(soft music) >> Good morning from Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live on our second day of coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, great to be back with you. The buzz is here, no doubt. We've been talking a lot about the developers. And one of the biggest bottlenecks that they face in software delivery, is when they're stuck waiting for access to environments. >> Yeah, this next segment's going to be very interesting. It's a company that's making DevOps more productive, but recognizing the reality of how people are working remotely, but also company to company developers. People are collaborating in all kinds of forms, so this is really going to be a great segment. >> Exactly. Two new guests to theCUBE who know theCUBE, but are first time on theCUBE from Release Hub, Tommy McClung, it's CEO and Matt Carter, it's CMO. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us here. >> So we want to dig into Release Hub, so the audience really gets an understanding. But Tommy, I want to get an understanding of your background. >> Sure. >> You've been at Release Hub for what, three years? >> Yep, I'm the co-founder. >> Before that you were at TrueCar? >> I was, yeah, I was the CTO at TrueCar. And prior to that, I've been a software engineer my entire career. I've started a couple of companies before this. Software engineer at heart. I've been working on systems management and making developers productive since 2000, long time. So it's fun to be working on developer productivity stuff. And this is our home and this is where I feel the most comfortable. >> Lisa: Yeah. And Matt, you're brand new to the company as it's chief marketing officer. >> Matt: Yeah, so I just joined earlier this month, so really excited to be here. I came over from Docker, so it's great to be able to keep working with developers and helping them, not only get their jobs done better and faster, but just get more delight out of what they do every day, that's a super important privilege to me and it's exciting to go and work on this at Release here. >> Well, they're lucky to have you. And we work together, Matt, at Docker, in the past. Developer productivity's always been a key, but communities are now more important. We've been seeing on theCUBE that developers are going to decide the standards, they're going to vote with their axes and their code. And what they decide to work on, it has to be the best. And that's going to be the new defacto standard. You guys have a great solution that I like. And I love the roots from the software engineering background because that's the hardest thing right now, is how do you scale the software, making things simpler and easier. And when things happen, you don't want to disrupt the tool chains, you want to make sure the code is right, you guys have a unique solution. Can you take a minute to explain what it is and why it's so important? >> Tommy: Yeah, I'll use a little bit of my experience to explain it. I was the CTO of a company that had 300 engineers, and sharing a handful of environments, really slowed everybody down, you bottleneck there. So in order to unlock the productivity of that team, developers need environments for development, they need it for testing, they need it for staging, you run your environments in production. So the environment is the key building block in every software development process. And like my last company, there were very few of them, one or two, everybody sharing them. And so the idea at Release is to make environments available on demand, so if a developer needs one for anything, they can spin one up. So if they want to write their code in a environment based in the cloud, they can do that, if they want to test on a poll request, an environment will automatically spin up. And the environments are full stack, include all the services, data, settings, configuration that runs the app. So developers literally get an isolated copy of the application, so they can develop knowing they're not stepping on other developers' toes. >> John: Can you give an example of what that looks like? Do they have to pre-configure the environment, or how does that work? Can you give an example? >> Yeah, sure. You have to, just like infrastructure is code, we call this environments is code. So you need to define your environment, which we have a lot of tools that help you do that. Analyze your repositories, help you define that environment. Now that you have the template for that, you can easily use that template to derive multiple environments out of it. A key part of this is everybody wants to make sure their development and data is secure. It runs within the AWS account of our customer. So we're the control plane that orchestrates it and the data and applications run within the context of their AWS account, so it's- >> John: What's the benefit? >> Tommy: Well, bottlenecking, increased developer productivity, developer happiness is a big one. Matt talks about this all the time, keeping developers in flow, so that they're focused on the job and not being distracted with, "Hey DevOps team, I need you to go spin up an environment." And a lot of times in larger organizations, not just the environments, but the process to get access to resources is a big issue. And so DevOps was designed to let developers take control of their own development process, but were still bottlenecking, waiting for environments, waiting for resources from the DevOps team, so this allows that self-service capability to really be there for the developer. >> Lisa: Matt, talk about... Target audience is the developer, talk about though... Distill that down into the business value. What am I, if I'm a financial services organization, or a hospital, or a retailer in e-commerce, what is my business value going to be with using technology like this and delighting those developers? >> Matt: I think there's three things that really matter to the developers and to the financial leader in the organization, A, developers are super expensive and they have a lot of opportunities. So if a developer's not happy and finding joy and productivity in what they're doing, they're going to look elsewhere. So that's the first thing, the second thing is that when you're running a business, productivity is one measure, but also, are you shipping something confidently the first time, or do you have to go back and fix things? And by having the environment spun up with all of your name space established, your tendencies are managed, all of your data being brought in, you're testing against a very high fidelity version of your application when you check in code. And so by doing that, you're testing things more quickly, and they talk a lot about shifting left, but it's making that environment as fully functional and featured as possible. So you're looking at something as it will appear in production, not a subset of that. And then the last thing, and this is one where the value of Figma is very important, a lot of times, you'll spin up an environment on AWS and you may forget about it and might just keep running and chewing up resources. Knowing that when you're done it goes away, means that you're not spending money on things just sitting there on your AWS instance, which is very important for competitors. >> Lisa: So I hear retention of developers, you're learning that developers, obviously business impact their speed to value as well. >> Tommy: Yep. >> And trust, you're enabling your customers to instill trust in their developers with them. >> Tommy: That's right, yeah. >> Matt: And trust and delight, they can be across purposes, a developer wants to move fast and they're rewarded for being creative, whereas your IT team, they're rewarded for predictability and consistency, and those can be opposing forces. And by giving developers a way to move quickly and the artifact that they're creating is something that the IT team understands and works within their processes, allows you to let both teams do what they care about and not create a friction there. >> John: What about the environment as a service? I love that 'cause it makes it sound like it's scaling in the cloud, which you have mentioned you do that. Is it for companies that are working together? So I don't want to spin up an environment, say we're a businesses, "Hey, let's do a deal. "I'm going to integrate my solution into yours. "I got to get my developers to maybe test it out, "so I'm spinning up an environment with you guys," then what do I do? >> Tommy: Well as far as if you're a customer of ours, is that the way you're asking? Well, a lot of times, it's being used a lot in internal development. So that's the first use case, is I'm a developer, you have cross collaboration amongst teams, so a developer tools. And what you're talking about is more, I'm using an environment for a demo environment, or I'm creating a new feature that I want to share with a customer, That's also possible. So if I'm a developer and I'm building a feature and it's for a specific customer of mine, I can build that feature and preview it with the customer before it actually goes into production. So it's a sandbox product development area for the developers to be actually integrating with their customers very, very quickly before it actually makes its way to all of the end users. >> A demo? >> It could be a demo. >> It's like a collaboration feature? >> Sandbox environment. We have customers- >> Kind of like we're seeing more of this collaboration with developers. This becomes a well- >> Tommy: And it's not even just collaboration with internal teams, it's now you're collaborating with your customer while you're building your software, which is actually really difficult to do if you only have one environment, you can't have- >> John: Yeah, I think that's a killer right there, that's the killer app right there. >> Matt: Instead of sending a Figma to a customer, this is what's going to look like, it's two dimensions, this is the app. That is a massive, powerful difference. >> Absolutely. In terms of customer delay, customer retention, employee engagement, those are all inextricably linked. Can you share, Matt, the voice of the customer? I just saw the release with TripActions, I've been a TripActions user myself, but give us this sense, I know that you're brand new, but the voice of the customer, what is it? What is it reflecting? How is it reinforcing your value prop? >> Matt: I think the voice that comes through consistently is instead of spending time building the system that is hard to do and complicated and takes our engineering cycles, our engineers can focus on whether it's platform engineering, new features and whatnot, it's more valuable to the company to build features, it's more exciting for a developer to build features and to not have to keep going back and doing things manually, which you're doing a... This is what we do all day long. To do it as a sideline is hard. And the customers are excited 'cause they get to move onto higher value activities with their time. >> Lisa: And everybody wants that, everybody wants to be able to contribute high value projects, programs for their organization rather than doing the boring stuff. >> Tommy: Yeah. I think with TripActions specifically, a lot of platform engineering teams are trying to build something like this in house, and it's a lot of toil, it's work that isn't value added, it enables developers to get their job done, but it's not really helping the business deliver a feature to the user. And so this whole movement of platform engineering, this is what those groups are doing and we're a big enabler to those teams, to get that to market faster. >> John: You're targeting businesses, enterprises, developers. >> That's right. >> Mainly, right, developers? >> Yeah. >> What's the business model? How are you guys making money? What's the strategy there? >> Yeah, I mean we really like to align with the value that we deliver. So if a user creates an environment, we get paid when that happens. So it's an on-demand, if you use the environment, you pay us, if you don't, you don't. >> John: Typical cloud-based pricing. >> Yeah. >> Pay as you go. >> Tommy: Usage based pricing. >> Is there a trigger on certain of how it gets cost? Is it more of the environment size, or what's the- >> Yeah, I mean there's a different tier for if you have really large, complicated environments. And that's the trend, that distributed applications aren't simple anymore, so if you have a small little rails app, it's going to be cheaper than if you have a massive distributed system. But manageable, the idea here is that this should help you save money over investing deeply into a deep platform engineering team. So it's got to be cost effective and we're really cognizant of that. >> So you got a simple approach, which is great. Talk about the alternative. What does it look like for a customer that you want to target? What's their environment? What does it look like, so that if I'm a customer, I would know I need to call you guys at Relief Hub. Is it sprawl? Is it multiple tool chains? Chaos, mayhem? What does it look like? >> Tommy: Yeah, let's have Matty, Matt could do this one. >> When you look at the systems right now, I think complexity is the word that keeps coming up, which is that, whether you're talking about multi-cloud or actually doing it, that's a huge thing. Microservices proliferation are happening over and over again, different languages. What I'm excited about with Release, is not dissimilar from what we saw in the Docker movement, which is that there's all this great stuff out there, but there's that common interface there, so you can actually run it locally on your machine, do your dev and test, and know that it's going to operate with, am I using Couchbase or Postgres or whatever, I don't care, it's going to work this way. Similar with Release, people are having to build a lot of these bespoke solutions that are purpose built for one thing and they're not designed to the platform. And the platform for platform engineering gives us a way to take that complexity out the equation, so you're not limited to what you can do, or, "Oh crud, I want to move to something else, "I have to start over again," that process is going to be consistent no matter what you're doing. So you're not worried about evolution and success and growth, you know that you've got a foundation that's going to grow. Doing it on your own, you have to build things in that very bespoke, specific manner, and that just creates a lot more toil than you'd want to get if you were using a platform and focusing on the value after your company. >> Matt Klein was just on here. He was with Lyft, he was the one who open source Envoy, which became very popular. We asked him what he thought about the future and he's like, it's too hard to work with all this stuff. He was mentioning Yamo code, but he got triggered a little bit, but his point was there's a lot to pull together. And it sounds like you guys have this solution, back in the old days, spin up some EC2, compute, similar way, right? "Hey, I don't want to person a server, I person a server, rack and stack, top of rack switch, I'm going to go to the cloud, use EC2. >> Tommy: Yeah, I mean just think about if- >> You're an environment version of that. Why wait for it to be built? >> Yeah. >> Is that what I'm getting- >> Yeah, I mean, and an application today isn't just the EC2 instances, it's all of your data, it's your configuration. Building it one time is actually complicated to get your app to work it, doing it lots of times to make your developers productive with copies of that, is incredibly difficult. >> John: So you saw the problem of developers waiting around for someone to provision an environment. >> Tommy: That's right. >> So they can do whatever they want to do. >> Tommy: That's right. >> Test, ship, do, play around, test the customer. Whatever that project scope is, they're waiting around versus spinning up an environment. >> Yeah, absolutely, 100%. >> And that's the service. >> That's what it is. >> Take time, reduce the steps it takes, make it more productive. >> And build an amazing developer experience that you know your developers are going to love. If you're at Facebook or Google, they have thousands of DevOps people building platforms. If you're a company that doesn't have that resource, you have a choice of go build this yourself, which is a distraction, or invest in something like us and focus on your core. >> John: You got Matt on board, got a new CMO, you got enterprise class features and I saw the press release. Talk about the origination story, why you developed it, and then take a minute to give a plug for the company, on what you're looking for, I'm sure you're hiring, what's going on? >> Tommy: Yeah, I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. My last experience at TrueCar, I saw this problem firsthand. And as the CTO of that company, I looked into the market for a solution to this, 'cause we had this problem of 300 developers, environments needed for everything. So we ended up building it ourselves and it costs multiple millions of dollars to build it. And so as the buyer at the time, I was like, man, I would've spent to solve this, and I just couldn't. So as a software engineer at heart, having seen this problem my entire career, it was just a natural thing to go work on. So yeah, I mean, for anybody that wants to create unlimited environments for their team, just go to releasehub.com. It's pretty self-explanatory, how to give it a shot and try it out. >> Environments is a service, from someone who had the problem, fixed it, built it- >> That's right. >> For other people. What are you guys hiring, looking for some people? >> Yeah, we have engineering hires, sales hires, Matt's got a few marketing hires coming, >> Matt: I was going to say, got some marketing coming. >> Selfishly he has that. (John laughs) The team's growing and it's a really great place to work. We're 100% remote. Part of this helps that, we build this product and we use it every day, so you get to work on what you build and dog food, it's pretty cool. >> Great solution. >> We love remote development environments. Being here and watching that process where building a product and a feature for the team to work better, wow, we should share this with customers. And the agility to deliver that was really impressive, and definitely reinforced how excited I am to be here 'cause we're building stuff for ourselves, which is- >> Matt: Well we're psyched that you're here in theCUBE. Matt, what's your vision for marketing? You got a hiring plan, you got a vision, I'm sure you got some things to do. What's your goals? What's your objective? >> My goal is... The statement people say, you can't market to developers. And I don't want to market to developers, I want to make sure developers are made aware of how they can learn new things in a really efficient way, so their capabilities grow. If we get people more and more successful with what they're doing, give them joy, reduce their toil and create that flow, we help them do things that make you excited, more creative. And that's to me, the reward of this. You teach people how to do that. And wow, these customers, they're building the greatest innovations in the world, I get to be part of that, which is awesome. >> Lisa: Yeah. Delighted developers has so many positive business outcomes that I'm sure organizations in any industry are going to be able to achieve. So exciting stuff, guys. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the program. Good luck with the growth and congrats on what you've enabled so far in just a few short years. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thanks you so much. >> Thank you for having us on. >> Appreciate it. >> Pleasure. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, live in Detroit, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon '22. We're back after a short break. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to the CUBE's continuous live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. continuous live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Lisa Martin here with David Nicholson. We have two live sets going on, we've got two remote sets, over 100 guests working with AWS and it's a massive ecosystem of partners, really digging into the next decade of cloud innovation and we're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Edith Harbaugh, CEO, and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. We're going to be talking about a blueprint for continuous modernization, Edith, it's great to have you, thanks for coming. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I was doing some research, you guys raised 200 million in series D in August, just a few months ago, that new funding tripled your valuation to 3 billion up more than 3x from the previous funding rounds, so rocket ship. >> Edith: Yeah. >> I also noticed you guys are on the Forbes Cloud 100 2nd year on the list, you jumped dramatically from 100 in 2020 to 47 this year, talk to us about all the innovation and acceleration that's going on at LaunchDarkly. >> Yeah, well, it's, it's great to be here, you know, I'm the CEO and co-founder and we started seven years ago in 2014 and what we were doing back then was a really new field, like I actually came up with the name feature management, just to describe what we were doing and it was this idea that you could release features to different people at different times, which sounds really simple, but it really allows you to have valves to different populations that you can then turn something on, turn something off, run a beta, do personalization and then if something's going wrong out on the field quickly and easily, turn it off. >> So as an engineer, as a long standing engineer, what were the things that really frustrated you, that you thought this, this is missing, we've got to focus on this. >> Oh my gosh, so, I was an engineering manager, I actually do a podcast too called To Be Continuous just about all the bad things I saw happen, the worst thing you could do is, is build something that nobody wants, which is really frustrating, so I think a lot of continuous delivery came out of the urge to just get stuff out quicker. The flip side of that is that if you moved too fast, a release can be catastrophic. We used to call them the push and pray release because you push stuff out and then you're just crossing your fingers that nothing breaks because if something breaks it's extremely stressful. Your mind starts flooding with endorphins and hormones, your heart rate increases and you sometimes make even worse decisions, so what LaunchDarkly and feature management allow you to do is push it out to who you want and if something is going wrong, you could turn it off without a redeploy, if things are going right, you can continue to push it out. >> And when you say feature management, you're talking about, you're talking about a level of granularity that is finer than a release version. that is finer than a release version. >> Edith: Yeah. How do you do that? >> Our customers do it, so we provide a platform where our customers and we have 2,500 worldwide, everything from IBM and Atlassian, down to like three person startups, they decide how to encapsulate a feature >> David: Okay. >> So they could push it to who they want, so, so there's a lot of really neat use cases. >> So knowing that you're providing them with the valves. >> Edith: Yes. Then they can- think differently about how they're actually developing in anticipation of delivering encapsulated features, as opposed to, here's your new release. >> Edith: Exactly. >> Okay. >> Exactly, so we have some customers who've used LaunchDarkly to actually move to the cloud. So like TrueCar was running their own data centers and they wanted a way to start moving all of that data center traffic into AWS, so they could use LaunchDarkly to manage that traffic flow and do it in a controlled way instead of just one quick switch. >> I was looking at that case study of TrueCar, they migrated 500 websites to AWS without downtime and deploying 20x per day, which is up from 1x a week, that's a massive change. >> Yeah, I think really what we give our customers is confidence that if you know that you can always have control over stuff with feature management, you actually move much quicker. You can, you can move 20 times a day if you know that if something goes wrong, you can always turn it off, you have much more confidence. >> Where are your, you having customer conversations? I know you, you coined to the term feature management, I'd love to know a bit more contextually about the evolution from feature flags to feature management and where are those customer conversations happening? are they kind of down in the technical ways? are they more higher level? given the fact that we're in such a, still a, such a state of flux with COVID? >> Yeah, so we, we didn't invent feature flagging like the smart companies like Amazon, Facebook, Netflix have been doing feature flagging for decades now, it was always a secret sauce of this is how they could manage their own functionality. What LaunchDarkly did was kind of changed it to feature management about doing it where any other customer also had the same set of tools and platforms and also on top of that things like a workflow, scheduling, integrations. So that for example, a developer could develop something and then give the keys to the product manager, say product manager, you get to, you get to run the beta now. >> So putting, putting more control back in the hands of the folks that are, that really are touching and feeling and smelling the product. >> Yeah or customer support, you know, >> Yeah or customer support, you know, if something is going wrong in the field, instead of having to wait for an engineer to fix a bug customer support could just turn it off. >> So I'm curious about, you know, when we talk about it's a, this, this sort of dovetails with something that was discussed in the keynote today, out of the gate, Adam comes out and he's talking about microprocessor technology. Now in the era of cloud, generally people would say, that stuff doesn't matter, right? It's all about the feeling of being in the cloud and the flame, you know, the, the, the field of wheat blowing in the wind and it's a feeling that you get, it's really interesting what you're doing under the covers, but who is the, who is the audience? Who, who buys this? Because I can imagine some in the engineering, on the engineering side of things, feeling like maybe they're giving up some control, but really you're giving them more tools, but is it business people who are demanding this? how, how do you go to market? >> Yeah, so it's really interesting because our core audience is developers and VP of engineering, like they love the platform. Like our Net Promoter Score is extremely high, engineers say like, this gave me my weekends back because if a bug happens I don't have to come in. >> David: Okay so they get it. >> They get it. This isn't being pushed down- from executives that don't understand the technology. >> No, I mean, a typical thing is a developer's, like, I need this to do my job and then the business people say, well, if the developers are happy, we're happy, you know, it's, it's a developers world now, you know, they're hard to hire, you have to have them and if you have anything that will make their job easier and them happier, why wouldn't you buy it? >> That's a big facilitator, so you mentioned a high, high NPS, high Net Promoter Score, we, we talk with Amazon folks about their their focus on the customer and their customer obsession if you will, that everything starts backwards, we start from the customer, 2,500 customers in such a short time period, we talked about the funding, I imagine culturally there's similarities there, if one of the things that you're able to confidently give your customers is that confidence in LaunchDarkly. >> Yeah, you know, one of the happiest parts of my job is visiting customers, you know, I, my co-founder and I personally visited, I think the first 10 or 20 customers and if they had a bug, if they wanted something, and if they had a bug, if they wanted something, we built it. And I love going on customer sites, cause it's. And I love going on customer sites, cause it's. >> When they're telling you that you gave them their weekend back. >> Edith: Yeah. >> Huge. >> That's, yeah, that.- that's not an insignificant thing when you think about what people do with their weekends, you know, so? >> Yeah, you know, it, it feels really good to have customers say, like this literally has changed the way they built software for the better. >> I can't imagine this, you know, with everything that's happened in the last 22 months with the acceleration to cloud, but all these massive pivots by businesses, in every industry just to survive in the beginning, were an advantage, something like LaunchDarkly is for those organizations, so you have to move really, really quickly and keep changing direction to kind of figure out how do we stay afloat and now how do we thrive in that, that this has probably been a real lifesaver for a lot of organizations. >> Yeah, I mean, we've seen like a ten year roadmap at our customers compressed into a month, like we had a, a retail chain in the Midwest that was thinking about doing in-store pickup and then when COVID hit, they're like, okay, this changed from a, maybe to a, we need to have this to stay afloat and now, now they can help people pick up, same with, same with restaurants having a mobile app to do delivery or pickup, it used to be when we'll get to that next year, now it's something that you have to have. >> Oh yeah. >> Because if, if you're going to go get coffee and one place has a mile long line and their place has an app, which one are you going to pick? >> So, what do people do that don't have this capability? This, I mean, this might sound like a completely naive question, I know a lot about a lot of things, so I'm okay looking dumb sometimes, it's how I learn, so I'm okay looking dumb sometimes, it's how I learn, but seriously, if you don't have these valves, then aren't you doomed then aren't you doomed to releases that are going to be panic inducing. >> It's really, it's really painful, like, I mean, that's, that's the way I used to, to release, you know, I remember it, like you're released and you would have tried to have caught all the bugs, but it would go out and if something happened, you had to fix it on the fly and even if you have a really good deployment process, that's 20 minutes, maybe two hours. >> David: Sure, and, and. >> Which, which if you're a mobile app, it could be a business killer. >> Yeah, well we're here at AWS reinvent, I mean, how does, how does this dovetail with this, the AWS mission to migrate and modernize into the cloud native world? we're talking about cloud native, you know, development and operations that you're involved with, so there's obviously a synergy there, but why specifically AWS? >> Oh, I mean, I think one of the biggest tailwinds we've had as a business is if you're releasing twice a year, we've had as a business is if you're releasing twice a year, you don't really need a tool like this, or a platform like this, your business process is completely different, but you're going to die as a company cause you can't survive on two releases a year. If you're moving to the cloud, we help you get there and once you're in the cloud, if you want to move at the speed of business, but safely, we give you that platform. Like, so, I think continuous delivery got this bad wrap because people thought that meant that you push out stuff every second and break everything. >> David: Right. >> What we do is we allow you to innovate as fast as you want, but release in a controlled way. >> I got to ask you a question, you, you talked about the customers and your love of being with customers, one of the things I can't help thinking is that what you're helping facilitate is brand reputation. If, you know, if we have an expectation and we want to go on a, on an app and order coffee, and it's down, we're going to go to the next competitor, so from a brand reputation perspective, I'm just wondering if, if any of your customer conversations kind of go in addition to the VP of engineering kind of go in addition to the VP of engineering and it focused on the folks that are leading these companies going, our reputation is on the line, people are, let's face it during COVID far less patience than we've, we've seen a lot of really impatient people, but is, is that something that you also facilitate, is the brand reputation? >> Oh, not just a brand reputation that an outage can be costly of millions of dollars, like. that an outage can be costly of millions of dollars, like. >> Lisa: $5,600 a minute, I think is what Gartner estimates. >> Yeah, but depending on what business you're in, like if you're in a bank, you absolutely need to be reliable. If you're a streaming service like streaming, one of the biggest horse races in Australia, you need to have uptime. >> Everybody needs uptime, let's, let's just be clear if I can't get door dash or whatever, it's a disaster from my perspective as a consumer and yes, we have, we have far less patience than we've ever had. >> Yeah, I mean, we have a really interesting, we have both B2C, like streaming ash, streaming apps, delivery apps, as well as B2B streaming apps, delivery apps, as well as B2B and they both have problems that we solve but honestly, the, the, the business problems with a B2B are much more challenging sometimes. >> Well Edith, thank you so much for joining David and me on the program, talking about LaunchDarkly, what you're enabling organizations to achieve in every industry, it sounds like you're riding a rocket ship. >> It's been really fun, you know, I, I love seeing a customer that's been using us for three, five years. >> David: Wow. >> And how much their life has gotten better. >> And as you said, that's, that's no small statement. Thank you so much for joining us on the program, we appreciate your insights and look forward to hearing more news from LaunchDarkly coming out. >> Thanks. >> All right, for David Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS:reinvent 2021, theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE, continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year, two live sets, two remote studios with AWS, and its ecosystem partners. We've got over a hundred guests on the program this year, going deep as we enter the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome for the first time to theCUBE, John Kodumal, the CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. John is here to talk about modern DevOps with feature management. John, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me, Lisa. >> Great to have you on the program. Let's talk a little bit about LaunchDarkly. I know it's been on theCUBE a couple of times, but it's been awhile. Give the audience an overview of LaunchDarkly, what it is that you do and what's new. >> Yeah. LaunchDarkly is the leading platform for feature management. We allow developers, product managers, anyone in the practice of building software to leverage feature flags, to deliver better software faster, a better product experiences through the use of feature flags. >> One thing that I noticed on the website is you guys have some big customer names, Square, I also saw Adidas, NBC, at least you've got some pretty big organizations that are relying on LaunchDarkly to deliver and control their software. What can you tell us about it from a customer perspective? >> Yeah. You know, it's an amazing thing. We have over 30% of the Fortune 100 using the LaunchDarkly platform for feature management. And, you know, I think it's been incredible to see how basically anyone building software can leverage feature flags to deliver better customer experiences. So, the companies you named, I mean, they're all over the map in terms of the kinds of products they deliver to consumers from Square to Adidas. I mean, those are totally different companies, but I think the thing that they all have in common is that they're increasingly becoming... They're either already a software company or they're increasingly becoming a software company and that's where we help our customers, the customers that are delivering more digital experiences to their consumers. >> That is table stake these days, you mentioned all software, all companies rather becoming software companies. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around much longer and you're right. You mentioned that's a quite a variety, NBC to Adidas as I talked about there, but in terms of what they have in common, talk to me a little bit about feature management. What is it and how can it help to bridge the divide between the developer folks, the business side of the organization? >> Absolutely. I think the fundamental thing that feature management provides, the simplest thing, that the thing that people first utilize LaunchDarkly for is to separate the processes of deploying software from releasing software. So it used to be in a pre-LaunchDarkly world, when you deploy a new piece of software, you package the artifact up, you put it out on your servers, and then your entire customer base was experiencing that new version of the software. So, if things were going wrong, if there was a bug, something wasn't working right, your blast radius was enormous. Literally, your entire customer base was impacted. And one of the things that LaunchDarkly does, the first thing that we do, the first piece of value that we provide is we help you sort of reduce that risk. So when you release a change, you can deliver that change to a much more targeted, smaller, safer cohort of users, measure the impact of what's going on. Are there any bugs? Are there any performance problems? Or is everything's smooth sailing? And if it is, then you can use LaunchDarkly to rapidly, and with a lot of visibility control, scale that release and scale that roll-out out. And that's the most fundamental value that we provide. >> Big value there. Speaking of value, let's talk about the partnership with LaunchDarkly and AWS. I know you have a lot of experience working with AWS for many years back when you were at Atlassian, but give us an overview of the partnership and that shared developer audience that you're both working with. >> Yeah. I've got a number of years of experience working with AWS. So, you mentioned my time prior to starting LaunchDarkly, I was at Atlassian for many years, and I was at Atlassian and during that time period where Atlassian was switching from traditional hosting providers to public cloud, to AWS specifically, and the capabilities that an unlocked, not only for our operations teams, but for our developers were pretty incredible. One of the things that we launched almost immediately on my team was the ability to like preview environments through AWS hosting and have that experience not happen on the local developers desktop, but rather in the cloud. And that was incredibly helpful for improving our velocity and helping us preview changes. Since starting LaunchDarkly, I mean, we've leveraged cloud and AWS in particular from the earliest days, we started the platform on AWS and we've been consuming more and more services through AWS and seeing more and more value. From a partnership perspective, we're incredibly excited because we have a massive number of customers that are either just beginning their public cloud journey or are making significant migrations or significant infrastructure changes, and they're using the LaunchDarkly platform to control the release of those changes to mitigate risk. We have customers using us to do migrations from one cloud provider to another, or go through modernization efforts and push change out safely as they migrate to a provider like AWS. >> Talk to me about some of the things that you've seen in the last year and a half, 20 months or more probably. Since the pandemic started, we've seen so much acceleration to cloud, so much cloud migration, so many companies, not only becoming software companies because they need to be competitive but understanding it's not why move to the cloud, it's when. How have you helped organizations, you know, from the NBC, the media folks to the retailers, to undergo those migrations safely but quickly in a time of such dynamics? >> Yeah, I mean, that is exactly what we saw during the pandemic, a massive amount of change, not just in the move to digital and digital experiences, but also in the need to sort of adapt to rapidly changing conditions. We had customers in, for example, food delivery that needed to rapidly change the way their software behaved in response to changes in regulations or guidelines around things like COVID. And our platform really was transformative for many of those organizations as they sort of needed to become more flexible and adapt, not only to changing rules and regulations, but changing consumer behavior and changing end-user behavior. So, it was an incredible year. It was a year that was sort of fraught with uncertainty, but it was a year where LaunchDarkly, our platform really helped many of our customers sort of navigate the waters and figure out how to get the experiences they needed to and the change they needed to in front of their customers rapidly. >> Yeah. Rapid being a keyword of the last 20 years, it feels like 20 years, doesn't it? Two years, 40 and slipped there. But talk to me a little bit about some of the other trends that you're seeing from a cloud perspective. We talked about the acceleration of migration. What are some of the other trends that your customers are facing and how is LaunchDarkly helping them to address those trends? >> Yeah. One of the trends that we're seeing is the rapidity of change is forcing companies that even companies that were really software driven at their heart to iterate more rapidly. I think there's this story around modernization that is becoming more and more common where you normally think of modernization as sort of like legacy companies, sort of non software-driven companies, having to make that shift and modernize their software stacks, but the rapid pace of change is it's shifting things into a world where even companies like my own company, like LaunchDarkly are having to modernize our stack. Our company is seven years old. And some of the things that we were doing seven years ago, they've been eclipsed in terms of like processes, tools, technologies, and use. And so we've had to go through modernization as well to keep up with the times and to give our developers the quality of tools and processes that they expect. >> I think that's an important point, John, that you bring up is that modernization isn't just for legacy applications, legacy businesses, and I'll be honest, that's how I normally think about it. I don't think of a company as young as LaunchDarkly needing to modernize, but you bring up a point that really what it is is an ongoing process for businesses in any industry. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about what the landscape looked like seven years ago and you fast forward to today, so many of the practices are different. So even companies like us, we're having to change. I mean, seven years ago, it wasn't really clear that Kubernetes was going to be a platform that was going to end up being the winner and sort of like the orchestration space. And so when we were starting out, none of our workloads were on Kubernetes. And even today, we're not really significantly using Kubernetes, we're sort of like legacy container-based. And that's just us, we're still a startup and we're still able to move pretty rapidly. But even for us, we're having to sort of like revisit the technologies and use and modernize our stack and kind of look around and see what's not working anymore and what we need to change. It's certainly a pace that is massively different from a company that is relying on a legacy software stack, I don't want to pretend like LaunchDarkly is, I would compare us to a company that's moving off of mainframes and COBOL or anything like that, but it's still something that we're cognizant of and something that we have to invest in. >> But you bring up a good point. And as we talk about this when we're talking with any vendor about, from the customer's perspective, it's a journey, it's the same thing that you're talking about here. It's evaluating what you have under the hood, what's working, what needs to be better as the markets change, as the dynamics change, as trends change. >> Yeah. That's exactly how I think about it and that's how a lot of these companies that are becoming more software-driven are thinking about it too. Just sort of like assessing the catalog of tools and technologies and saying what's working, what's not working. And I think one of the trends that we're seeing is that re-evaluation is happening more and more frequently and the frequency of new technologies and tools being adopted is increasing. And so, it's something that you have to spend an enormous amount of effort just to stay ahead of the game and stay ahead of what's modern. The practices that we've determined are really working for organizations. >> Right, exactly. So, I mentioned a few customers by name that work with LaunchDarkly, but can you tell me an example of one of your favorite customer stories that you think really articulate the value that LaunchDarkly is delivering to your customers across industries? >> Yeah. What comes to mind is TrueCar. TrueCar has been a LaunchDarkly customer for a long time. They're great partners of ours. We have a case study up with them. And one of the stories that they talked about was their own cloud migration. They shifted their workloads from one cloud provider to another and feature flags were instrumental in that. So, feature flags allowed them to sort of gate the flow of traffic from one cloud to another and to sort of in real-time assess whether things were working or not as they did that migration. It took a process that would have been incredibly risky and scary, and made it sort of business as usual for that organization. So, that's a company that I think of that really understands the value of LaunchDarkly and has really leveraged us to our full potential. >> Awesome. Something I want to ask you about as well, is this concept of release impact. Compare and contrast that to like the traditional optimization focused A/B Testing. What's the difference? What are the similarities? >> Yeah. You know, A/B Testing has been around for a long time and it's used in software, definitely in the past decade has grown tremendously as a piece of the software development experience. But when I think about the practice of building deep product experiences and contrast that to sort of like A/B testing on a marketing site, you know, testing out the layout of a page, we're testing out which call to action button color ends up creating more engagement. That's a very different world than I'm building a SaaS product and I'm building this a new feature within that SaaS product. Traditionally, you wouldn't really A/B test that. And part of the reason for that is it's really too expensive to build software. And it's not really a reality that most companies have where they can take a team and have them go build a feature for multiple weeks or months, pry it out in production and then say, "You know what, that didn't work. That million dollar expense that we just made. We're just going to roll that back and not use it." So, that's sort of the way I think about the difference between a traditional optimization focused A/B Testing, where it's sort of like smaller bets designed to move the needle on a metric where if it doesn't work, you can turn it off versus these deep product experiences where what you're more interested in is being more quantitative about the impact of that release, but you're not necessarily interested in sort of like A/B testing focused optimization, picking a winner in a short period of time. One of the things that we've realized at LaunchDarkly is those are two separate tasks, they're two separate processes, and they require different analysis and different tools under the hood. And so, we're really excited at LaunchDarkly to be innovating on sort of both fronts, not only just providing a platform for optimization focused A/B Testing, but providing a platform where product managers can be more quantitative about the capabilities that they're building and not thinking about it in terms of optimization, but just in terms of measuring the impact of the work that they're shipping to customers. >> The impact, and of course, it's all outcomes focus as we talk about with customers and vendors and at any industry. Last question, John, for you as we're coming up on re:Invent in-person, what are some of the things that attendees can learn and see at the LaunchDarkly booth? >> Yeah. You're going to learn a lot about, if you visit our booth, you're going to learn a lot about sort of like the direction that we're taking, which is I think the exciting thing about LaunchDarkly as a platform is we really provide two capabilities. For engineering teams, we help you mitigate risks. We help you move more efficiently. That gives you more at bats as a team. It lets you ship more product and see whether it's working. LaunchDarkly also though provide something on the flip side of that, which is the ability for product managers to measure whether the changes that they're making are the right changes for their customers. And when you combine those two things in one platform, you get the ability for the engineering team to have more at bats, to create more change in production and see whether it's working. And then you get product managers the ability to measure the impact on their customers. And you combine that together, and at the end of the day, what LaunchDarkly provides is the ability for you as an organization to deliver business value better, more quickly through the R&D investments that you're making, the software that you're producing. >> And that's critical. I love that baseball analogy, more at bats. Fantastic, John, thank you for joining me talking to the audience about LaunchDarkly, what you're doing, the trends that you're helping customers address, the partnership with AWS, and what folks can learn when they visit the LaunchDarkly booth at re:Invent. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. I really enjoyed our conversation. >> Me too, for John Kodumal, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-Invent 2021. (upbeat music)