from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation I am stupid a man and this is a special cube conversation we've been talking a lot of course for many years about the ascent of cloud and today in 2020 multi cloud is a big piece of the discussion and we're really happy to help unveil coming out of cell al kiram which is helping the networking challenges when it comes to multi cloud and I have the two co-founders they are brothers I have Amir who is the CEO and a DIF who is the CTO the Khan brothers thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on the launch of the company thank you sue for having us on the show it's a pleasure to see you again all right so Amir we've had you on the program your previous company that you've done was of course the fella you the two of you have worked together at I believe five companies successful companies acquired you know the most recent one into Cisco so a mirror obviously you know you know strong networking theme your brother the CTO I was going to talk to us about the engineering but give us you know just the the story of Al Kyra what you've been building and now ready to unveil to the world certainly needs to so in around 2018 timeframe we started looking into the next big problem to solve in the industry which was not only a substantial you know from the market size perspective but also from the customers perspective was solving a major pain point so when we started looking into the cloud customers and started talking to our customers they were struggling from the cloud networking perspective even in a single cloud and it was a new environment for them and they had to understand all the nitty-gritty details of each one of these clouds and when you go to multi cloud environment it becomes exponentially complicated to address not only connectivity but how to deploy services like firewall and other services including low balancers and IP address management etc and remote access so we started digging deeper into this problem and start working with the customers and took a clean sheet of paper and came up with a very comprehensive approach to offering a solution which is as a service this time we are not shipping any hardware or software it is you know just like any other SAS application you just come to our portal I just drag and drop literally draw out your network and click on provision and you know come back after 40 minutes or so your full global cloud infrastructure is up and running so out if your brother laid out a pretty broad vision there any of us from the networking world we know there's a lot of complexity there and therefore it takes a lot of work when I want to do things simply as a service is you know a huge growth area bring us inside the engineering challenges that you and the team have been working on to build this solution second let's do so we've been working both our men and myself in the networking industry for more than 25 years now and our the way we have worked and what we have believed in is that we need to solve customer problems we never believed in like doing a science project so here also we started working with customers as we have always done in the past we understood the customers pain points the challenges they were facing especially in this case and in cloud networking space multi-cloud networking space based on the user requirements users or the customers use cases we started the building a service and here what we have built is a complete network as a service it's a multi cloud met work as a service which not only provides connectivity to multiple routes but also addresses the needs for bringing in networking services as well as security services making sure that you have a full policy based infrastructure on top of it you have deep visibility into into the clouds as well as into on-premise into and visibility into and monitoring troubleshooting and all of it is delivered to you as a service so that's what we have been doing here at ELQ here excellent so when we look at multi-cloud of course you know every cloud they have some similar things they have some different things they all tend to do things a little bit differently you know one of the secret sauces that have been talked about for the last few years is ESP BAM space like you and built with Nutella to help really enable those environments so if we've got a diagram here which I think will help explain a little bit as you know we're out here it how it plugs into these different environments walk us through a little bit what we're seeing here and what you're actually doing a tell Kira so here we are building a global unifying the multi cloud Network it's consumed as a service think of it as consuming it just like you would consume any other SAS like our SAS issue so you come to lqs portal you register and then there you go and you start building your global multi-cloud unified network with integrated services so here what you see is is a Elka's cloud services exchange with comprises of cloud exchange points you can bring these up these cloud exchange points up anywhere on the globe you can decide like what networking services security services you need in these cloud exchange points you can connect the multiple clouds from there you can bring your existing on-premise connector matiee into the CX PS all these CX B's have a full mesh of overlay high speed low latency connectivity among each other so there is a full network which comes up between these CX B's and this the whole infrastructure scales with customers as as a customer scale so it's a horizontally scalable veil a very highly redundant and resilient infrastructure which we have both all right so armor now that we understand the basics of the technology you've got some strong investors including Sequoia kleiner perkins give us you know what is being announced day you're coming out of stealth where are you with the product you know how many employees you have and where are you with the discussion of customer adoption so stew we're obviously bringing this to the market and we will be announcing it on April 15th it's available for the customers to consume our solution as a service on that day so they are welcome to reach out to us and we'll be happy to help them and as a matter of fact just come to our website and register for the service and yeah we rightly said that we have a superstar team of not only the venture capital companies but also the board members representing those companies the bill Cochran and mamoon Hamid Wright who the leading VCS are on the board of our company including myself inactive all right I'm all right love to actually bring up the second slide that we have here walk us through you said you know the service you know how do people get started how do they understand you know what would walk us through what what they do so the biggest challenge when we started looking into these problems you know Stu was that it was very complicated you have to piecemeal bring up instances and the cloud and stitch them together and when you try to integrate the services that was a different challenge for the customers right so we wanted to make sure that it was so simple and clean that the customer didn't even have to think about any underlying construct on any of the clouds they should not have to worry about learning each individual power from the you know networking perspective so here's your portal you just come you know step one is come to a portal or register step two is you start drawing your network based on your intent what on-prem an activity you want to bring into this service what type of services you need like all all the firewalls and then you know what pilots you need to connect and everything happens seamlessly the from on pram pram through services into the cloud and across multiple clouds it's a seamless service that we have created and with full analytics capabilities and full governance built in alright so I'll to bring us into what this means for customers you know how do they manage it you know is this the networking team is it the cloud architects you know what api's are there how does this fit into kind of what customers are doing today and you know solve some of those challenges that we laid out earlier in the discussion yes trauma from the customers perspective it's as I said it's it's completely delivered as a service customers come to our portal they draw out the network they select the services they click on provision and the whole network comes up within minutes so the main thing here is that from a customer's point of view if they are connecting to different clouds they don't need to understand any of the underlying specifics or underlying constructs of any of the of the cloud in order to bring can I bring up connectivity so we what we are doing here is we are abstracting the clouds here so we are building a virtual cloud network so if you if you think of if you compare it with what we did in the in the previous life be virtualized the when so here would be a doing is we are virtualizing the cloud network so underlying doesn't matter which cloud you sit on which cloud you need to connect to which networking services whether cloud native services or whether you you want to consume our care services or we also support like customer bringing in third-party services as well so it's all all offered from our platform all offered is a service for to the customer again no expertise required in any of the underlying networking constructs of any of these cards give us what we should be looking at from a technology roadmap from Akira through the rest of 2020 good question as to so as I mentioned earlier our roadmap is dictated by customer requirements so we prioritize what customers need from us so we have come out with a scalable platform we have come out with a marketplace for networking services in there in the near term we'll be expanding our market place with more services we will be addressing more use cases and when I talk about use cases I can give you some examples like there's a view you not just only need connectivity into cloud you might have different requirements from from throughput perspective or bandwidth perspective or different services that you need to front-end your cloud but you may have certain applications such as internet basing application where you eat like traffic coming in from the internet inbound to those applications you might need services like a load balancer like an external load balancer in our services exchange you might also need like a firewall you might need traffic engineering or sorry service eaning capability is where you would chain service through multiple or traffic through multiple of these services like a firewall in the load balancer so we have built a platform which gives you all those capabilities going forward we will be adding more services more use cases to it we have a long ways ahead of us and we will be putting all our effort in delivering a roadmap as we go all right so Amma your technical team definitely has their hands full and uh you know robust after work on uh give us the the high-level what we should be looking for out Kira for people that are out there you know multi-cloud and networking you know tend to get talked a lot there's many big companies and some small ones what will separate al Kira from the rest of the market today and what should we be looking to see the company's progression through 2020 yeah thanks for asking that yeah certainly I mean you know from the solution perspective out it's said that you know it's so fundamentally important to have a very strong basis right and that's what we have done we are bringing out a certain number of services and now we will continue to grow on that will create a big marketplace we will continue to improve on which clouds we connect to and how and we will be building our own services in certain cases as well now building a technology is just one piece of it we have to go out to market with a company that the customers can trust every single you know the department in that company whether it's sales or how they do business with us all the business back-end pieces have to be sorted out and that's what we've been working with and you know then go to market partners that is very very important right support is very important so let me spend a little bit of time on go to market strategy we have been working with the service riders so that we can extend our reach not only to the large customers but also to midsize customers across the globe so you will see us in the future announcing major service water partnerships as well as we've been working with large sis bars and system integration in a partners and also we have taking a slightly different approach this time because it's a service so we are going with telecom master agents which have been you know working with the service providers the cloud providers the cable providers as a channel and they have a huge reach into the customer base so we we have a very comprehensive strategy not only from the go to market in the technology perspective but also how we are going to support our customers and continue to build a relationship to build a lasting company yeah I'm a super important point there absolutely we've seen the maturation and change in the service providers as today they are working with many of the public cloud providers and they're as you said a close touch point and a trusted partner of our customers all right so before I let you go you know YouTuber brothers everybody in today's day and age is spending even more time with family but you know your your situation you've worked together for a long time what keeps bringing the two of you together working together and then talk about that ball so I mean we're very close-knit family we have four brothers and one sister and obviously active and I have been the closest because we have been working together for the longest we have at least work in five different companies together our families travel together we have three daughters each we live about five minutes you know walk from each other and we you know just have this bond where we not only have you know the family close but also very close-knit friends a circle which we both hang out with and we you know obviously have common interest in the sports as well we play squash and tennis and work out so after four if they want to take a stab at it but also yeah so we've always been very close in fact we've been together for the last like ever since I can remember like even even college days he was we were roommates for for some time also he ever say we have like our circle of friends is the same also so again we're very close and we work well together so we complement each other's skills and and it's it's worked out in the past hopefully it will work out again and I look forward to working with them for many many more years to come yeah well I'm or not - thank you so much for sharing the the coming out of stealth for Al Kyra we definitely look forward to watching your progress and you know seeing how you're helping customers in this multi-cloud world thank you for joining us - thank you so much thank you for having us all right I'm Stu minimun and thank you so much for watching this special cube conversation on the cube [Music]

>> Narrator: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, here in Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, founder and CEO of a start-up, solo.io, Idit Levine. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> All right, so one of the things we were talking in the open. Lauren Cooney, who you know, and I were talking about, well, you know, Cloud Foundry. We've been talking about digital transformation. The enterprise for years, but there's always these new technologies. It was, you know, Kubernetes came this wave, now server-less is the wave, and you know, Amazon's kind of overarching, you know, discussion in the market place. That's why I'm glad to bring you in because your company, a startup, plays across a number of these, you know, emerging spaces in the Cloud Foundry space. So, give our audience a little bit about your background and what led to the foundation of solo.io. >> Yeah, thanks. So I was in start-up all my life. I worked in DynamicOps, we got acquired by VMWare, so vRealize, if you remember. And then I moved to another start-up, got inquired by Verizon, so cloud switch, who was moving back in the day from micro, from on prem to off prem. And then I moved to Dell EMC, to the city office and that was great because what I was doing was basically started the dojo of Cloud Foundry. So, me and Ryan Gallagher, if you know him, and Patrick Dennis, we are the three who started it and we basically co-located with the Cloud Foundry team and we worked very, very closely with them. And what we did, what I was doing a lot was bringing in innovation so we created some opensource projects like Key Unique if you heard about it about UniCare, you know, building and running UniCare. We worked with a lot of the ecosystem and the reason we started Solo is because I felt, I really feel, I really felt that the EMC is a great place but that it sometimes slow you down because of the big organization and I felt that we can do much faster outside. So that's why we opened, we started Solo, and all the purpose with Solo is basically playing two tracks. One of them is we really, really want people to use our product, so we want to target the people who has the problem, which is the enterprise. So that's where we're really, really targeting to help them move to what we really master which is the opensource community, so all the innovation. So, that's exactly what we're doing, basically helping them to take their monolithic application, move them to microservices and to Serverless, but by using very, very unique and innovative technology like Envoy and a lot of others. >> Okay, so we hear a lot of times it's you know, of course, companies, they need to move faster. They need to go through this transformation. It's the API economy. And that's, I think, where Gloo fits in there. So Gloo is spelled G-L-O-O, >> Right. >> What's a function gateway? How does this help with, kind of, you know, is it API Sprawl these days? Or, you know, all these various services. You know, how is this the glue that brings everything together? >> So as I said, we're working in two ecosystems, right? The first one is the enterprise. So the main use case that we are trying to solve as I said is the movement. We wanted to make sure that people will be able to take the monolithic and at least extend them to microservices like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, and to Serverless, and also in the free time to kind of like move it. So that was kind of like our purpose. But we needed some technology for that, and we looked outside and discovered that the first thing that we needed is probably a very good API gateway. But it need to route on the function level, and it need to discover the function, and a lot of technology that just wasn't exist back then. So what we did was basically build one, which is Gloo. That's the first thing that we needed because we had no choice. There wasn't anything that actually we seriously, and trust me, and looking very well of all the opensource project, there's nothing like what we built out there, in terms of the quality of the technology and what we're capable of doing. So that's why we built it. We didn't plan to make it a product, but that was the purpose. And the second thing. Now we're building more stuff, and we need maybe to extend to service-match, or function-match, like we call it. Again, not because we want to. Because we have no choice. Right? So this is not a core product, but it's really, we're building is about, we're targeting everything that's related to this use case and we're trying to move. >> Okay, so Google and Microsoft in their keynotes talked about an API gateway, opensource project, I hear service-match, I'm thinking about ISDL. How does Gloo fit-- >> So as I said, there's a beautiful, we are not competing because as I said, at the beginning, my purpose, look, I will look at the situation. That's how somebody can use it. But they're just not moving fast enough for us as a startup. So we had to actually create it. Now, when we created it, we created it specifically to our use case, right? We needed the function, that we knew that our purpose was to take all that, those ecosystems of monolithic, microservices, and Serverless, and look and see, what is the smallest unit of compute that's common between them, and cut everything to it, and that's the function. So basically, what we're doing, we're taking all these ecosystems, cut everything to function, and then reassemble a movement between them. That's something that they just didn't give us, so we had to build it. But the beauty of it is because we are, you know, we are really innovative and that's what we know how to do, we decided to leverage the opensource, so for instance is build on Envoy, right, because it is the best proxy that exists today. And we extended it, because we needed some functionalities, so we created a lot of filter, right? Because it was very important to us to make Envoy basically have this functionality. So we are not competing with none of them, because mainly, that's not what we're doing. We're just focusing on the use case. But theoretically, if you're looking at API gateway, I will say hands down we're probably the best that exists out there, which is, that's not what we started with. >> Yeah, it's really smart, coming, you know, no small startup's going to be, oh, well, we're going to, you know, in Silicon Valley maybe they think they're going to take down the giants and break the world and competing is everything, but I like you actually spent some time working in the EMC CTO office, and there are certain things we will always look at. And it's like, there's this gap. Here's what we have today, and here's absolutely where we know where the market is going. >> Right. >> So, you know, the analogy I hear today is like, well, customers they've got their applications. They need to modernize them. So it's been the last year or so, there's been this discussion of lift and shift. It made people cringe. I said, you know, I've lifted the virtualization way. One of the biggest challenges where, was I took this old application which, to be frank, stunk, and I kept it alive for years longer, even though the server was no longer supported, the OS was no longer supported, but I could just virtualize it and that was great. I want to get to 12-factor, microservice architecture, even Serverless might be the foundation that I'd like to build this. I cannot lift and shift to get Serverless. There is no path from old to there. So it sounds like you're >> What we're doing. Trying to attack some of that there, am I getting that right? >> Yes, I mean, basically, I will give you an example of a customer that we have, right? So, they came, their monolithic application, right? And they really want it to move. And you know, it's really hard to maintain this, so they said, you know what, we really want it to move to Serverless. That's the engineering part, right? They're saying, we want it to move to engineering. They came to the boss and they said, well, what we want to do is to take it, rewrite it, and put it as a greenfield, right? Basically as a Serverless. So the boss said, no problem, go, evaluate how much time it will take, and then come back to me. So they went and they did it, and they basically came with nine months. So the boss said, okay, so, no. And the reason is because nine months means a year, and also, I didn't get any feature on this year. Right? They will fire me. So what we're doing is we're saying, take this monolithic application, it's working, don't touch it, extend it. First of all, extend, on the new functionality, going to the Serverless and to microservices, and we're supporting everything, and it's brand new. I mean, I can start telling you what is the platform that we support. It's almost everything. And then, the second thing is that, on your spare time, start breaking it. Now, there's no magic. I know people are saying there's an algorithm. That's never going to work. Trust me, and I did a lot of software in my life. You can't guess this stuff. You actually need to rewrite them. But on your spare time, when you're available, and on the way, you know, on your pace of learning. And I feel that that's what we're giving. We're basically giving them the freedom to do that on their spare time, and we're giving a lot of other tools, like for instance, debug. So we create, we opensource a project called Squash, that basically be able to attach debuggers to microservices, to Serverless, and to monolithic, in different language, different everything, and jump between them. So you basically can create what I call library up, and jump cross that. So I feel that what we're targeting is basically make this movement easy, with any technology that we can put out there. >> Yeah. The whole application modernization is a real challenge. If I look at, you know, in this space, Pivotal's acquisition of Pivotal Labs was to help them. A lot of services, things that we're looking at, Pivotal going public. How much of their business is actually services, how much of it is you know, subscription and software? How much are you, is this just tooling you're building, or are you helping customers get through some of the services that maybe it's time for you to talk, how many people do you have on your team? Like, I look at the website, I see like five people, so. >> Yeah, that's actually what we are. So I mean, specifically, we are five. We are startup. We got actually really well funded from True Ventures, great, great investors. And what was important to me, was not to do a lot of mistakes of the other startups doing, which is basically scale too fast, right? I wanted first to putting a product out there, I want to see what's going on. And today, because we opensource, because we all can use Amazon and so on, we don't need a lot of money to actually create the additional projects. So that's what we did. Specifically, I can tell I'm getting a lot of resumes and right now, I'm actually pushing them back, because it's really, really important to me to scale on the right side. Now we're starting to have customers, we will have to scale, right? So that's that. In terms of how much, so that's enough. We are five and as I said, it's good, but we are not in the services. Actually people they're doing an amazing job. We don't want to touch that. What we do want to make sure is that they're giving the tools to do them themselves and they will hire probably people to do the services. >> Are you able to share how much funding, you said True Ventures is one of the funding? >> So we got 2.5 from True Ventures, and then we got 500 from Haystack and another 250 from Wave Ventures, capital. >> Okay, and five people. You're hiring too. What are you looking for? >> Yeah, so we're definitely going to hire more. We need a full stack engineer, we need a system engineer. Right now it's very flat architecture. A lot of really, really good people. I mean, my engineers are people who was in the Israeli Army as lackers, you know, very, very technical. People who are, walk with me in EMC, and so on. Very, very good people. And our purpose is to grow as system engineers a little bit, UI, and we also need some help to scale. >> And you're located here in Boston, correct? >> I am, I am. I have one engineer in Seattle, but all the rest are here. >> Okay, and the products itself, you know, opensource, and the things that are available, so-- >> For now, so we started as an open, we did put it as an opensource project. This is the platform I feel should be opensource. But there will be features that we will not opensource. A lot of more things that makes sense for the enterprise, we will not opensource. But yeah, right now, everything is opensource, and we wanted to share for the community. >> Okay, and from the customers you're talking to, what's their biggest challenge, you know, things like Serverless, you know, are they getting their arms around it, especially, you know, out here in the east coast, as opposed to, you know, some of the startups in the like? >> So actually, people in the enterprise, I mean, I think I nailed the use case, because you know, I went, I'm talking a lot in conference, QCon is one of the conference that I really, really liked and talked a lot, and when I talk there to the people, everybody has this problem, which I have a monolithic, how do you move them? Most of them trying to move to container right now. That's where it is. But the beauty of how we built Gloo, and that was totally on purpose, is the fact that, and I actually have a diagram showing it, today those enterprise that are only using monolithic. I don't know, like Bank of America, I think is only monolithic. Then if you're looking, there's people only using microservices, probably Google and others. And then there is companies like iRobot for instance. So it's going all the way to Serverless. That's all there, right? Bam, which is amazing. But, and there is companies that's sharing it, right? That means they're microservices and Serverless, so monolithic, and then. And EMC for instance, they have like Serverless, microservices and monolithic. What we're trying to do is basically, the beauty of what we build, is basically a platform on top of an envoy. So we can actually create the customized offer for you that will be only what you need. And what we will help you is to basically glue, this is what the name, glue your environment, so it will give you one experience that you can manage it or you can mix and match, you can do whatever you want, and it's really, really clean. So when I'm talking to customers today, mainly where they are is like monolithic to microservices, but they love this use case. I mean, I didn't meet a customer yet that I show him the demo of how we're taking a spring boot application and move it, and he said that they don't want it to proceed. So it's good. >> Wow. Fascinating stuff. I really appreciate you sharing. Definitely, we hear from customers all the time. It's moving from the old to the new, it's I need to live in both of those worlds, and they can't split those teams, it can't be islands, I need to pull this together. It's definitely through a multi-cloud, and seems like it's happening in the development environment too. So, Idit Levine, solo, congratulations on where you've gone. Look forward to catching up much more in the future. We're back with lots more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry summit in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.