>>Hi, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the eight of us startup showcase open cloud innovations. This is season two episode one of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from ABC ecosystems today. Uh, episode one, steam is the open source community and open cloud innovations. I'm Sean for your host got two great guests, Webb brown CEO of coop costs and as Thielen, head of business development, coop quest, gentlemen, thanks for coming on the cube for the showcase 80, but startups. >>Thanks for having a Sean. Great to be back, uh, really excited for the discussion we have here. >>I keep alumni from many, many coupons go. You guys are in a hot area right now, monitoring and reducing the Kubernetes spend. Okay. So first of all, we know one thing for sure. Kubernetes is the hottest thing going on because of all the benefits. So take us through you guys. Macro view of this market. Kubernetes is growing, what's going on with the company. What is your company's role? >>Yeah, so we've definitely seen this growth firsthand with our customers in addition to the broader market. Um, you know, and I think we believe that that's really indicative of the value that Kubernetes provides, right? And a lot of that is just faster time to market more scalability, improved agility for developer teams and, you know, there's even more there, but it's a really exciting time for our company and also for the broader cloud native community. Um, so what that means for our company is, you know, we're, we're scaling up quickly to meet our users and support our users, every, you know, metric that our company's grown about four X over the last year, including our team. Um, and the reason that one's the most important is just because, you know, the, the more folks and the larger that our company is, the better that we can support our users and help them monitor and reduce those costs, which ultimately makes Kubernetes easier to use for customers and users out there on the market. >>Okay. So I want to get into why Kubernetes is costing so much. Obviously the growth is there, but before we get there, what is the background? What's the origination story? Where did coop costs come from? Obviously you guys have a great name costs. Qube you guys probably reduced costs and Kubernetes great name, but what's the origination story. How'd you guys get here? What HR you scratching? What problem are you solving? >>So yeah, John, you, you guessed it, uh, you know, oftentimes the, the name is a dead giveaway there where we're cost monitoring cost management solutions for Kubernetes and cloud native. Um, and backstory here is our founding team was at Google before starting the company. Um, we were working on infrastructure monitoring, um, both on internal infrastructure, as well as Google cloud. Um, we had a handful of our teammates join the Kubernetes effort, you know, early days. And, uh, we saw a lot of teams, you know, struggling with the problems we're solving. We were solving internally at Google and we're we're solving today. Um, and to speak to those problems a little bit, uh, you know, you, you, you touched on how just scale alone is making this come to the forefront, right. You know, there's now many billions of dollars being spent on CU, um, that is bringing this issue, uh, to make it a business critical questions that is being asked in lots of organizations. Um, you know, that combined with, you know, the dynamic nature and complexity of Kubernetes, um, makes it really hard to manage, um, you know, costs, uh, when you scale across a very large organization. Um, so teams turned to coop costs today, you know, thousands of them do, uh, to get monitoring in place, you know, including alerts, recurring reports and like dynamic management insights or automation. >>Yeah. I know we talked to CubeCon before Webb and I want to come back to the problem statement because when you have these emerging growth areas that are really relevant and enabling technologies, um, you move to the next point of failure. And so, so you scaling these abstraction layers. Now services are being turned on more and more keeping it as clusters are out there. So I have to ask you, what is the main cost driver problem that's happening in the cube space that you guys are addressing? Is it just sheer volume? Is it different classes of services? Is it like different things are kind of working together, different monitoring tools? Is it not a platform and take us through the, the problem area? What do you guys see this? >>Yeah, the number one problem area is still actually what, uh, the CNCF fin ops survey highlighted earlier this year, um, which is that approximately two thirds of companies still don't have kind of baseline to visibility into spend when they moved to Kubernetes. Um, so, you know, even if you had a really complex, you know, chargeback program in place, when you're building all your applications on BMS, you move to Kubernetes and most teams again, can't answer these really simple questions. Um, so we're able to give them that visibility in real time, so they can start breaking these problems down. Right. They can start to see that, okay, it's these, you know, the deployments are staple sets that are driving our costs or no, it's actually, you know, these workloads that are talking to, you know, S3 buckets and, you know, really driving, you know, egress costs. Um, so it's really about first and foremost, just getting the visibility, getting the eyes and ears. We're able to give that to teams in real time at the largest scale Kubernetes clusters in the world. Um, and again, most teams, when they first start working with us, don't have that visibility, not having that visibility can have a whole bunch of downstream impacts, um, including kind of not getting, you know, costs right. You know, performance, right. Et cetera. >>Well, let's get into that downstream benefit, uh, um, problems and or situations. But the first question I have just throw naysayer comment at you would be like, oh, wait, I have all this cost monitoring stuff already. What's different about Kubernetes. Why what's what's the problem I can are my other tool is going to work for me. How do you answer that one? >>Yeah. So, you know, I think first and foremost containers are very dynamic right there. They're often complex, often transient and consume variable cluster resources. And so as much as this enables teams to contract construct powerful solutions, um, the associated costs and actually tracking those, those different variables can be really difficult. And so that's why we see why a solution like food costs. That's purpose built for developers using Kubernetes is really necessary because some of those older, you know, traditional cloud cost optimization tools are just not as fit for, for this space specifically. >>Yeah. I think that's exactly right, Alex. And I would add to that just the way that software is being architected deployed and managed is fundamentally changing with Kubernetes, right? It is deeply impacting every part of scifi software delivery process. And through that, you know, decisions are getting made and, you know, engineers are ultimately being empowered, um, to make more, you know, costs impacting decisions. Um, and so we've seen, you know, organizations that get real time kind of built for Kubernetes are built for cloud native, um, benefit from that massively throughout their, their culture, um, you know, cost performance, et cetera. >>Uh, well, can you just give a quick example because I think that's a great point. The architectures are shifting, they're changing there's new things coming in, so it's not like you can use an old tool and just retrofit it. That's sometimes that's awkward. What specific things you see changing with Kubernetes that's that environments are leveraging that's good. >>Yeah. Yeah. Um, one would be all these Kubernetes primitives are concepts that didn't exist before. Right. So, um, you know, I'm not, you know, managing just a generic workload, I'm managing a staple set and, or, you know, three replica sets. Right. And so having a language that is very much tailored towards all of these Kubernetes concepts and abstractions, et cetera. Um, but then secondly, it was like, you know, we're seeing this very obvious, you know, push towards microservices where, you know, typically again, you're shipping faster, um, you know, teams are making more distributed or decentralized decisions, uh, where there's not one single point where you can kind of gate check everything. Um, and that's a great thing for innovation, right? We can move much faster. Um, but for some teams, um, you know, not using a tool like coop costs, that means sacrificing having a safety net in place, right. >>Or guard rails in place to really help manage and monitor this. And I would just say, lastly, you know, uh, a solution like coop costs because it's built for Kubernetes sits in your infrastructure, um, it can be deployed with a single helmet stall. You don't have to share any data remotely. Um, but because it's listening to your infrastructure, it can give you data in real time. Right. And so we're moving from this world where you can make real time automated decisions or manual decisions as opposed to waiting for a bill, you know, a day, two days or a week later, um, when it may be already too late, you know, to avoid, >>Or he got the extra costs and you know what, he wants that. And he got to fight for a refund. Oh yeah. I threw a switch or wasn't paying attention or human error or code because a lot of automation is going on. So I could see that as a benefit. I gotta, I gotta ask the question on, um, developer uptake, because develop, you mentioned a good point. There that's another key modern dynamic developers are in, in the moment making decisions on security, on policy, um, things to do in the CIC D pipeline. So if I'm a developer, how do I engage with Qube cost? Do I have to, can I just download something? Is it easy? How's the onboarding process for your customers? >>Yeah. Great, great question. Um, so, you know, first and foremost, I think this gets to the roots of our company and the roots of coop costs, which is, you know, born in open-source, everything we do is built on top of open source. Uh, so the answer is, you know, you can go out and install it in minutes. Like, you know, thousands of other teams have, um, it is, you know, the, the recommended route or preferred route on our side is, you know, a helm installed. Um, again, you don't have to share any data remotely. You can truly not lock down, you know, namespace eat grass, for example, on the coop cost namespace. Um, and yeah, and in minutes you'll have this visibility and can start to see, you know, really interesting metrics that, again, most teams, when we started working with them, either didn't have them in place at all, or they had a really rough estimate based on maybe even a coop cost Scruff on a dashboard that they installed. >>How does cube cost provide the visibility across the environment? How do you guys actually make it work? >>Yeah, so we, you know, sit in your infrastructure. Um, we have integrations with, um, for on-prem like custom pricing sheets, uh, with card providers will integrate with your actual billing data, um, so that we can, uh, listen for events in your infrastructure, say like a nude node coming up, or a new pod being scheduled, et cetera. Um, we take that information, join with your billing data, whether it's on-prem or in one of the big three cloud providers. And then again, we can, in real time tell you the cost of, you know, any dimension of your infrastructure, whether it's one of the backing, you know, virtual assets you're using, or one of the application dimensions like a label or annotation namespace, you know, pod container, you name it >>Awesome. Alex, what's your take on the landscape with, with the customers as they look the cost reductions. I mean, everyone loves cost reductions as a, certainly I love the safety net comment that Webb made, but at the end of the day, Kubernetes is not so much a cost driver. It's more of a, I want the modern apps faster. Right? So, so, so people who are buying Kubernetes usually aren't price sensitive, but they also don't want to get gouged either on mistakes. Where is the customer path here around Kubernetes cost management and reduction and a scale? >>Yeah. So I think one thing that we're looking forward to hearing this upcoming year, just like we did last year is continuing to work with the various tools that customers are already using and, you know, meeting those customers where they are. So some examples of that are, you know, working with like CICT tools out there. Like we have a great integration with armoring Spinnaker to help customers actually take the insights from coop costs and deploy those, um, in a more efficient manner. Um, we're also working with a lot of partners, like, you know, for fauna to help customers visualize our data and, you know, integrate with or rancher, which are management platforms for Kubernetes. And all of that I think is just to make cost come more to the forefront of the conversation when folks are using Kubernetes and provide that, that data to customers and all the various tools that they're using across the ecosystem. Um, so I think we really want to surface this and make costs more of a first-class citizen across, you know, the, the ecosystem and then the community partners. >>What's your strategy of the biz dev side. As you guys look at a growing ecosystem with CubeCon CNCF, you mentioned that earlier, um, the community is growing. It's always been growing fast. You know, the number of people entering in are amazing, but now that we start going, you know, the S curves kicking in, um, integration and interoperability and openness is always a key part of company success. What's Qube costs is vision on how you're going to do biz dev going forward. >>Absolutely. So, you know, our products opensource that is deeply important to our company, we're always going to continue to drive innovation on our open source product. Um, as Webb mentioned, you know, we have thousands of teams that are, that are using our product. And most of that is actually on the free, but something that we want to make sure continues to be available for the community and continue to bring that development for the community. And so I think a part of that is making sure that we're working with folks not just on the commercial side, but also those open source, um, types of products, right? So, you know, for Fanta is open source Spinnaker's are open source. I think a lot of the biz dev strategies just sticking to our roots and make sure that we continue to drive it a strong open source presence and product for, for our community of users, keep that >>And a, an open source and commercial and keep it stable. Well, I got to ask you, obviously, the wave is here. I always joke, uh, going back. I remember when the word Kubernetes was just kicked around pre uh, the OpenStack days many, many years ago. It's the luxury of being a old cube guy that I am 11 years doing the cube, um, all fun. But if we remember talking to him in the early days, is that with Kubernetes was, if, if it worked, the, the phrase was rising, tide floats all boats, I would say right now, the tides rising pretty well right now, you guys are in a good spot with the cube costs. Are there areas that you see coming where cost monitoring, um, is going to expand more? Where do you see the Kubernetes? Um, what's the aperture, if you will, of the, of the cost monitoring space at your end that you think you can address. >>Yeah, John, I think you're exactly right. This, uh, tide has risen and it just keeps riding rising, right? Like, um, you know, the, the sheer number of organizations we use C using Kubernetes at massive scale is just mind blowing at this point. Um, you know, what we see is this really natural pattern for teams to start using a solution like coop costs, uh, start with, again, either limited or no visibility, get that visibility in place, and then really develop an action plan from there. And that could again be, you know, different governance solutions like alerts or, you know, management reports or, you know, engineering team reports, et cetera. Um, but it's really about, you know, phase two of taking that information and really starting to do something with it. Right. Um, we, we are seeing and expect to see more teams turn to an increasing amount of, of automation to do that. Um, but ultimately that is, uh, very much after you get this baseline highly accurate, uh, visibility that you feel very comfortable making, potentially critical, very critical related to reliability, performance decisions within your infrastructure. >>Yeah. I think getting it right key, you mentioned baseline. Let me ask you a quick follow-up on that. How fast can companies get there when you say baseline, there's probably levels of baseline. Obviously all environments are different now. Not all one's the same, but what's just anecdotally you see, as that baseline, how fast we will get there, is there a certain minimum viable configuration or architecture? Just take us through your thoughts on that. >>Yeah. Great question. It definitely depends on organizational complexity and, you know, can depend on applicational application complexity as well. But I would say most importantly is, um, you know, the, the array of cost centers, departments, you know, complexity across the org as opposed to, you know, technological. Um, so I would say for, you know, less complex organizations, we've seen it happen in, you know, hours or, you know, a day less, et cetera. Um, because that's, you know, one or two or a smaller engineering games, they can share that visibility really quickly. And, um, you know, they may be familiar with Kubernetes and they just get it right away. Um, for larger organizations, we've seen it take kind of up 90 days where it's really about infusing this kind of into their DNA. When again, there may not have been a visibility or transparency here before. Um, again, I think the, the, the bulk of the time there is really about kind of the cultural element, um, and kind of awareness building, um, and just buy in throughout the organization. >>Awesome. Well, guys got a great product. Congratulations, final question for both of you, it's early days in Kubernetes, even though the tide is rising, keeps rising, more boats are coming in. Harbor is getting bigger, whatever, whatever metaphor you want to use, it's really going great. You guys are seeing customer adoption. We're seeing cloud native. I was told that my friends at dock or the container side is going crazy as well. Everything's going great in cloud native. What's the vision on the innovation? How do you guys continue to push the envelope on value in open source and in the commercial area? What's the vision? >>Yeah, I think there's, there's many areas here and I know Alex will have more to add here. Um, but you know, one area that I know is relevant to his world is just more, really interesting integrations, right? So he mentioned coop costs, insights, powering decisions, and say Spinnaker, right? I think more and more of this tool chain really coming together and really seeing the benefits of all this interoperability. Right. Um, so that I think combined with, uh, just more and more intelligence and automation being deployed again, that's only after the fact that teams are really comfortable with his decisions and the information and the decisions that are being made. Um, but I think that increasingly we see the community again, being ready to leverage this information and really powerful ways. Um, just because, you know, as teams scale, there's just a lot to manage. And so a team, you know, leveraging automation can, you know, supercharge them and in really impactful ways. >>Awesome, great integration integrations, Alex, expand on that. A whole different kind of set of business development integrations. When you have lots of tool chains, lots of platforms and tools kind of coming together, sharing data, working together, automating together. >>Well. Yeah, we, so I think it's going to be super important to keep a pulse on the new tools. Right. Make sure that we're on the forefront of what customers are using and just continuing to meet them where they are. And a lot of that honestly, is working with AWS too, right? Like they have great services and EKS and managed Prometheus's. Um, so we want to make sure that we continue to work with that team and support their services as that launched as well. >>Great stuff. I got a couple of minutes left. I felt I'll throw one more question in there since I got two great experts here. Um, just, you know, a little bit change of pace, more of an industry question. That's really no wrong answer, but I'd love to get your reaction to, um, the SAS conversation cloud has changed what used to be SAS. SAS was, oh yeah. Software as a service. Now that you have all these kinds of new kinds of you have automation, horizontally, scalable cloud and edge, you now have vertical machine learning. Data-driven insights. A lot of things in the stack are changing. So the question is what's the new SAS look like it's the same as the old SAS? Or is it a new kind of refactoring of what SAS is? What's your take on this? >>Yeah. Um, there's a web, please jump in here wherever. But in, in my view, um, it's a spectrum, right? There's there's customers that are on both ends of this. Some customers just want a fully hosted, fully managed product that wouldn't benefit from the luxury of not having to do any, any sort of infrastructure management or patching or anything like that. And they just want to consume a great product. Um, on the other hand, there's other customers that have more highly regulated industries or security requirements, and they're going to need things to deploy in their environment. Um, right now QP cost is, is self hosted. But I think in the future, we want to make sure that, you know, we, we have versions of our product available for customers across that entire spectrum. Um, so that, you know, if somebody wants the benefit of just not having to manage anything, they can use a fully self hosted sat or a fully multitenant managed SAS, or, you know, other customers can use a self hosted product. And then there's going to be customers that are in the middle, right, where there's certain components that are okay to be a SAS or hosted elsewhere. But then there's going to be components that are really important to keep in their own environment. So I think, uh, it's really across the board and it's going to depend on customer and customer, but it's important to make sure we have options for all of them. >>Great guys, we have SAS, same as the old SAS. What's the SAS playbook. Now >>I think it is such a deep and interesting question and one that, um, it's going to touch so many aspects of software and on our lives, I predict that we'll continue to see this, um, you know, tension or real trade-off across on the one hand convenience. And now on the other hand, security, privacy and control. Um, and I think, you know, like Alex mentioned, you know, different organizations are going to make different decisions here based on kind of their relative trade-offs. Um, I think it's going to be of epic proportions. I think, you know, we'll look back on this period and just say that, you know, this was one of the foundational questions of how to get this right. We ultimately view it as like, again, we want to offer choice, um, and make, uh, make every choice be great, but let our users, uh, pick the right one, given their profile on those, on those streets. >>I think, I think it's a great comment choice. And also you got now dimensions of implementations, right? Multitenant, custom regulated, secure. I want have all these controls. Um, it's great. No one, no one SaaS rules the world, so to speak. So it's again, great, great dynamic. But ultimately, if you want to leverage the data, is it horizontally addressable? MultiTech and again, this is a whole nother ball game we're watching this closely and you guys are in the middle of it with cube costs, as you guys are creating that baseline for customers. Uh, congratulations. Uh, great to see you where thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having us again. Okay. Great. Conservation aiders startup showcase open cloud innovators here. Open source is driving a lot of value as it goes. Commercial, going to the next generation. This is season two episode, one of the AWS startup series with the cube. Thanks for watching.