>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. And when we kicked off this program, Cloud Native Insights, we wanted to talk about the innovation and agility that's happening, not just Cloud as a location. We're going to draw down a little bit into one of the very important pieces of a company and that's their websites and their applications, that live in that environment. And of course, that comes from a lot of changes over the years. Any of us that have been in tech for a couple of decades have worked from the early days, to of course today's multimedia globally distributed environment and everyone during the global pandemic, of course, has been (indistinct) straining their use of the internet. So really excited to welcome to the program the two co-founders of Netlify. I have Matt Biilmann, who is the CEO, and his co-founder Christian Bach, who is the president both of Netlify really the company behind Jamstack, which we're going to explain and talk about a bit. Matt and Chris, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us >> All right so, let's start with just some of the basics. I expect that some of our audience is not familiar with Jamstack. You do a quick Google search and it's JavaScript, its APIs, its markup. And you say, okay, I understand what a bunch of that means. But, yeah, if you could give us kind of a compare contrast to what web development was before and how Jamstack's really helping to revolutionize what's happening in this space. >> Yes, so for many years, we built websites and web applications with an application based architecture, where every website or every application would be this monolithic application with typically like a load balancer, a set of web servers, application servers, and that database and every request through a page would go through this whole stack it would pass through the application layer, talk to the database, fetch template, merge data and template, build HTML on the fly and send it back to the user. And basically what we saw happening and what's been happening with the Jamstack is this decoupling of the actual front-end presentation layer of the websites and web applications and then the back-end layer. And the advantages there is that if you can really pre-build the front-end application layer, you can take the actual HTML, or an application shell and distribute it across a globally distributed network, you can get it into the hands of the user's browser very quickly. And then the back end, what we've seen happening there is that it's split up to all these different APIs and services you no longer have your one monolithic back end you have all these different services. Where some of your own but a lot of them are other people's services like Stripe or Twilio or Algolia or Contentful. So we've seen this shift to this architecture, where we're considered in a way that the stack has moved up a little from the old tooling where something like the LAMP stack would be common in really naming the programming language, the specific web server, the Linux server, the operating system, and so on right? And then up to a level where it's really about getting an application into the browser, using JavaScript as the runtime and talking to this whole new economy of APIs and services. >> Yeah, Chris I wonder if you could bring us inside your customers and the companies that you talk to. I think about for the longest time it was, maybe I just outsource my web development, but website is one of those key components that I share my value, I share what's going on, I want to be able to change it pretty often and there's so much more that I can do today than I could have done 10 years ago. We've watched that mark. So, help us understand, what skill sets do people need to have? what type of companies are using Jamstack? And, bring in if you can, Netlify. How is this a business and not just, an open source standards movement, that's helping to revolutionize what's happening? >> Absolutely, I mean, First of all, people using this and companies use this is extremely wide. Wide vertical, right? Its very horizontal. This is anyone with a digital property basically, right? I think what we've seen all the time is that, that we have a lot more channels than we used to have, right? So we started off just maybe having the one dot com, right? With limited functionality. And today, you have a multiple channels, right? You have the landing pages, you have the domains, you have lots of activities online. You have mobile apps and commerce is often a big part of it, and I would say especially the last few months, there's a lot of people that had the digital convergence points as one of many. And now it's the only ones, right? So I think it's become extremely important. I also think that when you look at your web infrastructure in general, it has been very complex, right? And you need a lot of different people, right? And you need to maintain staging environments, production lines, development environments. You need to, have a wide set of skills to maintain these things, right? And if a web developer wanted to do a lot of things, right? They have to go and tap DevOps and so on on the shoulder, right? And I think what the Jamstack is about saying, hey, you can get so much further as a web developer. Now, if you take the modern built tools, you can take the Git workflows, and you wrap around the browser that has become a full-fledged operating system and the API economy as Matt was just talking about. You have these workflows, or you potentially have these workflows, where you can get so much further, right? And that's very much Netlify submission. So Netlify saw this opportunity of decoupling the front end from the back end of the building from the hosting of creating an approach to making websites that would be many times faster, 'cause you have multiple points of origin and you don't feel fredurous. It's many times safer. There's not that huge surface area of attack. It's much more scalable, and so on. It was sort of a win-win-win. But the problem was, there was no viable workflow. If you take a traditional CDN, and you put it in, it doesn't matter really, if it's one or the other. As good as they (indistinct) services, they're all meant to sit in front of an origin, right? They're meant to buffer something. And if you have the gems, there's no origin in that way, right? The network in itself has to be an origin so it has to be architectured quite differently. And then there's a lot of things around CDCI and how you server lists and so on. That all had to be sort of re-merged . And Netlify is that glue, it is that platform that takes you from local development all the way out to edge nodes. But allows you to mix and match any tool. So it's not program independent. So you can say, well, we use a build tool, and that's PHP or Ruby or JavaScript, the react or Next or whatever it might be, right? And we use these APIs for this server, for this property. Over here we have a commerce site. Over here, we have a dotcom, that needs a huge enterprise CMS with tons of stakeholders. But the thing is that all of those now becomes something that plugs into your website. Rather than have to drive the website itself. And that's sort of frees up the silos. So when we see people using Netlify, we have companies using Netlify. Big Fitness Company, for example, that own fitness company that uses us for developer documentation, or their marketing sites, but also for their dotcom. But even if you go to the equipment that people have at home, and you log in, that's actually using some very nifty identity and remote based access control for Netlify and if you watch the video there, it's also going through a Netlify player, all right? We have fast food chains that has their dotcom and their marketing sites, but also the kiosks down in the store like the menus, the screens there. Rather than being an old Windows NT server running some .NET application in a dusty corner, why not have it like that? And so, both the category but also Netlify sort of brings in a solution and because it's decoupled from all those architectural choices, that means that you can now use the solution in a much, much wider setting. And we were sort of first to market doing this. They get serverless approach where you just push your serverless functions to get better Netlify. First Feature Deploy Previews Were invented by us and so on. So the Jamstack is an extremely wide fundamental architectural approach that matches basically anyone that wants to build web properties. Netlify is the segnostic wide platform that just makes it possible. >> Yeah, good Chris actually, I saw the Peloton use case up on the website and you're right, a very different experience rather than I bring my device, is it synced? Does it work with it? Really integrates those solutions. And you just brought up serverless, which is actually how I got connected to talk in Netlify. So, Matt, sorry, I think you wanted to jump in there but I was wondering if you could help us. I've looked at serverless and what the promise of serverless of course, is that I don't need to think about that underlying infrastructure. I just like developers build our applications. Well, feels like that's really the same mission that you have. And they're serverless is a piece of your story. So, maybe explain (indistinct) that out a little for us. >> Absolutely, I think it ties in, right? Basically, what we saw just from a architectural perspective was this approach of really decoupling front end and back end and so on and working in a new way that gave a lot of benefits to the inducers in performance and security and so on right? But on the other hand, early on, what we saw was that to adopt that approach, like developers had to deal with lot of different moving pieces like CICD, CDN. What to do about the API endpoints that didn't need to be dynamic, and so on. And as Netlify, what we saw was that we could give one intro and workflow for all of this and make it extremely easy for developers to work with this thing. And serverless plays a really important piece there, right? Because when Amazon pioneered AWS Lambda and took it to the world, right? I think the promise also for the front-end web developers of being able to simply write code and then not have to worry at all about where is it actually running? How are we scaling it? How are we operating it and so on, right? That's a really powerful promise, right? But at the same time, in the same way, what we saw earlier on was that for a front-end team to actually adopt serverless functions as part of the Jamstack, it introduced another level of complexity of now having to manage your serverless functions independent from your front end figuring out API Gateway endpoints for every one of them. And how about deployment pipeline for your functions layer versus deployment pipelines for the actual front end layer that's supposed to talk to those front ends. How about staging environments versus to production environments? How do you manage all that, right? So we saw that there was this inherent incredible potential, but also a lot of complexity, right? And as Netlify we saw that if we could give front end developers a web developers in general, an ene-to-end workflow, where they can work both with the front-end framework, write the code that will get deployed into the browser, but also just have a folder where they can write this serverless functions and then know that Netlify will take care of all of the wiring, right? When you open a pull request and get with new function we'll give you a URL on our globally distributed CDN where you can view both the whole front end, but also the function and sidestep sort of all of the complexities of linking together API Gateways, to functions of managing CICD pipelines and test environments and so on. And in the end, the serverless functions starts becoming a really important part of this Jamstack approach, right? Because you have this world where you have a front end that's often talking to many different APIs and services where again, some of your own and some other people's services. But really often you need some place to glue those together or to build your own custom API endpoint that talks to a couple of them and it has access to server site secrets and so on, right? And this idea of not having to suddenly operate and manage a whole set of servers and infrastructure just for that part of it, but simply just writing the code and then knowing, that you don't have to worry about the operation scalability or anything around that code. That's a really powerful paradigm. >> Yeah, that's one of the real challenges of the Cloud as you talk about the Paradox of Choice. There's so many ways to do things. Not necessarily... It's simple anybody... I was a blogger for many years and it was like, well, I'll just use the self-hosted WordPress, because I don't want to have to worry about that piece of it. Matt, I watched it you did a presentation talking about if I wanted to do WordPress hosted in a AWS that absolutely is not simple. I heard a podcast from one of your board members, Tom Preston Werner, talking about we need to be more opinionated. We need to be able to give more guidance to developers, maybe Chris if you could, how are we when the proliferation of choice, keeps increasing, making sure that people can... How do I make that decision tree? And how do we try to keep it simple? >> Absolutely, I mean, and I actually think that, that's a super relevant question, because you have a lot of choice as a web developer today. Front-end developers used to cut out Photoshop files and turn them into HTML, right? Now with the new advanced markup, and they have all these frameworks and flavors of JavaScript to choose between and there's these powerful build tools, And all those workflows and the browser can do everything you can imagine, right? And so yeah, there is a lot of choice out there, right? And I think, for Netlify what's extremely important is that we are opinionated in the right places. And so when it comes to, for example, a front-end tool and built tools and these things that web developers often face with having to choose between. Our role is to make it as simple as possible to use any of them. But also give you the opportunity of saying, well, this new paradigm allows you to actually mix and match, right? It allows you to use this tool for this property and this tool for this property and gives you a ton of flexibility. But still, come under one roof of a platform like Netlify. And I think that is very powerful. And so we also don't want to choose for you, we want to inform your choices and we want to make it as easy as possible to go and say, hey, these are my needs, what direction should I be going? And of course, we work with enterprise clients, so on migration services, and so on, right? And where we help them a lot with that. But if we locked down on a single flavor, or a single bill tool or a single front end framework, then we also limit the application of what we bring to market and we want to remain a little more open-ended there. But I think there's a lot complexity, a platform like Netlify is all about simplification. So all that wiring that Matt just mentioned, that at least goes, right? You don't spend hours configuring bondage caching and trying to find those edge cases, it just works. And that's a huge game changer for a lot of people, right? But there's definitely parts of the ecosystem that has a lot of choice. And we do our best to inform. And I think, under hand holding part, adjacent to that is the story of, well, do we then start using content management systems? Is this a whole new? Is it out with the old and in with the new? And I would say, you still have a lot of those needs, right? You still have non-technical people, for example, that needs to be able to update and create moves and content, and so on, right? And create content. And so you very often will need and an E-commerce solution or content management systems and so on. But what we're seeing there, is that we're speaking basically with every single major CMS out there. That are saying we're working on a headless system, or we already have a headless version, or we just gone full headless, that means that we work decoupled. So we don't no longer need to build the site. But we just provide like an independent source of content. And then it plugs into a platform like Netlify. So that can bring a lot of simplicity. And now you just have to maintain your content, but you don't have to worry about all the different environments and what is up to date and how does some of the infrastructure look like you press a button that commits to get a default preview, and it looks the same everywhere. >> I'm curious, what impact the current global pandemic has had on Netlify, and your customers. I saw you've got a COVID tracking project that you've done. But also now just there's different considerations when I think about what services I need to access from the web and what kind of connectivity the ultimate end user would have. So, what learnings have you had? What's involved there? >> In, obviously we, it depends a lot on, as Chris mentioned, right? The game circus is adopted horizontally across all kinds of areas and businesses and so on, right? So, we've of course seen businesses in sectors that are having a hard time and on the other hand, we've seen businesses and sectors that are exploding, right? We did immediately when the lockdown started happening and the pandemic started happening we set aside like a free plan for projects working in the space of tackling the information sharing around COVID and finding solutions and so on. And that was really interesting to see you mention the COVID tracking project, right? Which was a project like built a short time by small group of distributed incredibly talented front end developers and scientists and so on, right? And I think it was interesting to see that, how the Jamstack and our tooling and so on also really made it possible for them to build as a small distributed team the set of data information and tooling to a global audience, right? Seeing huge traffic peaks at time and just knowing that their architecture and our infrastructure could handle it for them. >> All right. Chris, I've got one, a little bit off to the side here. When I look at what Netlify is doing, you talk about having an open and independent web. And while we are fully supportive of that, we're a little concerned sometimes. If you look at what's happening across the globe, there's a lot of discussions. Will the internet actually fragment? Will certain countries wall off certain environments? Any concerns there? What do you look at? What are you hearing from your customers when you talk about that mission? >> It's one of the big challenges of all time, right? I think we all maybe took for given the Internet as the standard it became right? The way that you can publish without permission is pretty magnificent, right? And it would be indescribably painful for civilization if we lost that, right? And I think fragmentation is something that we all have to sort of worry around. From the way we see it, is that the web, the traditional monolithic approach, right? To which led to as a web that wasn't secure enough and wasn't scalable enough and wasn't performing enough and that's, for example, what opened the door for mobile applications, right? Where it just didn't make sense to pull in the UI every time you turn the page. So we ended up with a form that's it. We prebuilt the application, you download it, and then you speak to service for anything then atmosphere come up with it, right. And that makes perfect sense. That's basically the same architecture that we're bringing to the web a very large scale. Of course, the problem is that now there are gatekeepers there, right? There people, you have to ask for permission to publish and so on. And, and there are other attempts to say, "Hey, we need a performing web." And there's a very big players out there that say, "Let's come over and just..." Do we even need to call it the Internet? Can we just call it our company website? I'm not going to name any names here, right? But leading down, it's what we've called walled gardens, that are great for absolutely no one except for the company. And what we believe is that if you have a web that is secure and is scalable, and it's performant enough to justify at least the architecture maintaining and not having to run into any walled gardens and still say no, you don't need to use a handful of commercial platforms if you want to be heard rather than have your own web properties on your own custom domains, right? I think that's the part of the open independent viable web that we're fighting for. Basically, one that adopts and keeps adopting an architecture that is something that levels the playing field. And then they would also say, why Netlify? I mean, a few years before we started, like, try configuring your own CDN. And like that was reserved for the very, very large tech players. Now you can comment, you can literally click a button on Netlify, you get custom domain and ACS post process site that's globally distributed, automatically integrated into get. And that's on the premium plan. And so as a startup, you can level set together with everyone else and be available widely across the globe without performance issues, immediately. And so in that way, I'm also seeing that's a democrat sensation of performance, right? That means that, that's great. And for places where you see developing economies, where you often have brownouts, where you often can't depend on having viable services and is locally and so on, this idea of having he cover that and having something that's just automatically, you know what, don't even worry about it, because it's already ready to go in all these packets all around the world. That's a huge game changer. That's actually what we see a lot of adoption of the gems they can never find in those places as well. Guess that's just such a promise to the architecture. So, I hear what you're saying and I'm also very concerned about a fragmented web for political reasons as well across the globe. And from our angle, the way we fight for this is to make sure that it retains using an architecture that makes it accessible for me. >> Yeah, I heard many years ago, a friend of mine said, if you're a technologist it means that in general you are a technology optimist, which I definitely try to be. So, I love Chris how you've just brought in some of the potential opportunity Matt, I want to give you just... People out there they hear like oh, 5G is coming, it's going to completely change the world. Anything that you're seeing on your side as to real opportunities that we will see, just a step function in what your company is using. Jamstack, partnering with Netlify in your ecosystem. What are some of the early things that you see that are exciting you down the line for this? >> Part of it is simply like the whole ecosystem around the gem stalk growing up and the tooling, the APIs, the frameworks available around it, and the level of innovation that's triggered. And especially how it's triggering in... Especially how we're seeing like the potential for small, distributed teams to work together and build things with a global impact in a short time. And I remember a couple of years ago, we did a hackathon with together with freeCodeCamp. And of course, like since it was with freeCodeCamp, it was mostly like teams were mostly fairly new to programming and so on, right? It was pretty amazing to see what over a weekend with this architecture and with this tooling, with the vendors that were present there and helping out and so on, what the small teams could actually get done in a weekend, right? Like I remember the winning team had an app where the whole room would see an image on the main stage screen and then on their phone, try to place that image on the map and you would real time see how people ranked, how close they got and get a winner and so on, right? And that was all just from combining APIs and tooling, like history, like Netlify, like Honor Bee, like Google Maps, and so on, right? And I think, in some way we shouldn't forget just how much this kind of ecosystem of readily available APIs and services around this front end stake. It's allowing people to build things that years ago would have taken a very big team probably like a year to build, and suddenly you can have a relatively small group of relatively new programmers built something really impressive, right? So I think that's a trend we'll see continue accelerating And me and Chris are personally involved in advising and helping out a lot of these new startups in the space that are trying to bring new tooling to the world that makes more and more of these things possible and accessible. >> Well, Chris and Matt, I really appreciate you both joining such an exciting space. Talk about the cloud, agility and innovation, such a robust ecosystem. Thank you so much for joining. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> And I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for joining and look forward to hearing more about your CUBE insight. (soft music)