welcome back to la we are live in los angeles at kubecon cloudnativecon 21 lisa martin and dave nicholson we've been talking to folks all day great to be here in person about 2 700 folks are here the kubernetes the community the cncf community is huge 138 000 folks great to see some of them in person back collaborating once again dave and i are pleased to welcome our next guest we have suresh ragaram co-founder and ceo of platform 9. sarish welcome to the program thank you for having me it's a pleasure to be here give our audience an overview of platform 9 who are you guys what do you do when were you founded all that good stuff so we are about seven years old we were founded with a mission to make it easy to run private hybrid and edge clouds my co-founders and i were early engineers at vmware and what we realized is that it's really easy to go use the public cloud because the public clouds have this innovation which is they have a control plane which serves as a it serves as a foundation for them to launch a lot of services and make that really simple and easy to use but if you need to get that experience in a private cloud or a hybrid cloud or in the edge nobody gives you that cloud control plane you get it from amazon in amazon get it from azure in azure google and google who gives you a sas cloud control plane to run private clouds or edge clouds or hybrid clouds nobody and this is uh this is what we do so this is we make it easy to run these clouds using technologies like kubernetes with our our sas control plane now is it limited to kubernetes because when you you you mentioned your background at vmware uh is this a control plane for what people would think of as private clouds using vmware style abstraction or is this primarily cloud native so when we first started actually docker did not exist like okay so at the time our first product to market was actually an infrastructure service product and at the time we looked at what is what is out there we knew vmware vsphere was out there it's a vmware technology there was apache cloud stack and openstack and we had look the open ecosystem around vms and infrastructure as a service is openstack so we chose open source as the lingua franca for the service endpoint so our control plane we deliver openstack as a service that was our first product when kubernetes when the announcement of communities came out from google we knew at that time we're going to go launch because we'd already been studying lxc and and docker we knew at the time we're going to standardize on kubernetes because we believe that an open ecosystem was forming around that that was a big bet for us you know this this this foundation and this this community is proof that that was a good bet and today that's actually a flap flagship product it's our you know the biggest biggest share of revenue biggest share of install base uh but we do have more than one product we have openstack as a service we have bare metal as a service we have containers as a service with kubernetes i want to ask you some of the the i'm looking at your website here platform9.com some of the three marketing messages i want you to break these down for me simplify day two ops multi-cloud ready on day one and we know so many businesses are multi-cloud and percentage is only going up and faster time to market talk to me about this let's start with simplified day two ops how do you enable that so you know one of the biggest if you talk to anyone who runs like a large vmware environment and you ask them when was the last time you did an upgrade or for that matter somebody who's running like a large-scale kubernetes environment or an openstack environment uh probably in a private cloud deployment awesome when was the last time you did an upgrade how did that go when was the last time you had an outage who did you call how did that go right and you'll hear an outpouring of emotion okay same thing you go ask people when you use kubernetes in the public cloud how do these things work and they'll say it's pretty easy it's not that hard and so the question the idea of platform 9 is why is there such a divide there's this you know we talk about digital divide there is a cloud divide the public clouds have figured out something that the rest of the industry has not and people suffer with private clouds there's a lot of demand for private clouds very few people can make it work because they try to do it with a lot of like handheld tools and you know limited automation skills and scripting what you need is you need the automation that makes sure that ongoing troubleshooting 24x7 alerting upgrades to new versions are all fully managed when amazon doesn't upgrade to a new version people don't have to worry about it they don't have to stay up at night they don't deal with outages you shouldn't have to deal with that in your private cloud so those are the kinds of problems right the troubleshooting the upgrades the the remediation when things go wrong that are taken for granted in the public cloud that we bring to the customers who want to run them in private or hybrid or edge cloud environments how do you help customers and what does future proofing mean like how do you help customers future proof their cloud native journey what does that mean to platform 9 and what does that mean to your customers i'll give you one of my favorite stories is actually one of our early customers is snapfish it's a photo sharing company it's a consumer company right when they got started with us they were coming off of vmware they wanted to run an openstack environment they started nearly four years ago and they started using us with openstack and vms and infrastructure as a service fast forward to today 85 percent of the usage on us is containers and they didn't have to hire openstack experts nor do they have to hire kubernetes experts but their application development teams got went from moving from a somewhat legacy vmware style id environment to a modern self-service developer experience with openstack and then to containers and kubernetes and we're gonna we're gonna work on the next generation of innovation with serverless technologies simplifying you know building modern more elastic applications and so our control plane the beauty of our model is our control plane adds value it added value with openstack it added value with kubernetes it'll add value with what's next around the evolution of serverless technologies right it's evergreen and our customers get the benefit of all of that so when you talk about managing environments that are on premises and in clouds i assume you're talking hyperscale clouds like aws azure gcp um what kind of infrastructure needs to be deployed and when i say infrastructure that's can be software what needs to be deployed in say aws for this to work what does it look like so some 30 of our users use us on in the public cloud and the majority of that actually happens in aws uh because they're the number one cloud and we really give people three choices right so they can choose to use and consume aws the way they want to so we have a small minority of customers that actually provisions bare metal servers in aws that's a small minority because the specific use cases they're trying to do and they try to deploy like kubernetes on bare metal but the bare metal happens to be running on aws okay that's a small minority a larger majority of our users in aws or some hyperscale cloud brings their vpc under management so they come in get started sign up with platform 9 in their platform 9 control plane they go and say i want to plug in this vpc and i want to give you this much authorization to this vpc and in that vpc we essentially can impersonate them and on their behalf provision nodes and provision clusters using our communities open source kubernetes upstream cncf kubernetes but we also have customers that said hey i already have some clusters with eks i really like what the rest of your platform allows me to do and i think it's a better platform for me to use for a variety of reasons can you bring my eks clusters under management and then help me provision new new clusters on top and the answer is you can so you can choose to bring your bare metal you can choose to bring your vpc and just provision like virtual machine and treat them as nodes for communities clusters or you can bring pre-built kubernetes clusters and manage them using our management uh product what are your routes to market so we have three routes to market um we have a completely self-serve completely free forever uh experience where people can just go sign up log in get access to the control plane and be up and running within minutes right they can plug in their server hardware on premises at the edge in the cloud their vpcs and they can be up and running from there they can choose to upgrade upsell into a grow into an uh growth tier or you know choose to request for more support and a higher touch experience and work with our sales team and get into an enterprise tier and our that is our second go to market which is a direct go to market uh companies in the retail space companies tech companies uh companies in fintech companies that are investing in digital transformation a big way have lots of software developers and are adopting these technologies in a big way but want private or hybrid or edge clouds that's the second go to market the third and and in the last two years this is new to us really exciting go to market to us is a partner partner let go to market where partners like rackspace have oem platform line so we have a partnership d partnership with rackspace all of rackspace's customers and they install base essentially including customers who are consuming public cloud services wire rackspace get access to platform 9 and rackspace working together with rackspace's ability to kind of service the whole mile uh and also uh we have a very important partnership with maveneer in the 5g space so 5g we think is a large opportunity and there's a there's a joint product there called maven webscape platform to run 5g networks on our community stack so platform nine why what does that mean harry potter harry potter so it's platform nine and three quarters okay we had this realization my cofounders and i were at vmware for 10 for 10 15 years and we were struggling with this problem of why is the public cloud so easy to use why is it so hard to run a private cloud and even today i think not many people realize uh and that's the analogy to platform nine and three quarters it's like it's right in the middle of king's cross station you go through it and you enter the whole new world of magic that that secret door that platform nine and three quarters is a sas control plane that is a secret sauce that amazon has and azure has and google has and we're bringing that for anybody who wants to use it on any infrastructure of their choice where can customers go to learn more about platform nine so platform nine dot com uh follow us on twitter platform line says or on linkedin you know and if any of our viewers are here at kubecon they can stop by your booth what are some of the things that you're featuring there we are at the booth we have our product managers we have our support engineers we have the people that are actually doing the real work behind the product right there we're talking about our roadmap we're talking about the product demos we're doing like specific show talks on specific deep dives in our product and we're also talking about some some really cool things that are coming up in the garage uh in the in the next six months can you leave us with any teasers about what some of the cool things are that are coming up in the garage yeah one one one thing that is a really big deal is um uh is the ability to manage kubernetes clusters as as as cattle right kubernetes makes node management and app management lets you treat them as cattle instead of pets but kubernetes clusters themselves our customers tell us like even in amazon eks and others these clusters themselves become pets and they become hard to manage so we have a really really interesting capability to manage these as more as you know from infrastructure code with githubs uh as cattle we actually have an announcement that i'm not able to share at this point which is coming out in two weeks uh in the ed space so you'll have to stay tuned for that so folks can go to platformnine.com.com check out that announcement two weeks two weeks from now by the end of october that's right awesome sharers thank you so much for joining us i love the fact that you asked that question because i kept thinking platform nine where do i know that from and i just googled harry potter that's right from nine and five dying because i didn't automatically make the correlation because my son and i are the most unbelievable potterheads ever yeah well so we have that in common that's fantastic awesome thank you for joining us sharing what platform mine is some of the exciting stuff coming out and two weeks learn to hear some great news about the edge absolutely awesome thank you for joining us my pleasure thank you for having me uh our pleasure as well for dave nicholson i'm lisa martin live in los angeles thecube is covering kubecon cloudnativecon21 stick around we'll be right back with our next guest