 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of DockerCon Live 2020 brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to DockerCon 2020, DockerCon 20, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for a virtual event, DockerCon. Go to DockerCon.com and check out all the great footage and also great guests. We're talking to all the major thought leaders and people in the industry making it happen as we have this new reality. We've got a great guest and a great segment here from EngineX, now part of F5, Sydney Rapsat who's the Vice President of Product Management. Sydney, thanks for coming on this segment. Appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. Yeah, no problem, happy to be here. So EngineX, everyone that does development knows about you guys, been very popular product with developers, number one in the Docker Hub, we'll get into that later on in the segment. So it's known really in the industry, is really easy to use and very reliable component of cloud native and cloud if you will, anything networking. So I got to ask you with the new reality, we're living with COVID-19, we now see the new reality that's now apparent to everyone in the world that with the new work style, working at home, VPNs are under provision, now people are working from home, more surface area with security. The at scale problems are surface for the executives and business saying, we need to figure this new reality out because this is not going to change. It's going to move to hybrid when it comes back, but ultimately it exposes and highlights the opportunities around cloud native and kind of shows the operating model of how applications are going to be used. And so I think this is going to be a mainstream trend for what used to be an inside baseball kind of industry conversation around microservices, containers, Docker containers, Kubernetes. This is all now a tailwind for what will be a massive surge in new apps. Want to get your thoughts and reaction to that as you guys are in the middle of it with your product and the developers who have to build new value on top of it. What's your reaction? Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. We're also dealing with our own version of this new way of working, right? We're also working from home and working remotely and seeing how that impacts us. But as we think about our customers and the folks that leverage EngineX, we started with scaling applications. We had that 10X solution that made it easier to deploy an application and have it scale in a very efficient way. And so as folks are moving online more and more, relying more on staying connected, no matter where they're working from, providing that capability is something that's going to continue to be core and will increase in importance. And as folks are looking to build more modern applications or modernize what they already have, leveraging our technologies is just a natural extension. It's the technology they're already familiar with. They've been relying on it for many years and as they look to the future, it has the capabilities they need to continue to rely on it going forward. What are some of the new things that you're working on that you can share with the audience? Because you're known for tried and true, very reliable. Okay, now you've got microservices, which is emerging and very dynamic, literally, figuratively. So what's the new stuff? What are you guys focused on? Can you share some insights into how you're thinking about it and some things that you're doing? Yeah, a big part of what we're focused on is really taking away the headaches that come with scaling up applications, especially in the modern world. You know, those headaches are all about, you know, understanding the complexity of these new applications, gaining the confidence needed to be able to deploy them at scale and understand not only what they're doing, but make sure that if something were to go wrong, they could figure out what was happening. And so as we think about the investments we're making to help folks modernize versus just making it easy to employ modern applications at scale, which is one category of things. Second is making sure that you have, you know, really strong understanding of how that application is really working so that, you know, if it breaks, it can be fixed quickly. With their opportunities to improve it, we can quickly see the impact of it. And, you know, there's a lot of capabilities we're building in along those two dimensions. And then the third dimension I would say is around security. I think there's a lot of new surface area that's being exposed as folks start to build more microservices-based applications. And, you know, with the technology we have, we allow people to apply both rich security capabilities as well as very surgical capabilities depending on where they need the right functionality. And the container business has been really a great ride to watch the rise of containers. It really, you know, someone who's been in software engineering since, you know, I was, you know, 17. You know, the old way of systems thinking is modernized with containers. And you saw that the beginning of a surge of a sea change. Now, obviously with microservices, we just pointed out, it's going to create a whole other level of headroom. But containers really brought in this notion of making systems work better together. And I think that's really been a great boon for developers. So I got to ask you, you know, Docker containers, obviously now with good Kubernetes and this trend, you guys have been very popular, if not the most popular downloaded container in the hub. And so you've been super popular with developers. So what happens next? Well, first of all, why is that the case? And talk to the developers. Why will you continue to be popular? What are you guys, how are you going to keep that, that satisfaction going? Why so popular? And how are you going to keep that rolling? Yeah, I think why so popular is, I think we've just been fortunate to ride the wave of, you know, trusted solutions, right? So folks are already leveraging us for their critical applications in a very critical location. It's natural to look to that same type of technology as you move to new environments. And yeah, we've been very fortunate to, you know, have folks continue to trust us with their applications as they move to new environments and as they containerize things. And we appreciate that. And we continue to invest in making sure that our feature set is just as capable in those environments as it is anywhere else. And in addition to that, we do invest heavily in making sure that our capabilities in the container space and the microservices space specifically are staying ahead of the curve. There's a lot of work we're doing to support the next generation capabilities that folks want to be able to leverage but aren't necessarily yet. And that scales from kind of the nearer term things like, things like GRPC all the way out to HTTP 3, that's, you know, on the horizon. And so, you know, as we look at, you know, the space, we're privileged to have the footprint already. But at the same time, we're not resting on our laurels. We're absolutely investing in making sure that we allow folks to continue to deliver that high quality, high performance application experience, no matter what environment they choose to use. You know, you know, this whole COVID crisis brings up the glasses half full or half empty, depending on who your view is. You know, the two worlds are certainly getting more collision oriented when they come together. The CXO level, the size of the business and the developer side. You know, we've always said for years, oh, the developer's on the front lines. And it's true. They have been cloud native and cloud has been great for developers. But now more than ever, the conversation having on the business side with CXO, CEO, CIO, CSOS or whatever have been, hey, my house is on fire. I don't need to worry about the appliances and what's going on in my kitchen. I need to save my business. And so they're then going to call the developers to the table. And you're seeing this kind of formation of critical path thinking around, okay, we need to come out of this crisis on a reinvention growth trajectory, which brings the developers into the mix even faster. So I want to get your thoughts on that because, you know, what does that actually mean? Are they going to be called in for projects? I mean, what's the meetings look like? Because, you know, I have a Zoom meeting or whatever. This is going to be now a new dynamic, a new psychology of the business models of these companies where developers are going to be very active leaders in that new role because the virtualized world now that we live in is going to be different. The application is going to have more demands and more needs, more capabilities. So take us through your thinking on this and what should developers expect when they get called to those meetings? Yeah, I think, you know, the trend that we're seeing that's going to accelerate, I believe, as a result of this is the internal transformation. So there's a lot of technologies that developers already leverage to be able to deliver their apps. And there's technologies that they'd like to be able to leverage more and more, especially as they're using more modern environments. And that tends to come into sharp relief against the legacy infrastructure that exists and the legacy tooling that oftentimes exists in large organizations. And so as organizations start to see, not only did that the world has changed prior to COVID and they need to modernize and transform, I think this crisis will also spur folks to really put some more thought into how they operate. We're already looking at it from the remote work perspective, but also the agility that businesses really want to be able to have but traditionally have been prevented from having. And so I think that the developers are really going to have an opportunity here to really drive that agile change they want to see in an organization so they can get the capabilities as they want out to market quickly. That's going to require new tools, new processes within the organization. And those are the types of things that we're fully supportive of. We work in legacy environments, we work in modern environments. We allow companies to be as agile as they'd like to be. And I think developers are going to have a really good opportunity here to really be leaders of that change. That's awesome, great insights. Oh, let's go to the developer side. I'll put my developer hat on for a second. Yes, Sidney. Okay, the business guys came to me. We're going to do more cool stuff. I get that, that's totally relevant. Very good insight there. But now I'm the developer and I've been working with Nginx and I know of Nginx. What's in it for me? What's in it for me, the developer? What do I need to know about Nginx now? For me, as a developer, going forward. Look, I mean, we come from a really strong open source tradition and the main reason folks use our solutions because we take headaches away, right? I mean, we're a tool that allows folks to deliver their applications, deploy their applications without having to worry about the mechanics and the plumbing. And so for the developers, what's in it for you is you build the application, we'll take care of the rest. We'll make sure it gets delivered with the controls that are required with the security and authentications required. We operate as an extension of your application. We provide a lot of nice things at the front door all the way back to, you know, into the bedrooms, technically, as far as the application infrastructure is concerned. But, you know, we take care of that common kind of infrastructure that infrastructure set of capabilities needed so that application developers can simply focus on building the best applications they can and we'll make sure that they work. Awesome. Now let's get into the F5 acquisition combination with Nginx. What does that do for you guys as a change of capabilities, as it increased more headroom for solutions? Is there a new joint tech? Take us through some of the impacts of that combination. Yeah, so it's been a good ride. It's been just over a year since the deal closed and we've been aggressively investing in scaling up the vision that we previously had. You know, we really want to bring applications to life. You know, make it so that, you know, your application not only is scalable and highly available, it's able to adapt over time and that, of course, would require, you know, input from, you know, the operations teams, of course. But, you know, we're trying to make sure that folks have the ability to operate their applications under any circumstances, whether they're being attacked, whether they're under high demand, whether people are moving all over the place and we're really trying to make it so that the application is essentially bulletproof. So, you know, with F5, you know, we have the ability to invest more in that roadmap and that vision. I mean, in addition to bringing on some pretty cool complementary capabilities, one of the things that we're really happy to see is the rich security capabilities that F5 had or has that we're now able to leverage with the IngenX solutions side by side, providing, you know, again, new ways to get really advanced security capabilities into the right places in your application. And so, yeah. Great insights. I really appreciate that commentary. Love to get your thoughts on just something that's always been near indeed in my heart, you know, being in the cloud world since the early days and trying stuff now, it's fully enterprise ready and doing all sorts of new things, get a multi-cloud hybrid. But the memory of the days back when DevOps was kind of debated all of that, is it DevOps or they always had that DevOps kind of, you know, I'm an operations person or a developer, that's kind of generally been resolved in the sense that infrastructure as code has kind of resolved that. But now with the COVID crisis, you're seeing operations clearly from the center again, right? So you got security ops now coming online, networking ops. So I think the new reality, and you got the edge exploding, people are at home that's technically an edge, you know, perimeter, security is now the edge point. More and more edges, more and more network traffic is getting more and more complicated. This is bringing up a lot of conversations around what is the new formula as you navigate this? How do you attack the problem spaces? How do you create solutions? Is there a playbook? Is there anything that you could share in terms of this new thinking because it's going to be a new trajectory? I think this is an inflection point. Cambridge explosions coming of apps, I believe we've been kind of reporting on that, but the thinking has to change. It's going to be pretty crazy. What's your thoughts on this? Yeah, I think folks are getting more and more experience with kind of this new way of working. Infrastructure of code is absolutely here. Automation is absolutely here, orchestration is absolutely here. And so I see, you know, more and more these capabilities will get stitched together. And as I said earlier, you know, this organizational transformation that's all about taking the human more and more out of the loop for certain things to be able to, in the benefit, or to the benefit of being able to move much more quickly, but in a predictable way. So you're eliminating the failures that come with moving quickly, but you're getting that velocity that you really wanted. And so, yeah, I think there's more and more adoption of new practices. It's not going to be overnight for folks, but I do think, again, that this crisis is going to give folks an opportunity to really take a deep look at how they've been operating and where they want to get to. And it's going to provide an opportunity to accelerate that move. You know, from a developer's perspective, the tried and true form of making something complex easy, whether it's through abstractions, making things highly performant and highly available, always a good formula, right? I mean, as the world gets more complex, you still got to move packets around. You still got to run applications. It's just going to be that tried and true formula of, you know, reduce the complexities, make things easier, but makes things run faster, make things run higher scale. This seems to be the playbook. What's your thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. You know, things that once were hard or becoming easy, and I think we'll look back three years, five years from now, and we'll see a world that's even more automated, moving much more quickly. And some of the things that look difficult now are going to become commoditized, right? And so, you know, as I talk about bringing applications to life and making applications more resilient, more able to protect themselves, more able to heal, defend all that kind of stuff, the things that, the advanced things that we're doing now that, you know, folks are kind of playing with will become the easy things and we'll have new challenges to focus on, especially as we look at things like AI. We're really starting to get a sense for not only the capabilities we can apply to impact application behaviors and performance, but, you know, once you get to the point where you've built up a good library of capabilities, now you really have a nice playbook that can become the foundation for even more advanced things. Yeah, build that foundation, scale it up. It's beautiful. Scale is the new competitive advantage. I love it. Final question, just take a minute to give the plug for Nginx. Really appreciate your insights here in this segment on this new reality, this new developer environment is going to be huge. Give the plug for Nginx. What are you guys working on? What should people know about? Cher, what's happened? Yeah, so Nginx has spent, you know, the last decade plus making applications work at scale. We're really focused now on making applications easy and bringing them to life. And so, you know, the laser focus we have is on taking away the headaches that folks might have, you know, as they try to scale up on their applications. So we're focused on that space. We're focused on taking away the headaches that folks have as they're trying to make sure that the applications are more secure. We're taking away the headaches that folks have as they're dealing with the complexity of applications and APIs, you know, that's the hottest thing right now. People aren't talking just about applications, but they're actually talking about the APIs that need to be leveraged to be able to make their applications really same. And so, you know, in all of those spaces, our focus is on making modernization much easier and taking away the headaches associated with doing so. Sydney Rapsad with EP and product management at Nginx, now part of F5, great conversation. Hit him up on Twitter. He's out there, great conversation with the community. Really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you, Sydney. Okay, thank you. Okay, hit him up on Twitter. Got any questions? Jump into the event. This is DockerCon 2020. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto Studios getting all the remote interviews as fast as we can, getting them to you. Here's DockerCon segment. Thanks for watching.