>> Announcer: 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 and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm coming from the Boston area studio. We were supposed to have a KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam. First in the spring, they pushed it off to the summer, and, of course, the decision due to the global pandemic is it's making it virtual. But happy to welcome to the program two guests that I was planning to have on in person, but couldn't wait for our virtual coverage of the event, though. Happy to welcome the co-founders of TriggerMesh. Sitting in the middle is Mark Hinkle, who is the CEO of the company, and to the other side is Sebastien Goasguen, who is also the co-founder and the Chief Product Officer. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us, Stu. >> Thanks, Stu. >> All right, so, it's interesting, we've been covering the cloud native space for a number of years, and especially at KubeCon, there's always some of those discussions of does cloud kill on-premises, does this new thing kill that old thing. And in some of the early days of KubeCon, it was like, well, containers are really interesting, and there was all the buzz for years about Docker but, hey, the next thing is going to be serverless. And serverless, we don't need to think about any of that stuff, it's the nirvana of what developers wanted. So therefore, let's not worry about containers, but you sit in that space really helping to connect between some of the various pieces. So, I guess, Sebastien, maybe if I could start with you, 'cause you've built some of these various projects, when you go through and look at your background, you've been involved in the co-business space, uBLAS, and now for TriggerMesh but, you know, give us some of that background as to how, from a technological under pinnings, the community's been thinking about how these worlds fit together. >> Yeah sure, it's very interesting because first, the container rejuvenation started with Docker obviously and then Kubernetes appeared, and the entire community started building this. And this was really an evolution from the virtual machine orchestration, right. People needing a better way to package applications, deploy them, and they said, "You know what, "virtual machines are not that great for this. "Can't we have a better vehicle to do this" and that's where, really, containers took over. And it made total sense and so we saw this switch from, craziness about open stack and even cloud stack that Mark and I worked on, and putting all the focus on containers. And then comes AWS always innovating, always in the lead, and AWS saying, "Hey, you know what? "Actually, we need to go serverless. "We need to forget about the infrastructure. "What people want is really deploy applications "without worrying about the infrastructure. "They want things that are going to auto scale. "They want to pay very little, even pay per function call "and not pay when your VM is up." So AWS really pushed this mindset of serverless, but then what was the meaning in that realm of containers, and that's when I started Kubeless and I said, "You know what, if you would need to build function "as a service, you should build it on Kubernetes, "and use Kubernetes as a platform." And from there we started started seeing this fight, a little bit, between people, saying "Hey, forget containers, go serverless." So in TriggerMesh, we're not really taking that stance. We really see on-premises has, it's always going to be here, we have worked clouds on-premises, we have our own data centers but definitely there is more and more cloud usage, and when you start using the cloud you don't want to care about the infrastructure in the cloud, right. So, you want as much serverless as possible in the cloud, but you know you have to deal with your on-premises, data bases and some work loads and so on. So you have to be a pragmatic and you have to pick the best of both worlds and keep moving to modernize your stack and your IT in general. >> Excellent, alright so Mark, at the CNCF I'd seen the Knative project come out and it was talking about how we can connect containers and serverless, and one of the questions I'd been asking is "Well look, there are a lot "of open source projects for serverless." But when I talk to the community, when I talk to users, you say serverless, I think AWS. Sebastien was just talking about, so, I was sitting at the KubeCon shows and talking to the vendors and a lot of really big vendors were working on Knative, Oracle, IBM, RedHat and others and I said if this doesn't connect with AWS first and Azure second, I don't understand what we're doing. Yes, there's probably a place for on-premises but that was when, I think you and I had a conversation, we'd been looking at this space, so how did the ideas that Sebastien talked about turn into an initiative and a company of TriggerMesh. >> Well, early on we latched onto the Knative announcement that Google made. Google had given Sebastien some insight into where they were going with serverless, and the Knative project before it launched. And then they actually quoted him in the release which started interest in our company which was the only company in name at that point. But we really didn't know where Knative and Kubernetes together were going and the serverless movement, but we thought at first that there would need to be management capabilities to do lifecycle management around serverless functions, but what we realized, or Sebastien realized, early on was that it's not so much the management of serverless, because the whole idea of serverless is to abstract away all of the severs and architecture so that all you're really dealing with is the run time. So the problem that we saw early on was not managing but actually integrating applications across serverless framework, so the name TriggerMesh, that came from the idea that you trigger serverless functions and that you would mesh architectures whether they be legacy applications or they be file services or other serverless clouds across the fabric of the internet. So that's Triggermesh and that's really where we're going and we see that there's a couple of proof points in our industry for that already and people having the desire to do that. >> All right excellent, so that integration that you're talking about. Help Sebastien explain, there's some news I believe its the EveryBridge Cloud Native Integration Platform that's just announced. Help us understand what that is and what should we be kind of comparing it to other solutions in the industry today. >> Yeah so, you know we are very happy about the EveryBridge announcement and it's really, we're getting beta, we are doing a beta release of EveryBridge available in our SaaS cloud, the Triggermesh.io and really to first piggy back on what Mark was saying, is that a lot of people still believe serverless is just functions, right. And for us serverless is much more than this. Serverless is about building event driven applications. We see it with AWS, with things like they are doing with EventBridge, for example, but we really believe in this mindset. What we are trying to do is to help people build applications, build cloud native applications, that fundamentally are event driven and they are linking cloud services in the public cloud providers and also on-premises work load, right. So EveryBridge allows people to do this, to build those cloud native apps as basic event flows that connect event sources wherever they are, could be events that are on-prem from an eCommerce application, ERP application, could be events that are circulating through a Kafka infrastructure on-prem, and people can connect those event sources with what we call targets. So those targets could be on-premises, they would be OpenShift work loads for example or they could be in the cloud at AWS lambda functions, Google cloud run, or even dedicated SaaS like Twilio, SendGrid, and so on, so that's when we saw really over the last 18 to almost two years now, is that serverless is more of an integration problem, more like traditional IPaaS that we've seen, right. So basically we are building a new IPaaS solution at the frontier of serverless offerings from the public clouds, traditional messaging systems like Kafka, Remittent, Q and so on, plus the, I would say, the old IPaaS solution and we're doing all of this backed by Kubernetes and Knative. >> Excellent, so Mark I heard Sebastien talking about, he mentioned OpenShift, talked about Google, speak a little bit to really the ecosystems, the market places that TriggerMesh fits into. What are the use cases that you are seeing customers using. >> Yeah, I think a couple of the, to the dive into the on-prem triggers we have capabilities to trigger oracle database changes that could actually pick off cloud based ETL transactions. We're seeing that users are going through digital transformation and really to be more specific given the global climate right now, it's remote work, and the idea of lifting and shifting all of your infrastructure into the cloud is pretty daunting and long ask, but if you can front end those systems with new cloud native architecture and you have a way to create those event flows to tie in your existing systems to new portals for your employees to get their work done, automate workflows to provision new systems, like Zoom for example, and other conferencing systems, you can use the serverless front ends and work flows that actually integrate with all of your existing infrastructure and give you a way to extend your life of your applications and modernize them. >> Yeah, the long pole on attending modernization is that application. Sebastien maybe I'd come to you on this is, I think about iPaaS, when you look at that space they talk about all the integration that they need to work on, usually there are certifications involved, you mentioned Oracle databases, these are things that we need to go in there with a engineering effort and make sure that it is tested and certified by the ISV out there. Does containerization, Kubernetes, and serverless, does this change it at all, does this make it easier to move along these environments? I guess the question is for the enterprise, normally this change is rather slow. Mark was just alluding to the fact that we need to do some of these things faster, to try to react from what's happening in the world. >> Yeah, I think that's the entire premise of containers. It's speeding up the software life cycle and the speed at which we can deliver new features, for all our applications and so on. So, a big part of the job, when Docker started and then Kubernetes has been, if you adopt that type of infrastructure and that type of artifact, containers, you're going to speed up your software management and software delivery. So now what happens is that you have slow moving pieces, maybe pieces that you've had in your data center for 10, 20 years, for quite a while, and then you have these extremely fast moving environment, which is containerized and running Kubernetes plus the cloud. That's even, we could say even faster moving, and you can, that's definitely the challenge, that's where we see the value and that's where we see the struggle, is that you have all those big companies that have those slow moving pieces Oracle DB, IBM MQ, and so on and they need to make those pieces relevant in a fast moving containerized world and in a cloud native world, right. So how do you bridge that gap? Well that's what we do, we provide bridges. We provide integration bridges with every bridge, there you go. So we connect the event sources from Oracle DB and MQ and we bring that to a more fast moving cloud native environment, whether it's managed Kubernetes on Google GKE or whether its still on-prem in OpenShift. >> Mark, want to get your view point, just being a start up in today's global environment, obviously, you look at the cloud data space, many of the companies are distributed. We're talking to Sebastien from over in Europe, you're down in North Carolina, but give us your view point as a startup. How is the current economic environment impacting you, impacting your partners, impacting your customers. >> So, our partners and customers are probably moving more slowly than we do as a startup because they had physical brick and mortar offices and now they are coming into our world. We're 100% virtual, we're in 3 continents across over 12 time zones. That kind of work versus where they're at, I think everybody is consciously moving ahead, the one thing that I will say is that their interest in being more like the startups that are virtual, don't have brick and mortar, are really good at online collaboration. They look at us for sort of inspiration on how they are going to do business going forward or at least for the foreseeable future. So, overall I think that, not only are we teaching them about cloud native technologies but we're just teaching them about distributed work forces in a quarantined world. >> Absolutely, and I think those are some of the key learnings that you look at that are diversity consistent in the cloud native space. Want to give you both a final word and-- >> And Stu if I just add something. Mark and I have been working from home for quite a while, eight to 10 years, and definitely right now this is not the normal working from home, right, we all have, most of us have kids at home 24/7. The cognitive load in the news is huge, this is not the normal environment. So we are extremely careful, we help each other definitely internally in the team, you know, India, Vietnam, Germany, Spain, U.S. We have to be extremely careful that everybody is not falling down and putting too much on the nerves and their spirits right, so not a normal environment and even though we know how to do it we have to be careful. >> Yeah Sebastien, I'm so glad you brought that up 'cause this is not just a, how do we move to a distributed system. There is the rest of the impact on that. All right so lets give you both final words. Hopefully, we absolutely will be gathering together even if we are remote for the KubeCon event for Europe, other event later on this year, but Sebastien let's start with you, final take aways. >> Yeah, so we are very excited to build a startup. It's fast moving, its an exciting industry and really seeing the beta release of EveryBridge for us. We are trying to bring the future of event driven application to everybody, event sources to targets for everyone, not just on AWS and taking all of the strength of Kubernetes with us. It's going to be a familiar system for all Kubernetes lovers. >> Great, and Mark. >> Well as we talked about today, we are very excited about the EveryBridge announcement, and if you are interested in a cloud native, serverless, digital transformation we think we have great tools for you. But on a more personal and global note, I think Sebastien hit something that's really important, it's that even though we are not all together it's really important to check in. Even these virtual sessions have been, it's nice to interact with your colleagues and friends in the industry but be kind to each other and don't just take it for granted. that everything is good at the other end of the wire so reach out to each other and we'll all get through this together. >> Well Mark and Sebastien, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely the personal pieces as well as TriggerMesh. You're helping to pull some of those technology communities together so congratulations on the progress and definitely look forward to tracking where you go from here. >> Thanks Stu. >> Thanks a lot. >> We appreciate it. >> All right be sure to check out theCUBE.net, we will be covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe as it goes virtual as well as lots of others in the cloud developer space. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Greetings from Los Angeles, Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We are on day three of the caves wall-to-wall coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon North America 21. We're pleased to welcome Mark Hinkle to the program, the co-founder and CEO of TriggerMesh. Mark welcome. >> Thank you, It's nice to be here. >> Lisa: Love the name. Very interesting TriggerMesh. Talk to us about what TriggerMesh does and what, when you were founded and what some of the gaps were that you saw in the market. >> Yeah, so TriggerMesh actually the Genesis of the name is in, cloud event, driven architecture. You trigger workloads. So that's the trigger and trigger mesh, and then mesh, we mesh services together, so cloud, so that's why we're called TriggerMesh. So we're a cloud native open source integration platform. And the idea is that, the number of cloud services are proliferating. You still have stuff in your data center that you can't decommission and just wholesale lift and shift to the cloud. So we wanted to provide a platform to create workflows from the data center, to the cloud, from cloud to cloud and not, and use all the cloud native design principles, but not leave your past behind. So that's, what we do. We're, very, we were cloud, we are cloud operators and developers, and we wanted the experience to be very similar to the way that DevOps folks are doing infrastructure code and deploying that we want to make it easy to do integration as code. So we follow the same design patterns, use the same domain languages, some of those tools like Hashi corpse, Terraform, and that that's what we do and how we go about doing it. >> Lisa: And when were you guys founded? >> September, 2018. >> Oh so your young, your three years young. >> Three years it's feels like 21 >> I bet. >> And startup years it's a lot has happened, but yeah, we my co-founder and I were former early cloud folks. We were at cloud.com worked through the OpenStack years and the CloudStack, and we just saw the pattern of, abstraction coming about. So first you abstract the hardware, then you abstract the operating system. And now at with the Kubernetes container, you know, evolution, you're abstracting it up to the application layer and we want it to be able to provide tooling that lets you take full advantage of that. >> Dave: So being founded in 2018, what's your perception of that? The shift that happened during the pandemic in terms of the drive towards cloud adoption and the demands for services like you provide? >> Mark: Yeah, I think it's a mixed blessing. So we, people became more remote. They needed to enable digital transformation. Biggest thing, I think that that for us is, you know, you don't go to the bank anymore. And the banking industry is doing, you know, exponentially more remote, online transactions than in person. And it's very important. So we decided that financial services is where we were going to start with first because they have a lot of legacy architecture. They have a lot of need to move to the cloud to have better digital experiences. And we wanted to enable them to, you know, keep their mainframes online while they were still doing cutting edge, you know, mobile applications, that kind of thing. >> Lisa: And of course the legacy institutions like the BFA's the Wells Fargo, they're competing with the fintechs who are much more nimble, much more agile and able to sort of disrupt the financial services industry. Was that part of also your decision to start in financial services? >> It was a little bit of luck because we started with our network and it turned out the, you know, we saw, we started talking to our friends early on, cause we're a startup and said, this is what we're going to do. And where it really resonated was PNC bank was our, one of our first customers. You know, another financial regulatory company was another one, a couple of banks in Europe. And we, you know, as we started talking about what we were doing, that we just gravitated there because they had the, the biggest need, even though everybody has the need, their businesses are, you know, critically tied to digital transformation. >> So starting with financial services. >> It's, it's counter intuitive, isn't it? >> It was counterintuitive, but it lends credibility to any other industry vertical that you're going to approach. >> Yeah, yeah it does. It's a, it's a great, they're going to be our hardest customers and they have more at stake than a lot of like transactions are millions and millions of dollars per hour for these folks. So they don't want to play around, they, they have no tolerance for failure. So it's a good start, but it's sort of like taking up jogging and running a marathon in your first week. It's very very grilling in that sense, but it really has made us a lot better and gave us a lot of insight into the kinds of things we need to do from not just functionality, but security and that kind of thing. >> Where are you finding these customers with respect to adoption of Kubernetes? Are they leading? Are they knowing we've got to get there eventually from an infrastructure perspective? >> So the interesting thing is Kubernetes is a platform for us to deliver on, so we, we don't require you to be a Kubernetes expert we offer it as a SaaS, but what happens is that the Kubernetes folks are the ones that we end up really engaging with earlier on. And I think that we find that they're in this phase of they're containerizing their apps, that's the first step. And then they're putting them on Kubernetes and then their next step is a security and integration path. So once she, I think they call it and this is my buzzword of the show day two operations, right? So they, they get to day two and then they have a security and an integration concern before they go live. So they want to be able to make sure that they don't increase their attack face. And then they also want to make sure that this newly deployed containerized infrastructure is as well integrated as the previous, you know, virtualized or even, you know, on the server infrastructure that they had before. >> So TriggerMesh, doesn't solely work in the containerized world, you're, you're sort of you're bridging the divide. >> Mark: Yes. >> What percentage of the workloads that you're seeing are the result of modernization migration, as opposed to standing up net new application environments in Kubernetes? Do you have a sense for that? >> I think we live in a lot in the brown field. So, you know, folks that have an existing project that they're trying to bridge to it versus the Greenfield kind of, you know, the, the huge wins that you saw in the early cloud days of the Netflix and the Twitter's Dwayne scale. Now we're talking to the enterprises who have, you know, they have existing concerns. So I would say that it's, it's mostly people that are, you know, very few net new projects, unless it's a modernization and they're getting ready to decommission an old one, which is. >> Dave: So Brownfield financial services. You just said, you know, let's just, let's just go after that. >> You know, yeah. I mean, we had this dart forward and we put up buzzwords, but no, it was, it was actually just, and you know, we're still finding our way as far as early on where we're open source folks. And we did not open source from day one, which is very weird when everybody's new, your identity is, you know, I worked, I was the VP of marketing for Linux foundation and no JS and all these open source projects. And my co-founder and I are Apache committers. And our project wasn't open yet because we had to get to the point where it could be open and people could be productive in the use and contribution. And we had to staff up engineers. And now I think this week we open-sourced our entire platform. And I think that's going to open up, you know, that's where we started because it was not necessarily the lowest hanging fruit, but the profitable, less profitable, lowest hanging fruit was financial services. Now we are letting our code out into the wild. And I think it'll be interesting to see what comes back. >> So you just announced that this week TriggerMesh integration platform as an open source project here at KubeCon, what's been some of the feedback? >> It's all been positive. I haven't heard anything negative. We did it, so we're very, very, there's a very, the culture around open source is very tough. It's very critical if you don't do it right. So I think we did a good job, we used enough, we used a OSI approved. They've been sourced, licensed the Apache software, a V2 license. We hired someone who was well-respected in the DevREL world from a chef who understands the DevOps sort of culture methodologies. We staffed up our engineers who are going to be helping the free and open source users. So they're successful and we're betting that that will yield business results down the road. >> Lisa: And what are the two I see on your website, two primary use cases that you guys support. Can you dig into details on that? >> So the first one is sort of a workflow automation and a really simple example of that is you have a, something that happens in one cloud. So for example, you take a picture on your phone and you upload it and it goes to Amazon and there is a service that wants to identify what's in that picture. And once you put it on the line and the internship parlance, you could kick off a workflow from TensorFlow, which is artificial intelligence to identify the picture. And there isn't a good way for clouds to communicate from one to the other, without writing custom blue, which is really what, what we're helping to get rid of is there's a lot of blue written to put together cloud native applications. So that's a workflow, you know, triggering a server less function is the workflow. The other thing is actually breaking up data gravity. So I have a warehouse of data, in my data center, and I want to start replicating some portion of that. As it changes to a database as a service, we can based on an event flow, which is passive. We're not, we're not making, having a conversation like you would with an API where there's an event stream. That's like drinking from the fire hose and TriggerMesh is the nozzle. And we can direct that data to a DBaaS. We can direct that data to snowflake. We can direct that data to a cloud-based data lake on Microsoft Azure, or we can split it up, so some events could go to Splunk and all of the events can go to your data lake or some of those, those things can be used to trigger workloads on other systems. And that event driven architecture is really the design pattern of the individual clouds. We're just making it multi-cloud and on-prem. >> Lisa: Do you have a favorite customer example that you think really articulates that the value of that use case? >> Mark: Yeah I think a PNC is probably our, well for the, for the data flow one, I would say we have a regular to Oracle and one of their customers it was their biggest SMB customer of last year. The Oracle cloud is very, very important, but it's not as tool. It doesn't have the same level of tooling as a lot of the other ones. And to, to close that deal, their regulatory customer wanted to use Datadog. So they have hundreds and hundreds of metrics. And what TriggerMesh did was ingest the hundreds and hundreds of metrics and filter them and connect them to Datadog so that, they could, use Datadog to measure, to monitor workloads on Oracle cloud. So that, would be an example of the data flow on the workflow. PNC bank is, is probably our best example and PNC bank. They want to do. I talked about infrastructure code integration is code. They want to do policy as code. So they're very highly regulatory regulated. And what they used to do is they had policies that they applied against all their systems once a month, to determine how much they were in compliance. Well, theoretically if you do that once a month, it could be 30 days before you knew where you were out of compliance. What we did was, we provided them a way to take all of the changes within their systems and for them to a server less cluster. And they codified all of these policies into server less functions and TriggerMesh is triggering their policies as code. So upon change, they're getting almost real-time updates on whether or not they're in compliance or not. And that's a huge thing. And they're going to, they have, within their first division, we worked with, you know, tens of policies throughout PNC. They have thousands of policies. And so that's really going to revolutionize what they're able to do as far as compliance. And that's a huge use case across the whole banking system. >> That's also a huge business outcome. >> Yes. >> So Mark, where can folks go to learn more about TriggerMesh, maybe even read about more specifically about the announcement that you made this week. >> TriggerMesh.com is the best way to get an overview. The open source project is get hub.com/triggermesh/trigger mesh. >> Awesome Mark, thank you for joining Dave and me talking to us about TriggerMesh, what you guys are doing. The use cases that you're enabling customers. We appreciate your time and we wish you best of luck as you continue to forge into financial services and other industries. >> Thanks, it was great to be here. >> All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you live from Los Angeles at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 21, stick around Dave and I, will be right back with our next guest.