>> Welcome to the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm pleased to welcome JT Giri, the CEO and founder of nOps, to the program. JT, welcome. It's great to have you. >> Thank you, Lisa. Glad to be here. >> Talk to me about nOps. This was founded in 2017, you're the founder. What do you guys do? >> Yeah. So just a little bit background on myself. You know, I've been migrating companies to AWS ever since EC2 was in beta. And you know, in the beginning I had to convince people like, "Hey, you should move to cloud." And the question people used to ask me, like, "Is cloud secure?" I'm glad no one is asking that question anymore. So, as I was building and migrating customers to the cloud, one of the things I realized very early on, is just cloud, there are so many resources, so many teams provisioning resources, then how do you align with your business goals? So we created nOps so that, for a mission, how do you are you build a platform where you make sure every single change and every single resource in the cloud is aligned with the business needs, right? Like we really helped people to make the right trade-offs. >> So you mentioned you've been doing this since EC2 was in beta, and we just celebrated, with AWS, EC2's 15th birthday. So you've been doing this awhile. You don't look old enough, but you've been doing this for awhile. So one of the things that I read on the website, I always love to understand messaging, that nOps says about itself, "The first cloud ops platform "designed to sync revenue growth across your teams." Talk to me about how you do that. >> Yeah. So one of the problems we see in the market right now, there are a lot of tools, there are a lot of dashboards that shows like, "Hey, you have this many issues, "here's the opportunity to fix issues. "And here are the security issues." We're more focused on how do we take those issues from a backlog and fixing those issues. Right? So our focus is more on operationalizing, so your teams could actually own that, prioritize, and actually remediate those issues. So that's where we focus our energy. >> Got it. Let's talk about cloud ops now, and how it varies or differs from traditional cloud management. >> Yeah, I think, like I mentioned, cloud management seems to be more like visibility. And everyone knows that there are challenges in their cloud environment. But when you focus more on the operation side, what we really try to do, from an issue, how do you actually fix that issue? How do you prioritize? How do you make the right trade-offs. Right? Trade offs is important because we make a lot of decisions in the cloud when you're building your infrastructure. Sometime you might have to prioritize for costs, sometime you might have to prioritize based on the SLA. You might have to add more resources to hit your SLAs. So we really help you to prioritize. And we build sort of accountability. You know, you can create roles. Most of the time, what we noticed, I truly believe that if it's everyone's responsibility, it's no one's responsibility. You know? So what we do is we help, within the tool, to establish clear roles and responsibilities. And we show audit log of people reviewing and fixing security issues. And we show audit log of people fixing and reviewing cost issues. That's one way we're trying to bring accountability. >> I like what you said, if everyone's responsible, then really no one is. And that seems to be a persistent problem that we see in businesses across industries, is just still that challenge with aligning IT and business. And especially with the dynamics of the market, JT, that we've seen in the last 18 months, things are moving so quickly. Talk to me about how you guys have been helping companies, especially in the last 18 months, with such change to get that alignment. So that that visibility and those clear roles are established and functional. >> Yeah. You know, what we really do is obviously listen to the customers. Right? And one of the challenges we hear over and over is like, you know, I know I have issues in the cloud environment that I really need help prioritizing. And they're really looking for a framework where they can come in and say, "Okay these are the people who are responsible for security. "These are the people who are responsible for the cost." So as part of onboarding with nOps, that's one of the things you do, you define your workloads. By the way, we automatically create your workload across all your accounts. And then we allow you to move resources around if you like. But then one of the first thing we do is assign roles and responsibilities for each one of these workloads. Oh, it's been incredible to see, when you have that kind of accountability, people actually do make sure that the resources are aligned with the business needs. >> So are you seeing, I mean, that's kind of a cultural shift. That changed management is a challenging process. How are you seeing that evolve in organizations who've been used to doing things maybe in a little bit of a blinders on kind of mode? >> Yeah. Well, changed management is an area where we spent a lot of time, because in cloud, changed management is almost like a fire hose. Right? There's so many changes and you could have 20 people or 20 different teams making changes. I think what people really want is sort of root cause analysis. Like, "Hey, this is what changed here. "Here's why it changed. "And here's how actions we could take, or you could take." So this is where we focus on this, where nOps focuses on. We really help people to show the root cause analysis, these three, four things, these three, four changes are related to this cost increase or these security issues. And we show like a clear path on taking action on those issues. >> That's critical. The ability to show the paths, to take the action to remediate or make any changes, course corrections. As we've learned in the last 18 months, real time is no longer for so many industries, a nice-to-have. The ability to be able to pivot on the fly is a survival and thriving mechanism. So that is really key. I do want to talk about the relationship with nOps and AWS. Here we are at the AWS startup showcase. Give me a little overview on the partnership. >> It's been an incredible. Like I said, I have a long history of working with AWS, and I started a consulting company, a very, very successful one. And so I have years of working with AWS partner teams. I think it's incredible. We were the first company in this, maybe not first, maybe very early. We were part of this Well-Architected framework. And when I came out of that training, the Well-Architected training, I was so excited. I was like, "Wow, this is amazing." You know? Because, to me, whenever you're building infrastructure, you really are making trade-offs. You know, sometime you optimize for cost, sometime you optimize for reliability. So it has been incredible to work with the Well-Architected team. Or Amazon also has this, another program, called FTR: Foundational Technical Review. We've been working closely with that team. So yeah, it's been amazing to collaborate with AWS. >> It sounds pretty synergistic. Have you had a chance influence infrastructure, and some of the technical direction? >> Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We work very closely. One of the cool thing about AWS is that they do take customers' feedback very, very seriously. And, Lisa, also other way around. Right? If AWS is going to build something, having that insight into the roadmap is very beneficial. Because if they're doing it, there's no point of us trying to reinvent the wheel. So that kind of synergy is very helpful. >> That's excellent. Let's talk about customers, now. I always loved talking about customer use cases and outcomes. You guys have a great story with Uber. Walk us through what the challenges were, how nOps came in, what you deployed, and how the business is being impacted positively. >> Yeah, I think Uber and all the enterprises, they sort of have the same challenge, right? There are many teams provisioning infrastructure. How do you make sure all those resources are aligned with your business needs? And in addition to that, not only you have different teams provisioning resources, there are different workloads. And these workloads have different requirements. Right? Some are production workloads, some are just maybe task workloads. So one of the things Uber did, they really embraced sort of nOps' way of managing infrastructure, building accountability, sharing these dashboards with all the different teams. And it was incredible, because within first 30 days they were able to save up to 15%. This was in their autonomous vehicle unit. And they spent a lot of money. And having to see that kind of cost saving, it was just amazing. And we see this over and over. And so like when customers are using platform, it's just incredible how much cost savings are there. >> So Uber, you said, in their autonomous vehicle department saved 15% in just the first 30 days alone. And you said that's a common positive business outcome that you're seeing from customers across industries, is that immediate cost savings. Tell me a little bit more about that as a differentiator of nOps' business. >> Yeah. Because as I mentioned earlier, one of the things we do, we bring accountability. Right? Most of the time when people, before nOps, maybe there are resources that are not accounted for. There is not clear owners, there's no budgets, there's no chargebacks. So I do think that's a huge differentiator of nOps, because, as part of onboarding, as you establish these roles and these responsibilities, you find so much unaccounted resources. And sometimes you don't even need those resources, and you shut them down. And those are the easiest next steps. Right? Like, you don't need to architect, you just shut it down. Like no one needs these resources. So that, I do believe, that's our strength. And we were able to demonstrate this over and over, this, on average, 15-30% cost saving in the first month or so. >> That's excellent. That's a lot of what customers, especially these days, are looking for, is cost optimization across the organization. What are some of the things that you've seen, that nOps has experienced in the last 18 months, with so much acceleration? Anything that surprised you, any industries that you see as really leading edge here, or prime candidates for your technology? >> Yeah. A couple of things. We see a lot of partners, a lot of other consulting company, leveraging nOps as a part of their offering. That's been amazing, we have a lot of partners who really leverage nOps as a go to market and ongoing management of their customers. And I do see that shift from the customer side as well. I think the complexity of cloud continues to kind of increase, like you just mentioned, it sounds like from last 18 months, it accelerated even more. How do you stay up to date, you know? And how do you always make sure that you're following best practices? So companies bring in partners to help them implement solutions. And then these partners are leveraging tools like nOps. And we've seen a lot of momentum around that. >> Tell me a little bit about how partners are leveraging nOps. What are some of the synergistic benefits on both sides? >> Yeah, so normally partners leverage nOps, you know, they will use it for Well-Architected assessments. And, you know, I've personally done a lot of these Well-Architected assessments. And, you know, early on, I kind of learned that, assessments are only good if you're able to move forward with fixing issues in the customer's environment. So what we really do, we really help customers, or sorry, we really help partners to actually do these Well-Architected assessments automatically. We auto discover issues, and then we help them to create proposals so they can present it to the customers like, "Hey, here are the five things we can help you with, "and here's how much it will cost." And, you know, we really streamline that whole process. And it's amazing that some partners used to take like days to do these assessments. Now they can do it an hour. And we also increase the close rate on SoW's because they are a lot more clear. You know, like here are the issues and here's how we can help you to fix those issues. >> You got some great business metrics there, in terms of speed and reduction in cost, reduction in speed. But it sounds like what you're doing is helping those partners build a business case for their customers far more efficiently and more clearly than they've ever been able to do before. >> Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And... >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, so absolutely. Before nOps, everyone is using spreadsheets most of the time. Right? It's spreadsheets to collect information, and emails back and forth. And after the partner's start using nOps, they use nOps to facilitate these assessments. And once they have these customers as ongoing customers, they use nOps for checks and balances to make sure they're constantly aligned. Right? And we have a lot of success of having real revenue impact on partners' business, by leveraging nOps. >> Excellent. That's true value and true trust there. Last question. Where can you point folks, a CTA or URL that you want people to go to to learn more about nOps? >> Yeah. Basically just go to nops.io and just put on signup. Yeah. I love doing this stuff. I love talking to the customers. Feel free to reach out to me, as well: jt@nops. I would love to have a conversation. But yeah, just nops.io is the best place to get started. >> Awesome, nops.io. And I can hear enthusiasm for this, and your genuineness comes through the zoom screen here, JT. I totally thought that the whole time. Thank you for talking to me about nOps, how you guys are helping organizations really embrace cloud ops and evolve from traditional cloud management tools. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> For JT Giri, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS Startup Showcase.

>>mhm >>Hello and welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo alto California, I'm john for a year host of the cube, we're here with a great guest Jt gear, Ceo and founder and ops Hot Startup. Jt Welcome to the cube conversation. >>Hey, that sound, thanks for having me. It sounds like we know each other, we used to run into each other at meat out. So yeah, >>it's fun to talk to you because I know you're, you know, scratching the devops it from the beginning before devops was devops before infrastructure of code was infrastructure as code. All that's played out. So it's really a great ride. I know you had a good time doing it a lot of action though. If you look at devops it's kind of like this new, I won't say devops two point because it kind of cliche but you're starting to see the mature ization of companies besides the early adopters and the people who are hardcore adopting and they realize this is amazing and then they? Re platform in the cloud and they go great, let's do more and next thing, you know, they have an operations issue and they got a really kind of stabilize and then also not break anything. So this is kind of the wheelhouse of what you guys are doing in ops reminds me of no ops, no operations, you know, we don't want to have a lot of extra stuff. This is a big thing. Take a but take them in to explain the company, you're what you guys stand for and what you're all about. >>Yeah, so you know, our main focus is more on the operation side, so, you know the reason why you move to cloud or the reason why you have devops practices, you want to go fast. Um but you know when you're building cloud infrastructure, you have to make trade offs right? You have to maybe some environment, maybe you have to optimize for S L A. And maybe another workload, you have to optimize for um you know, maybe costs, right? So what we're on a mission to do is to make sure that companies are able to make the right trade offs, right? We help companies to make sure all their workload, every single resource in the cloud is aligned with the business needs, you know, so we do a lot of cool things by like, you know, bringing accountability mapping and we're close to different genes. But yeah, the end goal is, can we make sure that every single resource on data Bs is aligned with the business needs >>and they're also adding stuff. Every reinvent zillion more services get announced. So a lot, a lot of stuff going on, I gotta ask you while I got you here, what is the definition of cloud apps these days, from your standpoint and why is it important? A lot of folks are looking at this and they want to have stable operations. They love the cloud really can't deny the cloud value at all. But cloud ops has become a big topic. What is cloud apps and why is it important. >>Right? I mean, first of all, Like you just mentioned, right? Like Amazon keeps on launching more services. It's over 200. So the environment is very complex, Right? And then mm complexity within the services is uh pretty uh you really need to be the main expert for example, know everything about do So, you know, our question to us is, let's say if you find a critical issue, uh let's say you want to uh you know, enable multi AZ on your RDS for example. Uh and it's critical because you know, you're running a uh high availability workloads on AWS. How do you follow up on that right to us. Operation is how do you build a cloud backlog? How do you prioritize, how do you come together as a team to actually remediate those issues? No one is tackling that job, everyone's surfaces like, hey, here's 1000 things that are wrong with your environment. No one is focused on like how do you go from these issues to prioritization to backlog to actually coming together as a team. You know, I've been fixing some of those issues. That's that's what operation means is >>I know it's totally hard because sometimes I don't even know what's going on. I gotta ask you why, why is it harder now? Why are people, I mean I get the impression that people like looking the other way? I hope it goes the problem kind of goes away. What are the challenges? What's the big blocker from getting at the root cause or trying to solve these problems? What's the big thing that's holding people back? >>Yeah, I mean, when I first got into, you know, I t you know, I was working in data center and every time we needed a server, you know, we have to ask for approvals, right? And you finally got a server, but nowadays anyone could provision resources. And normally you have different people within the team's provisioning resources and you can have hundreds of different teams who are provisioning resources. So the complexity uh and the speed that we are, you know, provisioning resources across multiple people, it just continues to go higher and higher. So that's why uh you know, on the surface it might look that hey, this, you know, maybe the biggest instance uh is, you know, aligned with the business needs, you know, looking at the changes, it's hard to know, are those aligned with the business? They're not? So that's that's that's where the complexity and player. >>So the question I get a lot from people we talk about devops and cloud, cloud apps or cloud management or whatever kind of buzz words out there, it kind of comes down to cloud apps and cloud management seems to be the category, people focus on. How is cloud ops different then? Say the traditional cloud management and what impact does it have for customers and why should they care and what do they need an option. >>Right. So one of the things we do uh and and we do think that cloud operation is sort of an evolution from cloud management. We make sure that Every single resource 1st, first of all blondes and workload. So and you know, workload could be a group of microservices uh and then uh you know every single workload has owners like define owners who are responsible for making sure they managed budget that they're responsible for security that normally doesn't exist. Right? Cloud is this black box, you know where multiple people are provisioning resources, you know, everyone tries to sort of build sort of a structure to kind of see like what are these resources for? What are these resources for as part of onboarding to end up? So what we do, we actually, you know, analyze all your metadata. We create like 56 workloads and then we say here is a bucket where there's there, this is totally unassigned, right? And then we actually walked them through assigning different roles and also we walk them through to kinda looking under this unallocated resources and assign resources for those as well. So once you're done, every single resource has clear definition, right? Is this a compliant? Uh you know hip hop workload, what are the run books, what is this for? John I don't know if he heard that before. Sometimes there are workloads running and how people don't know, I don't even know who is the owner, right? So after you're done with an office and after you're managing and uh, you know, uh, managing your workload on and off, you have full visibility and clear understanding of what are the. It's funny, it's >>funny you mentioned the workloads being kind of either not knowing the owners, but also we see people um, with the workloads sometimes it's like throwing a switch and leaving the hose on the water on. And next thing you know, they get the bill. They're like, oh my God, what happened? Why did I leave? What, what is this? So there's a lot of things that you could miss. This brings up the point you just said and what you said earlier aligning resources across the cloud uh and and having accountability. And then you, you mentioned at the top of this interview that aligning with the business needs. I find that fastest. I would like to take him in to explain because it sounds really hard. I get how you can align the resources and do some things, identify what's going on, accountability kind of map that that's, that's good tech. How does that, how do you get that to the alignment on the business side. >>Yeah. I mean we start by, first of all, like I said, you know, we use machine learning to play these workloads? And then we asked basic questions about the workload. You know, what is this workload for? Uh Do you need to meet with any kind of compliance is for this workload? Uh What is your S. O. A. For this workload? You know, depending on that. We we make recommendations. Uh So we kind of ask those questions and we also walk them through where they create roles. Like we asked who was responsible for creating budgets or managing security for this workload and guess what also the you know the bucket where resources are allocated for. We ask for you know, owners for that as well like in this bucket who's the owner for who's going to monitor the budget and things like that. So you know we asked, you know, we start by just asking the question, having teams complete that sort of information and also you know, why do you a little bit more information on how this aligns with the business needs? You know, >>talk about the complexity side of it. I love that conversation around the number of services. You said 200 services depending how you count what you call services in the thousands of so many different things uh knobs to turn on amazon uh web services. So why are people um focused on the complexity and the partnering side? Because you know, it's the clouds at E. P. I. Based system. So you're dealing with a lot of different diverse resources. So you have complexity and diversity. Can you talk me through how that works? Because that's that seems to be a tough beast to tame the difference between the complexity of services and also working with other people. >>Yeah for sure like this this normal to have um you know maybe thousands of lambda functions in their application. We're working with a customer where within last month there were nine million containers that launched and got terminated right there, pretty much leveraging, auto scaling and things like that. So these environments are like very complex. You know, there's a lot of moving pieces even, you know, depending on the type of services they're using. So again what we do, you know we when we look at tags and we look at other variables like environments and we look at who's provisioning resources, those resources and we try to group them together and that way there's accountability uh you know if the cost goes up for one workload were able to show that team like your cost is going up uh And also we can show uh unallocated bucket that hey within last week Your cost is you know, $4,000 higher in the unallocated bucket. Where would you like to move this these resources to just like an ongoing game. You >>know, you know jt I was talking with my friend jerry Chen is that Greylock partners is a V. C. Has been on the cube many times a couple of years ago. We're talking about how you can build a business within the cloud, in the shadows of the clouds, what he called it, but I called it more the enabling side and and that's happened now, you're seeing the massive growth. I'm also talking to some C X O C IOS or CSOs and they're like trying to figure out which companies that are evolving and growing to be to buy from, get to get the technology. Uh and they always say to me john I'm looking for game changing kind of impact. I'm looking for the efficiency and you know, enablement, the classic kind of criteria. So how would you guys position yourself to those buyers out there that might want to look at you guys as a solution and ups what game changing aspect of what you do is out there, how would you talk to that that C I O or C. So or buyer um out in the end the enterprise and the thieves ran his piece. What would you say to them? >>Yeah, I think the biggest uh advantage and I think right now it's a necessity, you hear these stories where, you know, people provision resources, they don't even know which project is it for. It's just very hard to govern the cloud environment, but I believe we're the only tool. Mhm where you want to compromise on the speed, right? The whole reason um cloud but they want to innovate faster. No one wants to follow that. Right? But I think what's important. We need to make sure everything is aligned with the business value. Uh, we allow people to do that. You know, we, we, we can both fast at the same time. You can have some sort of guard rails. So there are proper ownership. There's accountability. People are collaborating and people are also rightsizing terminating resources, they're not using. It's like, you know, I think if companies are looking for a tool that's gonna drive better accountability on how people build and collaborate on cloud, I think reply the best solution. >>So people are evolving with the cloud and you mentioned terminating services. That's a huge deal in cloud. Native things are being spun up and turned off all the time. So you need to have good law, You have a good visibility, observe ability is one of the hottest buzzwords out there. We see a zillion companies saying, hey, we're observe ability, which is to me is just monitoring stuff. They can sure you're tracking everything. So when you have all this and you start to operationalize this next gen, next level cloud scale, cost optimization and visibility is huge. Um, what is the, what is the secret sauce uh, for that you guys offer? Because the change management is a big 12 teams are changing too cost team accountability. All this is kind of, it's not just speeds and feeds, there's, it's kind of intersection of both. What's your take on that reaction to that? >>Yeah, I think it's the Delta. Right? So change management, What you're really looking for is not a, like a fire hose, you're looking for. What changed what the root cause who did it, what happened? Right. Because it's totally normal for someone to provision maybe thousands or even millions containers. But how many of those got shut down? What is the delta and uh, you know, if there is a, there is an anomaly, what is the root cause? Right? Uh, how we fix it. So you know the way we've changed managers, change management is a lot different. We really get to the root cause analysis and we really help companies to make, really show what changed and how they can take action to a media. But if there were issues, >>I want to put a little plug in for you guys. I noticed you guys have a really strong net promoter score. You have happy customers also get partners. A lot of enablement there. You kind of got a lot of things going on. Um, explain what you guys are all about. How did you get here? What's the day in the life of a customer that you're serving? Why then why are the scores so high? Um, take us through a use case of someone getting that value. >>Yeah. So I, I come from like a consulting background, john so you know, I was migrating companies to read the Bs when the institute was in beta and then I, you know, founded a consulting company over 100 employees. Really successful interview. S premier partner called in clouds. And so Enos was born there because because you know it was, it was born out a consulting company, there are a lot of other partners who are leveraging the tools to help their customers and it goes back to our point earlier, john like amazon has to wonder services, right? We are noticing customers are open to work with partners and uh you know with different partners that really helped them to make sure they're making the right decisions when they are building on cloud. So a lot of the partners, a lot of the consulting companies are leveraging uh and hopes to deliver value to their customers as far as uh you know how we actually operate. You know, we pay attention to uh you know what, what customers are looking for, what, where are the next sort of challenges uh you know, customers are facing in a cloud environment world like super obsessed, you know, like we're trying to figure out how do we make sure every single resource is aligned with the business value without slowing companies down so that really drives us, we're constantly welcome customers to stay true to the admission >>and that's the ethos of devops moving fast. The old quote Mark Zuckerberg used to have move fast, break stuff and then he revised it to move move fast and make it stable, which is essentially operational thing. Right, so you're starting to see that maturity, I noticed that you guys also have a really cool pricing model, very easy to get in and you have a high end too. So talk us through about how to engage with you guys, how do people get involved? Just click and just jump in there, buying software buying services, take a minute to explain how people can, can work with you. >>Yeah, it's just, it's just signing up on our site, you know, our pricing is tier model, uh you know, once you sign up, if you do need help with, you know, remediating high risk issues we can bring in partners, we have a strong partner ecosystem. Uh we could definitely help you do interviews to the right partners but it's as simple as just signing up and just taking me out. First thing I guess. >>Jt great chatting with you have been there from early days of devops, born in the field, getting, getting close to the customers and you mentioned ec two and beta, they just celebrate their 15th birthday and I remember one of my starts that didn't actually get off the off the blocks, they didn't even have custom domains at that time was still the long remember the long you are else >>everything was ephemeral like when you restart server, everything will go away a cool >>time. And I just remember saying to myself man, every entrepreneur is going to use this service who would ever go out and buy and host the server. So you were there from the beginning and it's been great to see the success. Thanks for coming on the cube >>all That's >>okay. Jt thanks so much as a cube conversation here in Palo alto. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm.