>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE! Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, helping to extract the signal from the noise. Here at OpenStack Summit 2018, I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for the week is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program atmail, which is an email as a service company. We have Jay Sil who's the European Sales Director, and we have Jason Brown, we'll call him JB for the rest of the interview, is a Solutions Architect. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks very much for having us here. >> Alright so Jay, email is a service, tell us a little bit about the company and the state of email, haven't Office 365 just taken everybody over? >> Jay: Well, so most people don't want to talk about email, but it's still essential. So atmail is a 20 year old company, we are probably one of the largest pure plaid, white label email providers in the world. We have about 170 million mailboxes out there in the wild. But we provide not to end-user businesses, we service the service provider and telco market. So a lot of our customers you would've heard of, we're more the brand behind the brand. So, we provide those email to their end-user subscribers, but it is very much the telco ISB, that is upfront that you would hear about. >> Yeah, excellent. There's been a discussion we've been having at this show a lot is, OpenStack itself is kind of something that gets in there, the telco and service providers, big place so, JB, tell us a little bit about your role and bring us into the involvement with OpenStack. >> JB: Sure, so I'm the Solutions Architect for atmail, I kind of help bridge the gap between the technical and the non technical, I help Jay out with explaining the technical details to the sales team and then bring back the non technical details of feedback that Jay gets and we get from our customers, into development and operations, so they can actually improve the product in a way that's fitting. And so, we started with OpenStack a few years ago, through a partnership with DreamHost, here in North America, to move from, we kind of had a traditional email, like a hosted email solution, or an on-premise email solution, but it wasn't a true Cloud solution, and so, took a big step back, looked at our architecture, what it actually looked like, what it needed, and it just turned out that OpenStack was the best direction for us to go to make that move. >> JB, can you clarify, when you say a true Cloud solution, what did you mean by that? What were kind of the requirements and what did that? >> So we had, for years, we would just take our on-premise solution, and we would run it in a data center that we had a rack in, we had 40 U's worth of servers, I was the guy at the time that was responsible if something went wrong. I got a call at three o'clock in the morning to drive to Spokane to go to our data center to fix something, replace a hard drive, or do something like that, and that just was, it didn't scale horziontically or vertically to be honest. That was just limited to what we could do with it, and so we really wanted something where we could save the cost by distributing a load as we needed it, and I think that's really the difference, is you can spin up instances for front end or spin up an instance for a back end, whatever you actually, whatever resource you actually need, you can spin that up as a service, in a Cloud infrastructure, whereas you can't really do that as easily or as cost effectively on bare metal. >> Jay so, I want to bring it back to the business. Your customers, what does OpenStack mean from them and the ultimate end-user, I don't think I've seen emails that say, "Sent to me via an email service powered by OpenStack". But, walk us through what that means for the business and your constituents. >> So there are both commercial and technical benefits. If I look at the commercial benefits first and foremost, what OpenStack allows us to do is to provide a solution, quickly and efficiently. The first thing that people want from email is they want a stable, robust service. It's a bit like turning a tap on at home, and it getting clean drinking water. You really don't give it a second thought, its only when that tap stops working and its not coming out properly, then you think about it. So first and foremost, our customers want a stable, mature, reliable service. They also want to make sure that it's secure. And that allows us, the OpenStack initiative that we've undertaken allows us to achieve that. The commercial other benefits that we obtain from that is being able to reuse our cost base, or controlling our cost base. As a result, that's passed on to our customers. So they can then, not only mitigate their risk, but they can control their costs as well. From a technical point of view, I mean, JB can touch upon some of the technical benefits, but one of the things that we found, because we are a small vendor in terms of the DevOps team that we have, what OpenStack allowed us to do was to gain from the knowledge that the community had, and really benefit and accelerate our solutions market. And when you talk to some of our DevOps guys, the first, and, well, foremost thing that they say is that we couldn't have achieved this without the help and support of the engineers and the OpenStack community. So the depth of knowledge out there really helped us accelerate those services. >> That's great, is the fact that it's OpenStack, seems like at this point, one of the themes that we've been talking about is OpenStack, ubiquitous, mature, a lot of talk here about containers and other things, but the Stack itself is well known and mature, that seems that that would also have a impact on, something that telco understands, right? It's a well known Stack, yeah. So JB, this is your first time, you said that this is your first time at a Summit. Kind of curious, before we dig into kind of maybe what your Stack looks like, OpenStack looks like, what did you think of the Summit, the level of kind of conversation here, the sessions and that sort of thing. >> So far it's been fantastic. I've had a complete, not a 180, but there's so much here that I'll be able to take back to our DevOps guys and our QA guys, we're looking at the zool stuff really heavily, the CICD stuff, just a huge benefit that'll streamline all of our development and testing and then pushing that to market will be huge. >> Anything specific, 'cause one of the things we've look, there's a number of CICD offerings in the market today, what specifically about zool, because you're using OpenStack that it makes sense to fit somewhere. >> Yeah I liked it, it fits with OpenStack really well, I like its level of maturity, and I like the gated looking at the future as opposed to looking at the past, or looking at the present, for your testing, specifically. >> Gotcha, that's interesting, yeah. Can you talk a little bit maybe about your so your Stack is a, so it sounds like, well yeah talk a little bit about the OpenStack, your OpenStack deployment in terms of there's a lot of components, are you using kind of the core components then? And anything else that interacts with the other theme here, right, is OpenStack has to talk to a lot of other systems. >> So we use a pretty, we use the OpenStack storage module and the networking module, and I don't know all of the little names to all of the little pieces, but we do use the storage and the networking. The networking was a really big help for us because we were actually able to offload some of the system load into the network layer moving into OpenStack, whereas before we would have, with an email system you have all of your actual email traffic, or your high map traffic, can create a significant load, by being able to move some of that load into the networking layer, we're able to provide a better customer experience because all of those edge services aren't as taxed, and so when the user goes to check their email, or send an email, they're not waiting because of a high level risk, and if you see this, especially if, when, something goes wrong in a system, 'cause they're systems, and things do happen, and so when that happens, the time to recover, is faster on our back end and the overall the way that's presented to our end-users is much better for us. >> John: Much better business benefits, yeah. >> Jay, have to think in the regions that you play, kind of the governance and compliance, something you need to worry about, also it's May 2018, so I have to ask you about GDPR, and how that fits into your business these days, so. >> Jay: Absolutely Stu. So, GDPR comes into effect this Friday, we've had a team dedicated on working on that, make sure that we are compliant, obviously our telco users, service providers, rely on us implicitly, to make sure that we are fully compliant, and I can assure you that we are. We have seen a number of high profile breaches of other offenders, it's not something that we want to have an experience of, so we have worked diligently, in order to make sure that we are fully compliant. >> Any commentary you want to share on the security these days too? As people always, governments asking for things, hackers, it's a complicated issue. >> It is, and it's interesting because email, I think, represents the largest surface area of attack, in any organization. You can get from a CEO, to anyone in the organization, via email. That's how powerful it is. And again, as we were talking off record earlier, it's not something you give an awful lot of thought to. Email is like turning on a tap at home and clean drinking water comes out, you don't give it a second thought. But when it stops working or there's an issue, than when it becomes a problem, and you could regress back into the dark ages, because you can't do business, you can't send that message, you can't communicate or connect to the audience that you want to. So, yes we have a lot of issueS around that that we need to make sure that we are fully on top of, our aim is to provide a stable, mature, reliable and secure service to our customers and their end-users. Security is something that we take seriously, as do a lot of other vendors, but it's something that is always constantly changing and evolving. By the time the latest attack comes out, and you've checked that you are covered, the next one has come out. And we've seen a lot of attacks over the last few months that come in waves. We had one acry last year, that really hit UK and Europe hard, as with other regions, and I'm sure there'll be more coming out soon. >> JB, containers, well, secure containers, one of the topics of conversation here, containers in general been a big topic, Kubernetes, how are you all looking at that application and orchestration layer? >> Containers with an email system are kind of tough. Security is a big reason for that, and its not that we can't use containers, but by the time you take a container and wrap all of the security around it, and everything that you need for something you would use with an email system, it almost negates the benefit of using the container to start with. >> John: Gotcha. >> So we're constantly looking at other ways that we can take advantage of that, and Koda I think today, just released their version one of their solution, which secures it down to the into the actual core of the system, and so that changes the game a little bit, on what might be possible now, not having to worry about some of the security issues that we are concerned with. >> Right, so, but even now, your Cloud portability strategy per se, is your app runs it's on an OpenStack context, with OpenStack configuration, you run I think at least two on two different instances of OpenStack, so that's part of your, you are multi-Cloud in that sense. >> We are, yes. >> That's great. >> And that actually made it really, the move into our EU data center was so much smoother, because of our experience with OpenStack on our initial deployment. We were just able to just launch it and go. >> Stu: Alright well, what I want to give you both just the final word is to, your takeaways here at the show so far, being first time attendees. >> So, from a commercial point of view, I mean the networking has been tremendous. I've had conversations with people over email or over phone, that I've actually met face to face here and made that connection, so for me as a sales person, those networking events et cetera, have been invaluable. What I also like about the show itself, and the community as a whole, is that there is this openness and there's this willing to share ideas which you don't always find in other arenas, it's much more of a closed, well I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing because its a trade secret or its going to give me advantage, whereas here it is very open, it is, we want to collaborate, we want to share, and that's been very refreshing from my point of view. >> The community is a big part of it for me. All of my work in developmental operations has been from the OpenSource community so, to come back and see that thriving and pushing this forward the way that it is, its just so reassuring. >> Well Jay and JB, we really appreciate you being open with sharing your story with a practitioner so, thank you and congratulations atmail for all that you've done here in the community. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, much more coverage here at the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver, thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)