but cute at servicenow knowledge 14 is sponsored by service now here are your hosts Dave vellante and Jeff trick we're back welcome everybody Alan line wind is here he's the vice president and chief technology officer of the cloud platform and infrastructure components of service now all the stuff that you don't see it's sort of behind the curtains all the magic and the secret sauce Alan welcome to the cube thank you very much for everything so what's the what's going on what's new in the in the cloud platform you guys obviously started this before cloud was sort of even referred to yes cloud you know I mean I mean Fred talks about his vision and sore clouds in there but you know really cloud started mid-2000s 2006 and then really started taking off so the latter part of the decade you guys kind of maybe not predated but so the same time you know so what's how was the platform evolved I mean the platform is really evolved during people like to talk about cloud when I think about cloud that's a little bit beyond water vapor so what we end it's been a hard time doing the very early to make silicon and make aluminum actually perform something for our customers the cloud platform has really evolved into being a platform that allows people to develop applications that are either both for IT or for the entire enterprise that's really what we're sort of here to talk about from service now is perspective in this whole show is what we've done on the platform is beyond IT and it can power services for the whole enterprise so we've scaled our cloud significantly we're in eight different regions across the planet 16 different data center locations and we're continuing to grow globally on our cloud right now so these data center locations that you used to you're building out data centers you we're actually using wholesale and retail space so we're using our data center partners and we're building out large cases of infrastructure that we own and operate on our own okay so so just make sure I understand so you're not building mega data centers yeah that's not your strategy that's right can you talk about why that's not strategy yeah I mean we're not building on mega datacenters like maybe they hear from facebook and google or other folks we're actually using our data center partners to build the infrastructure sort of meet our customer needs we don't necessarily host people or do sort of infrastructure services like those guys do we end up doing is we're in a building very specific cloud platforms in restructure for the enterprise it just turns out a footprint for that just isn't as big as other folks and we scale it as we need to do and there's confusion also about and I wonder if you could help us clear it up you're sort of your approach to multi-tenancy let's chat all right so you don't have a multi-tenancy that's remodel you've got more of a hybrid model can you talk about that a little bit and what the advantages are yeah absolutely there's folks that have a multi-tenant model what that really means is that multiple customers data is interlaced and and are intersected with in the same data structures within the same data sounds scary it is and can do that scary but we've actually ended up doing is segmenting both the application logic into virtual machines per customer and then actually dividing up the database itself on a per customer basis or every one of our customers has their own unique database process unique to them their own tables their own data they're on isolation and they have application luggages that's unique to them as well that's very different from multi-tenancy where you have a large database and a large piece of infrastructure that a lot of people share one of the biggest advantages for that for our customers is really about availability if I'm a big huge multi-tenant architecture I need to take all hundreds and hundreds of customers in this pod and move them somewhere else because of a failure that's a scary operation but we actually have the ability to do is move individual customers around our cloud and provide a very high available solution for them because of the fact in the way we've architected so if I'm a customer and and you're on a sales call and you tell me that I'm I good I want that right I'm like totally cool with that I'll tell you something right now if ok now if i'ma we're not quite big enough yet although there's some new products are coming up appeal to us but now if I'm let's say I'm an investor I might say well jeez aren't I going to get better leverage if I go multi-tenancy think Amazon and some of you know larger players also that response to that yeah I mean that's sort of an interesting distinction when people think about multi-tenancy their verses single term see what we call it what you actually find is that they think that the multi-tenancy allows you to scale the hardware better but the truth is what we've done when we actually called multi-instance is a hardware can be shared but the actual customer deployment the Java Virtual Machine the database for that customer is laid down on that shared harders we're actually getting good economics at the hardware and we're giving customers isolation they want we think it's very unique in industry loss is just really exciting things well we heard actually was interesting at oracle openworld which was here i want to say two years ago yeah so it was 2012 maybe was even 2011 was 2011 Ellison really railed on multi-tenancy yeah he railed on work day he railed on on on salesforce and said multi-tenancy is a bad thing you don't want to do it in the application now I think I know 12c changes that I'm not sure I know he did a flip flop Larry does that a lot but um but but your your your your dogma if you will is not going to flip flop rights right you guys got you you can see this am I correct well let me ask you does the scale you know to you know huge Heights that Frank's lubin once they hit yeah I mean we have 11,000 12,000 customer instances in the clouds individual instantiations but let me give you a quick fact here for knowledge we spun out 23,000 additional instances so we have the ability to scale this model in a very dynamic way and a very well orchestrated way we think it really helps our customers one of these I like to say about multi-tenancy is I get why it's good for the cloud provider I get why the folks that build multi-tenancy build it because you're right it you both at once you carve it up or bunch of pieces for a customer customers data is interlaced okay I'm not sure why I want that as a customer customer wants out isolation that's what we provide well giving both leverage of hardware and isolation of data yeah because again a conceptual you can see how there might be some some margin advantages but then then the big question to me a security sure know what kind of what kind of security nuance wants not the right word does it ease the security requirements does it make your security cleaner you know easier to scale replicate etc you talked about that a little yeah I mean it clearly makes our application logic easier because they viewed portion of the application is talking to that individual database instance for that individual customer but our security focus is really focused on protecting those instances from the various threats so we're always looking at threats on the Internet we're always adding our perimeter firewalls we're already doing our third party audits we're doing a penetration test so just like any other cloud provider we're continually updating our security model and making sure we're advancing and trying to stay one step ahead of bad guys but because we have customer data that is segmented and isolated it does make our security model easier and more straightforward for the customer by using a lot of open source in the back end yeah we do do a bunch of my soup of open source for the databases of course right we do a bunch of apology on the front end using Mongo right we are using Mongo to help us get our document store for a larger customers that's right what kind of effect if any did heartbleed have on you guys yeah we looked at heart bleed and we we looked at the effect of it we didn't really see much in effect we weren't using systems are affected by that yeah awesome so Alan we've been covering a lot of data center stuff absolutely and there's a lot of interesting innovation that's happening in the infrastructure we're cooling and our and segmentation and all kinds of interesting things where's the line of innovation in the data center between your stuff and the infrastructure provided that you're working with yeah so we spend a lot of time actually focused on the actual sort of server platform storage platform communication between the web servers in the network we don't spend a lot of time on maybe hot aisle containment or cold out containment worried about you know efficiency of the building or air flow through the building we spend a lot of time sort of utilizing the best practices there so we go look for our data center providers that are really driving that peewee number down to the level 10 level but we're not architecting the building we'll look for those providers and then we'll deploy our equipment in a way that takes advantage of that you know we're following and using some of the practices from local compute we're looking at the next generation networking hardware and networking software that's out there and we're really sort of leveraging everything that they're building on the data center itself and then I know there's a lot of data data regulations that are driving kind of the location of your data centers or where he says you have 16 that's right they're basically at eight locations double located that's where if I recall a country's yeah yep so there's still some some open area that you need to penetrate based on customer and demand that you haven't gone yet or where the next one's going to be yeah we're going to build with the customers ask us to build we built into Switzerland and Geneva and Zurich because of that we built in a Canada for data sovereignty issues we're building into Brazil we're building in Asia right now Hong Kong and Singapore so we're going to kind of go over the customer demand takes us oh it's a big question on on Germany and this came up actually we're at the AWS reinvent we did the age of aw our summit and Amazon doesn't have a data center in Germany sure don't have a data we do not turn out right but of course everybody knows german law but everybody knows but but the the sort of urban legend is German losses you got a store data in Germany when we asked amazon this they said well we have a location in ireland that's part of the EU is that a similar response that you guys track we have amsterdam and london and we serve the EU countries ramps down so if I'm a German customer I would store my data there yeah right I mean that would be the default I mean we actually might have a German customer that want to be in the US but we actually had our customers pick which region of the world that want to be deployed in and we deploy on their behalf in there that's a prerequisite of going through the process right you use wage in a store your data that's right and then that's a sales guys figure that out so I so I asked actually i'll ask you as well the Amazon perspective has that ever been tested you know in the court of law do we actually know that this stands up cuz you always hear so much from the the anti amazon crowd oh well you can't choose where your data is stored that's not true certainly not true with you that's right and Germany Brazil very strict they actually have a location in Brazil but but so are you comfortable that it's consider compliant with German law and in this instance do you have those conversations or customers I mean obviously you do business in Germany yeah i mean i'll say my last name is Austrian German but I'm not well-versed in German like everything people tell me I know we can deploy and it's always a good answer without a lawyer okay I am NOT a liar but it's not stopping sales right not something i mean i've seen this again there's so much chatter and noise out there yeah but none of those misperceptions people like to throw that thought out there they like to say you can't do business I haven't had that objection I'm sure we may run into it but right now it's not top of mind good it was interesting it at a pro Conal i would actually had a lawyer on Richard on every often on the Cuban he said you know there's even different data laws in Massachusetts from Connecticut you know Mike well where is the data I mean especially the cloud and is distributed you're talking about across state borders and it hasn't really been challenged and it apparently it hasn't yet or it's going to get really nasty because cloud just by its very nature stuffs distributed that's right it's replicated it's all over the place so it's everywhere from so everybody uses Germany but he was talking about the difference between two borders border states so it could be interesting at some point in time should we talked earlier about my sequel was really was surely the the data platform that you started that's right and then Mongo came in recently didn't it within a year or two we end up doing is we we deploy the master database so the reads and writes in my sequel we also have capabilities in the platform that when we start to scale the hardware we can add what's called we replicas so we can add sort of versions of my sequel that can take transactions that are read-only and then for people that have large document stores you're doing attachments are doing forums are doing images things are really document-based we can actually deploy Mongo and then we can use Mongo for that particular type of transaction in that system as well so that's what you use in long ago that's okay that wasn't clear to me and that's relatively new initiative is it not yeah came out in Calgary which was last year was that release right okay member i'm talking about it last year i think it at no 13 that's right okay so what's what's next for you guys you know behind the curtain which I it's not really behind the curtain many customers would say if I'm hurting right now that's it but you guys didn't you know it's not like is this is a mean well I guess it is party in marketing but you know you don't be talking about products you're talking about value but it's great we have an opportunity to speak to guys like you actually you know running the factory right yeah so what's next what's what a customer is asking for what are the innovations that you guys are working on yeah i think what customers are really asking for is for us to take the cloud platform in the infrastructure and really to evolve it to be that hardened highly available persistent you know people want to talk about the cloud being like electricity being always on we obviously strive for that but like any other business we we have issues you know hardware does go break and we does booming overnight we have to make sure we perfect it we're constantly tuning that we're focused very much on availability you'll see something tomorrow we're actually going to show customers their individual availability as opposed to this sort of larger distributed availability if you will talk about we're also looking into more automation so that way things that generally break that we now have humans intervene with we want to have that automation kick off automatically and then have people automatically have have the machines do that automatically instead of the humans and we're spending a lot of time just really focused on keeping the cloud alive keeping the cloud available and making sure it is kind of behind the curtain yeah invisible is always good right you know I asked Fred this morning and I'll ask you cuz I didn't fully grasp the answer and I want to want to get pressing at this fred was maybe a little over my head or was i don't know maybe I just didn't get it but so the question I had is so you're not really like the mega data center right we talked about earlier you're not like Amazon or Facebook or Google but you know you're growing you could you're getting to a scale that's quite large and you can you can see you know the future you could be very very large today you've got you know n number of applications it's not overwhelming and the question I ask for fred was working a sort of architecture question in database than the database world you've got transactions you're locking on the database the record that's one one application says I got it and then releases it then the next one has it as you grow out the applications my question the fred was does that become problematic do you get no queuing problems performance issues scale issues and he said his answer if I could summarize and I hope I get this right was especially we're not a heavy locking environment and so on number two there's a lot of other things that go on engagements that go on outside of that lock so you didn't see it as a challenge because of the nature of the applications and and I guess the architecture itself but as you grow to massive scale does that potentially become a problem have you architected around that do you have to architect around that or am I just not understanding it yeah i mean i think if we were multi-tenant where we had thousands of customers sharing a single database doing with those locking issues and the similar issues we'd have that issue but fortunately because every customer gets their own version of their own unique database they're just worried about the applications that they're running so what we end up doing is going to monitoring the hardware and monitoring the databases for transaction rates per customer and as this transaction rates per customer as they add applications as they add users as they're adding joins and lists and building forms and creating services like Fred talked about this morning we can actually find out if their database is starting to see issues and if their particular database to start to see issues we can then go to point B but because we can go deploy things like Mongo on a customer by customer basis so we don't have this Gale issue per se we have the monitor the individual customer transaction rate issue and make sure we're always automating and always upgrading the infrastructure to match yeah ok so you've obviously thought about this problem and the customer has to be quite large to even encounter the problem that's right and then you've got methods techniques approaches even I don't even call it brute force approaches we can we can solve it more silica there are cases where the bigger box wins right yeah Moore's Law wins you can you can add more metal to the clouds so and you can make a bigger so the point of all the reason I'm asking all these questions is not just for sort of you know academic or theoretical cures is there is this a potential constraint to your growth down the road and I'm hearing no it's not yeah we don't see it as a constraint some of our biggest customers are running very very large transaction rates regular scale both the core metal to actually drive those transactions as well as tune the system and tune the way the database behaves that way those interactions you're talking about those locks those joins or select statements can actually be handle by the system in a very efficient manner and what do you make of all this you know it's sort of started at at vmworld a year or so ago with the whole software-defined meme and the acquisition of nice Sarah software-defined networking now they're talking about software-defined storage you certainly see that from the hyperscale guys what do you make of that is that is that how does that affect your world well you're talking to guy that actually worked on a software-defined networking company I founded a company called viata in my path to know Coach brocade actually bought right so I believe in the sufferer Defined Networking I believe that software and algorithms running the metal makes a lot of sense our automation our workflow orchestration tools we have on the platform are what we use to bend our metal in the way we like for our customers and I think really putting logic into the software and learning a software actually change the infrastructure is the way for the future and so thinking about your storage and your network and yours your compute infrastructure you're sort of buying off the shelf that's right standard servers are you buying from ODMs or a combination we do we'd a little both we actually look at our servers on an annual basis we evaluate both ODMs that are in white boxes as well as your typical OEMs and then we're looking to understand the transaction rates and the performance of those particular pieces of hardware we do a price performance evaluation and we sort of upgrade and continue to migrate the farm forward and how about the storage and you buying big giant containers or not as big sands we're not so its commodity storage it's chemist or horizontally scaled across the service we don't believe in centralized storage model no fiber channel no InfiniBand no fiber to know and your stack is your stack our stack is on you've written your own stack to do replication and data migration and run app shots the replication side is actually using my sequel binlog replication okay the backup itself is actually using some open source tools as well as some technologies you stuck on top of it we actually call it sm vault for servers no vault and we've actually developed both a hybrid of open source and our own technologies to make that work do you use tape we do not use tape no tape no euro tape yeah i think frankly i'm not surprised Frank salute with the kind of it yeah and what about the networking what's the strategy there yeah from the networking point of view we use commodity here as well from you know the big two vendors out there cisco and juniper we're continually looking to upgrade we're continually looking to drive layer through technologies down close to the user and have a very reliable very done system let me give you an example in every data center cage location we have at least three tier one providers we have a fully read on the network all the way from the internet through the firewalls through the little answers all the way down to the servers in the rack and we just believe a high-availability enterprise-grade top the bottom and and what about this notion of converged infrastructure you're seeing that a lot is that's something that you're you're looking at you're staying away from you're adopting or we actually think it makes a lot of sense you know I'm not going to tell you we're doing it right now because it's it's pretty bleeding edge and we want to be highly available for the enterprise but this idea of a converged network and systems infrastructure that works together with automation again it's just part of our platform part of our DNA so kind of a single throat to choke and yeah reduce passed me at Pat patch management just a block of infrastructure that that's sensible for you absolutely i mean from our point of view the ServiceNow cloud platform would be that orchestration and automation this is like filled day for me being able to ask of a practitioner that's that's actually building out a big animatic cloud you know sounds awesome and okay well let's see so we hit on s the end we are you here on all the pieces here i guess i think i'm out i think i think i'm thinking about anytime you want yeah that's fantastic i really appreciate the insights you know cuz you know a lot of the lot of the cloud suppliers don't like to talk about you know the internal plumbing but i think it's important you know your customers want to know i mean at the end of the day you don't build a great you know multi-billion dollar business without understanding how infrastructure works in the architecture of the infrastructure I'm a really strong believer that our applications are driving Enterprise forward and I'd have a hard time talking to the cios I talked to you on a regular basis without convincing them but the infrastructure they are relying on for those applications is as solid as it gets do you see the need I do have another one so do you set the need you know remember the early days we all lose I all thought okay here's here comes you know guys like Amazon its commodity infrastructure software lead that's going to lead into the enterprise you're starting to see that happen now but now Amazon's kind of done a one-eighty that's right they're going highly customized infrastructure there's they won't show us their servers but they'll show us so you know no some odm server that's super dense and they say we blow that away because they control their data centers do you see that type of customization requirement for your servers and for your free for your networking we spend time looking at that as well I won't say perhaps we do it quite in-depth as Amazon don't run quite the same size farm they do but we do look at you know the motherboards and the PCI cards and this the the flash disk that's in there the SSD we spend time understand the bios we spend the time understanding how many ports were going to connect to the top Iraq switch we spend time specking all that I mean we're full heart and enterprise platform and our customers depend on us to do that so we have to we have to do that diligence are you using fun all right we still got time are you using flash how are you using it yeah we are using flash we find that the flash arrays we use fusion-io and for those s SD cards we put them into our higher-end database servers from moving actually off spinning media onto flash for the entire farm and one of the way we use it is it helps us get I ops out of the database servers and it actually helps in replication because the way replication works is I'm operating data center a I do my transaction in that database I write it out to the flash because the database is in memory I send it over the parasite the parasites gotta read it off disc and rerun that transaction and keep that replication in sync so that I oh actually does help us keep replication going so using percona my sequel or no no okay so do you raising are on my signal okay do you do atomic rights with fusion we are doing some rights for fusion yes yeah okay so you're essentially bypassing the scuzzy stack and writing directly to we have ability to do that with a new fusion on your driver so I'm not sure they're widely deployed it does it have potential absolutely not it's an amazing performance you can go straight from memory straight to SSD just like you're acting a ram chip why wouldn't we want to not only am I limiting the spinning disk I'm eliminating the overhead of the the storage protocol we'd love to be able to do that yes okay that's understanding the life of the flash / David's lawyers article that we covered the other day because I written specifically for flash as opposed to written for disk how about object stores that's something that you you know we generally don't have a ton of object stores that we do but when we do their document types are attachments to an incident their graphics on a particular application they're part of a workflow that pops up or resent something to the customer and if that is sort of documents become heavy transactional types for reads in the database put those on Mongo okay so and you're doing sort of a combination of block and file or it's all blocked it's all block all block okay well file except I guess what you doing in manga course violence or quasi object that's right awesome I'm having a field day I really appreciate all the insights you know it's this is good i'm actually any the second watch this several times i mean i mean the truth is for us it's all about like i said it's all about talking about folks about infrastructure we think the infrastructure is the core foundation for everything we do in the enterprise apps the apps are really what our customers are about letting them be creators and letting them do our applications but let's face it you know we build the cloud and the club's got to be solid to run those apps my last question so you we've been talking about all these cool innovations when do you see these or do you see these seeping into the the enterprise on-premise do you see that as a sort of viable approach for CIOs or or in your view are they just going to sort of outsourced it mostly to the cloud over the next decade I'm pretty clearly biased at the moment but you know I over your application driven we're talking about infrastructure fair enough from the side I mean I think the things that we're doing in the cloud and the infrastructure are sort of leading-edge I do you think the enterprises are going to adopt that but I'll be honest you there are certain enterprises are ahead of us right there are certain folks that are thinking one or two steps ahead of us because rat just a bigger scale than we are almost though yeah not most but there are some we've learned from them in their banks and yeah i'm thinking the big banks the big big financial institutions we spend time with them learning what they're doing inside so we can actually make the cloud better and they're sharing with you okay absolutely because they're trying to learn too yeah they're ready one happens to somebody that's running on bailing wire right yeah that's amazing innovations actually going on in financial services and it's like the the downturn ever happened yeah well thanks very much for five years all right great stuff keep it right there buddy Jeff Rick and I'll be right back we're live from 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