(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase AI/ML Top Startups Building Foundation Model Infrastructure. This is season three, episode one of our ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem to talk about data and analytics. I'm your host, Lisa Martin and today we're excited to be joined by two guests from Astronomer. Steven Hillion joins us, it's Chief Data Officer and Jeff Fletcher, it's director of ML. They're here to talk about machine learning and data orchestration. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you. >> It's great to be here. >> Before we get into machine learning let's give the audience an overview of Astronomer. Talk about what that is, Steven. Talk about what you mean by data orchestration. >> Yeah, let's start with Astronomer. We're the Airflow company basically. The commercial developer behind the open-source project, Apache Airflow. I don't know if you've heard of Airflow. It's sort of de-facto standard these days for orchestrating data pipelines, data engineering pipelines, and as we'll talk about later, machine learning pipelines. It's really is the de-facto standard. I think we're up to about 12 million downloads a month. That's actually as a open-source project. I think at this point it's more popular by some measures than Slack. Airflow was created by Airbnb some years ago to manage all of their data pipelines and manage all of their workflows and now it powers the data ecosystem for organizations as diverse as Electronic Arts, Conde Nast is one of our big customers, a big user of Airflow. And also not to mention the biggest banks on Wall Street use Airflow and Astronomer to power the flow of data throughout their organizations. >> Talk about that a little bit more, Steven, in terms of the business impact. You mentioned some great customer names there. What is the business impact or outcomes that a data orchestration strategy enables businesses to achieve? >> Yeah, I mean, at the heart of it is quite simply, scheduling and managing data pipelines. And so if you have some enormous retailer who's managing the flow of information throughout their organization they may literally have thousands or even tens of thousands of data pipelines that need to execute every day to do things as simple as delivering metrics for the executives to consume at the end of the day, to producing on a weekly basis new machine learning models that can be used to drive product recommendations. One of our customers, for example, is a British food delivery service. And you get those recommendations in your application that says, "Well, maybe you want to have samosas with your curry." That sort of thing is powered by machine learning models that they train on a regular basis to reflect changing conditions in the market. And those are produced through Airflow and through the Astronomer platform, which is essentially a managed platform for running airflow. So at its simplest it really is just scheduling and managing those workflows. But that's easier said than done of course. I mean if you have 10 thousands of those things then you need to make sure that they all run that they all have sufficient compute resources. If things fail, how do you track those down across those 10,000 workflows? How easy is it for an average data scientist or data engineer to contribute their code, their Python notebooks or their SQL code into a production environment? And then you've got reproducibility, governance, auditing, like managing data flows across an organization which we think of as orchestrating them is much more than just scheduling. It becomes really complicated pretty quickly. >> I imagine there's a fair amount of complexity there. Jeff, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk a little bit about Astronomer through your lens, data orchestration and how it applies to MLOps. >> So I come from a machine learning background and for me the interesting part is that machine learning requires the expansion into orchestration. A lot of the same things that you're using to go and develop and build pipelines in a standard data orchestration space applies equally well in a machine learning orchestration space. What you're doing is you're moving data between different locations, between different tools, and then tasking different types of tools to act on that data. So extending it made logical sense from a implementation perspective. And a lot of my focus at Astronomer is really to explain how Airflow can be used well in a machine learning context. It is being used well, it is being used a lot by the customers that we have and also by users of the open source version. But it's really being able to explain to people why it's a natural extension for it and how well it fits into that. And a lot of it is also extending some of the infrastructure capabilities that Astronomer provides to those customers for them to be able to run some of the more platform specific requirements that come with doing machine learning pipelines. >> Let's get into some of the things that make Astronomer unique. Jeff, sticking with you, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the key differentiators that you articulate to customers? >> So a lot of it is that we are not specific to one cloud provider. So we have the ability to operate across all of the big cloud providers. I know, I'm certain we have the best developers that understand how best practices implementations for data orchestration works. So we spend a lot of time talking to not just the business outcomes and the business users of the product, but also also for the technical people, how to help them better implement things that they may have come across on a Stack Overflow article or not necessarily just grown with how the product has migrated. So it's the ability to run it wherever you need to run it and also our ability to help you, the customer, better implement and understand those workflows that I think are two of the primary differentiators that we have. >> Lisa: Got it. >> I'll add another one if you don't mind. >> You can go ahead, Steven. >> Is lineage and dependencies between workflows. One thing we've done is to augment core Airflow with Lineage services. So using the Open Lineage framework, another open source framework for tracking datasets as they move from one workflow to another one, team to another, one data source to another is a really key component of what we do and we bundle that within the service so that as a developer or as a production engineer, you really don't have to worry about lineage, it just happens. Jeff, may show us some of this later that you can actually see as data flows from source through to a data warehouse out through a Python notebook to produce a predictive model or a dashboard. Can you see how those data products relate to each other? And when something goes wrong, figure out what upstream maybe caused the problem, or if you're about to change something, figure out what the impact is going to be on the rest of the organization. So Lineage is a big deal for us. >> Got it. >> And just to add on to that, the other thing to think about is that traditional Airflow is actually a complicated implementation. It required quite a lot of time spent understanding or was almost a bespoke language that you needed to be able to develop in two write these DAGs, which is like fundamental pipelines. So part of what we are focusing on is tooling that makes it more accessible to say a data analyst or a data scientist who doesn't have or really needs to gain the necessary background in how the semantics of Airflow DAGs works to still be able to get the benefit of what Airflow can do. So there is new features and capabilities built into the astronomer cloud platform that effectively obfuscates and removes the need to understand some of the deep work that goes on. But you can still do it, you still have that capability, but we are expanding it to be able to have orchestrated and repeatable processes accessible to more teams within the business. >> In terms of accessibility to more teams in the business. You talked about data scientists, data analysts, developers. Steven, I want to talk to you, as the chief data officer, are you having more and more conversations with that role and how is it emerging and evolving within your customer base? >> Hmm. That's a good question, and it is evolving because I think if you look historically at the way that Airflow has been used it's often from the ground up. You have individual data engineers or maybe single data engineering teams who adopt Airflow 'cause it's very popular. Lots of people know how to use it and they bring it into an organization and say, "Hey, let's use this to run our data pipelines." But then increasingly as you turn from pure workflow management and job scheduling to the larger topic of orchestration you realize it gets pretty complicated, you want to have coordination across teams, and you want to have standardization for the way that you manage your data pipelines. And so having a managed service for Airflow that exists in the cloud is easy to spin up as you expand usage across the organization. And thinking long term about that in the context of orchestration that's where I think the chief data officer or the head of analytics tends to get involved because they really want to think of this as a strategic investment that they're making. Not just per team individual Airflow deployments, but a network of data orchestrators. >> That network is key. Every company these days has to be a data company. We talk about companies being data driven. It's a common word, but it's true. It's whether it is a grocer or a bank or a hospital, they've got to be data companies. So talk to me a little bit about Astronomer's business model. How is this available? How do customers get their hands on it? >> Jeff, go ahead. >> Yeah, yeah. So we have a managed cloud service and we have two modes of operation. One, you can bring your own cloud infrastructure. So you can say here is an account in say, AWS or Azure and we can go and deploy the necessary infrastructure into that, or alternatively we can host everything for you. So it becomes a full SaaS offering. But we then provide a platform that connects at the backend to your internal IDP process. So however you are authenticating users to make sure that the correct people are accessing the services that they need with role-based access control. From there we are deploying through Kubernetes, the different services and capabilities into either your cloud account or into an account that we host. And from there Airflow does what Airflow does, which is its ability to then reach to different data systems and data platforms and to then run the orchestration. We make sure we do it securely, we have all the necessary compliance certifications required for GDPR in Europe and HIPAA based out of the US, and a whole bunch host of others. So it is a secure platform that can run in a place that you need it to run, but it is a managed Airflow that includes a lot of the extra capabilities like the cloud developer environment and the open lineage services to enhance the overall airflow experience. >> Enhance the overall experience. So Steven, going back to you, if I'm a Conde Nast or another organization, what are some of the key business outcomes that I can expect? As one of the things I think we've learned during the pandemic is access to realtime data is no longer a nice to have for organizations. It's really an imperative. It's that demanding consumer that wants to have that personalized, customized, instant access to a product or a service. So if I'm a Conde Nast or I'm one of your customers, what can I expect my business to be able to achieve as a result of data orchestration? >> Yeah, I think in a nutshell it's about providing a reliable, scalable, and easy to use service for developing and running data workflows. And talking of demanding customers, I mean, I'm actually a customer myself, as you mentioned, I'm the head of data for Astronomer. You won't be surprised to hear that we actually use Astronomer and Airflow to run all of our data pipelines. And so I can actually talk about my experience. When I started I was of course familiar with Airflow, but it always seemed a little bit unapproachable to me if I was introducing that to a new team of data scientists. They don't necessarily want to have to think about learning something new. But I think because of the layers that Astronomer has provided with our Astro service around Airflow it was pretty easy for me to get up and running. Of course I've got an incentive for doing that. I work for the Airflow company, but we went from about, at the beginning of last year, about 500 data tasks that we were running on a daily basis to about 15,000 every day. We run something like a million data operations every month within my team. And so as one outcome, just the ability to spin up new production workflows essentially in a single day you go from an idea in the morning to a new dashboard or a new model in the afternoon, that's really the business outcome is just removing that friction to operationalizing your machine learning and data workflows. >> And I imagine too, oh, go ahead, Jeff. >> Yeah, I think to add to that, one of the things that becomes part of the business cycle is a repeatable capabilities for things like reporting, for things like new machine learning models. And the impediment that has existed is that it's difficult to take that from a team that's an analyst team who then provide that or a data science team that then provide that to the data engineering team who have to work the workflow all the way through. What we're trying to unlock is the ability for those teams to directly get access to scheduling and orchestrating capabilities so that a business analyst can have a new report for C-suite execs that needs to be done once a week, but the time to repeatability for that report is much shorter. So it is then immediately in the hands of the person that needs to see it. It doesn't have to go into a long list of to-dos for a data engineering team that's already overworked that they eventually get it to it in a month's time. So that is also a part of it is that the realizing, orchestration I think is fairly well and a lot of people get the benefit of being able to orchestrate things within a business, but it's having more people be able to do it and shorten the time that that repeatability is there is one of the main benefits from good managed orchestration. >> So a lot of workforce productivity improvements in what you're doing to simplify things, giving more people access to data to be able to make those faster decisions, which ultimately helps the end user on the other end to get that product or the service that they're expecting like that. Jeff, I understand you have a demo that you can share so we can kind of dig into this. >> Yeah, let me take you through a quick look of how the whole thing works. So our starting point is our cloud infrastructure. This is the login. You go to the portal. You can see there's a a bunch of workspaces that are available. Workspaces are like individual places for people to operate in. I'm not going to delve into all the deep technical details here, but starting point for a lot of our data science customers is we have what we call our Cloud IDE, which is a web-based development environment for writing and building out DAGs without actually having to know how the underpinnings of Airflow work. This is an internal one, something that we use. You have a notebook-like interface that lets you write python code and SQL code and a bunch of specific bespoke type of blocks if you want. They all get pulled together and create a workflow. So this is a workflow, which gets compiled to something that looks like a complicated set of Python code, which is the DAG. I then have a CICD process pipeline where I commit this through to my GitHub repo. So this comes to a repo here, which is where these DAGs that I created in the previous step exist. I can then go and say, all right, I want to see how those particular DAGs have been running. We then get to the actual Airflow part. So this is the managed Airflow component. So we add the ability for teams to fairly easily bring up an Airflow instance and write code inside our notebook-like environment to get it into that instance. So you can see it's been running. That same process that we built here that graph ends up here inside this, but you don't need to know how the fundamentals of Airflow work in order to get this going. Then we can run one of these, it runs in the background and we can manage how it goes. And from there, every time this runs, it's emitting to a process underneath, which is the open lineage service, which is the lineage integration that allows me to come in here and have a look and see this was that actual, that same graph that we built, but now it's the historic version. So I know where things started, where things are going, and how it ran. And then I can also do a comparison. So if I want to see how this particular run worked compared to one historically, I can grab one from a previous date and it will show me the comparison between the two. So that combination of managed Airflow, getting Airflow up and running very quickly, but the Cloud IDE that lets you write code and know how to get something into a repeatable format get that into Airflow and have that attached to the lineage process adds what is a complete end-to-end orchestration process for any business looking to get the benefit from orchestration. >> Outstanding. Thank you so much Jeff for digging into that. So one of my last questions, Steven is for you. This is exciting. There's a lot that you guys are enabling organizations to achieve here to really become data-driven companies. So where can folks go to get their hands on this? >> Yeah, just go to astronomer.io and we have plenty of resources. If you're new to Airflow, you can read our documentation, our guides to getting started. We have a CLI that you can download that is really I think the easiest way to get started with Airflow. But you can actually sign up for a trial. You can sign up for a guided trial where our teams, we have a team of experts, really the world experts on getting Airflow up and running. And they'll take you through that trial and allow you to actually kick the tires and see how this works with your data. And I think you'll see pretty quickly that it's very easy to get started with Airflow, whether you're doing that from the command line or doing that in our cloud service. And all of that is available on our website >> astronomer.io. Jeff, last question for you. What are you excited about? There's so much going on here. What are some of the things, maybe you can give us a sneak peek coming down the road here that prospects and existing customers should be excited about? >> I think a lot of the development around the data awareness components, so one of the things that's traditionally been complicated with orchestration is you leave your data in the place that you're operating on and we're starting to have more data processing capability being built into Airflow. And from a Astronomer perspective, we are adding more capabilities around working with larger datasets, doing bigger data manipulation with inside the Airflow process itself. And that lends itself to better machine learning implementation. So as we start to grow and as we start to get better in the machine learning context, well, in the data awareness context, it unlocks a lot more capability to do and implement proper machine learning pipelines. >> Awesome guys. Exciting stuff. Thank you so much for talking to me about Astronomer, machine learning, data orchestration, and really the value in it for your customers. Steve and Jeff, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure, thanks. >> And we thank you for watching. This is season three, episode one of our ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Oh, welcome back to the cubes coverage of coop con cloud native con 2021. I'm John is the Cuba, David Nicholson, our cloud host analyst, and it's exciting to be back in person in event. So we're back. It's been two years with the cube con and Linux foundation. So scrape, it was a hybrid event and we have a great guest here, Cuban London, Nick Dirk, and CT field CTO of harness and harness.io. The URL love the.io. Good to see you. >>Thank you guys for having me on. I genuinely appreciate >>It. Thanks for coming on. You were a part of our AWS startup showcase, which you guys were featured as a fast growing mature company, uh, as cloud scales, you guys have been doing extremely well. So congratulations. But now we're in reality now, right? So, okay. Cloud native has kind of like, okay, we don't have to sell it anymore. People buying into it. Um, and now operationalizing it with cloud operations, which means you're running stuff, applications and infrastructure is code and it costs money. Yeah. Martine Casada at Andreessen Horowitz. Oh, repatriated from the cloud. So there's a lot of, there's some cost conversations starting to happen. This is what you guys are in the middle of. >>Yeah, absolutely. What's interesting is when you think about it today, we want to shift left. When you want to empower all the engineers, we want to empower people. We're not giving them the data they need, right. They get a call from the CFO 30 days later, as opposed to actually being able to look at what change I did and how it actually affected. And this is what we're bringing in. Allowing people to have is now really empowering. So throughout the whole software delivery life cycle from CGI continuous integration, continuous delivery feature flagging, and even bringing cost modeling and in cloud cost management. And even then being able to shut down, shut down the services that you're not using, how much of that is waste. We talk about it. Every single cloud conference it's how much is waste. And so being able to actually turn those on, use those accordingly and then take advantage of even the cheapest instances when you should. That's really what >>It's so funny. People almost trip over dollars to pick up pennies in the cloud business because they're so focused on innovation that they think, okay, we've got to just innovate at all costs, but at some point you can make it productive for the developers in process in the pipeline to actually manage that. >>That's exactly it. I mean, if you think about it to me in order to breach state continuous delivery, we have to automate everything. Right. But that doesn't mean stop at just delivering, you know, to production. That means to customer, which means we've got to make them happy, but then ultimately all of those resources in dev and QA and staging and UAT, we've sticker those as well. And if we're not being mindful of it, the costs are astronomical, right. And we've seen it time and time again with every company you see, you've seen every article about how they've blown through all their budgets. So bring it to the people that can affect change. That's really the difference, making it visible, looking at it. In-depth not just at the cloud level and all the spend there, but also even at the, uh, thinking about it, the Kubernetes level down to the containers, the pods and understanding where are the resources even inside of the clusters and bringing that as an aggregate, not just for visibility and, and giving recommendations, but now more importantly, because part of a pipeline start taking action. That's where it's interesting. It's not just about being able to see it and understand it and hope, right? Hope is not a strategy acting upon it is what makes it valuable. And that's part of the automate everything. >>Yeah. We'll let that at the Dawn of the age of DevOps, uh, there was a huge incentive for a developer just to get their job done, to seize control of infrastructure, the idea of infrastructure as code, you know, and it's, it's, you know, w when it was being born, it's a fantastic, I've always wondered though, you know, be careful what you wish for. Do you really want all of that responsibility? So we've got responsibility from a compliance and security perspective and of course cost. So, so where do we, where do we go from here, I guess is the question. Yeah. So >>When we look at building this all together, I think when we think about software delivery, everybody wants to go fast. We start with velocity, right? Everybody says, that's where I want to go. And to your point with governance compliance, the next roadblock to hit is weight. In order to go fast, I have to do it appropriately. I've got governing bodies that tell me how this has to work. And that becomes a challenge. >>It slows it down too. It doesn't, I mean, basically people are getting pissed off, right? This is, this general sentiment is, is that developers are moving fast with their code. And then they have to stop. Compliance has to give the green light sometimes days, correct? Uh, it used to be weeks now. It's days, it's still unacceptable. So there's like this always been that tension to the security groups or say it, or finance was like slow down and they actually want to go faster. So that has to be policy-based something. Yep. This is the future. What is your take on that? >>Take on, this is pretty simple. When everybody talks about people, process and technology, it's kind of bogus, right? It's all about confidence. If you're confident that your developers can deploy appropriately and they're not going to do something wrong, you'll let them to play all the time. Well, that requires process. But if you have tooling that literally guarantees your governance, make sure that at no point in time, can any of your developers actually do something wrong. Now you have, >>That's the key. That's the key. That's the key because you're giving them a policy-based guardrails to execute in their programs >>And that's it. So now you can free up all those pieces. So all those bottlenecks, all those waiting all those time, and this is how all of our customers, they move from, you know, change advisory boards that approve deployments. >>Can you give us some, give us some, give us some, uh, customer anecdotal examples of this inaction and kind of the love letters you get, or, or the customer you take us through a use case of how it all. >>So this is one of my favorites. So NCR national cash register. If you slide a credit card at like a Chick-fil-A or a Safeway, right? Um, traditional technology. But what was interesting is they went from doing PCI audit, which would take seven days to go to a PCI audit right now with harness, because, >>And by the way, when you and the seventh, six day, the things that you did on day one change. >>Exactly, exactly. And so now, because of using harness and everything's audited, and all the changes are, are controlled to make sure that developers again, can only do what they're allowed. They only get to broadcast two per production. If they've met all their security requirements, all their compliance, permits, all their quality checks. Now, because of that, they literally gave a re read only view of harness to their auditor. And in three hours it was over. And it's because now we're that evidence file from code commit through to production. Yeah. It's there for point of sale compliant. >>So what is the benefits to them? What's the result saves them time, saves the money. What's the good, the free up more times. I'll see the chops it down. That's the key. >>Yeah. It's actually something we didn't build in like our ROI calculators, which was, we talked to their engineers and we gave them their nights and their weekends back, which I thought was amazing. But Thursday night, when we're doing that deploy, they don't have to be up. Harness is actually managing and understanding, using machine learning to understand what normal looks like. So they don't have to, they don't have to sit and look at the knock or sit in the war room and eat the free pizza. Yeah. Right. And then when those things break, same concept rates aren't as good. So >>I got to ask you, I got you here. You know, as the software development delivery lifecycle is radically being overhauled right now, which people generally agree that that's the case, the old models are, are different. How do you see your vision around AI and automation playing into this? Because you could say, okay, we're going to have different kinds of coding styles. This batch has got an AI block here. It's very Lego block. Like yep. Okay. Services and higher level services in the cloud. What's your reaction to how this impacts automation and >>Sure. So throughout our entire platform, we've designed our AI to take care of the worst parts of anyone's job as Guinea dev ops person. If they love babysitting deployments, they don't harness handles that for them, ask your engineers that they love sitting there waiting for their tests to run. Every time they build, they go get coffee, right. Because we're waiting for all of our tests to run. Y yeah. Right. The reality >>Is sometimes they have to wait days and >>That's it. But like, if I change the gas cap on, uh, on your car, would you expect me to check every light switch and every electronic piece? No. Well, why do we do that with code? And so our AI, our ML is designed to remove all the things that people hate. It's not to remove people's jobs. It's actually to make their jobs much better. >>How do you guys feed the data? What's the training algorithm for that? How does that work? Yeah, >>Actually, it's interesting. A lot of people think it's going to take a ton of time to figure this out. The good news is we start seeing this on the second deployment. On the second bill, we have to have a baseline of what good looks like, and that's where it starts. And it goes from there. And by the way, this isn't a lot of people say AI, and this AML, I teach a class on this because ML is not standard deviation. It's not some checks. So we use a massive amount of machine learning, but we have neural networks to think about things like engineers do. Like if we looked at a log and I saw the same log with two different user IDs, you and I would know, well, it's the same thing. It's just different users, but machine learning models. Don't so we've got to build neural networks to actually think like humans. So that, >>So that's the whole expectation maximization kind of concept of people talk about, >>Well, and that's it because at the end of the day, we're like I said, I'm not trying to take people's jobs. I want to meet. >>Yeah. You want to do the crap work out of the way. And I had to do other redundant, heavy lifting that they have to do every single time we use the cloud way. We've >>Built mechanical muscle in, in the early 19 hundreds. Right. And it made everyone's jobs easier, allowed them to do more with their time. That's exactly what we're doing here. >>I mean, we've seen the big old guys in the industry trying to evolve. You got the hot startups coming out. So you got, you know, adapt or die as classic thing. We've been saying for many years, David on the cube, you know that. So it's like, this is a moment of truth. We're going to see who comes out the other side. How do you, Nick, what would you be your, your kind of guess of when that other side is, when are we gonna know the winners and the losers truly in the sense of where we are now? >>So I think what I've found is that in this space specifically, there's a constant shift and this is something with software. And the problem is, is that we see them come in ebbs and flows, right. And very few times are there businesses that actually carry the model? And what you find is that when they focus on one specific problem, it solves it. Now, if I was working on VMs a few years ago, great, but now we're, we're here at coop con, right? And that's because it's eaten, uh, that side of the world. And so I think it's the companies that can actually grow the test of time and continue to expand to where the problems are. Right. And that's one of the things that I traditionally think about harness and we've done it. We cover our customers where they were, I think the old mainframes, if you had to, where they were, where they are at their traditional, their VM. >>I mean, if you think about it, Nick, it's one of those things where it's like, that's such a common sense way to look at it evolves with a problem. So I ride the right with tech ways. But if you think about the high order bit, here is just applications. We ended the day. Companies have applications that they want to write modern. The applications of their business is going to be codified so that you just work backwards from there. Then you say, okay, what is the infrastructure as code working for me? That's an ethos of dev ops. And that's where we're at. So that's why I think that the cloud need is kind of one already, but we still have the edge devices, more complexity. This is a huge next level conversation at one point is that we just put a hard and top on the complexity. When is that coming? Because the developers are clear. They want to go fast. They want to go shift left and have all that data, get the right analytics, the telemetry and the AI. But it's too complicated still. That is a big problem. >>It's too complicated. You ask for a full-stack developer to also know infrastructure, to also know edge computing. Like it's impossible, right? And this is where tooling helps, right? Because if you can actually parameterize that and make it to the engineers and have to care, they can do what they're best at. Hey, I'm great at turning code in artifact, let them do that and have tooling take care of the rest. This is where our goal is. Again, allow people >>We'll do what they love. And this is kind of the new roles that are changing. What SRE has done. Everyone talks about the SRE and some states just as he had dev ops guy, but it's not just that there's also, uh, different roles emerging. It's, it's an architectural game. At this point, we would say, >>I'd say a hundred percent. And this is where the decisions that you make on are architecturally. If you don't know how to then roll them out, this is what we've seen. Time and time again, you go to these large companies, I've got these great architectures on planning four years later, we haven't reached it because to that point process, >>The process killed them four >>Different new tools throughout the process. Well, yeah. >>So when do we hit peak Kubernetes peak >>Kubernetes? I think we have a bit to go in and I'm excited about the networking space and really what we're doing there and, and bringing that holistic portion of the network, like when Istio was originally released, I thought that was one of the most amazing things, uh, to truly come to it. And I think there's a vast space in networking. Um, and, and so I think in the next few years, we're going to see this, you know, turn into that a hundred percent utilized across the board. This will be that where everyone's workloads continue to exist. Um, somewhat like VMs we're in >>And, and, and no, no fear of developers as code in the very near future. You're talking about automating the mundane. Correct. Uh, there have been stories recently about the three-day workweek, you know, as a, as a fan of, um, utopian science fiction, myself, as opposed to dystopian. Absolutely. I think that, you know, technology does have the opportunity to lift all boats and, uh, and it's, it's not nothing to be afraid of. You know, the fact that I put my dishes in the dishwasher and they run by themselves for three hours. It's a good thing. It's a great thing. >>I don't need to deal with that. Yeah, I agree. No, I think that's, and that's what I said in the beginning. Right. That's really where we can start empowering people. So allow them to do what they're good at and do what they're best at. And if you look at why do people quit? We don't have to go so hard to find. Yeah. Why? Because they're secondary to babysit and implement and they're told everywhere they go, they're not going to have to >>That's the line. And that's all right. We got a break, but it's great insight to have you on the Q one final question for you. Um, I got to ask about the whole data as code something that I've been riffing on for a bunch of years now. And as infrastructures could we get that, but data is now the resource everyone needs, and everyone's trying to, okay, I have the control plane for this and that, but ultimately data cannot be siloed. This is a critical architectural element. How does that get resolved in the land of the competitive advantage and lock in and whatnot? What's your take on that? >>So data's an interesting one because it has, it has gravity and this is the problem. And as we move, as I think you guys know, as you move to the edge as remove, move it places there's insights to be taken at the edge there's insights to be taken as it moves through. And I think what you'll see honestly, going forward is you'll see compute done differently to your point. It needs to be aggregated. It needs to be able to be used together, but I think you'll see people computing it on its way through it. So now even in transport, you'll start seeing insights gained in real time before you can have the larger insights. And I see that happening more and more. Um, and I think ultimately we just want to empower that >>Nick, great to have you on CTO of field CTO of harness and harness.io is a URL. Check it out. Thanks for the insight. Thank you so much. Great comments. Appreciate it. Natural cube analysts right here, Nick, of course, we've got our, our analysts right here, David Nicholson. You're good on your own. I'm John for a, you know, we have the host. Thanks for watching. Stay with two more days of coverage. We'll be back after this short break.

(gentle music) >> Hello and welcome today's session theCUBE presentation of AWS Startup Showcase powered by theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, for your host of theCUBE. This is a session on breaking through with DevOps data analytics tools, cloud management tools with MontyCloud and cloud management migration, I'm your host. Thanks for joining me, I've got two great guests. Venkat Krishnamachari who's the co-founder and CEO of MontyCloud and Shruthi Sreenivasa Murthy, solution architect research computing group St. Louis University. Thanks for coming on to talk about transforming IT, day one day two operations. Venkat, great to see you. >> Great to see you again, John. So in this session, I really want to get into this cloud powerhouse theme you guys were talking about before on our previous Cube Conversations and what it means for customers, because there is a real market shift happening here. And I want to get your thoughts on what solution to the problem is basically, that you guys are targeting. >> Yeah, John, cloud migration is happening rapidly. Not an option. It is the current and the immediate future of many IT departments and any type of computing workloads. And applications and services these days are better served by cloud adoption. This rapid acceleration is where we are seeing a lot of challenges and we've been helping customers with our platform so they can go focus on their business. So happy to talk more about this. >> Yeah and Shruthi if you can just explain your relationship with these guys, because you're a cloud architect, you can try to put this together. MontyCloud is your customer, talk about your solution. >> Yeah I work at the St. Louis University as the solutions architect for the office of Vice President of Research. We can address St. Louis University as SLU, just to keep it easy. SLU is a 200-year-old university with more focus on research. And our goal at the Research Computing Group is to help researchers by providing the right infrastructure and computing capabilities that help them to advance their research. So here in SLU research portfolio, it's quite diverse, right? So we do research on vaccines, economics, geospatial intelligence, and many other really interesting areas, and you know, it involves really large data sets. So one of the research computing groups' ambitious plan is to move as many high-end computation applications from on-prem to the AWS. And I lead all the cloud initiatives for the St. Louis university. >> Yeah Venkat and I, we've been talking, many times on theCUBE, previous interviews about, you know, the rapid agility that's happening with serverless and functions, and, you know, microservices start to see massive acceleration of how fast cloud apps are being built. It's put a lot of pressure on companies to hang on and manage all this. And whether you're a security group was trying to lock down something, or it's just, it's so fast, the cloud development scene is really fun and you're implementing it at a large scale. What's it like these days from a development standpoint? You've got all this greatness in the cloud. What's the DevOps mindset right now? >> SLU is slowly evolving itself as the AWS Center of Excellence here in St. Louis. And most of the workflows that we are trying to implement on AWS and DevOps and, you know, CICD Pipelines. And basically we want it ready and updated for the researchers where they can use it and not have to wait on any of the resources. So it has a lot of importance. >> Research as code, it's like the internet, infrastructure as code is DevOps' ethos. Venkat, let's get into where this all leads to because you're seeing a culture shift in companies as they start to realize if they don't move fast, and the blockers that get in the way of the innovation, you really can't get your arms around this growth as an opportunity to operationalize all the new technology, could you talk about the transformation goals that are going on with your customer base. What's going on in the market? Can you explain and unpack the high level market around what you guys are doing? >> Sure thing, John. Let's bring up the slide one. So they have some content that Act-On tabs. John, every legal application, commercial application, even internal IT departments, they're all transforming fast. Speed has never been more important in the era we are today. For example, COVID research, you know, analyzing massive data sets to come up with some recommendations. They don't demand a lot from the IT departments so that researchers and developers can move fast. And I need departments that are not only moving current workloads to the cloud they're also ensuring the cloud is being consumed the right way. So researchers can focus on what they do best, what we win, learning and working closely with customers and gathering is that there are three steps or three major, you know, milestone that we like to achieve. I would start the outcome, right? That the important milestone IT departments are trying to get to is transforming such that they're directly tied to the key business objectives. Everything they do has to be connected to the business objective, which means the time and you know, budget and everything's aligned towards what they want to deliver. IT departments we talk with have one common goal. They want to be experts in cloud operations. They want to deliver cloud operations excellence so that researchers and developers can move fast. But they're almost always under the, you know, they're time poor, right? And there is budget gaps and that is talent and tooling gap. A lot of that is what's causing the, you know, challenges on their path to journey. And we have taken a methodical and deliberate position in helping them get there. >> Shruthi hows your reaction to that? Because, I mean, you want it faster, cheaper, better than before. You don't want to have all the operational management hassles. You mentioned that you guys want to do this turnkey. Is that the use case that you're going after? Just research kind of being researchers having the access at their fingertips, all these resources? What's the mindset there, what's your expectation? >> Well, one of the main expectations is to be able to deliver it to the researchers as demand and need and, you know, moving from a traditional on-prem HBC to cloud would definitely help because, you know, we are able to give the right resources to the researchers and able to deliver projects in a timely manner, and, you know, with some additional help from MontyCloud data platform, we are able to do it even better. >> Yeah I like the onboarding thing and to get an easy and you get value quickly, that's the cloud business model. Let's unpack the platform, let's go into the hood. Venkat let's, if you can take us through the, some of the moving parts under the platform, then as you guys have it's up at the high level, the market's obvious for everyone out there watching Cloud ops, speed, stablism. But let's go look at the platform. Let's unpack that, do you mind pick up on slide two and let's go look at the what's going on in the platform. >> Sure. Let's talk about what comes out of the platform, right? They are directly tied to what the customers would like to have, right? Customers would like to fast track their day one activities. Solution architects, such as Shruthi, their role is to try and help get out of the way of the researchers, but we ubiquitous around delegating cloud solutions, right? Our platform acts like a seasoned cloud architect. It's as if you've instantly turned on a cloud solution architect that should, they can bring online and say, Hey, I want help here to go faster. Our lab then has capabilities that help customers provision a set of governance contracts, drive consumption in the right way. One of the key things about driving consumption the right way is to ensure that we prevent a security cost or compliance issues from happening in the first place, which means you're shifting a lot of the operational burden to left and make sure that when provisioning happens, you have a guard rails in place, we help with that, the platform solves a problem without writing code. And an important takeaway here, John is that a was built for architects and administrators who want to move fast without having to write a ton of code. And it is also a platform that they can bring online, autonomous bots that can solve problems. For example, when it comes to post provisioning, everybody is in the business of ensuring security because it's a shared model. Everybody has to keep an eye on compliance, that is also a shared responsibility, so is cost optimization. So we thought wouldn't it be awesome to have architects such as Shruthi turn on a compliance bot on the platform that gives them the peace of mind that somebody else and an autonomous bot is watching our 24 by 7 and make sure that these day two operations don't throw curve balls at them, right? That's important for agility. So platform solves that problem with an automation approach. Going forward on an ongoing basis, right, the operation burden is what gets IT departments. We've seen that happen repeatedly. Like IT department, you know, you know this, John, maybe you have some thoughts on this. You know, you know, if you have some comments on how IT can face this, then maybe that's better to hear from you. >> No, well first I want to unpack that platform because I think one of the advantages I see here and that people are talking about in the industry is not only is the technology's collision colliding between the security postures and rapid cloud development, because DevOps and cloud, folks, are moving super fast. They want things done at the point of coding and CICB pipeline, as well as any kind of changes, they want it fast, not weeks. They don't want to have someone blocking it like a security team, so automation with the compliance is beautiful because now the security teams can provide policies. Those policies can then go right into your platform. And then everyone's got the rules of the road and then anything that comes up gets managed through the policy. So I think this is a big trend that nobody's talking about because this allows the cloud to go faster. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? >> No, precisely right. I'll let Shurthi jump on that, yeah. >> Yeah, you know, I just wanted to bring up one of the case studies that we read on cloud and use their compliance bot. So REDCap, the Research Electronic Data Capture also known as REDCap is a web application. It's a HIPAA web application. And while the flagship projects for the research group at SLU. REDCap was running on traditional on-prem infrastructure, so maintaining the servers and updating the application to its latest version was definitely a challenge. And also granting access to the researchers had long lead times because of the rules and security protocols in place. So we wanted to be able to build a secure and reliable enrollment on the cloud where we could just provision on demand and in turn ease the job of updating the application to its latest version without disturbing the production environment. Because this is a really important application, most of the doctors and researchers at St. Louis University and the School of Medicine and St. Louis University Hospital users. So given this challenge, we wanted to bring in MontyCloud's cloud ops and, you know, security expertise to simplify the provisioning. And that's when we implemented this compliance bot. Once it is implemented, it's pretty easy to understand, you know, what is compliant, what is noncompliant with the HIPAA standards and where it needs an remediation efforts and what we need to do. And again, that can also be automated. It's nice and simple, and you don't need a lot of cloud expertise to go through the compliance bot and come up with your remediation plan. >> What's the change in the outcome in terms of the speed turnaround time, the before and after? So before you're dealing with obviously provisioning stuff and lead time, but just a compliance closed loop, just to ask a question, do we have, you know, just, I mean, there's a lot of manual and also some, maybe some workflows in there, but not as not as cool as an instant bot that solve yes or no decision. And after MontyCloud, what are some of the times, can you share any data there just doing an order of magnitude. >> Yeah, definitely. So the provisioning was never simpler, I mean, we are able to provision with just one or two clicks, and then we have a better governance guardrail, like Venkat says, and I think, you know, to give you a specific data, it, the compliance bot does about more than 160 checks and it's all automated, so when it comes to security, definitely we have been able to save a lot of effort on that. And I can tell you that our researchers are able to be 40% more productive with the infrastructure. And our research computing group is able to kind of save the time and, you know, the security measures and the remediation efforts, because we get customized alerts and notifications and you just need to go in and, you know. >> So people are happier, right? People are getting along at the office or virtually, you know, no one is yelling at each other on Slack, hey, where's? Cause that's really the harmony here then, okay. This is like a, I'm joking aside. This is a real cultural issue between speed of innovation and the, what could be viewed as a block, or just the time that say security teams or other teams might want to get back to you, make sure things are compliant. So that could slow things down, that tension is real and there's some disconnects within companies. >> Yeah John, that's spot on, and that means we have to do a better job, not only solving the traditional problems and make them simple, but for the modern work culture of integrations. You know, it's not uncommon like you cut out for researchers and architects to talk in a Slack channel often. You say, Hey, I need this resource, or I want to reconfigure this. How do we make that collaboration better? How do you make the platform intelligent so that the platform can take off some of the burden off of people so that the platform can monitor, react, notify in a Slack channel, or if you should, the administrator say, Hey, next time, this happens automatically go create a ticket for me. If it happens next time in this environment automatically go run a playbook, that remediates it. That gives a lot of time back that puts a peace of mind and the process that an operating model that you have inherited and you're trying to deliver excellence and has more help, particularly because it is very dynamic footprint. >> Yeah, I think this whole guard rail thing is a really big deal, I think it's like a feature, but it's a super important outcome because if you can have policies that map into these bots that can check rules really fast, then developers will have the freedom to drive as fast as they want, and literally go hard and then shift left and do the coding and do all their stuff on the hygiene side from the day, one on security is really a big deal. Can we go back to this slide again for the other project? There's another project on that slide. You talked about RED, was it REDCap, was that one? >> Yeah. Yeah, so REDCap, what's the other project. >> So SCAER, the Sinfield Center for Applied Economic Research at SLU is also known as SCAER. They're pretty data intensive, and they're into some really sophisticated research. The Center gets daily dumps of sensitive geo data sensitive de-identified geo data from various sources, and it's a terabyte so every day, becomes petabytes. So you know, we don't get the data in workable formats for the researchers to analyze. So the first process is to convert this data into a workable format and keep an analysis ready and doing this at a large scale has many challenges. So we had to make this data available to a group of users too, and some external collaborators with ads, you know, more challenges again, because we also have to do this without compromising on the security. So to handle these large size data, we had to deploy compute heavy instances, such as, you know, R5, 12xLarge, multiple 12xLarge instances, and optimizing the cost and the resources deployed on the cloud again was a huge challenge. So that's when we had to take MontyCloud help in automating the whole process of ingesting the data into the infrastructure and then converting them into a workable format. And this was all automated. And after automating most of the efforts, we were able to bring down the data processing time from two weeks or more to three days, which really helped the researchers. So MontyCloud's data platform also helped us with automating the risk, you know, the resource optimization process and that in turn helped bring the costs down, so it's been pretty helpful then. >> That's impressive weeks to days, I mean, this is the theme Venkat speed, speed, speed, hybrid, hybrid. A lot of stuff happening. I mean, this is the new normal, this is going to make companies more productive if they can get the apps built faster. What do you see as the CEO and founder of the company you're out there, you know, you're forging new ground with this great product. What do you see as the blockers from customers? Is it cultural, is it lack of awareness? Why aren't people jumping all over this? >> Only people aren't, right. They go at it in so many different ways that, you know, ultimately be the one person IT team or massively well-funded IT team. Everybody wants to Excel at what they're delivering in cloud operations, the path to that as what, the challenging part, right? What are you seeing as customers are trying to build their own operating model and they're writing custom code, then that's a lot of need for provisioning, governance, security, compliance, and monitoring. So they start integrating point tools, then suddenly IT department is now having a, what they call a tax, right? They have to maintain the technical debt while cloud service moving fast. It's not uncommon for one of the developers or one of the projects to suddenly consume a brand new resource. And as you know, AWS throws up a lot more services every month, right? So suddenly you're not keeping up with that service. So what we've been able to look at this from a point of view of how do we get customers to focus on what they want to do and automate things that we can help them with? >> Let me, let me rephrase the question if you don't mind. Cause I I didn't want to give the impression that you guys aren't, you guys have a great solution, but I think when I see enterprises, you know, they're transforming, right? So it's not so much the cloud innovators, like you guys, it's really that it's like the mainstream enterprise, so I have to ask you from a customer standpoint, what's some of the cultural things are technical reasons why they're not going faster? Cause everyone's, maybe it's the pandemic's forcing projects to be double down on, or some are going to be cut, this common theme of making things available faster, cheaper, stronger, more secure is what cloud does. What are some of the enterprise challenges that they have? >> Yeah, you know, it might be money for right, there's some cultural challenges like Andy Jassy or sometimes it's leadership, right? You want top down leadership that takes a deterministic step towards transformation, then adequately funding the team with the right skills and the tools, a lot of that plays into it. And there's inertia typically in an existing process. And when you go to cloud, you can do 10X better, people see that it doesn't always percolate down to how you get there. So those challenges are compounded and digital transformation leaders have to, you know, make that deliberate back there, be more KPI-driven. One of the things we are seeing in companies that do well is that the leadership decides that here are our top business objectives and KPIs. Now if we want the software and the services and the cloud division to support those objectives when they take that approach, transformation happens. But that is a lot more easier said than done. >> Well you're making it really easy with your solution. And we've done multiple interviews. I've got to say you're really onto something really with this provisioning and the compliance bots. That's really strong, that the only goes stronger from there, with the trends with security being built in. Shruthi, got to ask you since you're the customer, what's it like working with MontyCloud? It sounds so awesome, you're customer, you're using it. What's your review, what's your- What's your, what's your take on them? >> Yeah they are doing a pretty good job in helping us automate most of our workflows. And when it comes to keeping a tab on the resources, the utilization of the resources, so we can keep a tab on the cost in turn, you know, their compliance bots, their cost optimization tab. It's pretty helpful. >> Yeah well you're knocking projects down from three weeks to days, looking good, I mean, looking real strong. Venkat this is the track record you want to see with successful projects. Take a minute to explain what else is going on with MontyCloud. Other use cases that you see that are really primed for MontyCloud's platform. >> Yeah, John, quick minute there. Autonomous cloud operations is the goal. It's never done, right? It there's always some work that you hands-on do. But if you set a goal such that customers need to have a solution that automates most of the routine operations, then they can focus on the business. So we are going to relentlessly focused on the fact that autonomous operations will have the digital transformation happen faster, and we can create a lot more value for customers if they deliver to their KPIs and objectives. So our investments in the platform are going more towards that. Today we already have a fully automated compliance bot, a security bot, a cost optimization recommendation engine, a provisioning and governance engine, where we're going is we are enhancing all of this and providing customers lot more fluidity in how they can use our platform Click to perform your routine operations, Click to set up rules based automatic escalation or remediation. Cut down the number of hops a particular process will take and foster collaboration. All of this is what our platform is going and enhancing more and more. We intend to learn more from our customers and deliver better for them as we move forward. >> That's a good business model, make things easier, reduce the steps it takes to do something, and save money. And you're doing all those things with the cloud and awesome stuff. It's really great to hear your success stories and the work you're doing over there. Great to see resources getting and doing their job faster. And it's good and tons of data. You've got petabytes of that's coming in. It's it's pretty impressive, thanks for sharing your story. >> Sounds good, and you know, one quick call out is customers can go to MontyCloud.com today. Within 10 minutes, they can get an account. They get a very actionable and valuable recommendations on where they can save costs, what is the security compliance issues they can fix. There's a ton of out-of-the-box reports. One click to find out whether you are having some data that is not encrypted, or if any of your servers are open to the world. A lot of value that customers can get in under 10 minutes. And we believe in that model, give the value to customers. They know what to do with that, right? So customers can go sign up for a free trial at MontyCloud.com today and get the value. >> Congratulations on your success and great innovation. A startup showcase here with theCUBE coverage of AWS Startup Showcase breakthrough in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Management with MontyCloud. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, hosted by Cal Poly. >> Everyone, welcome to this special presentation with Cal Poly hosting the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE here in our Palo Alto studios with our remote guests. We couldn't be there in person, but we're going to be here remote. We got a great session and a panel for one hour, topic preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow. Got a great lineup. Bill Britton, Lieutenant Colonel from the US Air Force, retired vice president for information technology and CIO and the director of the California Cybersecurity Institute for Cal Poly. Bill, thanks for joining us. Dr. Amy Fleischer, who's the dean of the College of Engineering at Cal Poly, and Trung Pham, professor and researcher at the US Air Force Academy. Folks, thanks for joining me today. >> Our pleasure. >> Got a great- >> Great to be here. >> Great panel. This is one of my favorite topics. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Preparing students for the next generation, the jobs for today and tomorrow. We got an hour. I'd love you guys to start with an opening statement to kick things off. Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I'm really pleased to be, to start on this as the director for the Cybersecurity Institute and the CIO at Cal Poly, it's really a fun, exciting job, because as a polytechnic, technology has such a forefront in what we're doing, and we've had a wonderful opportunity being 40 miles from Vandenberg Air Force Base to really look at the nexus of space and cybersecurity. And if you add into that both commercial, government, and civil space and cybersecurity, this is an expanding wide open time for cyber and space. In that role that we have with the Cybersecurity Institute, we partner with elements of the state and the university, and we try to really add value above our academic level, which is some of the highest in the nation, and to really merge down and go a little lower and start younger. So we actually are running the week prior to this showing a cybersecurity competition for high schools and middle schools in the state of California. That competition this year is based on a scenario around hacking of a commercial satellite and the forensics of the payload that was hacked and the networks associated with it. This is going to be done using products like Wireshark, Autopsy, and other tools that will give those high school students what we hope is a huge desire to follow up and go into cyber and cyberspace and space and follow that career path and either come to Cal Poly or some other institution that's going to let them really expand their horizons in cybersecurity and space for the future of our nation. >> Bill, thanks for that intro. By the way, I just want to give you props for an amazing team and job you guys are doing at Cal Poly, the DxHub and the efforts you guys are having with your challenge. Congratulations on that great work. >> Thank you. It's a rock star team. It's absolutely amazing to find that much talent at one location. And I think Amy's going to tell you, she's got the same amount of talent in her staff, so it's a great place to be. >> Dr. Amy Fleischer. You guys have a great organization down there, amazing curriculum, amazing people, great community. Your opening statement. >> Hello everybody. It's really great to be a part of this panel on behalf of the Cal Poly College of Engineering. Here at Cal Poly, we really take preparing students for the jobs of today and tomorrow completely seriously, and we can claim that our students really graduate so they're ready day one for their first real job. But that means that in getting them to that point, we have to help them get valuable and meaningful job experience before they graduate, both through our curriculum and through multiple internship or summer research opportunities. So we focus our curriculum on what we call a learn by doing philosophy. And this means that we have a combination of practical experience and learn by doing both in and out of the classroom. And we find that to be really critical for preparing students for the workforce. Here at Cal Poly, we have more than 6,000 engineering students. We're one of the largest undergraduate engineering schools in the country. And US News ranks us the eighth best undergraduate engineering program in the country and the top ranked state school. We're really, really proud that we offer this impactful hands-on engineering education that really exceeds that of virtually all private universities while reaching a wider audience of students. We offer 14 degree programs, and really, we're talking today about cyber and space, and I think most of those degree programs can really make an impact in the space and cybersecurity economy. And this includes not only things like aero and cyber directly, but also electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, materials engineering, even manufacturing, civil, and biomedical engineering, as there's a lot of infrastructure needs that go into supporting launch capabilities. Our aerospace program graduates hundreds of aerospace engineers and most of them are working right here in California with many of our corporate partners, including Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, JPL, and so many other places where we have Cal Poly engineers impacting the space economy. Our cybersecurity focus is found mainly in our computer science and software engineering programs, and it's really a rapidly growing interest among our students. Computer science is our most popular major, and industry interests and partnerships are integrated into our cyber curriculum, and we do that oftentimes through support from industry. So we have partnerships with Northrop Grumman for professorship in a cyber lab and from PG&E for critical infrastructure cybersecurity lab and professorship. And we think that industry partnerships like these are really critical to preparing students for the future as the field is evolving so quickly and making sure we adapt our facilities and our curriculum to stay in line with what we're seeing in industry is incredibly important. In our aerospace program, we have an educational partnership with the Air Force Research Labs that's allowing us to install new high-performance computing capabilities and a space environments lab that's going to enhance our satellite design capabilities. And if we talk about satellite design, Cal Poly is the founding home of the CubeSat program, which pioneered small satellite capabilities, And we remain the worldwide leader in maintaining the CubeSat standard, and our student program has launched more CubeSats than any other program. So here again we have this learn by doing experience every year for dozens of aerospace, electrical, computer science, mechanical engineering students, and other student activities that we think are just as important include ethical hacking through our white hat club, Cal Poly Space Systems, which does really, really big rocket launches, and our support program for women in both of these fields, like WISH, which is Women In Software and Hardware. Now, you know, really trying to bring in a wide variety of people into these fields is incredibly important, and outreach and support to those demographics traditionally underrepresented in these fields is going to be really critical to future success. So by drawing on the lived experiences by people with different types of backgrounds will we develop the type of culture and environment where all of us can get to the best solution. So in terms of bringing people into the field, we see that research shows we need to reach kids when they're in late elementary and middle schools to really overcome that cultural bias that works against diversity in our fields. And you heard Bill talking about the California Cybersecurity Institute's yearly cyber challenge, and there's a lot of other people who are working to bring in a wider variety of people into the field, like Girl Scouts, which has introduced dozens of new badges over the past few years, including a whole cybersecurity series of badges in concert with Palo Alto Networks. So we have our work cut out for us, but we know what we need to do, and if we're really committed to properly preparing the workforce for today and tomorrow, I think our future is going to be bright. I'm looking forward to our discussion today. >> Thank you, Dr. Fleischer, for a great comment, opening statement, and congratulations. You got the right formula down there, the right mindset, and you got a lot of talent, and community, as well. Thank you for that opening statement. Next up, from Colorado Springs, Trung Pham, who's a professor and researcher at the US Air Force Academy. He's doing a lot of research around the areas that are most important for the intersection of space and technology. Trung. >> Good afternoon. First I'd like to thank Cal Poly for the opportunity. And today I want to go briefly about cybersecurity in space application. Whenever we talk about cybersecurity, the impression is that it's a new field that is really highly complex involving a lot of technical area. But in reality, in my personal opinion, it is indeed a complex field because it involves many disciplines. The first thing we think about is computer engineering and computer networking, but it's also involving communication, sociology, law practice. And this practice of cybersecurity doesn't only involve computer expert, but it's also involve everybody else who has a computing device that is connected to the internet, and this participation is obviously everybody in today's environment. When we think about the internet, we know that it's a good source of information but come with the convenience of information that we can access, we are constantly facing danger from the internet. Some of them we might be aware of. Some of them we might not be aware of. For example, when we search on the internet, a lot of time our browser will be saying that this site is not trusted, so we will be more careful. But what about the sites that we trusted? We know that those are legitimate sites, but they're not 100% bulletproof. What happen if those site are attacked by a hacker and then they will be a silent source of danger that we might not be aware of. So in the reality, we need to be more practicing the cybersecurity from our civil point of view and not from a technical point of view. When we talk about space application, we should know that all the hardware are computer-based or controlled by by computer system, and therefore the hardware and the software must go through some certification process so that they can be rated as airworthy or flightworthy. When we know that in the certification process is focusing on the functionality of the hardware and software, but one aspect that is explicitly and implicitly required is the security of those components. And we know that those components have to be connected with the ground control station, and the communication is through the air, through the radio signal, so anybody who has access to those communication radio signal will be able to control the space system that we put up there. And we certainly do not want our system to be hijacked by a third party. Another aspect of cybersecurity is that we try to design the space system in a very strong manner so it's almost impossible to hack in. But what about some other weak system that might be connected to the strong system? For example, the space system will be connected to the ground control station, and on the ground control station, we have the human controller, and those people have cell phone. They are allowed to use cell phone for communication. But at the same time, they are connected to the internet through the cell phone, and their cell phone might be connected to the computer that control the flight software and hardware. So what I want to say is we try to build strong system and we've protected them, but there will be some weaker system that we could not intended but exists to be connected to our strong system, and those are the points the hacker will be trying to attack. If we know how to control the access to those weak points, we will be having a much better system for the space system. And when we see the cybersecurity that is requiring the participation everywhere it's important to notice that there is a source of opportunity for students who enter the workforce to consider. Obviously students in engineering can focus their knowledge and expertise to provide technological solution to protect the system that we view. But we also have students in business who can focus their expertise to write business plan so that they can provide a pathway for the engineering advances to reach the market. We also have student in law who can focus their expertise in policy governing the internet, governing the cybersecurity practice. And we also have student in education who can focus their expertise to design how to teach cybersecurity practice, and student in every other discipline can focus their effort to implement security measure to protect the system that they are using in their field. So it's obvious that cybersecurity is everywhere and it implies job opportunity everywhere for everybody in every discipline of study. Thank you. >> Thank you, Trung, for those great comments. Great technology opportunities. But interesting, as well, is the theme that we're seeing across the entire symposium and in the virtual hallways that we're hearing conversations, and you pointed out some of them. Dr. Fleischer did, as well. And Bill, you mentioned it. It's not one thing. It's not just technology. It's different skills. And Amy, you mentioned that computer science is the hottest degree, but you have the hottest aerospace program in the world. I mean, so all this is kind of balancing. It's interdisciplinary. It's a structural change. Before we get into some of the, how they prepare the students, can you guys talk about some of the structural changes that are modern now in preparing in these opportunities, because societal impact is a, law potentially impact, it's how we educate. There's now cross-discipline skill sets. It's not just get the degree, see you out in the field. Bill, you want to start? >> Well, what's really fun about this job is that in the Air Force, I worked in the space and missile business, and what we saw was a heavy reliance on checklist format, security procedures, analog systems, and what we're seeing now in our world, both in the government and the commercial side, is a move to a digital environment, and the digital environment is a very quick and adaptive environment, and it's going to require a digital understanding. Matter of fact, the undersecretary of Air Force for acquisition recently referenced the need to understand the digital environment and how that's affecting acquisition. So as both Amy and Trung said, even business students are now in the cybersecurity business. And so again, what we're seeing is the change. Now, another phenomenon that we're seeing in the space world is there's just so much data. One of the ways that we addressed that in the past was to look at high-performance computing. There was a lot stricter control over how that worked. But now what we're seeing is adaptation of cloud, cloud technologies in space support, space data, command and control. And so what we see is a modern space engineer who has to understand digital, has to understand cloud, and has to understand the context of all those with a cyber environment. That's really changing the forefront of what is a space engineer, what is a digital engineer, and what is a future engineer, both commercial or government. So I think the opportunity for all of these things is really good, particularly for a polytechnic, Air Force Academy, and others that are focusing on a more widened experiential level of cloud and engineering and other capabilities. And I'll tell you the part that as the CIO I have to remind everybody, all this stuff works with the IT stuff. So you've got to understand how your IT infrastructures are tied and working together. As we noted earlier, one of the things is that these are all relays from point to point, and that architecture is part of your cybersecurity architecture. So again, every component has now become a cyber aware, cyber knowledgeable, and what we like to call as a cyber cognizant citizen where they have to understand the context. (speaking on mute) >> (indistinct) software Dr. Fleischer, talk about your perspective, 'cause you mentioned some of the things about computer science. I remember in the '80s when I got my computer science degree, they called us software engineers and then you became software developers. And then, so again, engineering is the theme. If you're engineering a system, there's now software involved, and there's also business engineering, business models. So talk about some of your comments, 'cause you mentioned computer science is hot. You got the aerospace. You got these multi-disciplines. You got definitely diversity, as well, brings more perspectives in, as well. Your thoughts on these structural interdisciplinary things? >> I think this is really key to making sure that students are prepared to work in the workforce is looking at the blurring between fields. No longer are you just a computer scientist. No longer are you just an aerospace engineer. You really have to have an expertise where you can work with people across disciplines. All of these fields are just working with each other in ways we haven't seen before. And Bill brought up data. You know, data science is something that's cross-cutting across all of our fields. So we want engineers that have the disciplinary expertise that they can go deep into these fields, but we want them to be able to communicate with each other and to be able to communicate across disciplines and to be able to work in teams that are across disciplines. You can no longer just work with other computer scientists or just work with other aerospace engineers. There's no part of engineering that is siloed anymore. So that's how we're changing. You have to be able to work across those disciplines. And as you, as Trung pointed out, ethics has to come into this. So you can no longer try to fully separate what we would traditionally have called the liberal arts and say, well, that's over there in general education. No, ethics is an important part of what we're doing and how we integrate that into our curriculum. So is communication. So is working on public policy and seeing where all these different aspects tie together to make the impact that we want to have in the world. So you no longer can work solo in these fields. >> That's great point. And Bill also mentioned the cloud. One thing about the cloud that's showed us is horizontal scalability has created a lot of value, and certainly data is now horizontal. Trung, you mentioned some of the things about cryptography for the kids out there, I mean, you can look at the pathway for career. You can do a lot of tech, but you don't have to go deep sometimes. You can as deep as you want, but there's so much more there. What technology do you see that's going to help students, in your opinion? >> Well, I'm a professor in computer science, so I like to talk a little bit about computer programming. Now we are working in complex projects. So most of the time we don't design a system from scratch. We build it from different components, and the components that we have, either we get it from vendors or sometimes we get it from the internet in the open source environment. It's fun to get the source code and then make it work to our own application. So now when we are looking at cryptology, when we talk about encryption, for example, we can easily get the source code from the internet. And the question, is it safe to use those source code? And my question is maybe not. So I always encourage my students to learn how to write source code the traditional way that I learned a long time ago before I allow them to use the open source environment. And one of the things that they have to be careful especially with encryption is the code that might be hidden in the source that they downloaded. Some of the source might be harmful. It might open up back gate for a hacker to get in later. We've heard about these back gates back then when Microsoft designed the operating system with the protection of encryption, and it is true that is existing. So while open source code is a wonderful place to develop complex system, but it's also a dangerous place that we have to be aware of. >> Great point. Before we get into the comments, one quick thing for each of you I'd like to get your comments on. There's been a big movement on growth mindset, which has been a great big believer in having a growth mindset and learning and all that good stuff. But now when you talk about some of these things we're mentioning about systems, there's a new trend around a systems mindset, because if everything's now a system, distributed systems now you have space and cybersecurity, you have to understand the consequences of changes. And you mention some of that, Trung, in changes in the source code. Could you guys share your quick opinions on the of systems thinking? Is that a mindset that people should be looking at? Because it used to be just one thing. Oh, you're a systems guy or gal. There you go. You're done. Now it seems to be in social media and data, everything seems to be systems. What's your take? Dr. Fleischer, we'll start with you. >> I'd say it's another way of looking at not being just so deep in your discipline. You have to understand what the impact of the decisions that you're making have on a much broader system. And so I think it's important for all of our students to get some exposure to that systems level thinking and looking at the greater impact of the decision that they're making. Now, the issue is where do you set the systems boundary, right? And you can set the systems boundary very close in and concentrate on an aspect of a design, or you can continually move that system boundary out and see where do you hit the intersections of engineering and science along with ethics and public policy and the greater society. And I think that's where some of the interesting work is going to be. And I think at least exposing students and letting them know that they're going to have to make some of these considerations as they move throughout their career is going to be vital as we move into the future. >> Bill, what's your thoughts? >> I absolutely agree with Amy. And I think there's a context here that reverse engineering and forensics analysis and forensics engineering are becoming more critical than ever. The ability to look at what you have designed in a system and then tear it apart and look at it for gaps and holes and problem sets. Or when you're given some software that's already been pre-developed, checking it to make sure it is really going to do what it says it's going to do. That forensics ability becomes more and more a skillset that also you need the verbal skills to explain what it is you're doing and what you found. So the communication side, the systems analysis side, the forensics analysis side, these are all things that are part of system approach that I think you could spend hours on and we still haven't really done a great job on it. So it's one of my fortes is really the whole analysis side of forensics and reverse engineering. >> Trung, real quick, systems thinking, your thoughts. >> Well, I'd like to share with you my experience when I worked in the space station program at NASA. We had two different approaches. One is a compound approach where we design it from the system general point of view where we put components together to be a complex system. But at the same time, we have the (indistinct) approach where we have an engineer who spent time and effort building individual component and they have to be expert in those tiny component that general component they deliver. And in the space station program, we bring together the (indistinct) engineer who designed everything in detail and the system manager who managed the system design from the top down, and we meet in the middle, and together we compromised a lot of differences and we delivered the space station that we are operating today. >> Great insight. And that's the whole teamwork collaboration that Dr. Fleischer was mentioning. Thanks so much for that insight. I wanted to get that out there because I know myself as a parent, I'm always trying to think about what's best for my kids and their friends as they grow up into the workforce. I know educators and leaders in industry would love to know some of the best practices around some of the structural changes. So thanks for that insight. But this topic's about students and helping them prepare. So we heard be multiple discipline, broaden your horizons, think like systems, top down, bottom up, work together as a team, and follow the data. So I got to ask you guys, there's a huge amount of job openings in cybersecurity. It's well-documented. And certainly with the intersection of space and cyber, it's only going to get bigger, right? You're going to see more and more demand for new types of jobs. How do we get high school and college students interested in security as a career? Dr. Fleischer, we'll start with you on this one. I would say really one of the best ways to get students interested in a career is to show them the impact that it's going to have. There's definitely always going to be students who are going to want to do the technology for the technology's sake, but that will limit you to a narrow set of students, and by showing the greater impact that these types of careers are going to have on the types of problems that you're going to be able to solve and the impact you're going to be able to have on the world around you, that's the word that we really need to get out. And a wide variety of students really respond to these messages. So I think it's really kind of reaching out at the elementary, the middle school level, and really kind of getting this idea that you can make a big difference, a big positive difference in the field with some of these careers, is going to be really critical. >> Real question to follow up. What do you think is the best entry point? You mentioned middle. I didn't hear elementary school. There's a lot of discussions around pipelining, and we're going to get into women in tech and underrepresented minorities later. But is it too early, or what's your feeling on this? >> My feeling is the earlier we can normalize it, the better. If you can normalize an interest in computers and technology and building in elementary school, that's absolutely critical. But the drop-off point that we're seeing is between what I would call late elementary and early middle school. And just kind of as an anecdote, I for years ran an outreach program for Girl Scouts in grades four and five and grade six, seven, and eight. And we had 100 slots in each program. And every year the program would sell out for girls in grades four and five, and every year we'd have spots remaining in grades six, seven, and eight. And that's literally where the drop-off is occurring between that late elementary and that middle school range. So that's the area that we need to target to make sure we keep those young women involved and interested as we move forward. >> Bill, how are we going to get these kids interested in security? You mentioned a few programs you got. >> Yeah. >> I mean, who wouldn't want to be a white hat hacker? I mean, that sounds exciting. >> So yeah, great questions. Let's start with some basic principles, though, is let me ask you a question, John. Name for me one white hat, good person hacker, the name, who works in the space industry and is an exemplar for students to look up to. >> You? >> Oh man, I'm feeling really... >> I'm only, I can't imagine a figure- >> (indistinct) the answer because the answer we normally get is the cricket sound. So we don't have individuals we've identified in those areas for them to look up to. >> I was going to be snarky and say most white hackers won't even use their real name, but... >> Right, so there's an aura around their anonymity here. So again, the real question is how do we get them engaged and keep them engaged? And that's what Amy was pointing out to exactly, the engagement and sticking with it. So one of the things that we're trying to do through our competition on the state level and other elements is providing connections. We call them ambassadors. These are people in the business who can contact the students that are in the game or in that challenge environment and let 'em interact and let 'em talk about what they do and what they're doing in life. But give them a challenging game format. A lot of computer-based training, capture the flag stuff is great, but if you can make it hands-on, if you can make it a learn by doing experiment, if you can make it personally involved and see the benefit as a result of doing that challenge and then talk to the people who do that on a daily basis, that's how you get them involved. The second part is part of what we're doing is we're involving partnership companies in the development of the teams. So this year's competition that we're running has 82 teams from across the state of California. Of those 82 teams at six students a team, middle school, high school, and many of those have company partners, and these are practitioners in cybersecurity who are working with those students to participate. It's that adult connectivity. It's that visualization. So at the competition this year, we have the founder of Defcon Red Flag is a participant to talk to the students. We have Vint Cerf, who is, of course, very well-known for something called the internet, to participate. It's really getting the students to understand who's in this, who can I look up to, and how do I stay engaged with them? >> There's definitely a celebrity aspect of it, I will agree. I mean, the influencer aspect here with knowledge is key. Can you talk about these ambassadors, and how far along are you on that program? First of all, the challenge stuff is, anything gamification-wise, we've seen that with hackathons, it just really works well. Creates bonding. People who create together can get sticky and get very high community aspect to it. Talk about this ambassador thing. What is that, industry, is that academic? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What is this ambassador thing? >> Industry partners that we've identified, some of which, and I won't hit all of 'em, so I'm sure I'll short change this, but Palo Alto, Cisco, Splunk, many of the companies in California, and what we've done is identified schools to participate in the challenge that may not have a strong STEM program or have any cyber program. And the idea of the company is they look for their employees who are in those school districts to partner with the schools to help provide outreach. It could be as simple as a couple hours a week, or it's a team support captain or it's providing computers and other devices to use. And so again, it's really about a constant connectivity and trying to help where some schools may not have the staff or support units in an area to really provide them what they need for connectivity. What that does is it gives us an opportunity to not just focus on it once a year, but throughout the year. So for the competition, all the teams that are participating have been receiving training and educational opportunities in the gamification side since they signed up to participate. So there's a website, there's learning materials, there's materials provided by certain vendor companies like Wireshark and others. So it's a continuum of opportunity for the students. >> You know, I've seen, just randomly, just got a random thought. Robotics clubs are moving then closer into that middle school area, Dr. Fleischer, and in certainly in high schools, it's almost like a varsity sport. E-sports is another one. My son just called me. "I made the JV at the college team." It's big and serious, right? And it's fun. This is the aspect of fun. It's hands-on. This is part of the culture down there. Learn by doing. Is there, like, a group? Is it, like, a club? I mean, how do you guys organize these bottoms-up organically interest topics? >> So here in the college of engineering, when we talk about learn by doing, we have learned by doing both in the classroom and out of the classroom. And if we look at these types of out of the classroom activities, we have over 80 clubs working on all different aspects, and many of these are bottom-up. The students have decided what they want to work on and have organized themselves around that. And then they get the leadership opportunities. The more experienced students train the less experienced students. And it continues to build from year after year after year with them even doing aspects of strategic planning from year to year for some of these competitions. Yeah, it's an absolutely great experience. And we don't define for them how their learn by doing experiences should be. We want them to define it. And I think the really cool thing about that is they have the ownership and they have the interest and they can come up with new clubs year after year to see which direction they want to take it, and we will help support those clubs as old clubs fade out and new clubs come in. >> Trung, real quick, before we go on the next talk track, what do you recommend for middle school, high school, or even elementary? A little bit of coding, Minecraft? I mean, how do you get 'em hooked on the fun and the dopamine of technology and cybersecurity? What's your take on that? >> On this aspect, I'd like to share with you my experience as a junior high and high school student in Texas. The university of Texas in Austin organized a competition for every high school in Texas in every field from poetry to mathematics to science, computer engineering. But it's not about the University of Texas. The University of Texas is only serving as a center for the final competition. They divide the competition to district and then regional and then state. At each level, we have local university and colleges volunteering to host the competition and make it fun for the student to participate. And also they connected the students with private enterprises to raise fund for scholarship. So student who see the competition is a fun event for them, they get exposed to different university hosting the event so that they can see different option for them to consider college. They also get a promise that if they participate, they will be considered for scholarship when they attend university and college. So I think the combination of fun and competition and the scholarship aspect will be a good thing to entice the student to commit to the area of cybersecurity. >> Got the engagement, the aspiration, scholarship, and you mentioned a volunteer. I think one of the things I'll observe is you guys are kind of hitting this as community. I mean, the story of Steve Jobs and Woz building the Mac, they called Bill Hewlett up in Palo Alto. He was in the phone book. And they scoured some parts from him. That's community. This is kind of what you're getting at. So this is kind of the formula we're seeing. So the next question I really want to get into is the women in technology, STEM, underrepresented minorities, how do we get them on cybersecurity career path? Is there a best practices there? Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I think it's really interesting. First thing I want to add is, if I could, just a clarification. What's really cool, the competition that we have and we're running, it's run by students from Cal Poly. So Amy referenced the clubs and other activities. So many of the organizers and developers of the competition that we're running are the students, but not just from engineering. So we actually have theater and liberal arts majors and technology for liberal arts majors who are part of the competition, and we use their areas of expertise, set design and other things, visualization, virtualization. Those are all part of how we then teach and educate cyber in our gamification and other areas. So they're all involved and they're learning, as well. So we have our students teaching other students. So we're really excited about that. And I think that's part of what leads to a mentoring aspect of what we're providing where our students are mentoring the other students. And I think it's also something that's really important in the game. The first year we held the game, we had several all-girl teams, and it was really interesting because A, they didn't really know if they could compete. I mean, this is their reference point. We don't know if. They did better than anybody. I mean, they just, they knocked the ball out of the park. The second part, then, is building that confidence level that can, going back and telling their cohorts that, hey, it's not this obtuse thing you can't do. It's something real that you can compete and win. And so again, it's building that camaraderie, that spirit, that knowledge that they can succeed. And I think that goes a long way. And Amy's programs and the reach out and the reach out that Cal Poly does to schools to develop, I think that's what it really is going to take. It is going to take that village approach to really increase diversity and inclusivity for the community. >> Dr. Fleischer, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned your outreach program and the drop-off, some of those data. You're deeply involved in this. You're passionate about it. What's your thoughts on this career path opportunity for STEM? >> Yeah, I think STEM is an incredible career path opportunity for so many people. There's so many interesting problems that we can solve, particularly in cyber and in space systems. And I think we have to meet the kids where they are and kind of show them what the exciting part is about it, right? But Bill was alluding to this when he was talking about trying to name somebody that you can point to. And I think having those visible people where you can see yourself in that is absolutely critical, and those mentors and that mentorship program. So we use a lot of our students going out into California middle schools and elementary schools. And you want to see somebody that's like you, somebody that came from your background and was able to do this. So a lot of times we have students from our National Society of Black Engineers or our Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers or our Society of Women Engineers, which we have over 1,000 members, 1,000 student members in our Society of Women Engineers who are doing these outreach programs. But like I also said, it's hitting them at the lower levels, too, and Girl Scouts is actually distinguishing themselves as one of the leading STEM advocates in the country. And like I said, they developed all these cybersecurity badges starting in kindergarten. There's a cybersecurity badge for kindergartener and first graders. And it goes all the way up through late high school. The same thing with space systems. And they did the space systems in partnership with NASA. They did the cybersecurity in partnership with Palo Alto Networks. And what you do is you want to build these skills that the girls are developing, and like Bill said, work in girl-led teams where they can do it, and if they're doing it from kindergarten on, it just becomes normal, and they never think, well, this is not for me. And they see the older girls who are doing it and they see a very clear path leading them into these careers. >> Yeah, it's interesting, you used the word normalization earlier. That's exactly what it is. It's life, you get life skills and a new kind of badge. Why wouldn't you learn how to be a white hat hacker or have some fun or learn some skills? >> Amy: Absolutely. >> Just in the grind of your fun day. Super exciting. Okay, Trung, your thoughts on this. I mean, you have a diverse, diversity brings perspective to the table in cybersecurity because you have to think like the other guy, the adversary. You got to be the white hat. You can't be a white hat unless you know how black hat thinks. So there's a lot of needs here for more points of view. How are we going to get people trained on this from underrepresented minorities and women? What's your thoughts? >> Well, as a member of the IEEE Professional Society of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, every year we participate in the engineering week. We deploy our members to local junior high school and high school to talk about our project to promote the study of engineering. But at the same time, we also participate in the science fair that the state of Texas is organizing. Our engineer will be mentoring students, number one, to help them with the project, but number two, to help us identify talent so that we can recruit them further into the field of STEM. One of the participation that we did was the competition of the, what they call Future City, where students will be building a city on a computer simulation. And in recent year, we promote the theme of smart city where city will be connected the individual houses and together into the internet. And we want to bring awareness of cybersecurity into that competition. So we deploy engineer to supervise the people, the students who participate in the competition. We bring awareness not in the technical detail level, but in what we've call the compound level so student will be able to know what required to provide cybersecurity for the smart city that they are building. And at the same time, we were able to identify talent, especially talent in the minority and in the woman, so that we can recruit them more actively. And we also raise money for scholarship. We believe that scholarship is the best way to entice student to continue education at the college level. So with scholarship, it's very easy to recruit them to the field and then push them to go further into the cybersecurity area. >> Yeah, I mean, I see a lot of the parents like, oh, my kid's going to go join the soccer team, we get private lessons, and maybe they'll get a scholarship someday. Well, they only do half scholarships. Anyway. I mean, if they spent that time doing these other things, it's just, again, this is a new life skill, like the Girl Scouts. And this is where I want to get into this whole silo breaking down, because Amy, you brought this up, and Bill, you were talking about it, as well. You got multiple stakeholders here with this event. You've got public, you've got private, and you've got educators. It's the intersection of all of them. It's, again, if those silos break down, the confluence of those three stakeholders have to work together. So let's talk about that. Educators. You guys are educating young minds. You're interfacing with private institutions and now the public. What about educators? What can they do to make cyber better? 'Cause there's no real manual. I mean, it's not like this court is a body of work of how to educate cybersecurity. Maybe it's more recent. There's cutting edge best practices. But still, it's an evolving playbook. What's your thoughts for educators? Bill, we'll start with you. >> Well, I'm going to turn to Amy and let her go first. >> Let you go. >> That's fine. >> I would say as educators, it's really important for us to stay on top of how the field is evolving, right? So what we want to do is we want to promote these tight connections between educators and our faculty and applied research in industry and with industry partnerships. And I think that's how we're going to make sure that we're educating students in the best way. And you're talking about that inner, that confluence of the three different areas. And I think you have to keep those communication lines open to make sure that the information on where the field is going and what we need to concentrate on is flowing down into our educational process. And that works in both ways, that we can talk as educators and we can be telling industry what we're working on and what types of skills our students have and working with them to get the opportunities for our students to work in industry and develop those skills along the way, as well. And I think it's just all part of this really looking at what's going to be happening and how do we get people talking to each other? And the same thing with looking at public policy and bringing that into our education and into these real hands-on experiences. And that's how you really cement this type of knowledge with students, not by talking to them and not by showing them, but letting them do it. It's this learn by doing and building the resiliency that it takes when you learn by doing. And sometimes you learn by failing, but you just pick up and you keep going. And these are important skills that you develop along the way. >> You mentioned sharing, too. That's the key. Collaborating and sharing knowledge. It's an open world and everyone's collaborating. Bill, private-public partnerships. I mean, there's a real, private companies, you mentioned Palo Alto Networks and others. There's a real intersection there. They're motivated. They could, there's scholarship opportunities. Trung points to that. What is the public-private educator view there? How do companies get involved and what's the benefit for them? >> Well, that's what a lot of the universities are doing is to bring in as part of either their cyber centers or institutes people who are really focused on developing and furthering those public-private partnerships. That's really what my role is in all these things is to take us to a different level in those areas, not to take away from the academic side, but to add additional opportunities for both sides. Remember, in a public-private partnership, all entities have to have some gain in the process. Now, what I think is really interesting is the timing on particularly this subject, space and cybersecurity. This has been an absolute banner year for space. The standup of Space Force, the launch of commercial partnership, you know, commercial platforms delivering astronauts to the space station, recovering them, and bringing them back. The ability of a commercial satellite platform to be launched. Commercial platforms that not only launch but return back to where they're launched from. These are things that are stirring the hearts of the American citizens, the kids, again, they're getting interested. They're seeing this and getting enthused. So we have to seize upon that and we have to find a way to connect that. Public-private partnerships is the answer for that. It's not one segment that can handle it all. It's all of them combined together. If you look at space, space is going to be about commercial. It's going to be about civil. Moving from one side of the Earth to the other via space. And it's about government. And what's really cool for us, all those things are in our backyard. That's where that public-private comes together. The government's involved. The private sector's involved. The educators are involved. And we're all looking at the same things and trying to figure out, like this forum, what works best to go to the future. >> You know, if people are bored and they want to look for an exciting challenge, you couldn't have laid it out any clearer. It's the most exciting discipline. It's everything. I mean, we just talk about space. GPS is, everything we do is involved, has to do with satellites. (laughs) >> I have to tell you a story on that right? We have a very unique GPS story right in our backyard. So our sheriff is the son of the father of GPS for the Air Force. So you can't get better than that when it comes to being connected to all those platforms. So we really want to say, you know, this is so exciting for all of us because it gives everybody a job for a long time. >> You know, the kids that think TikTok's exciting, wait till they see what's going on here with you guys, this program. Trung, final word on this from the public side. You're at the Air Force. You're doing research. Are you guys opening it up? Are you integrating into the private and educational sectors? How do you see that formula playing out? And what's the best practice for students and preparing them? >> I think it's the same in every university in the engineering program will require our students to do the final project before graduation. And in this kind of project, we send them out to work in the private industry, the private company that sponsor them. They get the benefit of having an intern working for them and they get the benefit of reviewing the students as the prospective employee in the future. So it's good for the student to gain practical experience working in this program. Sometimes we call that a co-op program. Sometimes we call that a capstone program. And the company will accept the student on a trial basis, giving them some assignment and then pay them a little bit of money. So it's good for the student to earn some extra money, to have some experience that they can put on their resume when they apply for the final, for the job. So the collaboration between university and private sector is really important. When I join a faculty normally there already exist that connection. It came from normally, again, from the dean of engineering, who would wine and dine with companies, build up relationship, and sign up agreement. But it's us professor who have to do the (indistinct) approach to do a good performance so that we can build up credibility to continue the relationship with those company and the student that we selected to send to those company. We have to make sure that they will represent the university well, they will do a good job, and they will make a good impression. >> Thank you very much for a great insight, Trung, Bill, Amy. Amazing topic. I'd like to end this session with each of you to make a statement on the importance of cybersecurity to space. We'll go Trung, Bill, and Amy. Trung, the importance of cybersecurity to space, brief statement. >> The importance of cybersecurity, we know that it's affecting every component that we are using and we are connecting to, and those component, normally we use them for personal purpose, but when we enter the workforce, sometimes we connect them to the important system that the government or the company are investing to be put into space. So it's really important to practice cybersecurity, and a lot of time, it's very easy to know the concept. We have to be careful. But in reality, we tend to forget to to practice it the way we forget how to drive a car safely. And with driving a car, we have a program called defensive driving that requires us to go through training every two or three years so that we can get discount. Every organization we are providing the annual cybersecurity practice not to tell people about the technology, but to remind them about the danger of not practicing cybersecurity and it's a requirement for every one of us. >> Bill, the importance of cybersecurity to space. >> It's not just about young people. It's about all of us. As we grow and we change, as I referenced it, we're changing from an analog world to a digital world. Those of us who have been in the business and have hair that looks like mine, we need to be just as cognizant about cybersecurity practice as the young people. We need to understand how it affects our lives, and particularly in space, because we're going to be talking about people, moving people to space, moving payloads, data transfer, all of those things. And so there's a whole workforce that needs to be retrained or upskilled in cyber that's out there. So the opportunity is ever expansive for all of us. >> Amy, the importance of cybersecurity in space. >> I mean the emphasis of cybersecurity is space just simply can't be over emphasized. There are so many aspects that are going to have to be considered as systems get ever more complex. And as we pointed out, we're putting people's lives at stake here. This is incredibly, incredibly complicated and incredibly impactful, and actually really exciting, the opportunities that are here for students and the workforce of the future to really make an enormous impact on the world around us. And I hope we're able to get that message out to students and to children today, that these are really interesting fields that you need to consider. >> Thank you very much. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, and the importance of cybersecurity and space is the future of the world's all going to happen in and around space with technology, people, and society. Thank you to Cal Poly, and thank you for watching the Cybersecurity and Space Symposium 2020. (bright music)

>> from the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering Cooper inspired. 2019. Brought to you by Cooper. >> Welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin on the ground at Cooper Inspire 19 at the Cosmopolitan, the chic Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Very pleased to be joined by my friend David Chang, the VP of business from Hello. Sign a drop box company. David, Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you for having me on. >> Great to have you here. It is a lot of fun. You could really geek out talking technology all day >> too much. So, >> yeah, there's that >> play that you gotta gamble. It'll keep it real. >> You know, I have no skills in that whatsoever, but maybe I'll try it. I'll take your advice. Give her audience an overview of Hello. Sign. Sure. Drop box Company. What? You guys are what you do. All that good stuff. >> Great. Great. So hello. Sign is today one of the fastest growing, if not the fastest growing electronic signature company in market place today and today we host, I think, over 100,000 paying businesses that use one of our products and over 150 different countries. today we actually were acquired by Dropbox. Sure, everybody's familiar Dropbox or one of the biggest brands in the Internet industry today by the leader in consumer and business files Thinking chair. So John Box actually purchased this, you know, for a number of reasons. First of all, even amazing product and cultural fit with them. But also, Electronic Signature Day is an enormous market. It is one piece of the overall digital transformation, but Elektronik, six year alone, analysts view, is probably a $25,000,000,000 industry, which we've only barely scratched the surface. So it's a huge opportunity, absolutely, and it's that big. That's exactly the you know. That's actually what's shocking about how big it is, because if you think about almost in every business, there are not just one, but probably dozens of different use cases where you need to sign documents. So electronic signature honestly is relevant for everything from all your sales agreements to all of your HR and offer letter and on boarding agreement. It's relevant specifically for all of your procurement and buying agreements, all your vendors contracts that need to be signed, your supply agreements that needs to be signed and D A s o purchase orders. All these documents need to be signed. And today you know, only a few of these use cases have been brought into the digital arena. So there's a whole huge area to grow. And with Dropbox being a leader and content management, where you normally store your documents, >> right, it's >> a natural workflow extension two haven't signed by. Hello, son. >> Excellent. Well, one of the things that we've been talking a lot about we talk about this in every show is the effects of consumer is Asian. And we talked about this yesterday with Rob Bernstein, Cooper's CEO in a number of gas yesterday and today is that we're consumers every day, even when we're at work. Oh, I forgot. I gotta buy this when we go on Amazon, we know we could get it in a day, but now we have the same expectations whether we're buying business, you know, software or what not? And we also want to be able to do things from our mobile phone, including sign. Hey, I got this new job offer or whatever happens to be without having out. Oh my God, there's a pdf. I have to go home, get to my desktop, talk to me about PDS because I can imagine when people either fill them out manually, then they scanning back in and somebody's gotta print it out or fax it. That date is stuck in Pdf. How does hello sign work to free dot data in a Pierre? >> Sure, our design philosophy really is about, you know, make making a superior user experience both for the person who needs to get a document, a document side, but also somebody who's actually gonna be signing it. So when we designed our products, you might as easy as possible for user's to sign that and recognizing some of the difficulties with P D EFS and signing on your mobile phone. We've made our products specifically Mobley responsive, so they don't have to pension, screen, pension, pension scan and all that kind of stuff and typing data. We make it very easy walking through the data entry process to streamline the whole process. We just want to make user customer satisfaction first and foremost >> moving the friction, probably getting documents signed much faster. >> Absolutely. I mean the base, you know, benefits associated the signature. Overall you know, our honestly getting your documents signed significantly faster and more efficiently. We have customers that used to take up to two weeks to get a contract signed. And, you know, as a salesperson, that gets your real nervous, right? So we've seen those contracts now get signed in less than a day. Also, Elektronik senator provides a tonic transparency. So throughout the process, we can actually provide notifications that let the sales people know that somebody's opened up the the >> end. Lt >> looked at the document, reviewed it, signed it, completed it. And even if the document has been signed, the consent of reminders to make sure to sign it. And the third thing is, you know you can't can't emphasize this enough. The value associate with productivity increases. Come on. Everyone's gone out. Printed out the document, walked it over to the scanning machine, you know, then uploading it back in your computer, you know that that whole step, you know, should be completely digital and automated as >> much as >> possible. So we see productivity increases to some of our customers between two x three x for X right in the number in reducing the number of man hours people have to spend to get >> documents only. Is that a cost savings? But all of the you can think of all the other benefits like we're talking about, even for the procurement officers were talking about it at Kuba inspires. It's not just saving money. It's all of the other ripple effects that cost savings, resource, reallocations, speed. All enable this digital transformation, which then enables the business Thio capture new customers. Increased customer, lifetime value, shareholder value. There's a lot of upside to this, >> especially for a company like Cooper. First of all, it's an incredible fit for what we do. Procurement documents. That whole host, um, they need to be signed but by, you know, utilizing Hello, son. We really facilitate that whole experience, and we're very excited to expand our partnership today. We're Cooper Advantage partner. >> Tell me about the Cooper Advantage program benefits. Who wins your >> coop? Advantage is this very unique marketplace that Cooper's brought together. They're pulling together both their customers, some of their lead customers and their matching them with some of the suppliers selected suppliers that provide their customers. Ah, whole host of service is that they need so it could be everything from goods and office supplies. All the way to service is like travel service is, and staffing service is all the way to software key software that their customers would utilize in conjunction with their procurement business. Spend management So companies like close on. So by matchmaking it for the suppliers, they get some pre negotiated discounts that offer them immediate savings off of buying direct from retail and then from ah, supplier side. We get huge benefits because we get to meet some of the most targeted companies that we want. So Cooper effectively is one of our favorite matchmakers. >> Nice. So, yeah, there's a tremendous amount of suppliers in their program. I forget the number and I don't want to misquote it. But I can imagine Cooper customer that's using them for procurement and expenses and invoices and payments. I talked a lot about Cooper pains of new things today. Well, then have the opportunity through the Cooper Advantage program to do prick human contract Scorpios with Hello sign as the e signature. >> Exactly, really, exactly. And that that is, like I said, a great match for what their customers need and by being virtue of a coupe advantage part. Sorry. Keep advantage Supplier. We've been pre vetted by Cooper have also worked out some special pre negotiated discounts with Cooper to make sure we passed that value on to their customers. >> So some of the things that came out today regarding yesterday as well with the Amazon extension you and I talked about the consumer ization affect a few minutes ago. What opportunities is that? Open up to Hello, sign for Cooper paid to be able to enable I t folks to have this visibility for the entire software from search to management. With this consume arised approach, open up doors for Hello Sign. >> Well, I think you know, if you look at the total life cycle of any purchase right from from beginning to end from everything from identifying the products that you want to being able to, you know, negotiate and secure a price that is good for you, you know that whole process. There's always tradition, but a lot of friction there. So the same way that there's friction on the e commerce side, we'll check out and purchase right and getting lining up your payment and Internet payment information Cooper. Streamlining that whole thing for the customer so long without sod is if there's documents they're associated with that with that workflow than by using companies like Hello Sign and our products were able to continue that process of digital izing the end and purchase cycle. >> And I imagine, from an information security perspective, everything >> Come on the old >> days usedto signed >> a contract and I thought, Oh, my boss's desk, Anybody could come by and pick that up So nowadays we you know nowadays we keep it stored securely in the cloud. We have some of the highest security requirements of any signature company out there, and that really matches Cupid's philosophy as well. They go overboard on security, which we really appreciate. That mission is completely lard with each other. >> Awesome. So last few seconds here. I know that you guys are early in the acquisition with Dropbox. What's exciting You for the rest of the calendar. 19. Since all these fiscal years are different. And what's next with you guys in Cuba? Yeah, >> So first of all, with Dropbox, we're just excited to be part of an enormous community of over 500,000,000 users globally So it's It's It's the reach is insane. >> I know >> my mom. Yeah, I think everybody has a DROPBOX account on >> eso getting introduced to their segments, whether it's a consumer segment, SMB and increasingly, the business segment offers huge brand recognition and the potential for new customers with Dropbox. So there's a great synergy from a go to market perspective, and with Cooper, we're very excited about the next stage of our partnership is entering the Cooper Link program. So, uh, you know said Now Cooper customers will be able to sign and send for signature from within the Cooper clr module. Eso any of their contracts vendor agreements that are stored within Cooper without ever having to leave Cooper. You consent for signature and seek the document back. And for a company like Cooper, this is a great strategic value. A because of the benefit it brings its customers, but also with all the great features that Cooper's coming out with leading edge. They want to keep a cz much of that procurement experience from within Cooper. They want Cooper to be that system of record per se and system of transaction for all your business. Ben Management So now you don't have to leave Cooper to perform to get your contract signed. You can do it from all within one place within Cooper, and we enable that. >> That's awesome. That's that's what we want. Keep him. In the experience of that, they actually adopted. They get it done. They're more efficient and and and well, David, it's been such a pleasure to >> have you on >> the Cube. Thank you for joining me today. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> All right, we'll see you next. Time for David Chang. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Cooper Inspired 19. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Barcelona Spain it's theCUBE covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Live from Barcelona Spain it's theCUBE covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hola Barcelona I'm Stu Miniman and my guest host for this week is the one and only Corey Quinn, and you're watching theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage, actually the fourth year we've been doing the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. This is KubeCon CloudNativeCon Barcelona 2019. We've got two days of wall to wall live coverage. Last year we were in Copenhagen it was outside a little bit windy and we had this lovely silk above us. This time we are inside at the Fira. We've got some lovely Cube branding. The store with all the t-shirts and the little plushies of Fippy and all the animals are right down the row for us, and there is 7,700 people here. So I have been, I did the Austin show in 2017 did the Seattle show last year 2018. We had done the Portland show in 2016, so it's my third time doing one of these, but Corey it is your first time at one of these shows. Wait this isn't an AWF show, so what are you doing here? >> I'm still trying to figure that out myself when people invite me to go somewhere "Do you know anything about insert topic here?" absolutely, smile and bluff your way through. Eventually someone might call you on it, but that's tomorrow's problem not quite today's. >> Yeah I have this general rule of thumb the less I know about something the more I overdress to overcompensate it. Oh so here's the guy in the three piece suit. >> My primary skill is wearing a suit everything else is just edging details. >> Alright, so let's set the stage for our audience here Corey. As I've said we've got the Foundation, we've got a lot of the big members, we've got some of the project people, but I'm really excited we actually have some excellent users here, because it is five years now since Kubernetes came onto the scene of course built off of Borg from Google, and as Dan Conn said in the opening key note, he actually gave a nice historical lesson. The term he used is simultaneous invention and basically those things that, you know, there are times where we argue, who created the light bulb first, or who did this and this? Because there were multiple times out there and he said look there were more than a dozen projects out there. >> Many of them open source or a little bit open as to these things like container orchestration, but it is Kubernetes that is the defacto standard today, and it's why so many people show up for this show, >> and there's such a large ecosystem around it. So you live in the Cloud world you know what's your general view on CloudNative and Kubernetes and this whole kind of space? >> Well going back to something you said a minute or two ago. I think there's something very strong to be said about this being defined by it's users. I've never yet seen a successful paradigm takeoff in the world of technology that was vendor defined. It's at some point you wind up with these companies doing the digital equivalent of here we've crafted you this amazingly precise wrench, and you hand it to a user and the first thing they say is wow it's kind of a crappy hammer, but it's at least good for a first attempt. Tools are going to be used as users want to use them and they define what the patterns look like. >> Yeah so I'll give you the counter point there because we understand if we ask users what they wanted they wanted better buggy whips so we can go faster. To compare and contrast we had done a few years ago was this openstack was user driven and it came out of NASA, and if it was good enough for the rocket scientist, it should be something we that can learn on, and Rackspace had done good and gave it to the open source community, and stepped back and let people use it. First of all openstack it's not dead it's being used in the Telco world it's being used outside of North America quite a bit, but we saw the kind of boom and bust of that. >> We are a long way passed the heyday. >> The vendor ecosystem of openstack was oh it's an alternative to AWS, and maybe some way to get off the VMY licensing, and I've actually said it's funny if you listen to what happens in this ecosystem. Well, giving people the flexibility not to be totally locked in to AWS, and oh it's built on Linux and therefore I might not want to have licensing from certain vendors. Still echos from previously but it is very different. >> Very much so, and I will say the world has changed. >> I was very involved in Eucalyptus which was a bit of a different take on the idea, or the promise of what openstack was going to be What if you had Cloud API's in your own data center in 2012 that seemed like a viable concern. The world we live in today of public cloud first for a lot of shops was by no means assured. >> Yeah, Martin Meikos, Cube alum by the way, fantastic leader still heavily involved in open source. >> Very much so >> One of those things I think he was a little bit ahead of his time on these. So Corey, one of the reasons, why are you here? You are here because I pulled you here, and we do pay you to be here as a host. You're not here for goodwill and that. Your customers are all users and tend to be decent sized users and they say Corey helps people with their Amazon bills no that's the AWS bills not the I have a pile of boxes of smiley faces on there, oh my God what did I do around Christmas time. >> Exactly >> So the discussion at the show is this whole hybrid and multi cloud world when I talk to users they don't use those words. Cloud strategy, sure, my pile of applications, and how I'm updating some of them, and keeping some of them running, and working with that application portfolio and my data. All hugely important but what do you hear from users, and where does the things like cloud and multi cloud fit into their world? >> There are two basic archetypes of user that I tend to deal with. Because I deal with, as you mentioned, with predominately large customers >> you have the born in the cloud types who have more or less a single application. Picture a startup that hits meteoric growth and now is approaching or is in the IPO stage. They have a single application. They're generally all in on one provider, and the idea of going multi cloud is for auxiliary things. If we take a step back, for example, they're saying things like oh PagerDuty is a service that's not run by one of our major public cloud providers. There are a bunch of SaaS applications like that that factor in, but their infrastructure is >> predominately going to be based in one environment. The other large type of customer you'll tend to see is one of those multinational very divisional organizations where they have a long legacy of being very data center first because historically that was kind of the only option. And you'll start to see a bunch of different popup cloud providers inside those environments, but usually they stop at the line of business boundary or very occasionally on a per workload basis. I'm not seeing people say, >> well we're going to build this one application workload, and we want to be able to put that on Oracle cloud, and Azure and GCP and AWS, and this thing that my cousin runs out of the Ozarks. No one wants to do that in the traditional sense because as soon as you go down that path you are constrained to whatever the lowest common denominator across all those things are, and my cousins data center in the Ozarks doesn't have a lot of frills. So you wind up trying to be able to deploy anywhere, but by doing that you are giving up any higher level offering. You are slowing yourself down. >> Yeah, the thing we've always been worried about is back in the day when you talk about multi vendor do we go by the standard, and then go to least common denominator and what has worked it's way through the environment? That's what the customers want. I want today if I'm the user, agility is really one of the things that seem to be top of mind. What IT needs to do is respond to the speed of what the business needs and a CloudNative environment that I look at is it has to be that lever to be able to help me deliver on the next thing, or change the thing, or update my thing to get that working. It was, so disclaimer Red Hat is our headline sponsor here we thank them for our presence, but actually it's a great conversation with open shift customers, and they didn't talk about open shift to open shift to open shift. They talk about their digital transformation. They talk about their data. They talk about the cool new things that they are able to do, and it was that platform happened to be built on Kubernetes. That was the lever to help them do this at the Google show where you were at. That was the same conversation we had whether it is in GCP or whether it was in my own data center. >> You know yes we can do it with containers and everything like that. It was that lever to be able to help me modernize and run new apps and do it faster than I would've done it in the past. So it's that kind of progression that is interesting for me to hear, and just there is not, there is this tendency now to be like oh look everybody is working together and it's wonderful open source ecosystem. It's like well look the world today is definitely coopetition. Yes you need to be up on stage and if a customer says, I need to work with vendors A, B, C, and D. A, B, C, and D, you better work with that or they will go and find an alternative, because there are alternatives out there. >> (Corey) Absolutely, and when a company embarks on a digital transformation and starts moving into public cloud, there are two reasons they are doing that. The first is for cost savings in which case (laughs), let's talk, and the other is for capability storing, and you're not going to realize cost savings for a lot longer than you think you will. In any case you are not going realize capability story if all you view public cloud is being, is another place to run your VAMS or now your containers. >> Yeah, so thank you, Corey your title in your day job You're a Cloud economist. >> I am, two words that no one can define. So no one calls me on it. >> Kubernetes it's magical and free right >> That's what everyone tells me. It feels like right now we are sort of peak heighth as far as Kubernetes goes, and increasingly, whenever you see a technology that has gotten this level of adoption. We saw it with openstack, we've seen it with cloud, we've seen it with a bunch of things. We are starting to see it with Serverless as well. Where, what problem are you trying to solve? I'm not going to listen to the answer, today that answer is Kubernetes, and it seems like everyone's first project is their own resume. Great, there has to be a value proposition, there has to be a story for it, >> and I'm not suggesting that there isn't, but I think that it is being used as sort of an upscale snake oil in some cases or serpen grease as we like to call it in some context. >> Yeah, and that's one of our jobs here is to help extract the sigma from the noise. We've got some good customers. We're going into the environment. One of the things I try to do in the open keynote is find that theme. Couple of years, for a couple of shows >> it's been service mesh is the new hotness. We're talking about Istio, we're talking about Helm, We're talking about all these all these environments that say okay how do I pull together all the pieces of the application, >> and manage that together? Because there's just, you know, moving up the stack, and getting closer to that application. We'll talk about Serverless in one of the other segments later this week I'm sure because you know there's the, okay here Knative can help bridge that gap, but is that what I need? We talk a lot about Kubernetes is how much does the public cloud versus in my data center, and some of the guys they talk to, Serverless is in the public cloud. We'll call it functions of the service if you put it in your own data center, because while yes there are servers everywhere. If you actually manage those racks and everything like that it probably doesn't make sense to call it Serverless. We try not to get into too many semantics arguments here on theCUBE. >> You can generally tend to run arbitrary code anywhere the premise of Serverless to my mind. >> Is more about the event model, and you don't get that on VRAM in the same way that you do in a large public cloud provider, and whether that is the right thing or not, I'm not prepared to say, but it's important for that to be understood as you are going down that path. >> So Corey, any themes that jumped out for you, or things that you want to poke at, at the show, for me, Kubernetes has really kind of crossed that Chasm, and we do have large crowds. You can see the throngs of people behind us, and users that have great stories to tell, and CNCF itself, you know has a lot of projects out there, we're trying to make some sense of all those pieces. There's six now that have graduated, and FluentD is the most recent, but a lot of interesting things from the sandbox, through that kind of incubating phase there, and we're going to dig into some of the pieces there. Some of them build on top of Kubernetes, some of them are just part of this whole Cloud Native Ecosystem, and therefore related but don't necessarily need it, and can play in all these various worlds. >> What about you? >> For me I want to dig a little bit more into the idea of multi cloud. I have been making a bit of a stink for the past year. With the talk called the myth of multi cloud. Where it's not something I generally advise as a best practice, and I'm holding that fairly well, but what I want to do is I want to have conversations with people who are pursuing multi cloud strategies and figure out first, are they in fact pursuing the same thing, so we're defining out terms and talking on the same page, and secondly I want to get a little more context, and insight into why they are doing that, and what that looks like for them. Is it they want to be able to run different workloads in different places? Great that's fair, the same workload run everywhere, on the lowest common denominator. Well lets scratch below the surface a bit, and find out why that is. >> Yeah, and Corey you're spot on, and no surprise because you talk to users on this. From our research side on our team, we really say multi cloud or hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud means you've got your own data centers, as opposed to multi cloud could be any of them. There's a little bit of a Venn Diagram you could do between that. >> But I am prepared to be wrong as well. I'm a company of two people. I don't have a research department, that's called the spare time I get >> when I can't sleep at night. So I don't have data, I have anecadata. I can talk about individual use cases, but then I'm telling individual company stories that I'm generally not authorized to tell. So it's more a question now of starting to speak to a broader base. >> So just to finish on the thought from out team is everything from I have all of these pieces, and they're really not connected, and I'm just trying to get my arms around through some of the solutions. Like in the AWS world we're looking at the VMware on AWS, and the outpost type of solution. That pullout or what Azure does with Azure stack, and the like, or even company like IBM and Oracle, where they have a stack that can be both >> in the public cloud and the private cloud. Those kind of fully integrated pieces versus the right now I'm just putting applications in certain areas, and then how do I manage data protection, how do I manage security across all these environments. It is a heterogeneous mess that we had, and I spent a lot of my career trying to help us break down those silos, get away from the cylinders of excellence as we called them, and we worked more traditionalist. So how much are we fighting that? I will just tell you that most of the people we're going to have on theCUBE, probably aren't going to want to get into that. They'll be happy to talk about their piece, and how they work with this broad wonderful ecosystem, but we can drill into where Kubernetes fits. We've got the five year anniversary of Kubernetes. We'll be talking to some of the people that helped create this technology, and lots of the various pieces. So with that, Corey, want to give you the final take here, before we talk about the stickers, and some of the rest. >> Oh absolutely, I think it's a fascinating show. I think that they're the right people who are attending. To give valuable perspective that, quite frankly, you're not going to get almost anywhere else. It's just a fascinating blend of people from large companies, small companies, giant vendors, and of course the middleware types, who are trying to effectively stand between in many cases, customers and the raw vendors, for a variety of very good reasons. Partner strategies are important. I'm very curious to see what that becomes, and how that tends to unfold in the next two days. >> Okay, so theCUBE by the way, we're not only a broadcast, but we are part of the community. We understand this network, and that is why Corey and I, you know, we come with stickers. So we've got these lovely sticker and partnership with Women Who Go, that made this logo for us for the Seattle show, and I have a few left, so if you come on by. Corey has his platypus, last week in AWS. So come on by where we are, you get some stickers, and of course, hit us up on Twitter if you have any questions. We're always looking for the community, and the network to help us with the data, and help us pull everything apart. So for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman, two days of live wall to wall coverage >> will continue very soon, and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (Fading Electronic Music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you buy Blockchain Industries. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to our exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico with theCUBE on the ground for extensive two days of coverage for Blockchain Unbound in Puerto Rico where all the action is. It's a global conference where investors, entrepreneurs, thought leaders are all coming together to check out the future and set the agenda for Blockchain cryptocurrency and the decentralized internet. My next guest is John Hartigan, Executive Vice President in Intiva Health. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So we were talking yesterday with Hash-Craft, CTO, you guys are part of that ecosystem, you guys are doing some of these things with health. Take a minute to explain what you guys are working on and your value proposition. >> Sure, so, Intiva Health is a career and credential management platform for physicians and all licensed medical professionals, and it streamlines and automates the credential management process that they have to go through every time that they either change positions or take on temporary work. And the Hash-Craft integration is allowing us to do instantaneous credential verification. Currently the state of affairs in the granting of privileges at a particular hospital or a facility can take literally weeks and in some cases months to complete. It's a very analog process, and with our integration with Hash-Craft, it will take seconds. >> So I was watching The New York Times today, an our Wall Street Journal article about verification of work history. This Blockchain is certainly a good example of that, but you're now getting it into more of health, what is the use case, what's the low hanging fruit that you guys are going after with your solution, and how does that evolve and how you see that evolving? >> Well, so, like I mentioned, the current verification process for the granting of privileges in a hospital setting, it is pretty much unchanged since the 1950s. The internet helps a lot but what you're talking about is somebody getting a credential paper file with 25 or 30 documents, and opening the file and picking up the phone and calling, and verifying the reputation and provenance of that particular physician. And it's truly a bureaucratic nightmare. It's red tape to the nth degree. And so that represents thousands and hundreds of thousands of hours and billions and billions of dollars in waste that could be reallocated to better patient care for example. >> The big use case we're seeing education, the workplace, but now healthcare. I see a perfect storm for innovation. Healthcare is not known for moving fast. >> John: Correct. >> HIPAA regulations in the past couple decades really put a damper on data sharing for privacy reasons. At that time it seemed like a good call. Has things like HIPAA, has the cloud computing model opened up new avenues for health because everyone wants great healthcare, but the data is stuck in some silo, database. >> Database, absolutely. >> That's the problem. >> That's absolutely a problem. >> So what's your reaction to that? >> So the approach that we're seeing a lot of organizations take is they are attempting to go after the EHRs and the EMRs, the Electronic Health Records for Patients. Of course that is something that needs to be fixed. However the medical space is truly influenced, the main stakeholders are the physicians. They sit on all the committees, they run all the budgets, they make the policy. So it's imperative that we address the physicians and get their buy into any kind of significant change. And what you're seeing now is states, as well as other organizations including the federal medical board, the Federal Association of Medical Boards, as well as the State of Illinois, Wyoming is here, as a matter of fact, representing, and they are all looking at Blockchain solutions for this verification problem for the medical space and remaining HIPAA compliant. >> Let's talk about security because hospitals and healthcare organizations have been really good targets for ransomware. >> John: Absolutely. >> And so we're seeing that mainly because their IT systems have been kind of ancient in some cases, but they're right in the target of, they don't have a lot of IT support. One of the things about Blockchain, it makes these things immutability. So is that something that is on the radar, and how is, I mean, not necessarily ransomware, that's one example of many security issues 'cause you got Internet of Things, you have a slew of cloud-edge technologies-- >> John: Yes. >> That are emerging, that opened up a surface area for a text. So what's your thoughts on that? >> So, as you mentioned, the traditional models have been layered on top of each other overtime. It's a patchwork situation. And because it's a patchwork situation, there is vulnerabilities all over the place, in facilities a lot of times. And besides that, the medical space is probably 10 years behind the times when it comes to technology, maybe five at a minimum. The model that we're using, you mentioned earlier that there are siloed information in these different facilities and hospitals, and that's absolutely true. So all of that information, you have facility A, facility B, facility C, they all have information on one particular provider or physician, but they don't talk to each, and that information is at different levels of accuracy and timeliness, you mentioned time and date stamps. So our model works where the information follows the provider, okay, it's all built around the provider themselves, and then the individual facilities can tap into that information, and also they can influence the information, they can update it. So everybody will then be talking to each other in an anonymous fashion around the one provider updating that information and making it the most accurate in the market, and we get away from the old SaaS model. >> Before we deep dive in here, I'm going to ask you one more thing around as you walked into healthcare providers and then the healthcare industry, you're a different breed, you have Blockchain, you got different solution, the conversation that they're having is, let's put a data leg out there, again, centralized data leg. ISPs are doing that. We know with cybersecurity, any time you have centralized data resources, it's just an easier target to hack. >> John: Correct. >> So it's clear that centralized is not going to be the ideal architecture, and this entire movement is based upon the principles of decentralized data. >> John: Yes. >> So what's it like when you go in there? It must be like, do you have like three heads to them? Or are you like a martian, you're like speaking some foreign language? I mean what is it like, are there people receptive to what you talk about? Talk about some of the experiences you had when you walked in the door and knocked on the front door and walked in and talked to them. >> So it is an interesting situation. When I speak with CEOs and when I speak with COOs, they understand that they're vulnerable when it comes to their data, and they understand how expensive it is if, for example, if they have a HIPAA breach, it's $10,000 per occurrence. Now that means if somebody texts patient information to somebody else on a normal phone, that $10,000 every time that happens, okay. And so if it's a major data breach, and a record of files if they have 50,000 files lost, I mean it could be a killing, a business killing event under the right circumstances. So I tried to educate them about-- >> Do they look at Blockchain as a solution there? Or are they scratching their heads, kicking the tires? What's the reaction? >> They're interested, they don't understand exactly how we can apply Blockchain, and we're trying to educate them as to how that is, we are capable of doing so. We're explaining about the vast security improvements by decentralizing the information, and they are receptive, they're just reticent because they're very, tend to be more conservative. So as these organizations like the State of Illinois and the Federal Association of Medical Boards, as they start to adopt the hospitals and facilities, they're starting to look in and oh say, "Hey, this is a real thing, "and there may be a real application here." >> Talk about your business, you market, you go on after obviously healthcare, product specifically in the business model, where are you guys? How big are you? Are you funded? Are you doing an ICO? How are you using token economics? How is it working? Give us a status on the company. >> Sure, so, we've been in business for approximately two years. We're a funded startup out of Austin, Texas. We are born actually out of a practice management company which is an important point because a technology company trying to solve this problem would really struggle because there is a lot of bureaucracy, there's a lot of nuance in how the system operates because it is evolved overtime. So that gives us a very significant advantage. We have an operating platform that has been out for a little over a year now, and we have thousands and thousands of physicians and other licensed medical professionals that use the platform now. >> Are they paying customers or are they just users? >> No, so the model works like this, it's free to the providers, it's also free to the facilities and medical groups, and so we allow that platform, that utility for them to use. How we monetize is we have other curated goods and services for the providers along their career journey. So, for example, continuing medical education. All providers are required to take so many units a year, and we have a very robust online library of CME. And we also have partnerships with medical malpractice organizations. >> So it's a premium model. You get them using the platform. >> Correct, that's right. >> Where does tokens fit in? Where does the cryptocurrency fit in? Do you have a token as a utility, obviously, it's a utility token. I mean explain the model. >> Correct. Yeah so we just announced last Friday. in South by Southwest that we are launching a token, a utility token, and it'll go on sale April 19th. And basically how it works is the providers, the physicians will earn tokens by taking actions in the platform that update their data for example, or if they look for a job on our platform, or if they do different tasks in the platform that improve the veracity of their data, and then they will be able to use those tokens to purchase the continuing medical education courses, travel courses, medical malpractice insurance, a number of different resources. >> Token will monitor behavior, engage behavior, and then a two-sided marketplace for clearing house. >> Exactly. >> How does the token go up in value? >> We have multiple partners that are involved, so the partners will be also purchasing advertising time, or it's a sponsorship model, so they'll be able to sponsor within the platform. So the more partners we bring in, the more providers we have, the value-- >> So suppliers, people who want to reach those guys. So >> Exactly. >> You get the coins, you see who's doing what. You get a vibe on who's active and then >> Exactly. That's a signal to potential people who want to buy coins. >> Yeah, and when we announced that we were doing this token, we had multiple partners that we have been in business with for the last two years, saying, "We want in, we want to do this, "we want to get involved." Oh another thing that we're doing with the token, we have an exclusive relationship with the National Osteoporosis Foundation, and we put forth to them that we would like to set them up with a crypto wallet so that they can accept donations, and then we would also match those donations up to a certain point that they receive in crypto. So we want to help our organizations, our not-for-profits by facilitating crypto acceptance. >> So talk about your relationship with Hash-Craft. It's two days old but it's been around for two years, they announced a couple days ago. It got good feedback, a lot of developers are using it. It's not a theorem but that's the compatibility to a theorem. You're betting on that platform. How long have you worked with these guys, and why the bet on Hash-Craft? >> So we were looking at Blockchain Technologies about two years ago because we realized, as you mentioned earlier, the security issues we have. We have to be very aware of the type of data that we're holding. So at the time though, there were significant issues with speed, significant issues with storage, and how it would work by actually putting a credential packet into Blockchain, and the technology frankly just wasn't there, and so we started looking for alternatives. Thankfully we were in Texas, and we happened to run into Hash-Craft, and they explained what they were doing, and we thought this must be too good to be true. It checked off all of our boxes. And we had multiple conversations about how we would actually execute an integration into our current platform with Hash-Craft. So we've been in talks with them for, I think, a little over five or six months, and we will actually, it looks like be one of the very first applications on the market integrating Hash-Craft. >> It's interesting, they don't really have a Blockchain-based solution, it's a DAG, a directed acyclic graphic model. Did that bother you guys? You don't care, it's plumbing. I mean does it matter? >> So actually the way that it is established, it has all of the benefits of Blockchain, and none of the fat and sugar, so to speak. I mean there are a number of things that they do that Blockchain-- >> You mean performance issues and security? >> Performance, speed is a big one, but also fairness on the date and timestamps, because with the verification system, you have to prove, you have to be able to prove and show that this date and timestamp is immutable, and that it has been established in a fair manner. And they have been able to solve that problem, where the Blockchain model, there is still some question about, if you have some bad actors in there, they can significantly influence the date and timestamps. And that was very significant for our model. >> Alright, well, congratulations. What's next for the company? What are you guys doing? What's the plan, what's the team like? Well, excited obviously. What's next? >> So we are going to be announcing some very big partnerships that we've established here late spring. I was hoping to do it here now, however we've-- >> Come on, break it out then. >> I would like to but I have to be careful. So we have some big partnerships we're going to be announcing, and of course we have the token sale coming up so there'll be a big-- >> Host: When is that sale happening? >> So it starts April 19th, and it'll run for about six weeks. >> What's the hard cap and soft cap? >> Yeah, we prefer not to talk about that, but let's say, soft cap, about 12 million. And we have some interested parties that want to do more, and so we're looking at what our best options are as far as setting the value to the token, and what the partnerships that are going to significantly impact it will be. >> Well, great job, congratulations. One of the big concerns to this market is scams versus legit, and you're starting to see clearly that this is a year, flight to quality, where real businesses are tokenizing for real reasons, to scale, provide value. You guys are a great example of that. Thanks for sharing that information. >> We're really excited, and it's very exciting to bring this to the healthcare space which is, as we said, conservative and somewhat traditional. And we believe that we will be setting the standard moving forward for primary source verification. >> And you can just summarize the main problem that you solve. >> Yeah, it is that analog primary source verification of the credential documents, and when our platform goes live, we will literally be putting hours of time a day, something like eight hours back into the providers' lives, and back to the money of that, associated with that back to their pockets, which we hope translates into better patient care. >> So verification trust and they save time. >> John: Absolutely. >> It's always a good thing when you can reduce the steps to do something, save time, make it easy. That's a business model of success. >> Absolutely and more secure. >> John Hatigan, who's with Intiva, Executive Vice President from Austin, Texas here in Puerto Rico for theCUBE coverage. Day Two of two days of live coverage here in Puerto Rico, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE host. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)