>> Presenter: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe, these are cloud native insights. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. When we launched this program, we talked about, how do we take advantage of the innovation and agility that's in the cloud? And of course, one of the big components that we've talked about for many years on theCUBE is, how do we empower developers? and developers are helping change things, and I'm really happy to welcome to the program first time guests that helped build many of the tools that developers are very well familiar. So Tom Preston Werner, he is the co-founder of Chatterbug, he is the creator of redwoodjs, we had an early episode, the JAMstack Netlify team, he's also on the board for that, and we'll talk about those pieces. People might know him, if you check him out on Wikipedia, you know, GitHub, he was one of the co-founders as well as held both CTO and CEO roles there. I could go on but Tom, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, so let's start there, Tom, you know, when I live in the enterprise space, how do you take advantage of new things? One of the biggest challenges out there is, let's go to something new, but let's do it the old way. And we know that that really doesn't take advantage of it you know, I think back to the oldest, some of the older technologies, it's like, well, you know, if I talk to people that are riding horses, what do they want? You know, well, I want faster horses, not the, you know, let's completely change things. I was hearing a stat that, you know, back in the early days of cars, we had like, 30% of them were electric cars, and now it's one. So what's old is new again, but I digress. One, as I mentioned, you know, GitHub, of course, is, you know, such a fundamental piece when we look at in the technology space over the last decade, you know, get in general, GitHub, specifically, of course, has created so much value engaged, you know, just millions and millions of developers and transform businesses. Take us back a little bit and you know, like to get your philosophy on, you know, building tools, how do you do it? How do you think about it? And what's inspired you? >> Yeah, I think it goes a long way back to just wanting to build things for the community. One of the first big projects I worked on was called Gravatar, and I remember laying in bed staring at the ceiling, just trying to think up some idea that that would contribute to what we then called The Blogosphere, and I came up with an idea for avatars that would follow you around and I coded it up and I got it out to a few bloggers and they started using it, and it caught on and it was really, it really introduced me to this idea that no matter who you are, where you come from, or what your background is, you know, I grew up in Iowa, things are very different there. And with with the Internet, and the ability to code, you can impact the world in really significant ways. And so it follows on from there, and I think GitHub is an extension of that desire to really put things into the world that will be useful for people, and knowing that, if you have the ability to code and especially with the advent of web applications as a common tool, there's such power in that you have global reach, you just need a computer and the ability to code and you can create these things, and GitHub kind of became that. It was just, it started out really as a side project, and I hoped that someday it would be able to support me to work on it full time. But I, we started building it just because we wanted it to exist. And that's most of what I work on is, is just ideas that I want to exist in the world. >> Yeah, it's been one of those great trends to watch at, you know, there were certain technologies that used to have to be a nation state, or, you know, one of the one of the global 50 companies to take advantage of it. Now, tools like GitHub, making it so that, you know, the smallest company or even the individuals can participate in communities, can create and build you know, the building is such an important theme. So Maybe, let's fast forward a little bit if we would, I mentioned Netlify and JAMstack, you talked about the blogosphere, that team is helping to really reinvent how we think about the web, you know, it's real time, It's high performance, and you know, we need to be able to get that to where everybody is. So, you know, back in the early days, web pages, you know, relatively static and, you know, had certain criteria, and now, of course, you know, edge devices and the global population change things. So, you know, you, you've been engaged in a, you know, huge supporter of that project, and that'll lead us towards the redwoods discussion, but maybe bring us as to how you got involved there, and what got you excited? >> Well, like you said, Everything old is new again and I think that's true in fashion. It's also true in technology, in a lot of ways, and the JAMstack really is taking these old ideas where the web started, taking files and just serving them as static files and it's super fast, and it's extremely secure. This is how the internet started, and now we've sort of come full circle. But we've added a lot of really nice things and workflows on top of that. And so my journey into the JAMstack, I suppose, started more than a decade ago, when I started working on a project called Jekyll, that's a, I called it at the time, A Blog Aware Static Site Generator. So you would write your blog articles, and you would run it through Jekyll, and that would take your markdown, you'd write your articles in markdown, and it would combine them with a, some kind of a theme that you would have, and that would output static pages that represented your blog, and then you could serve those from any kind of static blog serving system. GitHub had has one built in called GitHub Pages, and so we ended up adopting Jekyll for GitHub Pages. So everything that you put up on GitHub Pages. would be run through Jekyll, and so it was a really natural place to put your blog. And so I had a blog post, one of my blog posts using Jekyll was called Blogging Like A Hacker. And it was this idea that you don't need WordPress, you don't need to have a database somewhere that's, that's hackable, that's going to cause you security problems, all the WordPress admin stuff that constantly is being attacked. You don't need all that, like you can just write articles in flat files, and then turn them into a blog statically and then put those up to serve them somewhere, right? And so when I say it like that, it sounds a little bit like the JAMstack, right? That's not how we thought about it at the time, because it was really hard to do dynamic things. So if you wanted to have comments on your blog for instance, then you needed to have some third party service that you would embed a component onto your blog, so you could receive comments. And so you had to start gluing things together, but even then, again, that sounds a little bit like the JAMstack. So it's all of these ideas that have been, evolving over the last decade to 15 years, that now we finally have an entire tool chain and adding Git on top of that and Git based workflows, and being able to push to GitHub and someone like Netlify can pick those up and publish them, and you have all these third party services that you can glue together without having to build them yourself. All of the billing things, like there's just the ecosystem is so much more advanced now, so many more bits are available for you to piece together that in a very short amount of time, you can have an extremely performant site capable of taking payments, and doing all of the dynamic things that we want to do. Well, many, I should say many of the dynamic things that we want to do, and it's fast and secure. So it's like the web used to be when the web started, but, now you can do all the modern things that you want to do. >> You're giving me flashbacks remembering how I glued discus into my Tumblr instance when that was rolling out. (laughing) >> That's what I was referring to, discuss. >> Yeah, so absolutely, you talk about there's just such a robust ecosystem out there, and one of the real challenges we have out there is, people will come in and they say, "Oh my gosh, where do I start?" And it's like, well, where do you want to go? There's the Paradox of Choice, and that I believe is one of the things that led you to create Redwoods. So help explain to our audience you know, you created this project Redwood, it related to JAMstack, but, but I'll let you explain you know, what it is in life needed? >> Yeah, Redwood is a response to a couple of things. One of those things, is the JavaScript world has, as everything has evolved in tremendous way, in all kinds of ways and almost entirely positive I think. The language itself has been improved so much from when I was a teenager using view source and copy pasting stuff into you know, some random X Files fan site. To now it's a first class language I can compete with with everything, from a ergonomics perspective. I really enjoy programming in it and I come from a Ruby, Ruby on Rails background and now I'm very happy in JavaScript that was not true even five, seven years ago, right? So JavaScript itself has changed a lot. Along with that comes NPM in the whole packaging universe, of availability of modules, right? So most of the things that you want to do, you can go and you can search and find code that's going to do those things for you, and so being able to, to just pull those into your projects so easily. That is amazing, right? The power that that gives you is tremendous. The problem comes in when, like you said, you have the Paradox of Choice. Now you have, not just one way to do something, but you have 100 ways to do something, right? And now as a as a developer, and especially as a new developer, someone who's just learning how to build web applications, you come into this and you say, all you see is the complexity, just overwhelming complexity, and every language goes through this. They go through a phase of sort of this Cambrian explosion of possibilities as people get excited, and you see that the web is embracing these technologies, and you see what's possible. Everyone gets excited and involved and starts creating solution after solution after solution, often times to the same problems. And that's a good thing, right, like exploring the territory is a good and necessary part of the evolution of programming languages and programming ecosystems. But there's comes a time where that becomes overwhelming and starts to trend towards being a negative. And so at Chatterbug, which is a foreign language learning service, if you want to learn how to speak French or Spanish or German, we'll help you do that, as part of that work, we started using react on the front end, because I really love what react brings you from a JavaScript and interactivity perspective. But along with react, you have to make about 50 other choices of technologies to use to actually create a fully capable website, something for state management, you got to choose a way to do JavaScript or sorry, CSS. There's 100 things that you have to choose, and it's, it seems very arbitrary and you go through a lot of churn, you choose one, and then the next day an article comes out and then people raving about another one, and then you choose, you're like, Oh, that one looks really nice. You know, grass is always greener, and so Redwood is a bit of a, an answer to that, or a response to that, which is to say, we've learned a lot of things now about what works in building with react, especially on the front end. And what I really want to do is have a tool that's more like Ruby on Rails, where I come from, having done years and years of Ruby on Rails, what GitHub was built with. And Ruby on Rails presents to you a fully capable web application framework that has made all the choices or most of the choices, many of the important choices. And the same is kind of missing in the JavaScript TypeScript world and so, when I saw Netlify come out with their feature where you could commit the code for a lambda function to your repository, and if you push that up to GitHub, Netlify will grab it, and they will orchestrate deploying that code to an AWS lambda so that you can run business logic in a lambda but without having to touch AWS, because touching AWS is another gigantic piece of complexity, and their user interfaces are sometimes challenging, I'll say. That, that then made me think that, here finally is the ability to combine everything that's awesome about the JAMstack and static files, and security, and this workflow, with the ability to do business logic, and that sounded to me like the makings of a full stack web application framework, and I kept waiting for someone to come out and be like, hey, tada, like we glued this all together, and here's your thing, that's rails, but for the JAMstack, JavaScript, TypeScript world and nobody was doing it. And so I started working on it myself, and that has become Redwoodjs. >> It's one of the things that excited me the early days when I looked into Serverless was that, that low bar to entry, you know, I didn't have to have, you know, a CS degree or five years of understanding a certain code base to be able to take advantage of it. Feels like you're hoping to extend that, it believe it's one of your passions, you know, helping with with Chatterbug and like, you know, helping people with that learning. What do you feel is the state out there? What's your thoughts about kind of the future of jobs, when it when it comes to this space? >> I think the future of jobs in technology and especially software development is, I mean, there is no, there is no better outlook for any profession than that. I mean, this is the, this is where the world is going, more and more of what we want to accomplish, we do in software and it happens across every industry. I mean, just look at Tesla's for instance, right? You think about automobiles and the car that you owned, you know, 10 years ago, and you're like, I don't know, I know there's a computer in here somewhere, but like, I don't really, you know, either the software for it is terrible, and you're like, who, when was the last time you actually use the navigation system in your car, right? You just like get like just turn that off because it's, it's so horrible. And then Tesla comes along and says, hey, what if we actually made all this stuff useful, and had a thoughtful interface and essentially built a car that where everything was controlled with software, and so now cars are are basically software wrapped in hardware, and the experience is amazing. And the same is true of everything, look at your, look at how many things that your phone has replaced that used to be physical devices. Look at manufacturing processes, look at any any element of bureaucracy, all of this stuff is mediated by computers, and oftentimes it's done badly. But this just shows how much opportunity there is speaking of like governmental websites, right, you go to the DMV, and you try to schedule an appointment, and you just have no confidence that that's going to work out because the interfaces feel like they were written 15 years ago, and sometimes I think they were, written that long ago. But there's so much, there's still so much improvement to be had and all of that is going to take developers to do it. Unless, you know, we figure out how to get AI to do it for us, and there's been some very interesting things lately around that angle, but to me, it's, humans will always be involved. And so, at some level, humans are telling machines what to do, whether you're doing it more or less directly, and having the ability to tell machines what to do gives you tremendous leverage. >> Yeah, we're big fans, if you know Erik Bryjolfsson and Andy McAfee from MIT, they've, you know, are very adamant that it's the combination of people plus machines that always will win against either people alone or machines alone. Tom, what, you know, right now we're in the middle of a global pandemic, there're financially, there's a lot of bad news around the globe right now. I've talked to many entrepreneurs that said, well, a downturn market is actually a great time to start something new. You're an investor, you've helped build lots of things. We talked a lot about lowering the bar for people to create and build new things. What do you see are some of the opportunities out there, if you know, you had to recommend for the entrepreneurs out there? Where should they be looking? >> I'd say look at all of the things in your life that have become challenging, because where there's challenge, where there's pain, there's opportunity for solutions. And especially when there's a big environmental change, which we see right now, with COVID-19, obviously has changed a lot of our behaviors and made some of the things that used to be easy. It's made those a lot harder, and so you see, certain segments of the economy are doing extremely well, namely technology and things that allow us to do interviews like this instead of in person, and so those industries are doing extremely well. So you look at the you look at the stock market in the United States, and it's it's very interesting, because while much of the country is suffering, the people that are already wealthy are doing very well, and technology companies are doing very well. And so the question for me is, what are the opportunities that we have, leveraging technology in the internet, to where we can create more opportunities for more people, to get people back to work, right? I think there's so much opportunity there. Just look at education, like the entire concept of educating kids right now and I have three. So we feel this very much, it has been turned on its head. And so we so you see many people looking for solutions in that space, and that's, I think that's as it should be. When things get, when things get challenged when our, our normal daily experience is so radically changed, there's opportunity there, because people are willing to change more quickly in a crisis, right? Because you need, you need something like any solution. And so some choice is going to be made, and where that's happening, then you can find early adopters more easily, than you can under other circumstances, and so in economic downturns, you often see that kind of behavior where these are crisis moments for people, you have an opportunity to come in and if you have something that could solve a problem for them, then you can get a user where that may have not been a problem for a person before. So where there is, where there is a crisis, there is always opportunity to help people solve their problems in different and better ways to address that crisis. So again, it goes back to pain, you know, and it doesn't have to be the pain from a crisis. It could be a pain from from anything. Just like with GitHub, it was, it was hard to share code as developers like it was, there was too much pain, and this was, we started it in 2008, right after the housing crisis. It was unrelated to that, but it turns out that when you start a company, when the economy is depressed in a certain way, then at least you can look forward to the economy getting better as you are building your company. >> Oh, Tom, Preston Werner, thank you so much for joining pleasure talking with you. I appreciate all of your input. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me. >> I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for joining this Episode of cloud native insights. Thank you for watching the theCUBE. (light music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. And when we kicked off this program, Cloud Native Insights, we wanted to talk about the innovation and agility that's happening, not just Cloud as a location. We're going to draw down a little bit into one of the very important pieces of a company and that's their websites and their applications, that live in that environment. And of course, that comes from a lot of changes over the years. Any of us that have been in tech for a couple of decades have worked from the early days, to of course today's multimedia globally distributed environment and everyone during the global pandemic, of course, has been (indistinct) straining their use of the internet. So really excited to welcome to the program the two co-founders of Netlify. I have Matt Biilmann, who is the CEO, and his co-founder Christian Bach, who is the president both of Netlify really the company behind Jamstack, which we're going to explain and talk about a bit. Matt and Chris, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us >> All right so, let's start with just some of the basics. I expect that some of our audience is not familiar with Jamstack. You do a quick Google search and it's JavaScript, its APIs, its markup. And you say, okay, I understand what a bunch of that means. But, yeah, if you could give us kind of a compare contrast to what web development was before and how Jamstack's really helping to revolutionize what's happening in this space. >> Yes, so for many years, we built websites and web applications with an application based architecture, where every website or every application would be this monolithic application with typically like a load balancer, a set of web servers, application servers, and that database and every request through a page would go through this whole stack it would pass through the application layer, talk to the database, fetch template, merge data and template, build HTML on the fly and send it back to the user. And basically what we saw happening and what's been happening with the Jamstack is this decoupling of the actual front-end presentation layer of the websites and web applications and then the back-end layer. And the advantages there is that if you can really pre-build the front-end application layer, you can take the actual HTML, or an application shell and distribute it across a globally distributed network, you can get it into the hands of the user's browser very quickly. And then the back end, what we've seen happening there is that it's split up to all these different APIs and services you no longer have your one monolithic back end you have all these different services. Where some of your own but a lot of them are other people's services like Stripe or Twilio or Algolia or Contentful. So we've seen this shift to this architecture, where we're considered in a way that the stack has moved up a little from the old tooling where something like the LAMP stack would be common in really naming the programming language, the specific web server, the Linux server, the operating system, and so on right? And then up to a level where it's really about getting an application into the browser, using JavaScript as the runtime and talking to this whole new economy of APIs and services. >> Yeah, Chris I wonder if you could bring us inside your customers and the companies that you talk to. I think about for the longest time it was, maybe I just outsource my web development, but website is one of those key components that I share my value, I share what's going on, I want to be able to change it pretty often and there's so much more that I can do today than I could have done 10 years ago. We've watched that mark. So, help us understand, what skill sets do people need to have? what type of companies are using Jamstack? And, bring in if you can, Netlify. How is this a business and not just, an open source standards movement, that's helping to revolutionize what's happening? >> Absolutely, I mean, First of all, people using this and companies use this is extremely wide. Wide vertical, right? Its very horizontal. This is anyone with a digital property basically, right? I think what we've seen all the time is that, that we have a lot more channels than we used to have, right? So we started off just maybe having the one dot com, right? With limited functionality. And today, you have a multiple channels, right? You have the landing pages, you have the domains, you have lots of activities online. You have mobile apps and commerce is often a big part of it, and I would say especially the last few months, there's a lot of people that had the digital convergence points as one of many. And now it's the only ones, right? So I think it's become extremely important. I also think that when you look at your web infrastructure in general, it has been very complex, right? And you need a lot of different people, right? And you need to maintain staging environments, production lines, development environments. You need to, have a wide set of skills to maintain these things, right? And if a web developer wanted to do a lot of things, right? They have to go and tap DevOps and so on on the shoulder, right? And I think what the Jamstack is about saying, hey, you can get so much further as a web developer. Now, if you take the modern built tools, you can take the Git workflows, and you wrap around the browser that has become a full-fledged operating system and the API economy as Matt was just talking about. You have these workflows, or you potentially have these workflows, where you can get so much further, right? And that's very much Netlify submission. So Netlify saw this opportunity of decoupling the front end from the back end of the building from the hosting of creating an approach to making websites that would be many times faster, 'cause you have multiple points of origin and you don't feel fredurous. It's many times safer. There's not that huge surface area of attack. It's much more scalable, and so on. It was sort of a win-win-win. But the problem was, there was no viable workflow. If you take a traditional CDN, and you put it in, it doesn't matter really, if it's one or the other. As good as they (indistinct) services, they're all meant to sit in front of an origin, right? They're meant to buffer something. And if you have the gems, there's no origin in that way, right? The network in itself has to be an origin so it has to be architectured quite differently. And then there's a lot of things around CDCI and how you server lists and so on. That all had to be sort of re-merged . And Netlify is that glue, it is that platform that takes you from local development all the way out to edge nodes. But allows you to mix and match any tool. So it's not program independent. So you can say, well, we use a build tool, and that's PHP or Ruby or JavaScript, the react or Next or whatever it might be, right? And we use these APIs for this server, for this property. Over here we have a commerce site. Over here, we have a dotcom, that needs a huge enterprise CMS with tons of stakeholders. But the thing is that all of those now becomes something that plugs into your website. Rather than have to drive the website itself. And that's sort of frees up the silos. So when we see people using Netlify, we have companies using Netlify. Big Fitness Company, for example, that own fitness company that uses us for developer documentation, or their marketing sites, but also for their dotcom. But even if you go to the equipment that people have at home, and you log in, that's actually using some very nifty identity and remote based access control for Netlify and if you watch the video there, it's also going through a Netlify player, all right? We have fast food chains that has their dotcom and their marketing sites, but also the kiosks down in the store like the menus, the screens there. Rather than being an old Windows NT server running some .NET application in a dusty corner, why not have it like that? And so, both the category but also Netlify sort of brings in a solution and because it's decoupled from all those architectural choices, that means that you can now use the solution in a much, much wider setting. And we were sort of first to market doing this. They get serverless approach where you just push your serverless functions to get better Netlify. First Feature Deploy Previews Were invented by us and so on. So the Jamstack is an extremely wide fundamental architectural approach that matches basically anyone that wants to build web properties. Netlify is the segnostic wide platform that just makes it possible. >> Yeah, good Chris actually, I saw the Peloton use case up on the website and you're right, a very different experience rather than I bring my device, is it synced? Does it work with it? Really integrates those solutions. And you just brought up serverless, which is actually how I got connected to talk in Netlify. So, Matt, sorry, I think you wanted to jump in there but I was wondering if you could help us. I've looked at serverless and what the promise of serverless of course, is that I don't need to think about that underlying infrastructure. I just like developers build our applications. Well, feels like that's really the same mission that you have. And they're serverless is a piece of your story. So, maybe explain (indistinct) that out a little for us. >> Absolutely, I think it ties in, right? Basically, what we saw just from a architectural perspective was this approach of really decoupling front end and back end and so on and working in a new way that gave a lot of benefits to the inducers in performance and security and so on right? But on the other hand, early on, what we saw was that to adopt that approach, like developers had to deal with lot of different moving pieces like CICD, CDN. What to do about the API endpoints that didn't need to be dynamic, and so on. And as Netlify, what we saw was that we could give one intro and workflow for all of this and make it extremely easy for developers to work with this thing. And serverless plays a really important piece there, right? Because when Amazon pioneered AWS Lambda and took it to the world, right? I think the promise also for the front-end web developers of being able to simply write code and then not have to worry at all about where is it actually running? How are we scaling it? How are we operating it and so on, right? That's a really powerful promise, right? But at the same time, in the same way, what we saw earlier on was that for a front-end team to actually adopt serverless functions as part of the Jamstack, it introduced another level of complexity of now having to manage your serverless functions independent from your front end figuring out API Gateway endpoints for every one of them. And how about deployment pipeline for your functions layer versus deployment pipelines for the actual front end layer that's supposed to talk to those front ends. How about staging environments versus to production environments? How do you manage all that, right? So we saw that there was this inherent incredible potential, but also a lot of complexity, right? And as Netlify we saw that if we could give front end developers a web developers in general, an ene-to-end workflow, where they can work both with the front-end framework, write the code that will get deployed into the browser, but also just have a folder where they can write this serverless functions and then know that Netlify will take care of all of the wiring, right? When you open a pull request and get with new function we'll give you a URL on our globally distributed CDN where you can view both the whole front end, but also the function and sidestep sort of all of the complexities of linking together API Gateways, to functions of managing CICD pipelines and test environments and so on. And in the end, the serverless functions starts becoming a really important part of this Jamstack approach, right? Because you have this world where you have a front end that's often talking to many different APIs and services where again, some of your own and some other people's services. But really often you need some place to glue those together or to build your own custom API endpoint that talks to a couple of them and it has access to server site secrets and so on, right? And this idea of not having to suddenly operate and manage a whole set of servers and infrastructure just for that part of it, but simply just writing the code and then knowing, that you don't have to worry about the operation scalability or anything around that code. That's a really powerful paradigm. >> Yeah, that's one of the real challenges of the Cloud as you talk about the Paradox of Choice. There's so many ways to do things. Not necessarily... It's simple anybody... I was a blogger for many years and it was like, well, I'll just use the self-hosted WordPress, because I don't want to have to worry about that piece of it. Matt, I watched it you did a presentation talking about if I wanted to do WordPress hosted in a AWS that absolutely is not simple. I heard a podcast from one of your board members, Tom Preston Werner, talking about we need to be more opinionated. We need to be able to give more guidance to developers, maybe Chris if you could, how are we when the proliferation of choice, keeps increasing, making sure that people can... How do I make that decision tree? And how do we try to keep it simple? >> Absolutely, I mean, and I actually think that, that's a super relevant question, because you have a lot of choice as a web developer today. Front-end developers used to cut out Photoshop files and turn them into HTML, right? Now with the new advanced markup, and they have all these frameworks and flavors of JavaScript to choose between and there's these powerful build tools, And all those workflows and the browser can do everything you can imagine, right? And so yeah, there is a lot of choice out there, right? And I think, for Netlify what's extremely important is that we are opinionated in the right places. And so when it comes to, for example, a front-end tool and built tools and these things that web developers often face with having to choose between. Our role is to make it as simple as possible to use any of them. But also give you the opportunity of saying, well, this new paradigm allows you to actually mix and match, right? It allows you to use this tool for this property and this tool for this property and gives you a ton of flexibility. But still, come under one roof of a platform like Netlify. And I think that is very powerful. And so we also don't want to choose for you, we want to inform your choices and we want to make it as easy as possible to go and say, hey, these are my needs, what direction should I be going? And of course, we work with enterprise clients, so on migration services, and so on, right? And where we help them a lot with that. But if we locked down on a single flavor, or a single bill tool or a single front end framework, then we also limit the application of what we bring to market and we want to remain a little more open-ended there. But I think there's a lot complexity, a platform like Netlify is all about simplification. So all that wiring that Matt just mentioned, that at least goes, right? You don't spend hours configuring bondage caching and trying to find those edge cases, it just works. And that's a huge game changer for a lot of people, right? But there's definitely parts of the ecosystem that has a lot of choice. And we do our best to inform. And I think, under hand holding part, adjacent to that is the story of, well, do we then start using content management systems? Is this a whole new? Is it out with the old and in with the new? And I would say, you still have a lot of those needs, right? You still have non-technical people, for example, that needs to be able to update and create moves and content, and so on, right? And create content. And so you very often will need and an E-commerce solution or content management systems and so on. But what we're seeing there, is that we're speaking basically with every single major CMS out there. That are saying we're working on a headless system, or we already have a headless version, or we just gone full headless, that means that we work decoupled. So we don't no longer need to build the site. But we just provide like an independent source of content. And then it plugs into a platform like Netlify. So that can bring a lot of simplicity. And now you just have to maintain your content, but you don't have to worry about all the different environments and what is up to date and how does some of the infrastructure look like you press a button that commits to get a default preview, and it looks the same everywhere. >> I'm curious, what impact the current global pandemic has had on Netlify, and your customers. I saw you've got a COVID tracking project that you've done. But also now just there's different considerations when I think about what services I need to access from the web and what kind of connectivity the ultimate end user would have. So, what learnings have you had? What's involved there? >> In, obviously we, it depends a lot on, as Chris mentioned, right? The game circus is adopted horizontally across all kinds of areas and businesses and so on, right? So, we've of course seen businesses in sectors that are having a hard time and on the other hand, we've seen businesses and sectors that are exploding, right? We did immediately when the lockdown started happening and the pandemic started happening we set aside like a free plan for projects working in the space of tackling the information sharing around COVID and finding solutions and so on. And that was really interesting to see you mention the COVID tracking project, right? Which was a project like built a short time by small group of distributed incredibly talented front end developers and scientists and so on, right? And I think it was interesting to see that, how the Jamstack and our tooling and so on also really made it possible for them to build as a small distributed team the set of data information and tooling to a global audience, right? Seeing huge traffic peaks at time and just knowing that their architecture and our infrastructure could handle it for them. >> All right. Chris, I've got one, a little bit off to the side here. When I look at what Netlify is doing, you talk about having an open and independent web. And while we are fully supportive of that, we're a little concerned sometimes. If you look at what's happening across the globe, there's a lot of discussions. Will the internet actually fragment? Will certain countries wall off certain environments? Any concerns there? What do you look at? What are you hearing from your customers when you talk about that mission? >> It's one of the big challenges of all time, right? I think we all maybe took for given the Internet as the standard it became right? The way that you can publish without permission is pretty magnificent, right? And it would be indescribably painful for civilization if we lost that, right? And I think fragmentation is something that we all have to sort of worry around. From the way we see it, is that the web, the traditional monolithic approach, right? To which led to as a web that wasn't secure enough and wasn't scalable enough and wasn't performing enough and that's, for example, what opened the door for mobile applications, right? Where it just didn't make sense to pull in the UI every time you turn the page. So we ended up with a form that's it. We prebuilt the application, you download it, and then you speak to service for anything then atmosphere come up with it, right. And that makes perfect sense. That's basically the same architecture that we're bringing to the web a very large scale. Of course, the problem is that now there are gatekeepers there, right? There people, you have to ask for permission to publish and so on. And, and there are other attempts to say, "Hey, we need a performing web." And there's a very big players out there that say, "Let's come over and just..." Do we even need to call it the Internet? Can we just call it our company website? I'm not going to name any names here, right? But leading down, it's what we've called walled gardens, that are great for absolutely no one except for the company. And what we believe is that if you have a web that is secure and is scalable, and it's performant enough to justify at least the architecture maintaining and not having to run into any walled gardens and still say no, you don't need to use a handful of commercial platforms if you want to be heard rather than have your own web properties on your own custom domains, right? I think that's the part of the open independent viable web that we're fighting for. Basically, one that adopts and keeps adopting an architecture that is something that levels the playing field. And then they would also say, why Netlify? I mean, a few years before we started, like, try configuring your own CDN. And like that was reserved for the very, very large tech players. Now you can comment, you can literally click a button on Netlify, you get custom domain and ACS post process site that's globally distributed, automatically integrated into get. And that's on the premium plan. And so as a startup, you can level set together with everyone else and be available widely across the globe without performance issues, immediately. And so in that way, I'm also seeing that's a democrat sensation of performance, right? That means that, that's great. And for places where you see developing economies, where you often have brownouts, where you often can't depend on having viable services and is locally and so on, this idea of having he cover that and having something that's just automatically, you know what, don't even worry about it, because it's already ready to go in all these packets all around the world. That's a huge game changer. That's actually what we see a lot of adoption of the gems they can never find in those places as well. Guess that's just such a promise to the architecture. So, I hear what you're saying and I'm also very concerned about a fragmented web for political reasons as well across the globe. And from our angle, the way we fight for this is to make sure that it retains using an architecture that makes it accessible for me. >> Yeah, I heard many years ago, a friend of mine said, if you're a technologist it means that in general you are a technology optimist, which I definitely try to be. So, I love Chris how you've just brought in some of the potential opportunity Matt, I want to give you just... People out there they hear like oh, 5G is coming, it's going to completely change the world. Anything that you're seeing on your side as to real opportunities that we will see, just a step function in what your company is using. Jamstack, partnering with Netlify in your ecosystem. What are some of the early things that you see that are exciting you down the line for this? >> Part of it is simply like the whole ecosystem around the gem stalk growing up and the tooling, the APIs, the frameworks available around it, and the level of innovation that's triggered. And especially how it's triggering in... Especially how we're seeing like the potential for small, distributed teams to work together and build things with a global impact in a short time. And I remember a couple of years ago, we did a hackathon with together with freeCodeCamp. And of course, like since it was with freeCodeCamp, it was mostly like teams were mostly fairly new to programming and so on, right? It was pretty amazing to see what over a weekend with this architecture and with this tooling, with the vendors that were present there and helping out and so on, what the small teams could actually get done in a weekend, right? Like I remember the winning team had an app where the whole room would see an image on the main stage screen and then on their phone, try to place that image on the map and you would real time see how people ranked, how close they got and get a winner and so on, right? And that was all just from combining APIs and tooling, like history, like Netlify, like Honor Bee, like Google Maps, and so on, right? And I think, in some way we shouldn't forget just how much this kind of ecosystem of readily available APIs and services around this front end stake. It's allowing people to build things that years ago would have taken a very big team probably like a year to build, and suddenly you can have a relatively small group of relatively new programmers built something really impressive, right? So I think that's a trend we'll see continue accelerating And me and Chris are personally involved in advising and helping out a lot of these new startups in the space that are trying to bring new tooling to the world that makes more and more of these things possible and accessible. >> Well, Chris and Matt, I really appreciate you both joining such an exciting space. Talk about the cloud, agility and innovation, such a robust ecosystem. Thank you so much for joining. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> And I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for joining and look forward to hearing more about your CUBE insight. (soft music)