(upbeat music) >> Everybody welcome back to theCUBE, continuous coverage of AWS 2021. This is the biggest hybrid event of the year, theCUBEs ninth year covering AWS re:Invent. My name is Dave Vellante. Arwa Kaddoura is here CUBE alumni, chief revenue officer now of InfluxData and Brian Mullen, who's the chief marketing officer. Folks good to see you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Dave: All right, great to see you face to face. >> It's great to meet you in person finally. >> So Brian, tell us about InfluxData. People might not be familiar with the company. >> Sure, yes. InfluxData, we're the company behind a pretty well-known project called Influx DB. And we're a platform for handling time series data. And so what time series data is, is really it's any, we think of it as any data that's stamped in time in some way. That could be every second, every two minutes, every five minutes, every nanosecond, whatever it might be. And typically that data comes from, you know, of course, sources and the sources are, you know, they could be things in the physical world like devices and sensors, you know, temperature gauges, batteries. Also things in the virtual world and, you know, software that you're building and running in the cloud, you know, containers, microservices, virtual machines. So all of these, whether in the physical world or the virtual world are kind of generating a lot of time series data and our platforms are designed specifically to handle that. >> Yeah so, lots to unpack here Arwa, I mean, I've kind of followed you since we met on virtually. Kind of followed your career and I know when you choose to come to a company, you start with the customer that's what your that's your... Those are your peeps. >> Arwa: Absolutely. >> So what was it that drew you to InfluxData, the customers were telling you? >> Yeah, I think what I saw happening from a marketplace is a few paradigm shifts, right? And the first paradigm shift is obviously what the cloud is enabling, right? So everything that we used to take for granted, when you know, Andreessen Horowitz said, "software was eating the world", right? And then we moved into apps are eating the world. And now you look at the cloud infrastructure that, you know, folks like AWS have empowered, they've allowed services like ours and databases, and sort of querying capabilities like Influx DB to basically run at a scale that we never would have been able to do. Just sort of with, you know, you host it yourself type of a situation. And then the other thing that it's enabled is again, if you go back to sort of database history, relational, right? Was humongous, totally transformed what we could do in terms of transactional systems. Then you moved into sort of the big data, the Hadoops, the search, right. The elastic. And now what we're seeing is time series is becoming the new paradigm. That's enabling a whole set of new use cases that have never been enabled before, right? So people that are generating these large volumes of data, like Brian talked about and needing a platform that can ingest millions of points per second. And then the ability to query that in real time in order to take that action and in order to power things like ML and things like sort of, you know, autonomous type capabilities now need this type of capability. So that's all to know >> Okay so, it's the real timeness, right? It's the use cases. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about those use cases and--- >> Sure, sure. So, yeah so we have kind of thinking about things as both the kind of virtual world where people are pulling data off of sources that are in infrastructure, software infrastructure. We have a number like PayPal is a customer of ours, and Apple. They pull a time series data from the infrastructure that runs their payments platform. So you can imagine the volume that they're dealing with. Think about how much data you might have in like a regular relational scenario now multiply every that, every piece of data times however, often you're looking at it. Every one second, every 10 minutes, whatever it might be. You're talking about an order of magnitude, larger volume, higher volume of data. And so the tools that people were using were just not really equipped to handle that kind of volume, which is unique to time series. So we have customers like PayPal in kind of the software infrastructure side. We also have quite a bit of activity among customers on the IOT side. So Tesla is a customer they're pulling telematics and battery data off of the vehicle, pulling that back into their cloud platform. Nest is also our customer. So we're pretty used to seeing, you know, connected thermostats in homes. Think of all the data that's coming from those individual units and their, it's all time series data and they're pulling it into their platform using Influx. >> So, that's interesting. So Tesla take that example they will maybe persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. It's a femoral and end up putting some of it back to the cloud, probably a small portion percentage wise but it's a huge amount of data of data, right? >> Brian: Yeah. >> So, if they might want to track some anomalies okay, capture every time animal runs across, you know, and put that back into the cloud. So where do you guys fit in that analysis and what makes you sort of the best platform for time series data base. >> Yeah, it's interesting you say that because it is a femoral and there are really two parts of it. This is one of the reasons that time series is such a challenge to handle with something that's not really designed to handle it. In a moment, in that minute, in the last hour, you have, you really want to see all the data you want all of what's happening and have full context for what's going on and seeing these fluctuations but then maybe a day later, a week later, you may not care about that level of fidelity. And so you down sample it, you have like a, kind of more of a summarized view of what happened in that moment. So being able to kind of toggle between high fidelity and low fidelity, it's a super hard problem to solve. And so our platform Influx DB really allows you to do that. >> So-- >> And that is different from relational databases, which are great at ingesting, but not great at kicking data out. >> Right. >> And I think what you're pointing to is in order to optimize these platforms, you have to ingest and get rid of data as quickly as you can. And that is not something that a traditional database can do. >> So, who do you sell to? Who's your ideal customer profile? I mean, pretty diverse. >> Yeah, It, so it tends to focus on builders, right? And builders is now obviously a much wider audience, right? We used to say developers, right. Highly technical folks that are building applications. And part of what we love about InfluxData is we're not necessarily trying to only make it for the most sophisticated builders, right? We are trying to allow you to build an application with the minimum amount of code and the greatest amount of integrations, right. So we really power you to do more with less and get rid of unnecessary code or, you know, give you that simplicity. Because for us, it's all about speed to market. You want an application, you have an idea of what it is that you're trying to measure or monitor or instrument, right? We give you the tools, we give you the integrations. We allow you to have to work in the IDE that you prefer. We just launched VS Code Integration, for example. And that then allows these technical audiences that are solving really hard problems, right? With today's technologies to really take our product to market very quickly. >> So, I want to follow up on that. So I like the term builder. It's an AWS kind of popularized that term, but there's sort of two vectors of that. There's the hardcore developers, but there's also increasingly domain experts that are building data products and then more generalists. And I think you're saying you serve both of those, but you do integrations that maybe make it easier for the latter. And of course, if the former wants to go crazy they can. Is that a right understanding? >> Yes absolutely. It is about accessibility and meeting developers where they are. For example, you probably still need a solid technical foundation to use a product like ours, but increasingly we're also investing in education, in videos and templates. Again, integrations that make it easier for people to maybe just bring a visualization layer that they themselves don't have to build. So it is about accessibility, but yes obviously with builders they're a technical foundation is pretty important. But, you know, right now we're at almost 500,000 active instances of Influx DB sort of being out there in the wild. So that to me shows, that it's a pretty wide variety of audiences that are using us. >> So, you're obviously part of the AWS ecosystem, help us understand that partnership they announced today of Serverless for Kinesis. Like, what does that mean to you as you compliment that, is that competitive? Maybe you can address that. >> Yeah, so we're a long-time partner of AWS. We've been in the partner network for several years now. And we think about it now in a couple of ways. First it's an important channel, go to market channel for us with our customers. So as you know, like AWS is an ecosystem unto itself and so many developers, many of these builders are building their applications for their own end users in, on AWS, in that ecosystem. And so it's important for us to number one, have an offering that allows them to put Influx on that bill so we're offered in the marketplace. You can sign up for and purchase and pay for Influx DB cloud using or via AWS marketplace. And then as Arwa mentioned, we have a number of integrations with all the kind of adjacent products and services from Amazon that many of our developers are using. And so when we think about kind of quote and quote, going to where the developer, meeting developers where they are that's an important part of it. If you're an AWS focused developer, then we want to give you not only an easy way to pay for and use our product but also an easy way to integrate it into all the other things that you're using. >> And I think it was 2012, it might've even been 11 on theCUBE, Jerry Chen of Greylock. We were asking him, you think AWS is going to move up the stack and develop applications. He said, no I don't think so. I think they're going to enable developers and builders to do that and then they'll compete with the traditional SaaS vendors. And that's proved to be true, at least thus far. You never say never with AWS. But then recently he wrote a piece called "Castles on the Cloud." And the premise was essentially the ISV's will build on top of clouds. And that seems to be what you're doing with Influx DB. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that. We call it super clouds. >> Arwa: That's right. >> you know, leveraging the 100 billion dollars a year that the hyperscalers spend to develop an abstraction layer that solves a particular problem but maybe you could describe what that is from your perspective, Influx DB. >> Yeah, well increasingly we grew up originally as an open source software company. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> People downloaded the download Influx DB ran it locally on a laptop, put up on the server. And, you know, that's our kind of origin as a company, but increasingly what we recognize is our customers, our developers were building on the building in and on the cloud. And so it was really important for us to kind of meet them there. And so we think about, first of all, offering a product that is easily consumed in the cloud and really just allows them to essentially hit an end point. So with Influx DB cloud, they really have, don't have to worry about any of that kind of deployment and operation of a cluster or anything like that. Really, they just from a usage perspective, just pay for three things. The first is data in, how much data are you putting in? Second is query count. How many queries are you making against? And then third is storage. How much data do you have and how long are you storing it? And really, it's a pretty simple proposition for the developer to kind of see and understand what their costs are going to be as they grow their workload. >> So it's a managed service is that right? >> Brian: It is a managed service. >> Okay and how do you guys price? Is it kind of usage based. >> Total usage based, yeah, again data ingestion. We've got the query count and the storage that Brian talked about, but to your point, back to the sort of what the hyperscalers are doing in terms of creating this global infrastructure that can easily be tapped into. We then extend above that, right? We effectively become a platform as a service builder tool. Many of our customers actually use InfluxData to then power their own products, which they then commercialize into a SaaS application. Right, we've got customers that are doing, you know, Kubernetes monitoring or DevOps monitoring solutions, right? That monitor, you know, people's infrastructure or web applications or any of those things. We've got people building us into, you know, Industrial IoT such as PTC's ThingWorx, right? Where they've developed their own platform >> Dave: Very cool. >> Completely backed up by our time series database, right. Rather than them having to build everything, we become that key ingredient. And then of course the fully cloud managed service means that they could go to market that much quicker. Nobody's for procuring servers, nobody is managing, you know, security patches any of that, it's all fully done for you. And it scales up beautifully, which is the key. And to some of our customers, they also want to scale up or down, right. They know when their peak hours are or peak times they need something that can handle that load. >> So looking ahead to next year, so anyway, I'm glad AWS decided to do re:Invent live. (Arwa mumbling) >> You know, that's weird, right? We thought in June, at Mobile World Congress, we were going to, it was going to be the gateway to returning but who knows? It's like two steps forward, one step back. One step forward, two steps back but we're at least moving in the right direction. So what about for you guys InfluxData? Looking ahead for the coming year, Brian, what can we expect? You know, give us a little view of sharp view of (mumbles) >> Well kind of a keeping in the theme of meeting developers where they are, we want to build out more in the Amazon ecosystem. So more integrations, more kind of ease of use for kind of adjacent products. Another is just availability. So we've been, we're now on actually three clouds. In addition to AWS, we're on Azure and Google cloud, but now expanding horizontally and showing up so we can meet our customers that are working in Europe, expanding into Asia-Pacific which we did earlier this year. And so I think we'll continue to expand the platform globally to bring it closer to where our customers are. >> Arwa: Can I. >> All right go ahead, please. >> And I would say also the hybrid capabilities probably will also be important, right? Some of our customers run certain workloads locally and then other workloads in the cloud. That ability to have that seamless experience regardless, I think is another really critical advancement that we're continuing to invest in. So that as far as the customer is concerned, it's just an API endpoint and it doesn't matter where they're deploying. >> So where do they go, can they download a freebie version? Give us the last word. >> They go to influxdata.com. We do have a free account that anyone can sign up for. It's again, fully cloud hosted and managed. It's a great place to get started. Just learn more about our capabilities and if you're here at AWS re:Invent, we'd love to see you as well. >> Check it out. All right, guys thanks for coming on theCUBEs. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to see you. >> All right, thank you. >> Awesome. >> All right, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBEs coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. You're watching the leader in high-tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> (upbeat music) [Narrator] From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello welcome back to theCUBE virtual coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 Virtual. We're not face to face this year. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're bringing it together remotely. We're in the Palo Alto Studios with theCUBE and we're going remote for our guests this year. And I hope you can come together online enjoy the content. Of course, go check out the events site on Demand Live. And certainly I have a lot of great content. I've got a great guest Skyla Loomis Vice president, for the Z Application Platform at IBM. Also known as IBM Z talking Mainframe. Skyla, thanks for coming on theCUBE Appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me. So, you know, I've talked many conversations about the Mainframe of being relevant and valuable in context to cloud and cloud native because if it's got a workload you've got containers and all this good stuff, you can still run anything on anything these days. By integrating it in with all this great glue layer, lack of a better word or oversimplifying it, you know, things going on. So it's really kind of cool. Plus Walter Bentley in my previous interview was talking about the success of Ansible, and IBM working together on a really killer implementation. So I want to get into that, but before that let's get into IBM Z. How did you start working with IBM Z? What's your role there? >> Yeah, so I actually just got started with Z about four years ago. I spent most of my career actually on the distributed platform, largely with data and analytics, the analytics area databases and both On-premise and Public Cloud. But I always considered myself a friend to Z. So in many of the areas that I'd worked on, we'd, I had offerings where we'd enabled it to work with COS or Linux on Z. And then I had this opportunity come up where I was able to take on the role of leading some of our really core runtimes and databases on the Z platform, IMS and z/TPF. And then recently just expanded my scope to take on CICS and a number of our other offerings related to those kind of in this whole application platform space. And I was really excited because just of how important these runtimes and this platform is to the world,really. You know, our power is two thirds of our fortune 100 clients across banking and insurance. And it's you know, some of the most powerful transaction platforms in the world. You know doing hundreds of billions of transactions a day. And you know, just something that's really exciting to be a part of and everything that it does for us. >> It's funny how distributed systems and distributed computing really enable more longevity of everything. And now with cloud, you've got new capabilities. So it's super excited. We're seeing that a big theme at AnsibleFest this idea of connecting, making things easier you know, talk about distributed computing. The cloud is one big distribute computer. So everything's kind of playing together. You have a panel discussion at AnsibleFest Virtual. Could you talk about what your topic is and share, what was some of the content in there? Content being, content as in your presentation? Not content. (laughs) >> Absolutely. Yeah, so I had the opportunity to co-host a panel with a couple of our clients. So we had Phil Allison from Black Knight and Pat Lane from Allstate and they were really joining us and talking about their experience now starting to use Ansible to manage to z/OS. So we just actually launched some content collections and helping to enable and accelerate, client's use of using Ansible to manage to z/OS back in March of this year. And we've just seen tremendous client uptake in this. And these are a couple of clients who've been working with us and, you know, getting started on the journey of now using Ansible with Z they're both you know, have it in the enterprise already working with Ansible on other platforms. And, you know, we got to talk with them about how they're bringing it into Z. What use cases they're looking at, the type of culture change, that it drives for their teams as they embark on this journey and you know where they see it going for them in the future. >> You know, this is one of the hot items this year. I know that events virtual so has a lot of content flowing around and sessions, but collections is the top story. A lot of people talking collections, collections collections, you know, integration and partnering. It hits so many things but specifically, I like this use case because you're talking about real business value. And I want to ask you specifically when you were in that use case with Ansible and Z. People are excited, it seems like it's working well. Can you talk about what problems that it solves? I mean, what was some of the drivers behind it? What were some of the results? Could you give some insight into, you know, was it a pain point? Was it an enabler? Can you just share why that was getting people are getting excited about this? >> Yeah well, certainly automation on Z, is not new, you know there's decades worth of, of automation on the platform but it's all often proprietary, you know, or bundled up like individual teams or individual people on teams have specific assets, right. That they've built and it's not shared. And it's certainly not consistent with the rest of the enterprise. And, you know, more and more, you're kind of talking about hybrid cloud. You know, we're seeing that, you know an application is not isolated to a single platform anymore right. It really expands. And so being able to leverage this common open platform to be able to manage Z in the same way that you manage the entire rest of your enterprise, whether that's Linux or Windows or network or storage or anything right. You know you can now actually bring this all together into a common automation plane in control plane to be able to manage to all of this. It's also really great from a skills perspective. So, it enables us to really be able to leverage. You know Python on the platform and that's whole ecosystem of Ansible skills that are out there and be able to now use that to work with Z. >> So it's essentially a modern abstraction layer of agility and people to work on it. (laughs) >> Yeah >> You know it's not the joke, Hey, where's that COBOL programmer. I mean, this is a serious skill gap issues though. This is what we're talking about here. You don't have to replace the, kill the old to bring in the new, this is an example of integration where it's classic abstraction layer and evolution. Is that, am I getting that right? >> Absolutely. I mean I think that Ansible's power as an orchestrator is part of why, you know, it's been so successful here because it's not trying to rip and replace and tell you that you have to rewrite anything that you already have. You know, it is that glue sort of like you used that term earlier right? It's that glue that can span you know, whether you've got rec whether you've got ACL, whether you're using z/OSMF you know, or any other kind of custom automation on the platform, you know, it works with everything and it can start to provide that transparency into it as well, and move to that, like infrastructure as code type of culture. So you can bring it into source control. You can have visibility to it as part of the Ansible automation platform and tower and those capabilities. And so you, it really becomes a part of the whole enterprise and enables you to codify a lot of that knowledge. That, you know, exists again in pockets or in individuals and make it much more accessible to anybody new who's coming to the platform. >> That's a great point, great insight.& It's worth calling out. I'm going to make a note of that and make a highlight from that insight. That was awesome. I got to ask about this notion of client uptake. You know, when you have z/OS and Ansible kind of come in together, what are the clients area? When do they get excited? When do they know that they've got to do? And what are some of the client reactions? Are they're like, wake up one day and say, "Hey, yeah I actually put Ansible and z/OS together". You know peanut butter and chocolate is (mumbles) >> Honestly >> You know, it was just one of those things where it's not obvious, right? Or is it? >> Actually I have been surprised myself at how like resoundingly positive and immediate the reactions have been, you know we have something, one of our general managers runs a general managers advisory council and at some of our top clients on the platform and you know we meet with them regularly to talk about, you know, the future direction that we're going. And we first brought this idea of Ansible managing to Z there. And literally unanimously everybody was like yes, give it to us now. (laughs) It was pretty incredible, you know? And so it's you know, we've really just seen amazing uptake. We've had over 5,000 downloads of our core collection on galaxy. And again that's just since mid to late March when we first launched. So we're really seeing tremendous excitement with it. >> You know, I want to want to talk about some of the new announcements, but you brought that up. I wanted to kind of tie into it. It is addictive when you think modernization, people success is addictive. This is another theme coming out of AnsibleFest this year is that when the sharing, the new content you know, coders content is the theme. I got to ask you because you mentioned earlier about the business value and how the clients are kind of gravitating towards it. They want it.It is addictive, contagious. In the ivory towers in the big, you know, front office, the business. It's like, we've got to make everything as a service. Right. You know, you hear that right. You know, and say, okay, okay, boss You know, Skyla, just go do it. Okay. Okay. It's so easy. You can just do it tomorrow, but to make everything as a service, you got to have the automation, right. So, you know, to bridge that gap has everything is a service whether it's mainframe. I mean okay. Mainframe is no problem. If you want to talk about observability and microservices and DevOps, eventually everything's going to be a service. You got to have the automation. Could you share your, commentary on how you view that? Because again, it's a business objective everything is a service, then you got to make it technical then you got to make it work and so on. So what's your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. I mean, agility is a huge theme that we've been focusing on. We've been delivering a lot of capabilities around a cloud native development experience for folks working on COBOL, right. Because absolutely you know, there's a lot of languages coming to the platform. Java is incredibly powerful and it actually runs better on Z than it runs on any other platform out there. And so, you know, we're seeing a lot of clients you know, starting to, modernize and continue to evolve their applications because the platform itself is incredibly modern, right? I mean we come out with new releases, we're leading the industry in a number of areas around resiliency, in our security and all of our, you know, the face of encryption and number of things that come out with, but, you know the applications themselves are what you know, has not always kept pace with the rate of change in the industry. And so, you know, we're really trying to help enable our clients to make that leap and continue to evolve their applications in an important way, and the automation and the tools that go around it become very important. So, you know, one of the things that we're enabling is the self service, provisioning experience, right. So clients can, you know, from Open + Shift, be able to you know, say, "Hey, give me an IMS and z/OS connect stack or a kicks into DB2 stack." And that is all under the covers is going to be powered by Ansible automation. So that really, you know, you can get your system programmers and your talent out of having to do these manual tasks, right. Enable the development community. So they can use things like VS Code and Jenkins and GET Lab, and you'll have this automated CICB pipeline. And again, Ansible under the covers can be there helping to provision those test environments. You know, move the data, you know, along with the application, changes through the pipeline and really just help to support that so that, our clients can do what they need to do. >> You guys got the collections in the hub there, so automation hub, I got to ask you where do you see the future of the automating within z/OS going forward? >> Yeah, so I think, you know one of the areas that we'd like to see go is head more towards this declarative state so that you can you know, have this declarative configuration defined for your Z environment and then have Ansible really with the data and potency right. Be able to, go out and ensure that the environment is always there, and meeting those requirements. You know that's partly a culture change as well which goes along with it, but that's a key area. And then also just, you know, along with that becoming more proactive overall part of, you know, AI ops right. That's happening. And I think Ansible on the automation that we support can become you know, an integral piece of supporting that more intelligent and proactive operational direction that, you know, we're all going. >> Awesome Skyla. Great to talk to you. And so insightful, appreciate it. One final question. I want to ask you a personal question because I've been doing a lot of interviews around skill gaps and cybersecurity, and there's a lot of jobs, more job openings and there are a lot of people. And people are with COVID working at home. People are looking to get new skilled up positions, new opportunities. Again cybersecurity and spaces and event we did and want to, and for us its huge, huge openings. But for people watching who are, you know, resetting getting through this COVID want to come out on the other side there's a lot of online learning tools out there. What skill sets do you think? Cause you brought up this point about modernization and bringing new people and people as a big part of this event and the role of the people in community. What areas do you think people could really double down on? If I wanted to learn a skill. Or an area of coding and business policy or integration services, solution architects, there's a lot of different personas, but what skills can I learn? What's your advice to people out there? >> Yeah sure. I mean on the Z platform overall and skills related to Z, COBOL, right. There's, you know, like two billion lines of COBOL out there in the world. And it's certainly not going away and there's a huge need for skills. And you know, if you've got experience from other platforms, I think bringing that in, right. And really being able to kind of then bridge the two things together right. For the folks that you're working for and the enterprise we're working with you know, we actually have a bunch of education out there. You got to master the mainframe program and even a competition that goes on that's happening now, for folks who are interested in getting started at any stage, whether you're a student or later in your career, but you know learning, you know, learn a lot of those platforms you're going to be able to then have a career for life. >> Yeah. And the scale on the data, this is so much going on. It's super exciting. Thanks for sharing that. Appreciate it. Want to get that plug in there. And of course, IBM, if you learn COBOL you'll have a job forever. I mean, the mainframe's not going away. >> Absolutely. >> Skyla, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE Vice President, for the Z Application Platform and IBM, thanks for coming. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE here for AnsibleFest 2020 Virtual. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE covering DevNet Create, 2018, brought to you by Cisco. (techy music playing) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley for Cisco's DevNet Create. This is their new developer outreach kind of cloud, devops conference, different than DevNet their core, Cisco Networking Developer Conference is kind of an extension, kind of forging new ground. Of course theCUBE's covering, we love devops, we love cloud. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, my cohost today. Our next guest is Alex Ellis, project founder of OpenFaas, F-A-A-S, function as a service. That's serverless, that's Kubernetes, that's container madness. You name it, that's the cool, important trend, thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, it's great to be here. >> So, talk about the founding of the project. So, you're the founder of the project-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> And you now work for VmWare, so let's just get this-- >> Yeah. >> On the record, so-- >> Alex: Yeah, I think this is-- >> Take a minute to explain. >> This is important just to set a bit of context now. I started this project from the lens of working with AWS Lambda as a Docker captain. I was writing these Alexa skills and I found that I had to hack in a web editor and click upload, or I had to write a zip file, put dependencies on my laptop, and upload that to the cloud every time I changed it. It just didn't feel right because I was so bought into containers. It's the same everywhere, there's no more, "It works on my machine." >> John: You're going backwards. >> Right? (laughing) So, I put a POC together for Docker Swarm and nobody had done it at that point, and it got really popular. I got to Docker Concourse Hacks Contest and presented to 4,000 people in the closing keynote, and I kind of thought it would just blossom overnight, it would explode, but it didn't happen, and actually, the months... We're going back 14 now, I grew a community and spent most of my time growing the community and extending the project. Now, that has been really fruitful. It's led to over 11,000 stars on GitHub, 91 individual contributors, and much, much more. It's been a really rich experience, but at the same time-- >> So, rather than going big rocket ship you kind of went, hunkered down and got a kernel of core people together. >> Alex: Yeah. >> Kind of set the DNA, what is the DNA of this project if you had to describe it? >> Yeah, so I think at the heart of it it's serverless functions made simple for Docker and Kubernetes. >> Great, and so how does Amazon play into this? You were using Amazon cloud? >> Yeah, I was using AWS and I was using Lambda, and that flow was not what I was used to in the enterprise. It wasn't what I was used to as a Docker captain. You know, I wanted a finite image that I could scan for vulnerabilities. >> John: Yeah. >> I could check off and promote through an environment. >> John: Yeah. >> Couldn't do it, so that was what OpenFaas aimed to do, was to make those serverless functions easy with Docker as a runtime. >> Well, congratulations, it's a lot of hard work. First, building a community's very difficult, and certainly one that's relevant. Cool and relevant, I would say, is serverless and functions. We'll certainly be seeing that now at the uptake. Still early on, but people are working on it. So, then now, let's forward to today. You work for VMWare, so-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> How did they get involved, are you shipping the project to VMWare, do they own it? Do you maintain the independence? What's the relationship between VMWare, yourself, and the project, if you can talk about that. >> Yeah, I think that's a great question. So, I got to the point where I had demands on my time around the clock. I couldn't rest, open source project, weekends, nights, the lot. >> John: You need the beer money, too, by the way. >> Right, yeah. >> You need some beer money. >> And I was working at ADP and just doing all of this in my own time, and then had a number of different options that came up and people saying, "Look, how are you going to sustain this, "how are you going to keep doing what you love?" You know, you should be working on it full time. One of the options that came up was from VMWare to work in the Open Source Technology Center. It's relatively new-- >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And the mission of the OSTC is to show VMWare as a good citizen in the community and to contribute back to meaningful projects, right, that relate to their products. >> Yeah, and they have good leadership, too, at VMWare. A lot of people don't know that. We did a couple CUBE interviews with them last year, and there is a group inside VMWare that just does that, not with the tentacles of VMWare and Dell Technologies in there. It's an independent group. >> Alex: Yeah. >> They probably go to some meetings and do some debrief, but for the most part it's kind of decoupled from VMWare, right. >> Yeah, right. So, the mission is not necessarily to make money and to produce products. It's to contribute to open source. Help with inbound so when we need to consume a project in a product, and outbound when we want to make the world a better place. >> So, I'm not going to put words in VMWare's mouth, but I will speculate covering VMWare since theCUBE started. We've been to every VMWorld and everyone knows we've got the good presence there, but if I'm VMWare I'm like, "Hey, you know what, we just "did a deal with Amazon, our enterprise "group is not so cloud savvy." I mean, the enterprise, there are operators, not true cloud native, but they're bridging that gap. The world of cloud native and enterprise is coming together. Does this project fit into that spot? Is that kind of where they saw it? Did I get that right or what was their interest other than doing-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Helping the world out and solving world peace in the open source community. >> Yeah, so the mission of OSTC is slightly different. It's to contribute back to meaningful projects and to have this presence in the community. You know, I think OpenFaas is particularly attractive because it has such a broad community. There's people all around the world that are contributing to it, very active. For VMWare it makes a lot of sense because it runs natively on Kubernetes or Docker Swarm, and it's gained a lot of traction, people are using it. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> I had a call with BT Research before I came out and they said, "We've been using it for seven months. "We absolutely love it, it's transforming "how we're doing our microservices," and so I think that's part of it, as well as already have kind of a lead. Already have a lot of momentum with this project. >> So, are you looking to, you know, I know that the organization that you work for is really focused on driving this outbound, right? >> Alex: Yeah, yeah. >> Is VMWare using this internally as well? >> So, I think there's been a number of people who've shown an interest. You can think, "Right, there's a problem "we could solve with this," and I'm just getting my feet under the table, but really my mission is to make serverless functions simple to build this community-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And to have something that people can turn to as an alternative. So, one of the things that I did in the talk yesterday was, "How do you explain OpenFaas to your boss," and one of the points there was to unlock your data. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And I think we talked about this briefly before, now with controversies recently about data and who owns it, what's happening with it, I think it's even more relevant that-- >> John: Yeah. >> You can have full control over the whole stack if you want-- >> John: Yeah. >> Or use a product like Microsoft AKS, their Kubernetes service-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Or GKE and actually treat OpenFaas like a very thin layer of automation. >> Lauren: Really, okay. >> Or go full stack and have everything under your control. >> I mean, that's a great conversation to have, too, because obviously you're kind of referring to the Facebook situation. Zuckerberg's testifying it front of Senate yesterday, Congress today, and it's funny because watching him talk to senators in the US, they really don't know how stuff works, and so if you think about what Facebook does... I mean, granted they took some liberties. They're not the perfect citizen, they got slapped. They took it to the woodshed, if you will, but their mission is to use the data, and this is where cloud native's interesting and I think I want to get your reaction to this, you need to use the data, not treat it as a siloed, fenced in data warehouse. That model's old, right-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> It's now horizontal and scalable. Data's got to move and you've got to have data to make other things happen. That's the way these services are working. >> Yeah. >> So, it's really important to have addressability of the data and you know, GDPR takes an attempt at, you know, kind of hand waving that simple argument away. I'm not really a big fan of that, personally, but the role of data's super important. You've got to make it pervasive, so the challenge is how do you manage those controls. Is that an opportunity for functions? What's your reaction to that whole paradigm of data? >> Yeah, so we're talking about anonymous usage data, like Facebook situation or-- >> Just data in general... Oh, no, just data in general, if I'm an application and I have data-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> That I'm generating, same development of service-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> I need, you might want to leverage that data. So, I'm going to have to have a mechanism for you to share that data to make your service better-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Because data makes data, you know-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> The alchemy side of it is interesting, but then there's all... You get trapped in regulation, licensing, it can be destructive. >> Yes, so as an engineer, and as an open source engineer, you find people that have no clue about what an MIT license is to a GPL or why you'd use one or the other. I think there's a lot we can do to educate the wider community and help them to learn the basics of these issues. When I was at university we had a course on ethics and legal issues and licensing, and I heard on the radio earlier on the Uber that they're starting to try and up the level of that again, and I think it really needs to start at a ground level. We need to educate people about these issues so that they're aware of how to handle the data. I mean, if you look at common tools like Docker and VS Code and Atom, popular editors, they collect anonymous usage statistics and you have to opt out. You know, should OpenFaas collect data as well, because it can be super helpful for us to know the right thing to do. >> Yeah. >> And when you come to open source you get no feedback until somebody wants support from you and it has to be done yesterday for free. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And so, yeah, getting data can be super powerful. >> Well, Alex, you bring up a great point. I think this is something that's worthy of an ongoing conversation. I think it will be, too, because GPL, Apache license, all these licenses were built when open source was a Tier 2 citizen, so the whole idea of these-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Licenses was to create a robust sharing economy of code, and you know, with the certain nuances of those licenses. But just like stacks get updated and modernized with what we've seen the containers and now Kubernetes is serverless, the stack is changing and modernizing. The licenses have to, as well, so I think this is something that... I don't, I think it's kind of like we've got to get on it. (laughing) It's like I think we should just, this is a work area. It's not necessarily... It's game changing if you don't do it, right, because it could-- >> Yeah. >> It could flip it either way. So, to me that's my opinion. >> Well, I think you're under MIT, correct, is that-- >> So, it's under MIT right now. >> Lauren: Okay. >> One of the things that I didn't realize when I started the project is if you want to get into a big foundation like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation you need an Apache 2.0 license, and the main difference is that it offers some protections around patent claims, but it's basically-- >> Lauren: Okay. >> Compatible, so it is a minefield, and it's-- >> Lauren: So, that's just for the CNCF? >> Right, and the Apache Foundation, obviously as well. >> Lauren: Yes. >> And probably many others follow suit because I think it, we talk about the-- >> John: It's the dual source, it's the dual source. >> A refresh... >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> Right, it's a compatible license, it seems to help a lot of people. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> That's a huge issue because you could be well down the road with committing code and then the lawyers will make you take it out. >> Right, so that's why organizations like the Open Source Program Office exist within VMWare, to help these issues and to monitor and do compliance. They may use software like Black Duck to check stuff-- >> Lauren: Yep, mm-hmm. >> Automatically because you don't want to be doing checks on your aircraft once it's in the air. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> John: Yeah. >> You want to sort out everything out on the ground. >> You'll be grounding your fleet, that's for sure-- >> Right. >> When it comes to that, how do you handle that with licensing? How do you guys handle that when people contribute? >> Yeah. >> Are they aware of the license or they don't understand the implications? >> So, with OpenFaas we follow a model very similar to the Linux kernel, which is a sign off developer certificate of origin. What you're saying is I'm allowed to give you this code, I'm allowed for this to be a part of the project and I wrote it, I originated it. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> And that's pretty much a good balance between a full contributor license agreement and nothing at all. >> John: Yeah. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> But look, there's a lot of projects in this space right now. I don't know if you've noticed that, Kubernetes serverless projects. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of really interesting, it's why I like this show here. I think what Cisco's smart to do here at DevNet Create is identify the network programmability, which really takes devops, expands the aperture of what devops is, so-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> You know, as you got new applications coming online some developers want nothing to do with the infrastructure. Kubernetes has got a much more active and more prominent role with layer seven primitives, for instance, or-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> Managing things down to the network layer. You're talking about policy services inside services on the fly, so this is really a big, a good thing, in my opinion. So, you know, I think, Kubernetes, most people look at as a kind of generic orchestration, but I think there's so much more there. >> Alex: Yeah. >> I think that to me is attracting some really rockstar developers. >> Yeah, well I think, you know, the fact that you are open, you're under the MIT license, which I am a fan of-- >> Alex: Yeah. >> And you know, it is, you're on a very successful trajectory in terms of, you know, what you're building and who's engaged and the fact that VMWare is behind you means that they're going to put some money into it, hopefully, and help you guys along as it works, but it is also a project that is not... You know, it doesn't have folks just from VMWare. >> Alex: Yeah. >> It's really, really diverse in terms of who's committing the code. So, I think there's a lot of things that are really going for you. Now, who do you see, you mentioned competitors... >> Alex: Yeah. >> So, can you talk a little bit about what the ecosystem there looks like? >> Yeah, so there's a number of projects that I think have made some really good decisions about their architecture and their implementation. They all vary quite subtly, and one of the questions I get asked a lot is, you know, how is this different from X, cubeless nucleo, and if you look at the CNCF landscape there used to be a very small section with OpenFaas, Lambda, and a couple of others. It's now so big it has its own PDF just about serverless, and I think that's super confusing for people. So, part of what we're trying to do is make that simple and say, "Look, there may be many options. "Here's OpenFaas, here's how it works. "You can get it deployed in 60 seconds. "You can have any binary or any programming language "you want and it will scale up over Kubernetes." We'll just make a really deep integration, give you everything you'd expect, really nice developer experience. >> Lauren: That's great. >> What are some of the use cases you see right now, low hanging fruit for developers that want to come in and get involved in the project? Have you guys identified any low hanging fruit use cases? >> So, what I've seen, and I talked about this a bit yesterday in the talk, is three big use cases, really. The first one was Anisha Keshavan at University of Washington. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Now, she's doing a lot of data science with neuroinformatics, medical images. She's able to take scans of brains and give them to people like you and me, who don't know anything about medical science. We just draw around the lesions and we train her model, and then she makes it competitive like a game, gamefies it, you get more points, but actually, what we're doing is making the world a better place by training her medical imaging database. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> She'll then use that as an OpenFaas function to test real images as part of her postdoctorate. >> So, she's crowd sourcing, wisdom of crowds. >> Alex: Right. >> Collect some intelligence for her research. >> Now, one of the other things that I think's really cool is in the community we built out a project with two 17 year olds. Two 17 year olds built a really cool project, and when I think back to when I was 15, 16, I was playing with something like PHP on Windows Lamp Stack. You know, I had to do everything myself. >> John: Yeah. >> They got, like, this scaffolding built up and they could just go to the tenth story and just keep adding on. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And they didn't have to worry about managing this infrastructure at all. >> Or architecture, foundation architecture. >> Alex: Right, right. >> Yeah, and that's exactly the reason why you want to do that. >> So, they wrote some small blocks of Python that we found this machine learning code that could convert a black and white image to color, wrapped it in a box and said, "There's a function," then dropped it into OpenFaas and started feeding tweets in, and that was pretty much it. >> John: Yeah. >> Now we have @ColorizeBot, a bit of a strange spelling but you'll find it on Twitter, and it's been in Le Monde newspaper, all round the world. It was pronounced at CubeCon as well, and it's just a super interesting way of showing how you can take something very complex, right, and democratize it. >> Yeah, we'd love to get those people working for theCUBE and put the little cube box and throw all the tweets in there. >> Alex: Right, yeah. >> Alex, thanks for coming on, congratulations. What's next on your project, tell us what's going on, what's next for you, what are you guys conquering next? >> So, I'm really focused on growing the team and community. We've got an open recruitment position open right now and a small team that's building internally. I think the more people we can get contributing on a regular basis the more support there's going to be for the community, the more people are going to want to use this Actually had 26 people join a call last week. "How to contribute to OpenFaas," that was the name of it. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Around the world, and the best part for me was where we got to the testimonies and I had people just sharing their tips and experiences. How rewarding it is to contribute something bigger, something that you as a developer will actually want to use. >> Yeah, and the value opportunities, to extract value out of the group-- >> Yeah. >> It's phenomenal, functions as a service. Super relevant in cloud and devops as the middleware, if you want to call it that, expands more capabilities in devops are coming. It's theCUBE coverage here at DevNet Create. We'll be back with more live coverage here in Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California, after this short break. (techy music playing)