(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Native SecurityCon North America 2023. Its first inaugural event. It's theCUBE's coverage. We were there at the first event for a KubeCon before CNCF kind of took it over. It was in Seattle. And so in Seattle this week is Cloud Native SecurityCon. Of course, theCUBE is there covering via our Palo Alto Studios and our experts around the world who are bringing in Bassam Tabbara who's the CEO and founder of upbound.io. That's the URL, but Upbound is the company. The creators of Crossplane. Really kind of looking at the Crossplane, across the abstraction layer, across clouds. A big part of, as we call supercloud trend. Bassam, great to see you. You've been legend in the open source community. Great to have you on. >> Thanks, John. Always good to be on theCUBE. >> I really wanted to bring you in 'cause I want to get your perspective. You've seen the movie, you've seen open source software grow, it continues to grow. Now you're starting to see the Linux Foundation, which has CNCF really expanding their realm. They got the CloudNativeCon, KubeCon, which is Kubernetes event. That's gotten so massive and so successful. We've been to every single one as you know. I've seen you there and all of them as well. So that's going great. Now they got this new event that's spins out dedicated to security. Everybody wants to know why the new event? What's the focus? Is it needed? What will they do? What's different from KubeCon? Where do I play? And so there's a little bit of a question mark in the ecosystem around this event. And so we've been reporting on it. Looking good so far. People are buzzing, again, they're keeping it small. So that kind of managing expectations like any good event would do. But I think it's been successful, which I wanted like to get your take on how you see it. Is this good? Are you indifferent? Are you excited by this? What's your take? >> I mean, look, it's super exciting to see all the momentum around cloud native. Obviously there are different dimensions of cloud native securities, an important piece. Networking, storage, compute, like all those things I think tie back together and in some ways you can look at this event as a focused event on the security aspect as it relates to cloud native. And there are lots of vendors in this space. There's lots of interesting projects in the space, but the unifying theme is that they come together and probably around the Kubernetes API and the momentum around cloud native and with Kubernetes at the center of it. >> On the focus on Kubernetes, it seems this event is kind of classic security where you want to have deep dives. Again, I call it the event operating system 'cause you decouple, make things highly cohesive, and you link them together. I don't see a problem with it. I kind of like this. I gave it good reviews if they stay focused because security is super critical. There was references to bind and DNS. There's a lot of things in the infrastructure plumbing that need to be looked at or managed or figured out or just refactored for modernization needs. And I know you've done a lot with storage, for instance, storage, networking, kernel. There's a lot of things in the old tech or tech in the cloud that needs to be kind, I won't say rebooted, but maybe reset or jump. Do you see it that way? Are there things that need to get done or is it just that there's so much complexity in the different cloud cluster code thing going on? >> It's obviously security is a very, very big space and there are so many different aspects of it that people you can go into. I think the thing that's interesting around the cloud native community is that there is a unifying theme. Like forget the word cloud native for a second, but the unifying theme is that people are building around what looks like a standardized play around Kubernetes and the Kubernetes API. And as a result you can recast a lot of the technologies that we are used to in the past in a traditional security sense. You can recast them on top of this new standardized approach or on Kubernetes, whether it's policy or protecting a supply chain or scanning, or like a lot of the access control authorization, et cetera. All of those things can be either revived to apply to this cloud native play and the Kubernetes play or creating new opportunities for companies to actually build new and interesting projects and companies around a standardized play. >> Do you think this also will help the KubeCon be more focused around the developer areas there and just touching on security versus figuring out how to take something so important in KubeCon, which the stakeholders in KubeCon have have grown so big, I can see security sucking a lot of oxygen out of the room there. So here you move it over, you keep it over here. Will anything change on the KubeCon site? We'll be there in in Amsterdam in April. What do you think the impact will be? Good? Is it good for the community? Just good swim lanes? What's your take? >> Yeah, I still think KubeCon will be an umbrella event for the whole cloud native community. I suspect that you'll see some of the same vendors and projects and everything else represented in KubeCon. The way I think about all the branched cloud native events are essentially a way to have a more focused discussion, get people together to talk about security topics or networking topics or things that are more focused way. But I don't think it changes the the effect of KubeCon being the umbrella around all of it. So I think you'll see the same presence and maybe larger presence going forward at Amsterdam. We're planning to be there obviously and I'm excited to be there and I think it'll be a big event and having a smaller event is not going to diminish the effect of KubeCon. >> And if you look at the developer community they've all been online for a long time, from IRC chat to now Slack and now new technologies and stuff like Discord out there. The event world has changed post-pandemic. So it makes sense. And we're seeing this with all vendors, by the way, and projects. The digital community angle is huge because if you have a big tent event like KubeCon you can make that a rallying moment in the industry and then have similar smaller events that are highly focused that build off that that are just connective tissue or subnets, if you will, or communities targeted for really deeper conversations. And they could be smaller events. They don't have to be monster events, but they're connected and traverse into the main event. This might be the event format for the future for all companies, whether it's AWS or a company that has a community where you create this network effect, if you will, around the people. >> That's right. And if you look at things like AWS re:Invent, et cetera, I mean, that's a massive events. And in some ways it, if it was a set of smaller sub events, maybe it actually will flourish more. I don't know, I'm not sure. >> They just killed the San Francisco event. >> That's right. >> But they have re:Inforce, all right, so they just established that their big events are re:Invent and re:Inforce as their big. >> Oh, I didn't hear about re:Inforce. That's news to me. >> re:Inforce is their third event. So they're doing something similar as CloudNativeCon, which is you have to have an event and then they're going to create a lot of sub events underneath. So I think they are trying to do that. Very interesting. >> Very interesting for sure. >> So let's talk about what you guys are up to. I know from your standpoint, you had a lot of security conversations. How is Crossplane doing? Obviously, you saw our Supercloud coverage. You guys fit right into that model where clients, customers, enterprises are going to want to have multiple cloud operating environments for whatever the use case, whether you're using ChatGPT, you got to get an Azure instance up and running for that. Now with APIs, we're hearing a lot of developers doing that. So you're going to start to see this cross cloud as VMware calls, what we call it supercloud. There's more need for Crossplane like thinking. What's the update? >> For sure, and we see this very clearly as well. So the fact that there is a standardization layer, there is a layer that lets you converge the different vendors that you have, the different clouds that you have, the different hype models that you have, whether it's hybrid or private, public, et cetera. The unifying theme is that you're literally bringing all those things under one control plane that enables you to actually centralize and standardize on security, access control, helps you standardize on cost control, quota policy, as well as create a self-service experience for your developers. And so from a security standpoint, the beauty of this is like, you could use really popular projects like open policy agent or Kyverno or others if you want to do policy and do so uniformly across your entire stack, your entire footprint of tooling, vendors, services and across deployment models. Those things are possible because you're standardizing and consolidating on a control plane on top of all. And that's the thing that gets our customers excited. That we're seeing in the community that they could actually now normalize standardize on small number of projects and tools to manage everything. >> We were talking about that in our summary of the keynote yesterday. Dave Vellante and I were talking about the idea of clients want to have a redo of their security. They've been, just the tooling has been building up. They got zero trust in place, maybe with some big vendor, but now got the cloud native opportunity to refactor and reset and reinvent their security paradigm. And so that's the positive thing we're hearing. Now we're seeing enterprises want this cross cloud capabilities or Crossplane like thinking that you guys are talking about. What are your customers telling you? Can you share from an enterprise perspective where they're at in this journey? Because part of the security problems that we've been reporting on has been because clients are moving from IT to cloud native and not everyone's moved over yet. So they're highly vulnerable to ransomware and all kinds of other crap. So another attacks, so they're wide open, But people who are moving into cloud native, are they stepping up their game on this Crossplane opportunity? Where are they at? Can you share data on that? >> Yeah, we're grateful to be talking to a lot of customers these days. And the interesting thing is even if you talked about large financial institutions, banks, et cetera, the common theme that we hear is that they bought tools for each of the different departments and however they're organized. Sometimes you see the folks that are running databases, networking, being separated from say, the computer app developers or they're all these different departments within an organization. And for each one of those, they've made localized decisions for tooling and services that they bought. What we're seeing now consistently is that they're all together, getting together, and trying to figure out how to standardize on a smaller one set of tooling and services that goes across all the different departments and all different aspects of the business that they're running. And this is where this discussion gets a lot very interesting. If instead of buying a different policy tool for each department, or once that fits it you could actually standardize on policy or the entire footprint of services that they're managing. And you get that by standardizing on a control plane or standardizing on effectively one point of control for everything that they're doing. And that theme is like literally, it gets all our customers excited. This is why they're engaging in all of this. It's almost the holy grail. The thing that I've been trying to do for a long time. >> I know. >> And it's finally happening. >> I know you and I have talked about this many times, but I got to ask you the one thing that jumps into everybody's head when you hear control plane is lock-in. So how do you discuss that lock-in, perception from the reality of the situation? How do you unpack that for the customer? 'Cause they want choice at the end of the day. There's the preferred vendors for sure on the hyperscale side and app side and open source, but what's the lock-in? What does the lock-in conversation look like? Or do they even have that conversation? >> Yeah. To be honest, I mean, so their lock-in could be a two dimensions here. Most of our customers and people are using Crossplane or using app on product around it. Most of our do, concentrated in, say a one cloud vendor and have others. So I don't think this is necessarily about multicloud per se or being locked into one vendor. But they do manage many different services and they have legacy tooling and they have different systems that they bought at different stages and they want to bring them all together. And by bringing them all together that helps them make choices about consulting or even replacing some of them. But right now everything is siloed, everything is separate, both organizationally as well as the code bases or investments and tooling or contracts. Everything is just completely separated and it requires humans to put them together. And organizations actually try to gather around and put them together. I don't know if lock-in is the driving goal for this, but it is standardization consolidation. That's the driving initiative. >> And so unification and building is the big driver. They're building out >> Correct, and you can ask why are they doing that? What does standardization help with? It helps them to become more productive. They can move faster, they can innovate faster. Not as a ton of, like literally revenue written all over. So it's super important to them that they achieved this, increase their pace of innovation around this and they do that by standardizing. >> The great point in all this and your success at Upbound and now CNCF success with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and now with the inaugural event of Cloud Native SecurityCon is that the customers are involved, a lot of end users are involved. There's a big driver not only from the industry and the developers and getting architecture right and having choice. The customers want this to happen. They're leaning in, they're part of it. So that's a big driver. Where does this go? If you had to throw a dart at the board five years from now Cloud Native SecurityCon, what does it look like if you had to predict the trajectory of this event and community? >> Yeah, I mean, look, I think the trajectory one is that we have what looks like a standardization layer emerging that is all encompassing. And as a result, there is a ton of opportunity for vendors, projects, communities to build around within on top of this layer. And essentially create, I think you talked about an operating system earlier and decentralized aspect of this, but it's an opportunity to actually, what it looks like for the first time we have a convergence happening industry-wide and through open source and open source foundations. And I think that means that there'll be new opportunity and lots of new projects and things that are created in the space. And it also means that if you don't attach this space, you'll likely be left out. >> Awesome. Bassam, great to have you on, great expert commentary, obviously multi CUBE alumni and supporter of theCUBE and as you become successful we really appreciate your support for helping us get the content out there. And best of luck to your team and thanks for weighing in on Cloud Native SecurityCon. >> Awesome. It's always good talking to you, John. Thank you. >> Great stuff. This is more CUBE coverage from Palo Alto, getting folks on the ground on location, getting us the stories in Seattle. Of course, Cloud Native SecurityCon, the inaugural event, which looks like will be the beginning of a series of multi-year journey for the CNCF, focusing on security. Of course, theCUBE's here to cover it, every angle of it, and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hello everyone. My name is Savannah Peterson, coming to you live from the Kim Con Show floor on the cube here in Detroit, Michigan. The energy is pulsing big event for the Cloud Native Foundation, and I'm joined by John Furrier on my left. John. Hello. >>Great, great, great to have you on the cube. Thanks for being our new host. You look great, Great segment coming up. I'm looking forward to this. Savannah, this is a great segment. A cube alumni, an OG in the cloud, native world or cloud aati. I, as I call it, been there, done that. A lot of respect, a lot of doing some really amazing, I call it the super cloud holy grail. But we'll see >>Your favorite word, >>This favorite word, It's a really strong segment. Looking forward to hearing from this guest. >>Yes, I am very excited and I'm gonna let him tee it up a little bit. But our guest and his project were actually mentioned in the opening keynote this morning, which is very, very exciting. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Baam Tobar Baam, thanks for being here with >>Us. Thank you guys. So good to be back here on the show and, and this exciting energy around us. So it was super, super awesome to be here. >>Yeah, it feels great. So let's start with the opening keynote. Did you know you were gonna get that shout out? >>No, not at all. I, it was, it was really cool to see, you know, I think Cruz was up there talking about how they were building their own platform for autonomous cars and what's running behind it. And they mentioned all these projects and you know, we were like, Wow, that sounds super familiar. And then, then, and then they said, Okay, yeah, we we're, you know, cross plane. They mentioned cross plane, they mentioned, Upbound mentioned the work that we're doing in this space to help folks effectively run, you know, their own layer on top of cloud computing. >>And then Tom, we've known each other, >>We're gonna do a bingo super cloud. So how many times is this Super cloud? So >>Super Cloud is super services, super apps around us. He enables a lot of great things that Brian Grace had a great podcast this week on super services. So it's super, super exciting, >>Super great time on the queue. Super, >>Super >>Cloud conversation. All seriously. Now we've known each other for a long time. You've been to every cub com, you've been in open source, you've seen the seen where it's been, where it is now. Super exciting that in mainstream conversations we're talking about super cloud extractions and around interoperability. Things that were once like really hard to do back, even back on the opens stack days. Now we're at a primetime spot where the control plane, the data planes are in play as a viable architectural component of all the biggest conversations. Yeah, you're in the middle of it. What's your take on it? Give some perspective of why this is so important. >>I mean, look, the key here is to standardize, right? Get to standardization, right? And, and what we saw, like early days of cloud native, it was mostly around Kubernetes, but it was Kubernetes as a, you know, essentially a container orchestrator, the container of wars, Docker, Mesos, et cetera. And then Kubernetes emerged as a, a, the winner in containers, right? But containers is a workload, one kind of workload. It's, I run containers on it, not everything's containers, right? And the, you know, what we're seeing now is the Kubernetes API is emerging as a way to standardize on literally everything in cloud. Not just containers, but you know, VMs, serverless, Lambda, et cetera, storage databases that all using a common approach, a common API layer, a common way to do access control, a common way to do policy, all built around open source projects and you know, the cloud data of ecosystem that you were seeing around here. And that's exciting cuz we've, for the first time we're arriving at some kind of standardization. >>Every major inflection point has this defacto standard evolution, then it becomes kind of commonplace. Great. I agree with Kubernetes. The question I wanted to ask you is what's the impact to the DevOps community? DevSecOps absolutely dominated the playbook, if you will. Developers we're saying we'll run companies cuz they'll be running the applications. It's not a department anymore. Yes, it is the business. If you believe the digital transformation finds its final conclusion, which it will at some point. So more developers doing more, ask more stuff. >>Look, if you, I'd be hard pressed to find somebody that's has a title of DevOps or SRE that can't at least spell Kubernetes, if not running in production, right? And so from that perspective, I think this is a welcome change. Standardize on something that's already familiar to everyone is actually really powerful. They don't have to go, Okay, we learned Kubernetes, now you guys are taking us down a different path of standardization. Or something else has emerged. It's the same thing. It's like we have what, eight years now of cloud native roughly. And, and people in the DevOps space welcome a change where they are basically standardizing on things that are working right? They're actually working right? And they could be used in more use cases, in more scenarios than they're actually, you know, become versatile. They become, you know, ubiquitous as >>You will take a minute to just explain what you guys are selling and doing. What's the product, what's the traction, why are people using you? What's the big, big mo position value statement you guys think? >>Yeah, so, so, so the, my company's called Upbound and where the, where the folks behind the, the cross plane project and cross plane is effective, takes Kubernetes and extends it to beyond containers and to ev managing everything in cloud, right? So if you think about that, if you love the model where you're like, I, I go to Kubernetes cluster and I tell it to run a bunch of containers and it does it for me and I walk away, you can do that for the rest of the surface area of cloud, including your VMs and your storage and across cloud vendors, hybrid models, All of it works in a consistent standardized way, you know, using crossline, right? And I found >>What do you solve? What do you solve or eliminate? What happens? Why does this work? Are you replacing something? Are you extracting away something? Are you changing >>Something? I think we're layering on top of things that people have, right? So, so you'll see people are organized differently. We see a common pattern now where there's shared services teams or platform teams as you hear within enterprises that are responsible for basically managing infrastructure and offering a self-service experience to developers, right? Those teams are all about standardization. They're all about creating things that help them reduce the toil, manage things in a common way, and then offer self-service abstractions to their, you know, developers and customers. So they don't have to be in the middle of every request. Things can go faster. We're seeing a pattern now where the, these teams are standardizing on the Kubernetes API or standardizing on cross plane and standardizing on things that make their life easier, right? They don't have to replace what they're doing, they just have to layer and use it. And I layer it's probably a, an opening for you that makes it sound >>More complex, I think, than what you're actually trying to do. I mean, you as a company are all about velocity as an ethos, which I think is great. Do you think that standardization is the key in increasing velocity for teams leveraging both cross claim, Kubernetes? Anyone here? >>Look, I mean, everybody's trying to achieve the same thing. Everybody wants to go faster, they want to innovate faster. They don't want tech to be the friction to innovation, right? Right. They want, they wanna go from feature to production in minutes, right? And so, or less to that extent, standardization is a way to achieve that. It's not the only way to achieve that. It's, it's means to achieve that. And if you've standardized, that means that less people are involved. You can automate more, you can st you can centralize. And by doing that, that means you can innovate faster. And if you don't innovate these days, you're in trouble. Yeah. You're outta business. >>Do you think that, so Kubernetes has a bit of a reputation for complexity. You're obviously creating a tool that makes things easier as you apply Kubernetes outside just an orchestration and container environment. Do you, what do you see those advantages being across the spectrum of tools that people are leveraging you >>For? Yeah, I mean, look, if Kubernetes is a platform, right? To build other things on top of, and as a, as a result, it's something that's used to kind of on the back end. Like you would never, you should put something in front of Kubernetes as an application model or consumption interface of portals or Right, Yeah. To give zero teams. But you should still capture all your policies, you know, automation and compliance governance at the Kubernetes layer, right? At the, or with cross plane at that layer as well, right? Right. And so if you follow that model, you can get the best of world both worlds. You standardize, you centralize, you are able to have, you know, common controls and policies and everything else, but you can expose something that's a dev friendly experience on top of as well. So you get the both, both the best of both worlds. >>So the problem with infrastructure is code you're saying is, is that it's not this new layer to go across environments. Does that? No, >>Infrastructure is code works slightly differently. I mean, you, you can, you can write, you know, infrastructures, codes using whatever tooling you like to go across environments. The problem with is that everybody has to learn a specific language or has to work with understanding the constructs. There's the beauty of the Kubernetes based approach and the cross playing best approach is that it puts APIs first, right? It's basically saying, look, kind of like the API meant that it, that led to AWS being created, right? Teams should interact with APIs. They're super strong contracts, right? They're visionable. Yeah. And if you, if you do that and that's kind of the power of this approach, then you can actually reach a really high level of automation and a really high level of >>Innovation. And this also just not to bring in the clouds here, but this might bring up the idea that common services create interoperability, but yet the hyper scale clouds could still differentiate on value very much faster processors if it's silicon to better functions if glam, right? I mean, so there's still, it's not killing innovation. >>It is not, And in fact I, you know, this idea of building something that looks like the lowest common denominator across clouds, we don't actually see that in practice, right? People want, people want to use the best services available to them because they don't have time to go, you know, build portability layers and everything else. But they still, even in that model want to standardize on how to call these services, how to set policy on them, how to set access control, how to actually invoke them. If you can standardize on that, you can still, you get the, you get to use these services and you get the benefits of standardization. >>Well Savannah, we were talking about this, about the Berkeley paper that came out in May, which is kind of a super cloud version they call sky computing. Their argument is that if you try to standardize too much like the old kind of OSI model back in the day, you actually gonna, the work innovations gonna stunt the growth. Do you agree with that? And how do you see, because standardization is not so much a spec and it it, it e f thing. It's not an i e committee. Yeah. It's not like that's kind of standard. It's more of defacto, >>I mean look, we've had standards emerge like, you know, if you look at my S SQL for example, and the Postgres movement, like there are now lots of vendors that offer interfaces that support Postgres even though they're differentiated completely on how it's implement. So you see that if you can stick to open interfaces and use services that offer them that tons of differentiation yet still, you know, some kind of open interface if you will. But there are also differentiated services that are, don't have open interfaces and that's okay too. As long as you're able to kind of find a way to manage them in a consistent way. I think you sh and it makes sense to your business, you should use >>Them. So enterprises like this and just not to get into the business model side real quick, but like how you guys making money? You got the project, you get the cross playing project, that's community. You guys charging what's, what's the business model? >>We we're in the business of helping people adopt and run controlled lanes that do all this management service managed service services and customer support and services, the, the plethora of things that people need where we're >>Keeping the project while >>Keeping the project. >>Correct. So that's >>The key. That's correct. Yeah. You have to balance both >>And you're all over the show. I mean, outside of the keynote mention looking here, you have four events on where can people find you if they're tuning in. We're just at the beginning and there's a lot of looks here. >>Upbound at IO is the place to find Upbound and where I have a lot of talks, you'll see Crossline mention and lots of talks and a number of talks today. We have a happy hour later today we've got a booth set up. So >>I'll be there folks. Just fyi >>And everyone will be there now. Yeah. Quick update. What's up? What's new with the cross plane project? Can you share a little commercial? What's the most important stories going on there? >>So cross plane is growing obviously, and we're seeing a ton of adoption of cross plane, especially actually in large enterprise, which is really exciting cuz they're usually the slow to move and cross plane is so central, so it's now in hundreds and thousands of deployments in woohoo, which is amazing to see. And so the, the project itself is adding a ton of features, reducing friction in terms of adoption, how people ride these control planes and alter them coverage of the space. As you know, controls are only useful when you connect them to things. And the space is like the amount of things you can connect control planes to is increasing on a day to day basis and the maturity is increasing. So it's just super exciting to see all of this right >>Now. How would you categorize the landscape? We were just talking earlier in another segment, we're in Detroit Motor City, you know, it's like teaching someone how to drive a car. Kubernetes pluss, okay, switch the gears like, you know, don't hit the other guy. You know? Now once you learn how to drive, they want a sports car. How do you keep them that progression going? How do you keep people to grow continuously? Where do you see the DevOps and or folks that are doing cross playing that are API hardcore? Cause that's a good IQ that shows 'em that they're advancing. Where's the IQ level of advancement relative to the industry? Is the adoption just like, you know, getting going? Are people advancing? Yeah. Sounds like your customers are heavily down the road on >>Yeah, the way I would describe it is there's a progression happening, right? It, it DevOps was make, initially it was like how do I keep things running right? And it transitioned to how do I automate things so that I don't have to be involved when things are running, running. Right now we're seeing a next turn, which is how do I build what looks like a product that offers shared services or a platform so that people consume it like a product, right? Yeah. And now I'm now transition becomes, well I'm an, I'm a developer on a product in operations building something that looks like a product and thinking about it as a, as a has a user interface. >>Ops of the new devs. >>That's correct. Yeah. There we go. >>Talk about layers. Talk about layers on layers on >>Layers. It's not confusing at all John. >>Well, you know, when they have the architecture architectural list product that's coming. Yeah. But this is what's, I mean the Debs are got so much DevOps in the front and the C I C D pipeline, the ops teams are now retrofitting themselves to be data and security mainly. And that's just guardrails, automation policy, seeing a lot of that kind of network. Like exactly. >>Function. >>Yep. And they're, they're composing, not maybe coding a little bit, but they not, they're not >>Very much. They're in the composition, you know that as a daily thing. They're, they're writing compositions, they're building things, they're putting them together and making them work. >>How new is this in your mind? Cause you, you've watching this progress, you're in the middle of it, you're in the front wave of this. Is it adopting faster now than ever before? I mean, if we talked five years ago, we were kind of saying this might happen, but it wasn't happening today. It kind, it is, >>It's kind of, it's kind of amazing. Like, like everybody's writing these cloud services now. Everybody's authoring things that look like API services that do things on top of the structure. That move is very much, has a ton of momentum right now and it's happening mainstream. It, it's becoming mainstream. >>Speaking of momentum, but some I saw both on your LinkedIn as well as on your badge today that you are hiring. This is your opportunity to shamelessly plug. What are you looking for? What can people expect in terms of your company culture? >>Yeah, so we're obviously hiring, we're hiring both on the go to market side or we're hiring on the product and engineering side. If you want to build, well a new cloud platform, I won't say the word super cloud again, but if you want to, if you're excited about building a cloud platform that literally sits on top of, you know, the other cloud platforms and offers services on top of this, come talk to us. We're building something amazing. >>You're creating a super cloud tool kit. I'll say it >>On that note, think John Farer has now managed to get seven uses of the word super cloud into this broadcast. We sawm tomorrow. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. I can't wait to see more of you throughout the course of Cuban. My name is Savannah Peterson, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us here on the Cube where we'll be live from Detroit, Michigan all week.

>>The queue presents Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022, brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to Licia Spain, a Coon cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townson, along with Paul Gillon senior editor, enterprise architecture for Silicon angle. Paul, we're gonna talk to some amazing people this week. Coon, what the energy here, what, what, what, what would you say about >>It? I'd say it's reminiscent of, of early year, uh, early stage conferences I've seen with other technologies. There is a lot of startup activity. Here's a lot of money in the market, despite the sell off in the stock market lately. Uh, a lot of anticipation that there are, there could be big exits. There could be big things ahead for these companies. You don't see that when you go to the big established conferences, uh, you see just, uh, anticipation here that I don't think you see, uh, you you'll see maybe in a couple years, so it's fun to be here right now. I'm sure it'll be a very different experience in two or three years. >>So welcome to our guest cube alum. Batam Tobar the founder and CEO of Upbound. Welcome back. >>Thank you. Yeah, pleasure to be on, on the show again. >>So Paul, tell us the we're in this phase of migrations and, and moving to cloud native stacks. Are we another replatforming generation? I mean, we've done, the enterprise has done this, you know, time and time again, whether it's from Java to.net or do net to Java or from bare metal to VMs, but are we in another age of replatforming? >>You know, it's interesting. Every company has now become a tech company and every tech company needs to build a very model, you know, modern digital platform for them to actually run their business. And if they don't do that, then they'll probably be out of business. And, um, it is interesting to think about how companies are platforming and replatforming. Like, you know, as you said, just a, a few years back, you know, we were on people using cloud Foundry or using Heroku, you hear Heroku a lot, or, you know, now it's cloud native and Kubernetes and, and it, it begs the question, you know, is this the end? That to your point, is this, you know, do we have a, you know, what, what makes us sure that this is the, you know, the last platform or the future proof platform that, that people are building, >>There's never a last platform, right? There's always something around the core. The question is, is Kubernetes Linux, or is it windows? >>That, that's a good question. Um, it's more like more like Linux. I think, um, you know, the, you know, you've heard this before, but people talk about Kubernetes as a platform off platforms. Um, you can use it to build other platforms and if you know what you're doing, you can probably put, assemble a set of pieces around it and arrive at something that looks and can work for your business, but it requires a ton of talent. It requires a lot of people that actually can act, you know, know how to put this stick together to, to work for your business. It is, there's not a lot of guidance. I, we were, I think we were chatting earlier about the CSCF landscape and, and, um, how there are all these different projects and companies around it, but, but they don't come together in meaningful ways that you have, they act the enterprise itself has to figure out how to bring them together. Right. And that's the combination of what they do there organically or not is their platform. Right. And that changes. It can change over time. >>Do you think they really do. They really want to put these things together? I mean, there's, that's not what enterprise is like to do. They want to find someone who's gonna come in and, uh, turnkey do it all for them. >>Yeah. And, and if there was, this is the, this is the things like EV every week now you hear about another platform that says, this is the new Heroku. This is the new cloud Foundry, this replaces every, you know, some vendor has, and you can see them all around here. You know, companies that are basically selling platform solutions, um, that do put 'em together. And the problem with it is that you typically outgrow these, like you are, um, it might solve 80% of the use cases you care about, but the other 20% are not represented. And so you end up outgrowing the platform itself, right? And the, the choice has been mostly around, you know, do you buy something off the shelf that solves 80% of your use cases, or do you build something on your own? And then you have to spend all your resources actually going through and building all of it. And that's been the dilemma, you know, people who talk about this as a platform dilemma, but it's been, it's been the way for a long time. Like you, every, we go through this cycle every few years and, you know, people end up essentially oscillating between buying something off the, you know, that's off the shelf or building it, building it themselves. >>So what's the payoff. If I'm a CIO and I'm looking at the landscape, I don't need to understand, you know, I don't know to know what a pod is to know that looking at 200 plus projects in co and at, in cloud native, uh, foundation and the bevy of, of co-located projects and, and conferences before they, even the start of this, what's the payoff >>Increasing the pace of innovation. I mean, that literally is when we talk to customers, they all say roughly the same thing. They want something that works for their business. They want something that helps them take their, you know, line of business applications to production in a much quicker way, lets them innovate, lets them create higher engineers that can, don't have to understand everything about every system, but can actually specialize and focus on the, the parts that they sh they care about. Um, but it's all in the context of, you know, people want to be able to innovate at a very high pace, otherwise they get disrupted. >>So I was at the, you know, my favorite part of, of Coon in general is the hallway track and talking to people on the ground, doing cool things. I was talking to a engineer who was able to take their Java, stack their, their, uh, net stack and start to create APIs between and break 'em into microservices. Now teams are working across from one another realizing that, that, that promise of innovation, but that was the end point. They they're there. Yeah. As companies are thinking about replatforming where like, where do we start? I mean, looking at the, the CNCF, the, the map and it's 200 plus projects, where do I start? >>Do you typically today start with Kubernetes and, and um, a lot of companies have now deployed Kubernetes to production as a container orchestrator, whether they're going through a vendor or not, but now you are seeing all the things around it, whether it's C I C D or GI ops that they're looking at, you know, or the starting to build consoles around, you know, their, their platforms or looking at managing more than just containers. And that's a theme that, you know, we're seeing a lot now, people want, people want to actually bring this modern stack to manage, not just container workloads, but start looking at databases and cloud workloads and everything else that they're doing around it. Honestly, everybody's trying to do the same thing. They're trying to arrive at a single point of control, a single, you know, a platform that can do it all that they can centralize policy centralized controls to compliance governance, cost controls, and then expose a self-service experience to developers. Like they're all trying to build what we probably call an internal cloud platform. They don't know, they talk about it in different ways, but almost everyone is trying to build some internal platform that sits on top of, on premises. And on top of cloud, depending on their scenarios, >>You make an interesting point, which is that everyone here is to some extent trying to do the same thing. And there's fine points of granularity between now they're approaching it as you walk around this floor. Do you understand what all of these companies are doing? >>I'm not sure I understand all of them, but I, I do. I do recognize a lot of them. Yes. >>And in terms of your approach, you, you use the term control plane, uh, what is distinctive about your approach? >>Very good question. So, you know, we, we end up out take a, um, we we're trying to solve, uh, this problem as well. We're trying to help people build their own platforms. Um, but let me, let me, you know, there's a lot to it. So let me actually step back and talk about the architecture of this. But if you were to look at any cloud platform, let's take the largest one. AWS, if you peek behind the scenes at AWS, you know, um, it's basically a set of independent services, EC two S3 databases, et cetera, um, that are, you know, essentially working on different parts of, you know, like offer completely different pricing, different services, et cetera. They come together because they all integrate into a control plan. >>It's the thing that serves an API. It's the thing that gives it all a common field. It's where you do access control. It's where you do, um, billing, metering, cost control policy, et cetera. Right? And so our realization was if the enterprises are platforming and replatforming, why shouldn't they build their platform in the same way that the cloud vendors build theirs? And so we started this project almost four years ago, now three and a half years, um, called cross plain, which is a, essentially an open source control plane that can become the integration point for all services. And essentially gives you a universal control plane for cloud. >>So you mentioned the idea of the orchestrating or managing stuff other than containers, as I think about companies that built amazing platforms, enterprise companies, building amazing applications on AWS 10 years ago, and they're adopting the AWS control plane. And now I'm looking at Kubernetes is Kubernetes the way to multi-cloud to be able to control those discrete applic, uh, services in a AWS or Google cloud Azure or Oracle cloud is cetera. >>We kind of have the tease it, the parts. So there are really two parts to Kubernetes and everybody thinks of Kubernetes as a container orchestration platform. Right? And, um, you know, there is a sense that people say, if I was to run Kubernetes on everywhere and can build everything on top of containers, that I get some kind of portability across clouds, right. That I can put things in containers. And then they magically run, you know, in different environments. Um, in reality, what we've seen is not everything fits in containers. It's not gonna be the world is not gonna look like containers on the bottom. Everything else is on top. Instead, what we're gonna see is essentially a set of services that people are using across the different vendors. So if you look at like, you could be at AWS shop primarily, but I bet you're using confluent or elastic or data breaks or snowflake or Mongo or other services. >>I bet you're using things that are on premises, right? And so when you look at that and you say to build my platform as an enterprise, I have to consume services from multiple vendors. Even it's just one major cloud vendor, but I'm consuming services from others. How do I bring them together in meaningful ways so that I can, you know, build my platform on top of the collection of them and offer something that my developers can consume. And self-service on. That's not a, that's not just containers. What's interesting though, is if you look at Kubernetes and, you know, look inside it, Kubernetes built a control plane. That's actually quite useful and applicable outside of container scenarios. So this whole notion of CRDs and controllers, if you've heard that term, um, the ability, you know, like there are two parts to Kubernetes, there is the control plane, and then there's the container container, uh, workloads and the control plane is generic. >>It could be used literally across, you know, you can use it to manage things that are completely outside of container workloads. And that's what we did with cross plain. We took the control plane of Kubernetes and then built bindings providers that connected to AWS, to Google, to Azure, to digital ocean, to all these different environments. So you can bring the way of managing, you know, the style of managing that Kubernetes invented to more than just containers. You can now manage cloud services, using the same approach that you are now using with Kubernetes and using the entire ecosystem of tooling around it. >>Enterprise have been under pressure replatform for a long time. It was first go to Unix then to Linux and virtualize then to move to the cloud. Now, Kubernetes, do you think that this is the stack that enterprises can finally commit to? >>I think if you take the orientation of your deploying a control plane within your enterprise, that is extensible, that enables you to actually connect it to all the things that are under your domain, um, that that actually can be a Futureproof way of doing a platform. And, you know, if you look at the largest cloud platforms, AWS has been around for at least 15 years now, uh, and they really haven't changed the architecture of AWS significantly. It's still a control plane, a set of control planes that are managing services. >>It's a legacy >>They've added a lot of services. They've have a ton of diversity. They've added so many different things, but the architecture is still a hub and spoke that they've built, right? And if the enterprise can take the same orientation, put a control plane, let it manage all the things that are, you know, about today, arrive at a single point of control, have a single point where you can enforce policy compliance, cost controls, et cetera, mm-hmm <affirmative>, and then expose a self-service experience to your developers that actually can become future proof. >>So we've heard this promise before the cloud of clouds, basically. Yes, the, the, to be able to manage everything, what we find is the devils in the details. The being able to say, you know, a load balancer issuing a, a command to, to deploy a load balancer in AWS is different than it is in Azure, which is different than it is in GCP. How do, how do enterprises know that we can talk to a single control plane to do that? I mean, that just seems extremely difficult to manage. Oh >>Yeah. That, um, the approach is not, you're not trying to create a lowest common denominator between clouds. That's a really, really hard problem. And in fact, you get relegated to just using this, you know, really shallow features of each, if you're, if you're gonna do that, like your, your example of load balancers, load balances look completely different between between cloud vendors. Um, the approach that we kind of advocate for is that you shouldn't think of them as you shouldn't try to unify them in a way that makes them, you know, there's a, uh, there's a global abstraction that says, oh, there's a load balancer. And it somehow magically works across the different cloud vendors. I think that's a really, really hard thing to say, to do as you point out. However, if you bring them all under a same control plane, As different as they are, you're able to now apply policies. You're able to set cost controls. You're able to expose a self-service experience on top of them, even, even if they are very different. And that's, that's something that I think is, you know, been hard to do in the past. >>So BAAM, we'll love to dig deeper into this in future segments. And I'm gonna take a look at the, the, the product and project <laugh> and see where you folks land in this conversation from Valencia Spain, I'm Keith towns. And along with Paul Gillon, and you're watching the leader in high tech.

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22 brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to Licia Spain in Coon cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townson, along with Paul Gillon senior editor, enterprise architecture for Silicon angle. Paul, we're gonna talk to some amazing people this week. Coon, what the energy here, what, what, what would you say about >>It? I'd say it's reminiscent of, of early year, early stage conferences I've seen with other technologies. There is a lot of startup activity. Here's a lot of money in the market, despite the selloff in the stock market lately, a lot of anticipation that there are, there could be big exits. There could be big things ahead for these companies. You don't see that when you go to the big established conferences, you see just anticipation here that I don't think you see you you'll see maybe in a couple of years. So it's fun to be here right now. I'm sure it'll be a very different experience in two or three years. >>So welcome to our guest Q alum. BAAM Tobar the founder and CEO of Upbound. Welcome back. >>Thank you. Yeah, pleasure to be on, on the show again. >>So Paul, tell us the we're in this phase of migrations and, and moving to cloud native stacks. Are we another re-platforming generation? I mean, we've done, the enterprise has done this, you know, time and time again, and whether it's from Java to.net or net to Java or from bare metal to VMs, but are we in another age of replatforming? >>You know, it's interesting. Every company has now become a tech company and every tech company needs to build a very model, you know, modern digital platform for them to actually run their business. And if they don't do that, then they'll probably be out of business. And it is interesting to think about how companies are platforming and replatforming. Like, you know, as you said, just a, a few years back, you know, we were on people using cloud Foundry or using Heroku, you hear Heroku a lot, or, you know, now it's cloud native and Kubernetes and, and it, it begs the question, you know, is this the end that the tr point is this, you know, do we have a, you know, what, what makes us sure that this is the, you know, the last platform or the future proof platform that, that people are building, >>There's never a last platform, right? There's always something around the core. The question is, is Kubernetes Linux, or is it windows? >>That, that's a good question. It's more like more like Linux. I think, you know, the, you know, you've heard this before, but people talk about Kubernetes as a platform off platforms, you can use it to build other platforms. And if you know what you're doing, you can probably put, assemble a set of pieces around it and arrive at something that looks and can work for your business. But it requires a ton of talent. It requires a lot of people that actually can act, you know, know how to put the stick together to, to work for your business. It is, there's not a lot of guidance. I, we were, I think we were chatting earlier about the CSCF landscape and, and how there all these different projects and companies around it. But, but they don't come together in meaningful ways that you have, they act the enterprise itself has to figure out how to bring them together. Right. And that's the combination of what they do there organically or not is their platform. Right. And that changes. It can change over time. >>Do you think they really do. They really want to put these things together? I mean, there's, that's not what enterprise is like to do. They want to find someone who's gonna come in and turnkey do it all for >>Them. Yeah. And, and if there were, this is the, this is the things like EV every week now you hear about another platform that says, this is the new Heroku. This is the new cloud Foundry. This replaces every, you know, some vendor has, and you can see them all around here. You know, companies that are basically selling platform solutions that do put 'em together. And the problem with it is that you typically outgrow these, like you are, it might solve 80% of the use cases you care about, but the other 20% are not represented. And so you end up outgrowing the platform itself, right? And the, the choice has been mostly around, you know, do you buy something off the shelf that solves 80% of your use cases? Or do you build something on your own? And then you have to spend all your resources actually going through and building all of it. And that's been the dilemma, you know, people who talk about this as a platform dilemma, but it's been, it's been the way for a long time. Like you, every, we go through this cycle every few years and, you know, people end up essentially oscillating between buying something off the, you know, that's off the shelf or building it, building it themselves. >>So what's the payoff. If I'm a CIO and I'm looking at the landscape, I don't need to understand, you know, I don't know what a pod is to know that looking at 200 plus projects in co and at, in cloud native foundation and the bevy of, of co-located projects and, and conferences before the, even the start of this, what's the payoff >>Increasing the pace of innovation. I mean, that literally is when we talk to customers, they all say roughly the same thing. They want something that works for their business. They want something that helps them take their, you know, line of business applications to production in a much quicker way, lets them innovate, lets them create higher engineers that can, don't have to understand everything about every system, but can actually specialize and focus on the, the parts that they sh they care about. But it's all in the context of, you know, people want to be able to innovate at a very high pace. Otherwise they get disrupted. >>So I was at the, you know, my favorite part of coan in general is the hallway track and talking to people on the ground, doing cool things. I was talking to a engineer who was able to take their Java, stack their, their.net stack and start to create APIs between and break 'em into microservices. Now teams are working across from one another realizing that, that, that promise of innovation, but that was the end point. They they're there. Yeah. As companies are thinking about replatforming where like, where do we start? I mean, I'm looking at the, the C CNCF, the, the map and it's 200 plus projects. Where, where do I start? >>You typically today start with Kubernetes. And, and a lot of companies have now deployed Kubernetes to production as a container orchestrator, whether they're going through a vendor or not. But now you're seeing all the things around it, whether it's C I C D or GI ops that they're looking at, you know, or they're starting to build consoles around, you know, their, their platforms or looking at managing more than just containers. And that's a theme that, you know, we're seeing a lot now, people want, people want to actually bring this modern stack to manage, not just container workloads, but start looking at databases and cloud workloads and everything else that they're doing around it. Honestly, everybody's trying to do the same thing. They're trying to arrive at a single point of control, a single, you know, a platform that can do it all that they can centralize policies, centralized controls to compliance governance, cost controls, and then expose a self-service experience to the developers. Like they're all trying to build what we probably call an internal cloud platform. They don't know, they talk about it in different ways, but almost everyone is trying to build some internal platform that sits on top of, on premises. And on top of cloud, depending on their scenarios, >>You make an interesting point, which is that everyone here is to some extent trying to do the same thing. And there's fine points of granularity between now they're approaching it as you walk around this floor. Do you understand what all of these companies are doing? >>I'm not sure I understand all of them, but I, I do. I do recognize a lot of them. Yes. >>And in terms of your approach, you, you use the term control plane. What is distinctive about your approach? >>Very good question. So, you know, we, we end, Upbound take a, we we're trying to solve this problem as well. We're trying to help people build their own platforms, but let me, let me, you know, there's a lot to it. So let me actually step back and, and talk about the architecture of this. But if you were to look at any cloud platform, let's take the largest one. AWS, if you peek behind the scenes at AWS, you know, it's basically a set of independent services, EC two S three databases, et cetera, that are, you know, essentially working on different parts of, you know, like offer completely different pricing, different services, et cetera. They come together because they all integrate into a control plan. >>It's the thing that serves an API. It's the thing that gives it all a common feel. It's where you do access control. It's where you do billing metering, cost control policy, et cetera. Right? And so our realization was if the enterprises are platforming and replatforming, why shouldn't they build their platform in the same way that the cloud vendors build theirs? And so we started this project almost four years ago, now three and a half years called cross plain, which is a, essentially an open source control plane that can become the integration point for all services. And essentially gives you a universal control plane for cloud. >>So you mentioned the idea of if orchestrating or managing stuff other than containers, as I think about companies that built amazing platforms, enterprise companies, building amazing applications on AWS 10 years ago, and they're adopting the AWS control plane. And now I'm looking at Kubernetes is Kubernetes the way to multi-cloud to be able to control those discrete services in a AWS or Google cloud Azure or Oracle cloud, is that true? >>We kind have the tease it, the parts. So there are really two parts to Kubernetes and everybody thinks of Kubernetes as a container orchestration platform. Right? And you know, there is a sense that people say, if I was to run Kubernetes on everywhere and can build everything on top of containers, that I get some kind of portability across clouds, right. That I can put things in containers. And then they magically run, you know, in different environments. In reality, what we've seen is not everything fits in containers. It's not gonna be the world is not gonna look like containers on the bottom. Everything else is on top. Instead, what we're gonna see is essentially a set of services that people are using across the different vendors. So if you look at like, you could be at AWS shop primarily, but I bet you're using confluent or elastic or data breaks or snowflake or Mongo or other services. >>I bet you're using things that are on premises, right? And so when you look at that and you say to build my platform as an enterprise, I have to consume services from multiple vendors. Even if it's just one major cloud vendor, but I'm consuming services from others. How do I bring them together in meaningful ways so that I can, you know, build my platform on top of the collection of them and offer something that my developers can consume. And self-service on. That's not a, that's not just containers. What's interesting though, is if you look at Kubernetes and, you know, look inside it, Kubernetes built a control plane. That's actually quite useful and applicable outside of container scenarios. So this whole notion of CRDs and controllers, if you've heard that term, the ability, you know, like there are two parts to Kubernetes, there is a control plane, and then there's the container container workloads. >>And the control plane is generic. It could be used literally across, you know, you can use it to manage things that are completely outside of container workloads. And that's what we did with cross mind. We took the control plane of Kubernetes and then built bindings providers that connected to AWS, to Google, to Azure, to digital ocean, to all these different environments. So you can bring the way of managing, you know, the style of managing that Kubernetes invented to more than just containers. You can now manage cloud services, using the same approach that you are now using with Kubernetes and using the entire ecosystem of tooling around it. >>Enterprise has been under pressure to replatform for a long time. It was first go to Unix then to Linux and virtualize then to move to the cloud. Now, Kubernetes, do you think that this is the stack that enterprises can finally commit to? >>I think if you take the orientation of your deploying a control plane within your enterprise, that is extensible, that enables you to actually connect it to all the things that are under your domain, that that actually can be a Futureproof way of doing a platform. And, you know, if you look at the largest cloud platforms, AWS has been around for at least 15 years now, and they really haven't changed the architecture of AWS significantly. It's still a control plane, a set of control planes that are managing services. >>It's a legacy >>They've added a lot of services. They've have a ton of diversity. They've added so many different things, but the architecture is still a hub and spoke that they've built, right? And if the enterprise can take the same orientation, put a control plane, let it manage all the things that are, you know, about today, arrive at a single point of control, have a single point where you can enforce policy compliance, cost controls, et cetera, and then expose a self-service experience to your developers that actually can become future proof. >>So we've heard this promise before the cloud of clouds, basically, yes, the, the, to be able to manage everything, what we find is the devils in the details. The being able to say, you know, a load balancer issuing a, a command to, to deploy a load balancer in AWS is different than it is in Azure, which is different than it is in GCP. How do, how do enterprises know that we can talk to a single control plane to do that? I mean, that just seems extremely difficult to manage. >>Oh yeah. That the approach is not, you're not trying to create a lowest common denominator between clouds. That's a really, really hard problem. And in fact, you get relegated to just using this, you know, really shallow features of each, if you're, if you're gonna do that, like your, your example of load balancers, load balances look completely different between between cloud vendors, the approach that we kind of advocate for is that you shouldn't think of them as you shouldn't try to unify them in a way that makes them, you know, there's a, there's a global abstraction that says, oh, there's a load balancer. And it somehow magically works across the different cloud vendors. I think that's a really, really hard thing to say, to do as you pointed out. However, if you bring them all under a same control plane, as different as they are, you're able to now apply policies. You're able to set cost controls. You're able to expose a self-service experience on top of them, even, even if they are very different. And that's, that's something that I think is, you know, been hard to do in the past. >>So BAAM, we'll love to dig deeper into this in future segments. And I'm gonna take a look at the, the, the product and project and see where you folks land in this conversation from Valencia Spain, I'm Keith towns, along with Paul Gillon and you're watching the leader in high tech coverage.

>>from around the >>globe, it's the >>cube with coverage of Kublai >>khan and cloud Native con, europe 2021 virtual brought to you by red hat. The cloud >>native computing >>foundation and ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Yukon 21 cloud native con part of the C n C f s event. This is the cubes continuing coverage. You got a great guest cube alumni entrepreneurs to borrow founder and ceo of up bound. Great to see you remotely too bad. We're not in person. But soon the pandemic Is right around the corner will be post pandemic with searing events are coming back. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on for coop con 21 >>Good, good to be back on the cube, john >>great to see you. You know, I've always loved your career, what you've been doing with that many conversations on the Cuban. Also in person, you're the creative rook and cross plane um, C N C F projects there. Um great venture, really part of this cloud native revolution that's happening, you were early on and the history of your career, but now you're seeing it go mainstream. Let's get into that on this session, because I really want to dig into this across cloud and now get ops is hugely popular. This is kind of what you call day to operate your ongoing, this is the future. This is a new environment. Before we get going, talk about the update on your in what's new with cross plane. >>Uh, So cross plane is growing as you know, it's a multi cloud control plane that essentially lets you uh you can connect it up to all the different infrastructure vendors and lets you manage infrastructure in a consistent way consistent with what, you know, what we do with the tops and and on the kubernetes ap I um and so the community has been growing tremendously. We've just applied for it together, the incubation status at the CNC F and really happy with all the progress around it. It's, it's such an amazing journey we've been on with cross plane, >>you know, it's funny you watch all the, the evolution of the cloud in the early days, it was, what is cloud, the big debate, people define what cloud is that? It was Oh yeah, clouds great. You can, you know, start up cloud developers, Greenfield, then it became enterprise cloud around 2015. Now, you know, today the cloud is not so much, you know, moving to the cloud as it was in 2015, it's like scaling and cloud, that is true enterprise grade. Um real serious operational security impacts multiple resources and this is where cross cloud comes in or, or, you know, I see hybrid clouds operating model, everyone has agreed on that. That's the architecture, but that also brings in assumes multiple clouds, right? This is where the new kind of control plane or you guys called cross cloud management kicks in. This is an enterprise priority. From what I can see. Do you agree with that? Can you share your commentary on how much our enterprises of prioritizing cross cloud management? Because that seems to be the Hot one. What's your take on us? >>Yeah, the way, the way we see it is that and we see this with customers and we see those folks in the community. Almost every enterprise we talked to is modernizing their I. T. You know, that, as you said, they're not going to cloud, they're already in cloud, but they're doing so many more things to kind of accelerate the pace of innovation and reduce the time for them to ship applications, which is now a fundamental part or fundamental measure uh of their success. Right. And so what we're seeing is that they're organizing into platform teams internally, and these teams are the ones that own the cloud accounts, they're the ones that are responsible for deploying infrastructure cross, whether it's cross cloud or hybrid cloud. Um and these teams are essentially organizing to build what looks like an internal platform and a key ingredient of this. Internal platform is a control plane and this is what enables getups. You see kubernetes as a control plane, that's in there, um it's it's the piece that's allowing them to actually connect to different clouds. It's the piece that's allowing them to manage their infrastructure, whether it's on premise or in cloud, it's the thing that's allowing them to do day to operations, all of that's happening in an interesting way. It's, it's happening within the enterprise. It is their own platform and it layers on top of the back and infrastructure that they're using, whether it's cloud providers or hybrid, you know, infrastructure, it's happening in a way that's enterprise from the enterprise and going out to the vendors, which is a little different model than we've seen in the past. And that's where multi cloud tends to come in and multi vendor or heterogeneity in general. Uh we see that very, very commonly in in the enterprise, >>you know, I think you're exactly right. That's classic market evolution in computer industry, you know, multi multi vendors, ultimately when things start to settle in on the massive growth. Hybrid cloud, however, is really kind of where the action is today. And you can see people struggling and innovating around the area of continuous operations and as you can use development develops concept. But the problem is that as they realize, well stuffs in production, it's in the public cloud, its on premises, you know, this, the operational piece starts to rear its head and we gotta fix that. And then they connect the dots a saying, if multi cloud is coming, which people generally agree upon, then they go, if we don't clean this up, we're gonna be screwed. That's generally the consensus that I can that I hear from people so explain, explain with the rise of multi cloud what cross plane is, I mean, what is cross playing about? Give us an overview around this. >>So, I mean there's a lot of ways to describe this, but we see it as like the rise of platform engineering, there's a lot happening around people building their own platforms that layer on top of cloud, which happens to also be multi vendor and multi cloud. So when you're building a platform in an enterprise that can talk to amazon that can talk to Microsoft Azure that can talk to your on premise infrastructure, whether it's VM ware or open shift, you need a, you need a layer that is able to orchestrate and deploy and manage and deal with day to operations, Right. That that is an important piece. It's the piece that is, you know, the way you can enforce your policies, you can set out your controls, whether your compliance, do your compliance and governance and essentially sell sell served uh this to your developers so that they can actually get productive and deploy applications on on this platform. And we see cross plane and what what Kubernetes has started with a control plane as a critical approach in this, in this new platform. In fact, the approach that's kind of pioneered by kubernetes with the kubernetes Api and control plane is now becoming the dominant way of managing infrastructure and deploying applications on it. This is you hear this in different ways, like this is why get off has become popular. Get Office is a really great thing. It's a way to essentially let you manage infrastructure through, you know, configuration that's stored in GIT repositories. But the thing that it connects to is a control plane that's going to make it happen, right? And we see that with kubernetes uh predominantly with kubernetes. Right. And so what cross plane does is lets you extend the getups approach and the management approach that's pioneered by the kubernetes community to the entire surface area of cloud. So not only can you deploy your containers using get apps, you can actually manage through the tops VMS server lists, databases and cloud Hybrid environments. Multi cloud environments. You know, even, you know, your load balances that are on premise could be managed through tops anything that speaks in a p I could be managed to get off if you go through a project like cross plane. Now, that part is that part is where we're seeing the most success right now. We're seeing a lot of people that are adopting these approaches to managing infrastructure while they're building their platforms and they're pulling in cross plains, we're seeing massive end user adoption of cross plane right >>now. I want to get into this. I want to get this impact of the control playing but before we get there I want a real quick while I got you an expert. I know this coupon. You don't need to explain what get upset. Everyone knows what that is. But for the folks that aren't aren't aren't in the community, I want to grab the sound bite if you don't mind. Could you define what is getups? >>Uh huh. So so get up is somewhat of a marketing term. Uh but the way I interpreted is essentially storing your configuration in a git repository. Are you using, you know, uh versioning techniques that are pioneered to manage code, right? Whether using Pr flows, storing things and get doing the collaboration of what changes happen in get and then having that be essentially mirrored to uh control plane that is able to implement the declarative configuration that you've specified. So a good example of this is if you wanted to deploy, say, you know, start up a cluster of kubernetes cluster in the cloud vendor and then run applications on it and then configure it to connect to databases. You can describe your intent and store it and get collaborate with your team members on it, make sure it's all correct. And then through getups pipeline, you're able to take those, you know, essentially, configuration and then apply it via control plane onto your vendor of choice. Right? That's that's the style. It's great because, you know, get is a great place to store configuration. It's a great place to collaborate. There are amazing tools around pr flows, pull request flows. They're amazing tools for audit ability and versioning and you get to leverage all of those when you are deploying infrastructure that runs your entire >>enterprise. Yeah. And I would also add to that. I I explain it simply for people that aren't in the weeds on the tech is think of it like a QA for srs it's like you need to manage the infrastructure because we're talking about devops infrastructure as code, we're programming infrastructure. So you've got to have some sort of process. And I think this brings up my next point about this control plane, because you mentioned um Cross plans has these nice has this nice uh program to it. Most people write their own code, they'll like they'll they'll like do homegrown work to create in their platform, mainly because there's gaps in there. Can you comment on how you guys are different than someone saying? I'm just gonna write my own code and do my own thing, my own platform team. I don't need cosplaying what I need you for. I'm gonna do it myself. >>So what we see predominantly is folks that are doing get ops or infrastructure as code and setting up pipelines for their compute workloads and specifically for containers. Right. And then, like you said, they're actually writing homegrown scripts or doing Tara forum or doing other things that are on the side to deploy. The other parts, uh including, you know, state full workloads or things that are running across a I M L on premise, hybrid, all of that stuff is done organically on the side of this beautiful path. Forget ops right. What we're doing with cross plane is essentially letting you bring all of the things that you're managing organically into the same pipelines with get offs. So you're able to actually normalize on a single approach for management for orchestration of infrastructure and applications. So you're you're able to, you know, get rid of your custom scripts and use a P I. S to define what your developers should do. You're able to, you know, use the mechanisms that are in the tools that are available to you forget ups and for the in the company's ecosystem to manage the entire surface area of, you know, infrastructure that you're managing within the enterprise in a consistent way. Right? That's where cross money comes in cross plane enables you to extend the control plane of kubernetes to manage everything that's offered by amazon and Microsoft and google and VM ware and open shift and red hat, Everything else can become falls into the same orchestrator, the same control plane that's managing it all and you can access it and give it to your developers in a safe way using, you know, get ups like approaches. >>You know, I've heard horror stories where people pushed new codes, trivial stuff and then all of a sudden breaks because um, code or script was written for a different purpose, but the impact was created into a small little dependency, but it's essentially the human error aspect of software. It's like, well we didn't really kind of see that coming, but at that point that script worked. Now this new thing, something trivial and easy breaks because and then it crashes. This is the kind of day to operations >>that very amounting >>about. Is that right? >>That's that's very much that's very much the case. And we see a lot of people kind of normalizing on templates and scripts, you know, where it's like, okay, you want to deploy database, here's a we'll open a ticket. Uh, and then some human runs, uh, you know, a template, a Terror form template, etcetera, that deploys a script and then shuttle credentials back to the developers over email or over slack and then they plug them into their manifest to deploy on through getups, pipelines. That there's a lot of interesting things that are happening and what we we want to do is to prevent the human error. To put the guard rails in place is essentially arrive at a consistent approach for all of it. Your legacy workloads, your multi cloud workloads, your hybrid workloads, your the little system that's sitting on the side. You can, you can do, you can essentially normalize on using a single approach to manage all of it. One that is safe, that you can give to developers directly there. It has all the guardrails in place, has policy and controls factored in and is exposed through an api that's the part that I think is uh, you know, leads to the largest, most scalable platforms in the world. >>You know, I think that's just natural evolution to us as your customers and enterprises get visibility on the operational standards like, Okay, let's lock that input. The guard rails down. Makes a lot of sense. I gotta ask you on the enterprise adoption pieces, something that we've been covering on silicon angle on the cube this year is looking at the mainstream adoption of kubernetes and whatnot and the rest of the cloud native. It's certainly with Covid, it's accelerated everything. How is the enterprise adoption of cross plane changing? Uh is a game that kind of momentum you expected when you started the project a few years ago? >>Um We're very pleasantly surprised by the adoption, especially in the last six months since we declared cross plane one point. Oh, it has reached a maturity level now that it's actually in Fortune 100 massive production deployments in Fortune 100 companies. Um This is why we're actually, you know, taking to the next level of C N C F, we're also proud of the ecosystem convergence on it, so we're seeing the cloud providers, working with all of them on ensuring that Crossman can address their infrastructure and we're seeing main, the community rally around us. Uh We think the ecosystem part is super interesting for cross money, as you can imagine having an orchestrator control plane that's able to, you know, address the entire surface area of infrastructure offered by all these different vendors requires the vendors to be involved. Right? Uh and so both, uh, it's a two sided network. Both the ecosystem, you know, adoption and the end user adoption are important for cross plane and we're seeing like massive traction on both right >>now. That's awesome. Traditionally, the the adoption arises that users want more things actually enterprise. They they want everything every nook and cranny, they want every feature, they want every integration. I mean they prioritize but, but as you get more, it's not just like a consumer product, although it is cloud native and you've got that, but there's, there's certain things that are table stakes and then there's innovation, but they really want the well known integrations, um, and support and so forth. How is cross playing in the community responding to the challenges as you guys get more popular and as the standards become clear around multi cloud? >>Yeah, I mean, this is the beauty of open source. I mean, we're seeing a lot of different folks contributing to open source. The majority of contributors right now to cross plane are outside of a pound. The company that started cross plane and essentially donated C N C. F. We're seeing folks that are coming in and adding the resources that they are needing, um, or adding features, really significant features to the code base and improving, which is, you know, again, it's the network effect around open source and it's just unbelievable to see and, and I'm able to see it happen and happen so quickly around the project. >>That's awesome. Well something great to have you on, your always great to talk to your super smart, we've had many great conversations in person on camera on the cube. Now, remote CNC F is again um doing such a great job with the um, the open source and now with Coop Con and cloud, Native Con, the open hybrid cloud and now cross cloud, multi cloud, whatever you wanna call it, it's happening. So I gotta ask you with respect to kubernetes because you know, we were all having beers and open stack that time we write, cooper is going to be hot, I think how many years ago that was, um I think you are kind of hanging around with me and robert and others. Um, Kubernetes was just an idea it was developing. Now it's obviously mainstream. The question that I get a lot now is how do I manage and deploy kubernetes in an open hybrid cloud to take advantage of the current state of the art, Open software and commercial opportunities and be positioned to take advantage of multi cloud. In other words, they want the future of multi cloud, but they've got to address the open hybrid cloud. So how do I do that? What's your what's your advice? >>You know, honestly, uh reflecting on the success of kubernetes, I I have a you know, maybe a controversial answer to your question. >>I think >>Kubernetes will be remembered for its control plane and its ability to manage infrastructure and applications in a general way, and not for the fact that it's a container orchestrator In 10 years, we'll probably look at kubernetes and say it's true superpower is the fact that it revolutionized how we manage infrastructure and applications using this declarative approach, using this control plane approach uh to management. And the fact that it's managing the fact that it started out with just containers is well, we'll probably be a historical thing. Uh so so so in some ways, you know, to kind of to kind of go back to your question, I'd say yes. I think kubernetes is reached mainstream in the in the container space, but we now have two uncontained, arise it and use it for management, managing infrastructure everywhere in a multi cloud and a you know, in a hybrid environment as well. >>Well, I mean that's a great point. First, I don't think that's radical. I'm on the record years ago saying that I saw it as the TCP I P moment for cloud where you have interoperability and what you're getting and I think that's so interesting right now and I think everyone is kind of, it's the hidden secrets kind of like the land grab, everyone's trying to go for us. Customers just want a provision and manage cloud infrastructure and program it with applications. I mean just think about that general basic concept. Right? I want to provision, I don't want to have to have meetings, no waterfall know that. I want to be agile. Yeah, I want operation, I want security, I want all that big 10. That's kind of where the puck is going >>very much. Self, self service is a really critical part and the part that um is part of the kubernetes uh kind of design is you developers just want a database or they wanna cash to run their application alongside their application. They don't really need to understand all the security details and networking and be pcs and everything else. And so if you give them an A. P. I just like kubernetes does that tells them. Okay, look, if you want a pot or if you want a database or if you want to cash, here's the A. P. I use, use whatever framework you want, use any language you want. And then we've got all the guardrails built in behind the A. P. I line, just, you know, through getups or not deploy this thing, provision it and then the control plane takes care of the rest. That's the, that's the path we're on as an industry, >>whatever you wanna call it, getups, cross cloud, it's unlimited cloud resource at scale. That's what customers want to do. The markets evolving superfast tons of opportunity for entrepreneurs, tons of evidence for enterprises who are themselves innovating. Again, another big theme here. I'll give you the final word around this user generated open source paradigm, what they've always been involvement now, more than ever, you start to see that, I don't know, maybe second generation, maybe third generation end user inside companies contributing to projects and driving this. This is an interesting dynamic. No one's really reporting this, your thoughts on this end user driven projects. >>We're seeing, we're seeing a lot of end users get involved in projects like cross plane. I mean, it's amazing. It's like companies that are, you know, directionally, they're all, you know, when they're modernizing, they're all heading down about that's open source or even towards cloud native projects. Right. And so it's what we see is they typically get involved initially by just asking questions and, you know, reporting issues and asking for features. And then within within a few months you see actual like meaningful contributions come in two projects. Right. And so I mean there's nothing speaks uh, nothing, nothing says their work. You know, they're committed more than just submitting a pull request where they've spent hours weeks making changes to a project. Right. And and that's happening across the entire, you know, ecosystem around cloud Native. It's, it's what makes it so powerful, >>awesome. But some great to have this conversation. Great insights. Thanks for sharing the update on cross plane and your vision around this, you know, provisioning new infrastructure, having this control, universal control plan. I think this is where everyone is talking about having that value and the scale sets up automation. You know, it just brings everything to the next, next gen, next level of capability. So I appreciate taking the time. Thanks for coming in. >>Thanks john Yeah, good. Good to be back on the, on the cube. >>Great to see you. Okay. This is the Cube coverage of coop con 21 virtual cloud native Khanum jaan for your host with the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm.

>> Narrator: From New York, it's theCube. Covering Escape/19. (music plays) >> Welcome back everyone. It's Cube coverage for the first inaugural multicloud conference, Escape 2019. We are here with at Bassam Tabbara who is the CEO of Upbound, hot start-up, has not yet released their product but they're working on it. Good friend of theCube, Cube alumni. Bassam, good to see you again. >> Thank you, glad to be back on the Cube. >> Well we know your guys are beavering away, digging away at the product, building it out. You have a very compelling background coming into the cloud world. You're here at the multicloud, first ever conference >> That's right. >> There is hybrid cloud, but this is like being billed as the first multicloud conference. A lot of technical people here. >> Lots of. >> Lot of industry insiders setting the foundation is one theme I'm hearing and then the other theme is data. >> Yeah. >> These are the two dynamics. What's your take on this multicloud conference opportunity? >> Look, I think it's really interesting, it reflects kind of what's happening. Multicloud's becoming a reality, more and more people are, whether they like it or not, are actually using multiple vendors and they're trying to figure it out so I think it's great that we are now a forum, I mean there are likely to be more. We're doing one of the Atlanta Gitlab at the next KubeCon which is kind of cool. But you know so getting all the right people in here, focusing on the data problem. Where we look at from a universal control plain standpoint. There are lots of people here talking about the economics of this and what it means for venture capital in the next five years and what it means for acquisition patterns and NMA. There are lots of really interesting aspects being covered today. >> Yeah it's a classic inaugural conference where with the organic communities here you have a range of personas. Entrepreneurs, founder, executive, venture capitalists, all kind of having those candid conversations. What to do next. >> That's right. >> Kind of all ger multiclouds here. Questions is, what's it going to be? >> What's it going to be. Well I think I was trying to figure that out. Honestly, anything that makes it easy for enterprises to do this massive lifting and shifting of infrastructure and being able to control their data, deal with multiple vendors, the world is increasingly heterogeneous. That's another way of saying multicloud is just dealing with the heterogeneity. And it's going to be more and more heterogeneous because if you look at the trends, it's hard to imagine that all innovation is going to come out of one cloud company. Right. So if that's not the case then you have people innovating, people creating all sorts of new platforms and infrastructure. Ways of dealing with data, ways of dealing with networking. Or ways of dealing with storage. Data bases and everything else. Now that you've got this innovation happening, whether it's open source communities or not. And then as an enterprise user, I want to consume it, well I have to deal with the heterogeneity. How do I consume it? How do I bring it together? How do I make sense of it? How do I get it all secured? How do I get it all under my compliance department? Those are the opportunities that are on multicloud and it is a reality. So at some level I'd be hard pressed to find someone that says I'm using Amazon or Google or Azure only and not say using a boutique cloud or another service or something else. Everybody's got some set of services that are... >> I mean multicloud and multivendor are two words that you go back to the history of the computer industry >> That's right. multivendor is a heterogeneous environment. There's benefits of that. But all that was based upon the lock-in fear. And you'll be hearing some of that here. So what's your view of lock-in because if value creation is the lock-in, the red hat guys giving a talk about Wal-Mart cloud versus niche clouds, it's all open source so where's the lock-in? >> Yeah I don't know if I would subscribe to this as solving the lock-in problem and every time you use a vendor at some level you're kind of relying on them. If they have a good service you're kind of tied to them right? But the more interesting aspect to me is having a choice. So being able to say I'm going to pick the best data based vendor out there. One that suits my problem and being able to do that without having to let go of the integration aspect of us. If I have to choose a data based SaaS service that I really like but the cost of doing that involves me creating a new vendor or doing some custom automation, custom integration, figuring out monitoring, figuring out logging doing billing, doing metering. All of that stuff so that I can actually just consume one amazing service. That's a really large hurdle to kind of step over. And so, I think part of multicloud is reducing friction for being able to use things that you choose to. >> Do you have any commentary or advice for other founders or other CEOs or even any younger developers because we have a classical trained software developers, they think a certain way. They either were pipe lining it different, not doing Agile, their trained at Agile, but now micro service is a whole nother ballgame. How do you get people to think microservices when they've been classically trained Agile. >> Like Waterfall you're saying? >> Or Waterfall, both, both. >> I think there's a lot happening right now. I would start with looking at some of the best practices around building modern services. Things like Kubernetes and others help. Microservice adoption and all that stuff. But start with, honestly starting with a bunch of open sources probably not a bad place to be. But then find vendors that actually can support in one what you want to do. >> Final question. Tell us about your company. What's going on with you guys. Give an update on Upbound. What's going on? It's going great. We're growing. We launched this project called Crossplain. Like earlier or late last year. It's doing great. We're getting a ton of adoption on it. We're super happy with it. And we're growing the company. We're almost tripled the company this year. Which is fantastic. And working on a SaaS offering that we're exciting about. Hopefully we'll come back here and talk about it when it's... >> And you guys hiring? Looking for people? What's the update there? >> We are. We're hiring on the engineering side, we're hiring on the product side. It's start up so. You never stop hiring. >> Not for the faint of heart. >> Definitely not. >> Bassam, thanks for coming out. >> Yeah absolutely. Always fun. >> Here at the multicloud inaugural event. Escape. Here in New York City. Escape 2019 I'm John Furrier with theCube. Back with more after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Live in Copenhagen, Denmark, of KubeCon 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, my cohost. Exciting startup news here. Obviously, it's a growing ecosystem, all the big names are in it, but, great ecosystem of startups. One launching here, we have Bassam Tabbara, who's the founder and CEO of Upbound, here on theCUBE. Website is going to go live in a few hours. We're here for a quick preview. Thanks for joining theCUBE today. Appreciate it. >> Oh, my pleasure. >> So, you got a company. No one knows about it. (Bassam laughing) Now they're going to hear about it. What are you guys doing? What is Upbound about? And what are you doing? >> So Upbound is going after the problem of multi-cloud. So the way to think about it is that, you know, we're seeing now the ubiquity of Kubernetes, and if you think about what Kubernetes has done, it has solved the problem of taking many machines and making them into one, and doing all the scheduling and management and becoming the operating system of a cluster, right? Upbound is the next level up. Upbound is essentially taking multiple clusters and solving a similar set of problems around running distributed systems, distributed services, global services across clusters. It was really interesting to hear CERN this morning talking about how their managing 210 clusters and you think about 210 clusters, if you would talk about 210 machines, you'd be like, "Wow, that's a lot of machines", right? This is 210 clusters, and so a similar set of problems exist at a higher level, and that's the focus of Upbound. >> So, you guys are announcing a financing, $9 million from an investment Series A financing. Google Ventures as a lead and a variety of industry super-reputable investors. What was the value proposition pitch? What got Google Ventures excited? What was the core value, technology, business model? Give us the deck. >> My understanding of their investment thesis, and it's hard to claim that you always understand this. Essentially, the next level of infrastructure problem is essentially around multi-cloud and enterprises are managing many clusters today, many different cloud environments, whether it's across regions of a public cloud vendor or it's across public cloud vendors or across hybrid boundaries, on premise verse private cloud versus public cloud. It's become a challenge to run things across clusters and there's a lot of interesting scenarios to be solved at that level. That was the premise of the investment. >> John: So, are you guys a management software piece? Are you guys technology? What's the product? >> We're essentially building a service that helps companies run across cloud environments. And it's based on Kubernetes, 'cause Kubernetes is an amazing platform to build on top of, and we've learned that through our investment in Rook. You know, it's a great extension points and awesome community to be working with, We're offering a service for multi-cloud. >> Right, is it going to be, some shape of it, going to be open source or what are you looking at in particular? >> Yeah, obviously there'll be parts of it that are open source. We're a big open-source company. The team that's in Upbound, that's actually the team that's behind Rook, and Rook is a CNCF project now and all open source, obviously. And so, yeah, we're definitely an open-source player. >> Good. >> So you're exposed to the storage challenges with Rook and all the future kind of architecture. We just had Adrian Cockcroft on. we were both high fiving each other and celebrating that microservices is going to be a modern era. >> Bassam: Yes. >> How do you guys solve that problem? What is it going to be, the buyer going to be in a cloud architect? Is it going to be a storage person? Is it an ops person? Who's the target buyer of your service? Or user of your service? >> Well essentially people, DevOps people, that are managing multiple clusters today and understand the challenges around managing multiple clusters, no normalization of policies, separate users, separate user management, observability. All those things come up with a strategist, and of course, let's not forget, stateful workloads and managing state across environments is, I'd say, probably one of the harder problems. So, you know, the buyer is essentially somebody in DevOps, and then obviously, the CTO, CIO level gets involved at some point, but it's a draw. >> When you guys were forming the company. Obviously, with the Rook project, you were exposed to some of the pain points, you mentioned a few of them. What was the one pain point that jumped out at you the most and you said, "Hey, we can build a company around this"? >> The fact that most enterprises are now managing multiple cloud environments and they are completely independent. Anything that they try to normalize or do across them is... There's a human involved, or there's some homegrown script involved to actually run across clusters. And honestly, that's the same problem that people are trying to solve across machines, right? And that led to some, you know, the work that's happening around orchestration, Kubernetes, and others. It's only logical that we move up a level and solve similar set of problems. >> Yeah, I have a question about your service. Just, along the lines of, There are a lot of people coming into this market with, "We've got this integration solution that is multi-cloud," or, "We have this kind of API platform that can solve "for multi-cloud and run applications "cross multiple cloud platforms." >> Right. >> What is your differentiator? >> Yeah, so I mean, multi-cloud has become a thing now, as you've observed. I think the power of what we're doing is that we're building a control plane based on Kubernetes and the great work that's happening in the Kubernetes space around multi-cluster and federation and everything else, and offering a set of services that layer on top of that that solve some critical problems across clouds, including stateful workloads and migration portability across clouds. And essentially, inherently building this on the Kubernetes platform and our experience with that and our experience with the community around Kubernetes, I think is differentiated. >> So that leads me to our next question. So your pricing model, you said that you were going to be open source. So is that control plane going to be open source and then some services are going to be bucketed into-- >> Yeah, it's probably too early for us to talk about the pricing model, but think of it as a service a manage service for multi-cloud. >> Great. >> You can imagine that... Open source is actually quite compatible with a service play. >> Yes it is. >> And $9 million, that's a good chunk of cash. Congratulations. Use of funds? Obviously, hiring out of the gate? What's your priorities on the use of funds on the first round of funding? >> So we're going to accelerate hiring, we're going to accelerate delivering the service, and that's, you know, this is the fun part of a startup. (John laughing) This is my second one. It's the next 18 months is all building and growing and doing product. >> John: And what's your five-year pro-forma revenue projection? (laughing) You made it up on 30C. >> Let me pull up my spreadsheet. (hosts laughing) >> I love those VC slides, "Yeah, we're makin up year five." No, but you want to have some growth, so the trend is your friend. Here, it's multi-cloud, >> That's right. >> And obviously the growth of microservices. Obviously, right. >> That's right. >> Anything else out there that's on your mind observationally, looking at the market? As you start coming, certainly you're doing a lot of due diligence on the market. What are your risk factors? How you thinking about it? What are you looking at closely? How are you studying some of the trend data? >> I mean at some level, the way to think about this is Cloud Native is still at its infancy, right, despite all the amazing momentum that's building around it. I think, you know at some level, we use the term Cloud Native but it's really just cloud computing. I think the adoption cycle is going to be interesting, so that's something that I think about a lot. You know, how long will people kind of make transformative changes to what they're doing? But, I believe the power of open source and the community is that people are. I mean look at this conference. A lot of people are here, including-- >> No doubt open source is a good bet. >> That's right. >> I think the thing that we're watching, love to get your reaction to, and Lauren, you too, is that Stu Miniman, my cohost. He's not here, he's at the Dell EMC World event. We talk about this all the time around what's the migration going to look like from on-prem to cloud? Meaning, how's the on-prem is transferring to cloud ops? >> That's right. >> Right? So okay, perfect for your case, I think. What's the ratio, what's hybrid cloud going to look like when you have a true private cloud, true cloud environment on premise? >> Yeah. >> 'Cause this speaks to the multi-cloud trend because if I can have an on-premise operation, I can make-- >> Very much. >> Well you have to look at the applications too. I mean, that's critical because you've got these monolithic applications that have to be essentially changed and ported into different environments to become multi-cloud. There's heavy lifting there. >> Yeah, I think the interesting thing about what you're describing here is that it used to be that if you're running on premise you're using a completely different stack from say what you're running in public cloud, right? And so, not only was the choice about where you're hosting your compute and your networking and storage, but it was also a choice of stacks, right? Open stack or whatever you're running on premise, and then there was Amazon or others, right? What is happening now is that we're actually normalizing on stacks. So this whole movement around Kubernetes is essentially a way to say that there is now a common stack, regardless of where you're actually being deployed, right? The store is not always there and that's, but it'll get there, right? At some level, it gives people more choices about where they want to host, and in fact, if... Portability becomes more interesting 'cause you could move in and out of clouds, right? There are costs to doing that. Data gravity is a thing, but-- >> John: The containers are helpful. >> Containers are helpful, but, you know, that Amazon truck goes in one direction. (John chuckling) It is interesting to think about that. But at least it becomes possible for people to think about how to manage their infrastructure and how to manage their services across clouds. And, end result is it'll have more choices. >> Well, I think this community, you talked about on our intro today about portability is really what this community cares a lot about. >> Bassam: Very much. >> Choice and non-lock-in. >> Very much. It's amazing how many companies that we talk to that actually have a, like a strategies, you know, CTO, CIO-level down, around not getting locked in to any vendor. Yet, they are not able to fulfill that. >> Yeah, it's hard to talk about lock in when you actually don't even know what Cloud Native is. So, it's interesting discussion, and Adrian Cockcroft was just on from Amazon, and he and I were talking with Lauren about, that's a developer organization and management discussion. >> Yeah. >> First. >> Bassam: That's right. >> So you can't, you don't know what it is? How do you know what-- (Bassam laughing) >> Well, there's... >> A lock in looks like? You can't play chess if you don't know what checkmate looks like. >> Yeah, but the good news is that developers are high up on that food chain now and they're able to actually make these buy decisions. So I think that's going to be critical. >> Well congratulations on the financing. >> Bassam: Thank you. >> Love the company name, Upbound? >> Yes. >> Upbound. >> Bassam: Essentially going above the clouds. >> Above the clouds. >> Like it. >> Congratulations. Looking forward to tracking the progress. And great to have you on theCUBE. $9 million dollars in fresh financing. Upbound just scored a great deal for multi-cloud. Again, that's a great trend. Congratulations. More CUBE coverage here in a moment. Thanks for watching. Be right back, stay with us.

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCube. Covering Escape/19. (techno music) >> Yeah, welcome back to theCube's coverage here in New York City for the first ever inaugural multicloud conference called Escape 2019, escape, we're in New York, we're not escaping from New York, we're escaping from the cloud. Jim Walker, Vice President of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs, the custodian/founders of Cockroach Database. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Congratulations on your new role, new gig. Been there for a while? >> Yeah it's been a while since I've seen you, John, I've jumped out of the data space and into Kubernetes, and so, yeah, I landed at Cockroach Labs about a year ago. And having fun. >> It's interesting, the game is still the same, data is still the same as a value proposition, but software. >> Yeah. >> Data is now code, data is looking, interacting with software, data control planes, data layers, data lakes. All this is an evolution of stuff we were talking about back in the open source days at Hortonworks. The data is in motion, data in flight, data at rest, data is continuing to be critical in automation, security, every single app. >> Yeah, it's at the center of the big battle right now, right, there's this like... I just sense there's a larger battle going on for the platform right now, and the platform is being battled out by these large public cloud providers, and it's who can get compute, who can get actually, you know, people, residents in their cloud. Data has always been the centerpiece of that. Data is gravity, if it was on, before it was on-premise, so the battle was in-house at all these people and now it's like how do we get this stuff to move over. >> Yeah, we were talking before you came on camera, it helps we talk online a lot, and have a lot of connected friends in the cloud native space, but now that Cloud 2.0 has arrived, where it's enterprise hybrid, people are starting to get excited about that, you're seeing the re-platformization or refactoring or whatever word you want to use, a modern enterprise architecture, that has the best of cloud native, has the best of what the enterprise used to do with comput-- like mini-computers, whatnot, now packaged up an operating model. This modernization trend is hitting everything, note, developers, security, this is kind of where you're playing right now. Look what Google's done with Spanner database and where that's all come from in these kinds of large-scale data problems. Modernization's here, what's your take on this? >> Yeah, I know this is modernization, but it's stuff we've been doing for a long time. It's like, you know, I was talking to Steve Mulaney earlier, Steve's brilliant, right, and Steve's talking about 1992 we saw this transition to kind of client server. I've never seen anything like this trans... This transition and this modernization is much bigger than any of the other trends that we've been through. Back when we were talking before it was the Hadoop game, and we were talking modern data architecture, how do we actually transform the way we thought about data from these kind of single stovepipes of data into larger data lakes and this sort of thing. That was the beginning. What we're seeing this time though is a massive transformation up and down the stack of which data is one huge, massive piece of that. And as we know, man, data has gravity and it's at the center of this battle again. >> What's your definition of multicloud? We're at the first ever multicloud conference, what is multicloud? >> You know I get asked this a fair amount, so as I was looking for speakers it was like, "Well, what do you mean, a multicloud conference, what does that even mean?" There's a lot of people, multicloud unbelievers. I think we already live in a multicloud world. I think hybrid cloud is just multicloud. I talked to a lot of people through the CFP process for the conference. I had guys who were running edge computing platforms saying, "Talk to me about this", I'm like, "Well, if you look at it, it's just servers, they're just servers that are everywhere" and actually, how do we actually start to attach all this stuff. It's all multicloud, you know what is the cloud but a bunch of different servers that somebody else owns? You may own them, you may not. The challenge is going to be how do we tie all that together? >> Computer history has proven, if anything, heterogeneous environments, multi-vendor. You can go back and talk about, the comment about the client server, I mean, that was a real threat to the mainframe. Internetworking completely changed the game. At that time PCs were exploding in growth, and multi-vendor was a big buzzword. And that was the reality, you had to compete and service multiple vendors in an environment. >> Yeah, and-- >> Multiple cloud is just multiple vendors. >> John, it's called the multicloud conference, and you know my friend Joseph Jacks, I mean Joseph and I have a lot of conversations about things, you know, and he's brilliant in terms of how he thinks about commercial open source and how these things are, and you know I really played around with changing the name of this to the open and independent cloud conference, because that's really what this is about, it's about how do we have a conversation, in the open, about how we open up the cloud? I just thought, I was a little frustrated with some of the conferences I went to because, I think people are talking about this, but it's not lip service, it's just difficult to talk about it in a broader sense. >> Well, I'm really glad you did this because I've been calling multicloud bullshit on theCube for over a year, Stu and I have debates about this, and you know, putting-- >> I watched. >> Okay, of course, but people who know what I mean know that I believe that multicloud reality of "I have Amazon, I got Azure, I mean, hell, if you upgrade Office 365, you have Azure, so that's another cloud. So yes, people have multiple clouds in their environment, but the foundational work is being done now, you guys are doing it, and that's what I was getting at. There's no multiclouding going on, meaning sense of the seamless workload, what HashiCorp is doing, so this is the foundational, what you guys are getting at, in my mind, at least from my perspective, is a foundational conversation around what is the foundation of multicloud look like. >> And John, there is a technical equation here. I think a lot of people will argue the technical merits of what is multicloud, is it even possible to combine networking and security and all, those are really difficult problems to solve. At Cockroach Labs, to solve the database problem, to solve the data problem, to actually have, you know I could spin up a node at Cockroach on this laptop that's sitting next to you and have that participate in a database that spans multiple clouds, that's awesome. But there's a whole other side of this conversation, John, around what does it mean for my skills in my organization, what does it mean for the financial side of things, the legal, and so I think we're all dealing with a lot of these multicloud concepts, we're just not addressing them yet, and so, it's complex. >> Well, first of all, it's fun too, I mean it's complex, but innovation is complex. But here's the thing, Dave and I were joking around Cloud 2.0 and we picked that term, talking about Cloud 2.0, mainly because I remember during Web 2.0, it was just, everyone was just, "What is Web"..., and to create such a debate, so to goof on Web 2.0 we said Cloud 2.0, but what we mean is that it's changing, right? I'll give you an example, I mean to me Cloud 2.0 or multicloud is having a fully horizontal scalable infrastructure, that on-demand, elastic resource with domain specialty application development that takes advantage of data and machine learning for domain-specific context. And then having an addressable data layer on top of that. That to me is multicloud. >> And being able to service your customers no matter where they are. And unfortunately the public copywriters don't have full coverage across the whole planet so we inherently live in this multicloud world. If you wanted to pull an application today, I'm sorry but the world is your audience, there's no segmenting your app to just New York, right? And so how you actually service customers when they're coming at you from all over the planet. It's another challenge that we have. Fortunately I want to add to your Cloud Two conversation, I'm sorry the Cloud 2.0 conversation, that it is a world of hybrid and multi and multi region and single region and it's the evolution between these different kind of flavors of this situation, I feel is the emerging trend that's happening and we're-- >> Well categories are changing, network management becomes observability, configuration management becomes automation, the old database becomes a different kind of database for you, data protection is cyber protection. There's redefining moments here where white spaces are becoming larger categories. I mean, look at observability, probably going public, getting bought. >> John, look at what Google did over the past, like, 10, 12 years and look at the startups that are now out there that are kind of doing this really innovative stuff. We have LightStep here, you know Cockroach is another great example, what the Upbound team is doing, so people have been through this. From a data point of view we couldn't agree more. I can spin up an instance of RDS, Postgres and it's going to be a single instance, it's going to live in one region and that's going to service one bit of a cloud in one corner of the world. The cloud, and this massive distribution of stuff, it changed, you have to inherently start over when you're building these technologies, and that's why the CNCF has come about, right, is there's a fundamentally different approach-- >> CNCF, I love those guys and we're going to go to do CubeCon, but one of the things that I was talking with hashCode co-founder earlier today, he was talking about workflows. I was talking about workloads, and so I think the conversation is still technical and geeky but if you just abstract out all of the nerd talk and geek talk and say, "What's the workflow and what's the workload?", you go, okay, no other buzzwords should be talked. You've got to go onstage, so you've got to go. Jim Walker, Vice President of Product Marketing, Cockroach Labs, good friend of theCube, and our producer of this show, Mike Harold and the team, Escape/19, first inaugural multicloud conference. Be back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCube. Covering Escape/19. (techno music) >> Yeah, welcome back to theCube's coverage here in New York City for the first ever inaugural multicloud conference called Escape 2019, escape, we're in New York, we're not escaping from New York, we're escaping from the cloud. Jim Walker, Vice President of Product Marketing at Cockroach Labs, the custodian/founders of Cockroach Database. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Congratulations on your new role, new gig. Been there for a while? >> Yeah it's been a while since I've seen you, John, I've jumped out of the data space and into Kubernetes, and so, yeah, I landed at Cockroach Labs about a year ago. And having fun. >> It's interesting, the game is still the same, data is still the same as a value proposition, but software. >> Yeah. >> Data is now code, data is looking, interacting with software, data control planes, data layers, data lakes. All this is an evolution of stuff we were talking about back in the open source days at Hortonworks. The data is in motion, data in flight, data at rest, data is continuing to be critical in automation, security, every single app. >> Yeah, it's at the center of the big battle right now, right, there's this like... I just sense there's a larger battle going on for the platform right now, and the platform is being battled out by these large public cloud providers, and it's who can get compute, who can get actually, you know, people, residents in their cloud. Data has always been the centerpiece of that. Data is gravity, if it was on, before it was on-premise, so the battle was in-house at all these people and now it's like how do we get this stuff to move over. >> Yeah, we were talking before you came on camera, it helps we talk online a lot, and have a lot of connected friends in the cloud native space, but now that Cloud 2.0 has arrived, where it's enterprise hybrid, people are starting to get excited about that, you're seeing the re-platformization or refactoring or whatever word you want to use, a modern enterprise architecture, that has the best of cloud native, has the best of what the enterprise used to do with comput-- like mini-computers, whatnot, now packaged up an operating model. This modernization trend is hitting everything, note, developers, security, this is kind of where you're playing right now. Look what Google's done with Spanner database and where that's all come from in these kinds of large-scale data problems. Modernization's here, what's your take on this? >> Yeah, I know this is modernization, but it's stuff we've been doing for a long time. It's like, you know, I was talking to Steve Mulaney earlier, Steve's brilliant, right, and Steve's talking about 1992 we saw this transition to kind of client server. I've never seen anything like this trans... This transition and this modernization is much bigger than any of the other trends that we've been through. Back when we were talking before it was the Hadoop game, and we were talking modern data architecture, how do we actually transform the way we thought about data from these kind of single stovepipes of data into larger data lakes and this sort of thing. That was the beginning. What we're seeing this time though is a massive transformation up and down the stack of which data is one huge, massive piece of that. And as we know, man, data has gravity and it's at the center of this battle again. >> What's your definition of multicloud? We're at the first ever multicloud conference, what is multicloud? >> You know I get asked this a fair amount, so as I was looking for speakers it was like, "Well, what do you mean, a multicloud conference, what does that even mean?" There's a lot of people, multicloud unbelievers. I think we already live in a multicloud world. I think hybrid cloud is just multicloud. I talked to a lot of people through the CFP process for the conference. I had guys who were running edge computing platforms saying, "Talk to me about this", I'm like, "Well, if you look at it, it's just servers, they're just servers that are everywhere" and actually, how do we actually start to attach all this stuff. It's all multicloud, you know what is the cloud but a bunch of different servers that somebody else owns? You may own them, you may not. The challenge is going to be how do we tie all that together? >> Computer history has proven, if anything, heterogeneous environments, multi-vendor. You can go back and talk about, the comment about the client server, I mean, that was a real threat to the mainframe. Internetworking completely changed the game. At that time PCs were exploding in growth, and multi-vendor was a big buzzword. And that was the reality, you had to compete and service multiple vendors in an environment. >> Yeah, and-- >> Multiple cloud is just multiple vendors. >> John, it's called the multicloud conference, and you know my friend Joseph Jacks, I mean Joseph and I have a lot of conversations about things, you know, and he's brilliant in terms of how he thinks about commercial open source and how these things are, and you know I really played around with changing the name of this to the open and independent cloud conference, because that's really what this is about, it's about how do we have a conversation, in the open, about how we open up the cloud? I just thought, I was a little frustrated with some of the conferences I went to because, I think people are talking about this, but it's not lip service, it's just difficult to talk about it in a broader sense. >> Well, I'm really glad you did this because I've been calling multicloud bullshit on theCube for over a year, Stu and I have debates about this, and you know, putting-- >> I watched. >> Okay, of course, but people who know what I mean know that I believe that multicloud reality of "I have Amazon, I got Azure, I mean, hell, if you upgrade Office 365, you have Azure, so that's another cloud. So yes, people have multiple clouds in their environment, but the foundational work is being done now, you guys are doing it, and that's what I was getting at. There's no multiclouding going on, meaning sense of the seamless workload, what HashiCorp is doing, so this is the foundational, what you guys are getting at, in my mind, at least from my perspective, is a foundational conversation around what is the foundation of multicloud look like. >> And John, there is a technical equation here. I think a lot of people will argue the technical merits of what is multicloud, is it even possible to combine networking and security and all, those are really difficult problems to solve. At Cockroach Labs, to solve the database problem, to solve the data problem, to actually have, you know I could spin up a node at Cockroach on this laptop that's sitting next to you and have that participate in a database that spans multiple clouds, that's awesome. But there's a whole other side of this conversation, John, around what does it mean for my skills in my organization, what does it mean for the financial side of things, the legal, and so I think we're all dealing with a lot of these multicloud concepts, we're just not addressing them yet, and so, it's complex. >> Well, first of all, it's fun too, I mean it's complex, but innovation is complex. But here's the thing, Dave and I were joking around Cloud 2.0 and we picked that term, talking about Cloud 2.0, mainly because I remember during Web 2.0, it was just, everyone was just, "What is Web"..., and to create such a debate, so to goof on Web 2.0 we said Cloud 2.0, but what we mean is that it's changing, right? I'll give you an example, I mean to me Cloud 2.0 or multicloud is having a fully horizontal scalable infrastructure, that on-demand, elastic resource with domain specialty application development that takes advantage of data and machine learning for domain-specific context. And then having an addressable data layer on top of that. That to me is multicloud. >> And being able to service your customers no matter where they are. And unfortunately the public copywriters don't have full coverage across the whole planet so we inherently live in this multicloud world. If you wanted to pull an application today, I'm sorry but the world is your audience, there's no segmenting your app to just New York, right? And so how you actually service customers when they're coming at you from all over the planet. It's another challenge that we have. Fortunately I want to add to your Cloud Two conversation, I'm sorry the Cloud 2.0 conversation, that it is a world of hybrid and multi and multi region and single region and it's the evolution between these different kind of flavors of this situation, I feel is the emerging trend that's happening and we're-- >> Well categories are changing, network management becomes observability, configuration management becomes automation, the old database becomes a different kind of database for you, data protection is cyber protection. There's redefining moments here where white spaces are becoming larger categories. I mean, look at observability, probably going public, getting bought. >> John, look at what Google did over the past, like, 10, 12 years and look at the startups that are now out there that are kind of doing this really innovative stuff. We have LightStep here, you know Cockroach is another great example, what the Upbound team is doing, so people have been through this. From a data point of view we couldn't agree more. I can spin up an instance of RDS, Postgres and it's going to be a single instance, it's going to live in one region and that's going to service one bit of a cloud in one corner of the world. The cloud, and this massive distribution of stuff, it changed, you have to inherently start over when you're building these technologies, and that's why the CNCF has come about, right, is there's a fundamentally different approach-- >> CNCF, I love those guys and we're going to go to do CubeCon, but one of the things that I was talking with hashCode co-founder earlier today, he was talking about workflows. I was talking about workloads, and so I think the conversation is still technical and geeky but if you just abstract out all of the nerd talk and geek talk and say, "What's the workflow and what's the workload?", you go, okay, no other buzzwords should be talked. You've got to go onstage, so you've got to go. Jim Walker, Vice President of Product Marketing, Cockroach Labs, good friend of theCube, and our producer of this show, Mike Harold and the team, Escape/19, first inaugural multicloud conference. Be back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its Ecosystem Partners. >> Well everyone, welcome back to the live coverage of theCUBE here in Copenhagen, Denmark for KubeCon, Kubernetes Con 2018, part of the CNCF, Cloud Native Compute Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, the founder of Spark Labs, breaking down day two, wrapping up our coverage of KubeCon and all the success that we've seen with Kubernetes, I thought it would be really appropriate to bring on the cofounder of KubeCon originally, Joseph Jacks, known as JJ in the industry, a good friend of theCUBE and part of the early formation of what is now Cloud Native. We were all riffing on that at the time. welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you for having me John. >> So, for the story, for the folks out there, you know Cloud Native was really seen by the devops community, and infrastructure code was no secret to the insiders in the timeframes from 2010 through 2015, 16 timeframe, but really it was an open stack summit. A lot of people were kind of like, hey, you know, Google's got Kubernetes, they're going to open it up and this could be a real game changer, container, Docker was flying off the shelves. So we just kind of saw, right, and you were there and we were talking so there was a group of us. You were one of them. And you founded KubeCon, and bolted into the, at that time, the satellite Linux Foundation events, and then you pass it off as a good community citizen to the CNCF, so I wanted to just make sure that people knew that. What a great success. What's your impression? I mean, are you blown away? >> I am definitely blown away. I mean I think the size and scale of the European audience is remarkable. We had something like slightly less than half this in Austin last year. So to see more than that come here in Europe I think shows the global kind of growth curve as well as like, I think, Dan and someone else was asking sort of raise your hand if you've been to Kubecon Austin and very few actually, so there's a lot of new people showing up in Europe. I think it just shows the demand-- >> And Dan's been traveling around. I've seen him in China, some events I've been to. >> Joseph: All over. >> He's really working hard so props to him. We gave him some great props earlier. But he also told us Shanghai is coming online. >> Joseph: Yeah. >> So you got Shanghai, you to Barcelona next year for the European show, and of course Seattle. This is a community celebrating right now because there's a lot of high fives going on right now because there's a lot of cool, we've got some sort of core standard, defacto standard, now let's go to work. What are you working on now? You got a stealth startup? Share a little bit about it. I know you don't want to give the details out, but where is it kind of above the stack? Where you going to be playing? >> Sure, so we're not talking too much in terms of specifics and we're pretty stealthy, but I can tell you what I'm personally very excited about in terms of where Kubernetes is going and kind of where this ecosystem is starting to mature for practitioners, for enterprises. So one of the things that I think Kubernetes is starting to bring to bear is this idea of commoditizing distributed systems for everyday developers, for everyday enterprises. And I think that that is sort of the first time in sort of maybe, maybe the history of software development, software engineering and building applications, we're standardizing on a set of primitives, a set of building blocks for distributed system style programming. You know we had in previous eras things like Erlang and fault tolerant programming and frameworks, but those were sort of like pocketed into different programming communities and different types of stacks. I think Kubernetes is the one sort of horizontal technology that the industry's adopting and it's giving us these amazing properties, so I think some of the things that we're focusing on or excited about involve sort of the programming layer on top of Kubernetes in simplifying the experience of kind of bringing all stateful and enterprise workloads and different types of application paradigms natively into Kubernetes without requiring a developer to really understand and learn the Kubernetes primitives themselves. >> That's next level infrastructure as code. Yeah so as Kubernetes becomes more successful, as Kubernetes succeeds at a larger and larger scale, people simply shouldn't have to know or understand the internals. There's a lot of people, I think Kelsey and a few other people, started to talk about Kubernetes as the Linux kernel of distributed computing or distributed systems, and I think that's a really great way of looking at it. You know, do programmers make file system calls directly when they're building their applications? Do they script directly against the kernel for maybe some very high performance things. But generally speaking when you're writing a service or you're writing a microservice or some business logic, you're writing at a higher level of abstraction and a language that's doing some IO and maybe some reading and writing files, but you're using higher level abstractions. So I think by the same token, the focus today with Kubernetes is people are learning this API. I think over time people are going to be programming against that API at a higher level. And what are you doing here, the show? Obviously you're (mumbles) so you're doing some (mumbles) intelligence. Conversations you've been in, can you share your opinion of what's going on here? Your thoughts on the content program, the architecture, the decisions they've made. >> I think we've just, so lots of questions in there. What am I doing here? I just get so energized and I'm so, I just get reinvigorated kind of being here and talking to people and it's just super cool to see a lot of old faces, people who've been here for a while, and you know, one of the things that excites me, and this is just like proof that the event's gotten so huge. I walk around and I see a lot of familiar faces, but more than 80, 90% of people I've never seen before, and I'm like wow this has like gotten really super huge mainstream. Talking with some customers, getting a good sense of kind of what's going on. I think we've seen two really huge kind of trends come out of the event. One is this idea of multicloud sort of as a focus area, and you've talked with Bassam at Upbound and the sort of multicloud control plane, kind of need and demand out there in the community and the user base. I think what Bassam's doing is extremely exciting. The other, so multicloud is a really big paradigm that most companies are sort of prioritizing. Kubernetes is available now on all the cloud providers, but how do we actually adopt it in a way that is agnostic to any cloud provider service. That's one really big trend. The second big thing that I think we're starting to see, just kind of across a lot of talks is taking the Kubernetes API and extending it and wrapping it around stateful applications and stateful workloads, and being able to sort of program that API. And so we saw the announcement from Red Hat on the operator framework. We've seen projects like Kube Builder and other things that are really about sort of building native custom Kubernetes APIs for your applications. So extensibility, using the Kubernetes API as a building block, and then multicloud. I think those are really two huge trends happening here. >> What is your view on, I'm actually going to put you on test here. So Red Hat made a bet on Kubernetes years ago when it was not obvious to a lot of the other big wales. >> Joseph: From the very beginning really. >> Yeah from the very beginning. And that paid off huge for Red Hat as an example. So the question is, what bets should people be making if you had to lay down some thought leadership on this here, 'cause you obviously are in the middle of it and been part of the beginning. There's some bets to be made. What are the bets that the IBMs and the HPs and the Cisco's and the big players have to make and what are the bets the startups have to make? >> Well yeah, there's two angles to that. I mean, I think the investment startups are making, are different set of investments and motivated differently than the multinational, huge, you know, technology companies that have billions of dollars. I think in the startup category, startups just should really embrace Kubernetes for speeding the way they build reliable and scalable applications. I think really from the very beginning Kubernetes is becoming kind of compelling and reasonable even at a very small scale, like for two or three node environment. It's becoming very easy to run and install and manage. Of course it gives you a lot of really great properties in terms of actually running, building your systems, adopting microservices, and scaling out your application. And that's what's sort of like a direct end user use case, startups, kind of building their business, building their stack on Kubernetes. We see companies building products on top of Kubernetes. You see a lot of them here on the expo floor. That's a different type of vendor startup ecosystem. I think there's lots of opportunities there. For the big multinationals, I think one really interesting thing that hasn't really quite been done yet, is sort of treating Kubernetes as a first-class citizen as opposed to a way to commercialize and enter a new market. I think one of the default ways large technology companies tend to look at something hypergrowth like Kubernetes and TensorFlow and other projects is wrapping around it and commercializing in some way, and I think a deeper more strategic path for large companies could be to really embed Kubernetes in the core kind of crown jewel IP assets that they have. So I'll give you an example, like, for let's just take SAP, I'll just pick on SAP randomly, for no reason. This is one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. I would encourage the co-CEOs of SAP, for example. >> John: There's only one CEO now. >> Is there one CEO now? Okay. >> John: Snabe left. It's now (drowned out by talking). >> Oh, okay, gotcha. I haven't been keeping up on the SAP... But let's just say, you know, a CEO boardroom level discussion of replatforming the entire enterprise application stack on something like Kubernetes could deliver a ton of really core meaningful benefits to their business. And I don't think like deep super strategic investments like that at that level are being made quite yet. I think at a certain point in time in the future they'll probably start to be made that way. But that's how I would like look at smart investments on the bigger scale. >> We're not seeing scale yet with Kubernetes, just the toe is in the water. >> I think we're starting to see scale, John. I think we are. >> John: What's the scale number in clusters? >> I'll give you the best example, which came up today, and actually really surprised me which I think was a super compelling example. The largest retailer in China, so essentially the Amazon of China, JD.com, is running in production for years now at 20,000 compute nodes with Kubernetes, and their largest cluster is a 5,000 node cluster. And so this is pushing the boundary of the sort of production-- >> And I think that may be the biggest one I've heard. >> Yeah, that's certainly, I mean for a disclosed user that's pretty huge. We're starting to see people actually talk publicly about this which is remarkable. And there are huge deployments out there. >> We saw Tyler Jewell come on from WSO2. He's got a new thing called Ballerina. New programming language, have you seen that? >> Joseph: I have, I have. >> Thoughts on that? What's your thoughts on that? >> You know, I think that, so I won't make any particular specific comments on Ballerina, I'm not extremely informed on it. I did play with a little bit, I don't want to give any of my opinions, but what I'd say, and I think Tyler actually mentioned this, one of the things that I believe is going to be a big deal in the coming years, is so, trying to think of Kubernetes as an implementation detail, as the kernel, do you interact directly with that? Do you learn that interface directly? Are you sort of kind of optimizing your application to be sort of natively aware of those abstractions? I think the answer to all of those questions is no, and Kubernetes is sort of delegated as a compiler target, and so frankly like directionally speaking, I think what Ballerina's sort of design is aspiring towards is the right one. Compile time abstraction for building distributed systems is probably the next logical progression. I like to think of, and I think Brendan Burns has started to talk about this over the last year or two. Everyone's writing assembly code 'cause we're swimming yaml and configuration based designs and systems. You know, sort of pseudodeclarative, but more imperative in static configurations. When in reality we shouldn't be writing these assembly artifacts. We should be delegating all of this complexity to a compiler in the same way that you know, we went from assembly to C to higher level languages. So I think over time that starts to make a lot of sense, and we're going to see a lot of innovation here probably. >> What's your take on the community formation? Obviously, it's growing, so, any observations, any insight for the folks watching what's happening in the community, patterns, trends you'd see, like, don't like. >> I think we could do a better job of reducing politics amongst the really sort of senior community leaders, particularly who have incentives behind their sort of agendas and sort of opinions, since they work for various, you know, large and small companies. >> Yeah, who horse in this race. >> Sure, and there's, whether they're perverse incentives or not, I think net the project has such a high quality genuine, like humble, focused group of people leading it that there isn't much pollution and negativity there. But I think there could be a higher standard in some cases. Since the project is so huge and there are so many very fast moving areas of evolution, there tends to be sort of a fast curve toward many cooks being in the kitchen, you know, when new things materialize and I think that could be better handled. But positive side, I think like the project is becoming incredibly diverse. I just get super excited to see Aparna from Google leading the project at Google, both on the hosted Saas offering and the Kubernetes project. People like Liz and others. And I just think it's an awesome, welcoming, super diverse community. And people should really highlight that more. 'Cause I think it's a unique asset of the project. >> Well you're involved in some deep history. I think we're going to be looking this as moment where there was once a KubeCon that was not part of the CNCF, and you know, you did the right thing, did a good thing. You could have kept it to yourself and made some good cash. >> It's definitely gotten really big, and it's way beyond me now at this point. >> Those guys did a good job with CNCF. >> They're doing phenomenal. I think vast majority of the credit, at this scale, goes to Chris Anasik and Dan Conn, and the events team at the Linux Foundation, CNCF, and obviously Kelsey and Liz and Michelle Noorali and many others. But blood, sweat, and tears. It's no small feat pulling off an event like this. You know, corralling the CFP process, coordinating speakers, setting the themes, it's a really huge job. >> And now they got to deal with all the community, licenses, Lauren your thoughts? >> Well they're consistent across Apache v2 I believe is what Dan said, so all the projects under the CNCF are consistently licensed. So I think that's great. I think they actually have it together there. You know, I do share your concerns about the politics that are going on a little bit back and forth, the high level, I tend to look back at history a little bit, and for those of us that remember JBoss and the JBoss fork, we're a little bit nervous, right? So I think that it's important to take a look at that and make sure that that doesn't happen. Also, you know, open stack and the stuff that we've talked about before with distros coming out or too many distros going to be hitting the street, and how do we keep that more narrow focused, so this can go across-- >> Yeah, I started this, I like to list rank and iterate things, and I started with this sheet of all the vendors, you know, all the Kubernetes vendors, and then Linux Foundation, or CNCF took it over, and they've got a phenomenal sort of conformance testing and sort of compliance versioning sheet, which lists all the vendors and certification status and updates and so on and I think there's 50 or 60 companies. On one hand I think that's great, because it's more innovation, lots of service providers and offerings, but there is a concern that there might be some fragmentation, but again, this is a really big area of focus, and I think it's being addressed. Yeah, I think the right ones will end up winning, right? >> Joseph: Right, for sure. >> and that's what's going to be key. >> Joseph: Healthy competition. >> Yes. >> All right final question. Let's go around the horn. We'll start with you JJ, wrapping up KubeCon 2018, your thoughts, summary, what's happened here? What will we talk about next year about what happened this week in Denmark? >> I think this week in Denmark has been a huge turning point for the growth in Europe and sort of proof that Kubernetes is on like this unstoppable inflection, growth curve. We usually see a smaller audience here in Europe, relative to the domestic event before it. And we're just seeing the numbers get bigger and bigger. I think looking back we're also going to see just the quality of end users and the end user community and more production success stories starting to become front and center, which I think is really awesome. There's lots of vendors here. But I do believe we have a huge representation of end users and companies actually sharing what they're doing pragmatically and really changing their businesses from Financial Times to Cern and physics projects, and you know, JD and other huge companies. I think that's just really awesome. That's a unique thing of the Kubernetes project. There's some hugely transformative companies doing awesome things out there. >> Lauren your thoughts, summary of the week in Denmark? >> I think it's been awesome. There's so much innovation happening here and I don't want to overuse that word 'cause I think it's kind of BS at some point, but really these companies are doing new things, and they're taking this to new levels. I think that hearing about the excitement of the folks that are coming here to actually learn about Kubernetes is phenomenal, and they're going to bring that back into their companies, and you're going to see a lot more actually coming to Europe next year. I also true multicloud would be phenomenal. I would love that if you could actually glue those platforms together, per se. That's really what I'm looking for. But also security. I think security, there needs to be a security seg. We talked to customers earlier. That's something they want to see. I think that that needs to be something that's brought to the table. >> That's awesome. My view is very simple. You know I think they've done a good job in CNCF and Linux Foundation, the team, building the ecosystem, keeping the governance and the technical and the content piece separate. I think they did a good job of showing the future state that we'd like to get to, which is true multicloud, workload portability, those things still out of reach in my opinion, but they did a great job of keeping the tight core. And to me, when I hear words like defacto standard I think of major inflection points where industries have moved big time. You think of internetworking, you think of the web, you think of these moments where that small little tweak created massive new brands and created a disruptor enabler that just created, changed the game. We saw Cisco coming out of that movement of IP with routers you're seeing 3Com come out of that world. I think that this change, this new little nuance called Kubernetes is going to be absolutely a defacto standard. I think it's definitely an inflection point and you're going to see startups come up with new ideas really fast in a new way, in a new modern global architecture, new startups, and I think people are going to be blown away. I think you're going to see fast rising growth companies. I think it's going to be an investment opportunity whether it's token economics or a venture backer private equity play. You're going to see people come out of the wood work, real smart entrepreneur. I think this is what people have been waiting for in the industry so I mean, I'm just super excited. And so thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for everything you do for the community. I think you truly extract the signal from the noise. I'm really excited to see you keep coming to the show, so it's really awesome. >> I appreciate your support, and again we're co-developing content in the open. Lauren great to host with you this week. >> Thank you, it's been awesome. >> And you got a great new venture, high five there. High five to the founder of KubeCon. This is theCUBE, not to be confused with KubeCon. And we're theCUBE, C-U-B-E. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. It's a wrap of day two global coverage here exclusively for KubeCon 2018, CNCF and the Linux Foundation. Thanks for watching. (techno music)