Spotinst. >> Woah, how do I summarize two years of a startup? Every quarter is like a year for a startup, right? So, I think, right now, we're just... We've been like three employees when we talked last in 2016 and now we're over 100. Grew the company from like... Today we're headquarters in San Francisco, office in New York, office in Tel Aviv. Grew our customer base to like over a thousand today. >> Over a thousand customers. >> Over a thousand customers today and just keeping on, trying to keep the growth on. >> Right. Well you made a smart move early on as you connected your... Your train to the rocket ship that is public cloud and I think when we first talked a couple years ago, you were participating in the AWS marketplace and now you've since added, I think you said Google and obviously Microsoft Du Jour. So again for the people that don't know Spotinst, give 'em kind of the quick 101. >> Yeah, so, if you look about a cloud infrastructure space so Amazon was like the leader since we all knew what is cloud infrastructure, and cloud infrastructure, by definition, they have excess compute capacity. Excess compute capacity is there for support natural growth and support spikes in demand of AWS customers so Amazon always want to take these excess compute capacity and have it available for customers to purchase it. >> Right. >> But still, they want to have some access to that capacity whenever they need that so there is no guarantee, there is no SLA. So what we wanted to do to enable customers to use that excess compute capacity, because they can buy it in very cheap price, and we are the software that helps them to get the SLA. So that's what Spotinst does, enabling companies to unlock more compute for a reasonable price. >> So do you buy it and then resell it back to them so that you can control the management and or apply kind of your SLA type of tools or does your software sit there and the customer, they're still making that purchase directly through Amazon, but the softwares executing those details on their behalf? >> So that's the ladder. >> Okay. >> We're not like sitting between the customer and the cloud and buying and selling. We're just providing our software to the customers, enabling the customers to use that smart software so they can leverage compute more easily. >> Right. So what are they key components that take the Spot instance that doesn't have an SLA and makes it kind of SLA-worthy for your customers? >> That's a great point. A key component is statistical analysis that we're doing behind the scenes, is an AI-based platform that basically, we're always looking at the trends that AWS terminates capacity, so that basically tells us, alright, on Mondays, AWS reacts like this and on these hours, this is how you can get capacity, so basically our statistical model can tell the customer, hey, on 7:00 a.m. you should switch from one server to another before AWS takes it away from you. So that's how we bring SLA to a non-SLA compute. >> Right. >> Because we know what's probably going to happen. >> So how does Amazon sell that spot? Is there some, you buy it by a time duration so you know you at least can run a job without worrying about it suddenly going away in the middle of your job? Or how is it actually priced and bundled? >> So there are several ways. The most common way is just get spot capacity and whenever AWS needs that capacity back, they will take it away. And then you are >> So what happens if you're running a job? >> So you are as a customer, you need to take care of that. >> Okay >> You need to make sure that >> Does he get a warning flag or something? Hey we're taking this away in >> You get two minutes notification >> You get two minutes, okay. >> So sometimes, yeah, it's more than enough and sometimes, just you cannot handle with two minutes. >> Right. >> That's why you really need to choose which type of app you would probably want to use for a spot, but the good thing is that with our software, you don't have to worry about that, because you basically tell the software, my app runs and we need X amount of minutes, we need X amount of compute to complete our job and then we make it happen. >> Right, right. So do most of the customers then use this for specific jobs that they want to run, that they know are going to take X amount of compute power and run for an approximate level of time so they can schedule it, whether it's some type of a batch job or an end of quarter run or those types of things or can they actually start to integrate it into their actual operational software that's running pretty much all the time and it's really more just a resource shift, based on economics? >> Yeah, that's a great point because historically, if you look at Spot, Spot was exactly for what you've mentioned, which is badge jobs, things you need to schedule, you know that it's going to take you X amount of time to complete specific workload. >> Right. >> And that's what people did with Spot and the way we're looking at it is like the next generation of even new applications like web services, like containers, like any type of an application layer can use Spot just because we take... We leverage the fact that these applications that we're building today are all highly available, highly resilient, full tolerant by definition, so we know if you know to orchestrate Spot replacement in a very, very accurate way, you'll be able to run workload forever on Spot Instances without even noticing a single interruption. >> Interesting. 'Cause you're just kind of shifting, you're reacting to the Spot market dynamically, >> Correct. >> using your software. >> Correct. >> Very cool Now another thing we talked about before we turned the cameras on, you've got some good visibility, based on the software, as to what people are doing, and you made a really interesting comment on the rise of Kubernetes. We first heard about Kubernetes, I think it... Well, actually, we got the story from Craig at... It was a thing called Google Cloud Platforms. >> Yeah. >> Like Google Live or... In 2014, in the story of the naming, but you said that you've really seen a significant change in the landscape over the last year or so. Give us a little more color on that. >> Yeah, that's correct and the funny thing here is that we didn't see it coming like two years ago. When we've discussed, we didn't even know what's Kubernetes is. We know that containers are going to be the big next thing because it's so easy to deploy applications with containers, but then you had so many different options, right? You had Kubernetes and Amazon had their own stuff and Docker released their own stuff. But then in the past year, we just seeing something phenomenal that we've never seen before or never seen in any other area in our company, which is everybody just consolidating around Kubernetes as an orchestration layer for containers. >> Right, right. And we've... We hear that all the time but it's interesting, you're actually seeing it in the execution of what people are purchasing. Well, exciting. So another big part of the news, you said you got some new funding so give us kind of the details there and what are you going to do with some of this capital? What are... Hopefully it won't be two years till we see each other again. What are some of your priorities looking forward? How are you going to deploy some of this capital? >> Yeah, so, yeah. Gladly, we were able to secure another funding round and it's just because there is such a big opportunity in front of us to capture. The growth has been phenomenal in the past two years. Deloitte has crowned us as the fastest growing startup in Israel last year, in 2017. We grew more than 1400%, year over year and just seeing the opportunity in front of us, like replicating the same thing we did for AWS customers and doing it in other clouds as well, like Google and Azure, and seeing all this rocket ship, as you said, cloud infrastructure space, just continuing to grow in such pace year over year, we're just going to deploy all that capital into growth. >> Right. Well, very exciting and congratulations and thanks for coming and giving us the update. >> Absolutely, thank you. >> Alright. He's Amiram, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube. We're in our Palo Alto studios having a Cube Conversation. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)