 From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Escape 19. Okay, welcome back to theCUBE coverage in New York City for the inaugural multi-cloud conference called Escape 19. We're in New York City, escape from New York City, escape from your cloud, multi-cloud is the reality. Armand Dadgar, he's here, CTO co-founder of HashiCorp, CUBE alumni. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. Yeah, great to see you, thanks for having me back. So first of all, I just got to say congratulations on all your success. You guys have been doing extremely well as a business and you guys started out with a very pure mission, continues to be, you're getting some validation, marketplace is spinning in your direction and you couldn't ask for kind of a better scenario, kept doing it, so congratulations. Thank you so much, it's been fun. So you guys are at the pinnacle of kind of the confluence of automation meets, you know, what developers care about, just standing stuff up and getting stuff done, infrastructure as code has been the ethos of cloud, DevOps. Now we're on the horizon here at a cloud that's kind of billing itself as the inaugural multi-cloud show. When people have multiple clouds, but they're not multi-clouding, they're not inter, so there's still a lot more work, but the best minds are here, having conversations around what does that picture look like, what can we do foundationally, what best practices and things you double down on, what's your take on all this? You know, I think it's funny because I think if you had this exact same conference three, four years ago, everyone's take would have been like what, multi-cloud, right? Like everyone was like, multi-cloud's not real, it's only Amazon, et cetera. And so it's funny now to actually be at a multi-cloud conference where it's like nobody even questions the premise. Everyone's like, yeah, obviously we're gonna be multi-cloud. Right, and I think what's happened is that you've seen maturity of the public clouds, right? So it's no longer just Amazon, there's multiple credible clouds. And then I think the other piece of it is large organizations are realizing multi-cloud's inevitable, right? You might say I'm gonna go all in on, you know, cloud A and then I buy a company that's cloud B, now multi-cloud, right? And so I think the pragmatic reality for the kind of global 10,000 is you're gonna be a multi-cloud company whether you want to or whether you don't, right? It's like multi-vendor in the old days. When I was growing up in the, you know, the mini computer networking days, you had multiple vendors, that's not a bad thing. Yeah. Just kind of create some abstractions. I want to get your take on the work environment that's out there. You guys have been very successful providing great tools, open source and commercial for developers to stand stuff up and do their work to operationalize multi-cloud, which is inevitable. How do you see that vision? I mean, obviously common workflows and work streams, but if I'm an IT guy or I'm a VP of IT or CISO or whatever, I got money. I don't want to fork my developer teams. I want my guys being productive. I'd love to have my own stacks on premises. I'd love to push APIs out to my vendors and say, that's how we work together. So a modern thinking is going on. How do you look at the operationalizing that next level? So what I just spoke about is sort of like when we talk about multi-cloud, I think there's kind of four definitions of it. One is the notion of data portability, which is perfect fit for database technology like Cockroach, the notion that I'm going to have data that exists in multiple clouds at the same time. Then you have the notion of workflow portability, which is exactly what you're talking about, which is, hey, if I'm a developer building an app, I don't care, is it going to land on Amazon, is it going to land on-premises, is it going to go to Google? I want one workflow for how do I do my CI CD? How do I do my testing? How do I do the deployment? How do I monitor it? What are the workflows in terms of delivery? Because to your point, if I'm the CIO, I don't want to invest in four different workflows. I want to train my team on one. I want to have a common way of delivering it. And that's a developer efficiency. I think there's the sort of Shangri-La of multi-cloud, which is this idea of workload migration. I'm going to push a button and move it from cloud A to cloud B. And I think for most organizations, that's a very hard to architect for. It requires so much discipline, and I'm not sure it's actually practical for most organizations, because it means that you can't really use any of the cloud's high-value services. It means you have to really architect everything for data portability, everything for workflow portability. And so I think what's reasonable is kind of exactly what you said was really good. Well, the Shangri-La example is a good one. I mean, throw in SLAs on latency. I mean, you can't even get network latencies just so all over the map. So SLAs, I mean, just, that's almost impossible. Yeah, it's not practical. At this point. So the low-hanging fruit ultimately is data portability and workflows, and preserving the developer focus. So what is your take on, and I'd love to get your expert opinion on this, because people are investing in developers, and it's that people are doing it well, and some are not doing it very well. Meaning they've been relying on outsourced vendors. This company's been providing all my dev, and we've been lean and mean, we've got dashboards, we're pushing provisioning servers, and I got to cloud, I got Amazon dashboard, but now I'm like, I can't really crank anything craft out there. I need real developers. So you got great and poor. What's the successful one for having a good, strong enterprise developers? So I think what's interesting is those companies you talked about that you're sort of used to outsourcing everything. For them, they never thought about software dev as a core competency. It's like, oh, I'm a media company, or I'm a retailer. It's not my competency. I'm just going to outsource it to HP, IBM, whoever to do my dev work. And I think what's changing is as you think about DevOps and sort of this new digital economy, it's that, no, the application is my value. Like yes, maybe the product I end up delivering to is a razor blade, but my value is in the digital experience, the engagement. And so I think your core competency has to become software development. And I think that's that big shift. It's a bit of a top-down shift in terms of how do you think about the development group? And then I think from there, it's bootstrapping, a culture, it's bootstrapping, sort of those core engineering teams, like to your point, the kind of cloud native practitioners. I think you have to foster that sort of internal culture and community. But it's also a top-down investment. That's never going to work in a bottom-up way if you don't foster the top-down investment. Say, actually I'm going to think about this team as a revenue driver and not a cost center. It's interesting, I was just doing an exercise on the flight out from California here to the East Coast, and I was looking at all the different players that we cover. We cover hundreds and hundreds of companies. And I was trying to put them in buckets. And then I was like, cloud native, there's clearly a cloud native bucket and there's people in the cloud native. It's like, we know who they are. Then I'm like, okay, enterprise, data center. No, hybrid, oh yeah, hybrid. Well, are they hybrid? Hybrid IT? No, no, hybrid developer. So I was just like trying to shoehorn in, like, so a hybrid certainly is there, but it's hybrid IT is kind of losing favor on my list. It became hybrid developers. Meaning that IT wasn't like categorically relevant in just how they were organizing. They were doing hybrid with developers and then you had pure cloud native, which is just scale. So those two worlds are coming together on the data. Your reaction to that? Yeah, I mean, I think to your point, you can think about the architecture, the application architecture, I think is being distinct from the IT practices, right? And I think to your point, you can live in this sort of weird world where you might have a cloud native architecture, but sort of a traditional IT practice. And I think maybe that's what sort of a hybrid IT might look like. And so I think what ultimately people want to migrate away from that into more of sort of a truly cloud native DevOps sort of mentality. Well, I think one of the insights that's happening in real time with this conversation is that if software is your core competency, then inherently IT is subsumed into it. Right. Because in DevOps, they are the IT. Right. Right, so. Right, so you better be really good at it. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah, so every company, I mean, I think ultimately that's the pivot in my mind is that if you're not going software digital, then you might not make it. Yeah. Ultimately, because someone else will. Right, exactly. All right, talk about your success in Hashicorp. What's been the magic formula for you guys? If you had to look at, I know it's hard and sometimes you get lucky, you guys have made your own breaks, you have a good philosophy, good culture, but you had some tailwinds, you had some good trends at your back helping you. What's the big success formula for you guys? You know, I think there's two big ones, right? I think the two sort of bigger trends that we're sort of writing is one is this motion of cloud adoption, right? Like, you know, that's huge. The other one is this sort of app modernization of how do I go from traditional ticket driven process of delivering an app into DevOps, self-service, agile delivery. And so I think that sort of modernization of the process is just as important as the modernization of the architecture from on-premise to cloud, right? So I think we're kind of writing both of those. And I think what's been really important for Hashicorp is sort of an ethos that I think has helped us is this notion that we care a lot more about the workflow than we care about the technology, right? Because what's crazy to me is we're a small, you know, we're still a startup, right? And so in the last six, seven years of our life, if you look at 2012 and say, hey, what's changed from a technology standpoint since then, I'd say everything. 2012, you had one cloud. You didn't have Docker. You didn't have containers. You didn't have Kubernetes. You didn't have serverless. You didn't have infrastructure as code, right? So there's been just a sea change after sea change in terms of technology, but what hasn't changed is core workflow. And I think for us, that investment was, hey, we're going to be a workflow-oriented company and those things don't change, where if we say, I'm going to be the greatest shop at delivering Java and then Docker shows up, you know, that's an existential threat to your business. Exactly. And I think one of the things that we as a tech industry get into is speeds and feeds, the shiny new toy. And I think that's a great success for them. In fact, I was just having a conversation with another technologist this past week and we were talking about all the cool stuff's going on. He was, John, John, if you think about the workflow, as one thing as an underpinning, this thing's going on, that's automation and some goodness there. He goes, but up the stack, machine learning, forget all that. It's just the workload. Right. So if you think about just workload and workflow. Right. Everything else should just fall into place. Exactly. And that's where the cloud 2.0 is modernizations going. Right. So I think the companies you've seen succeed are either, to your point, they're a new type of workload that exists in the cloud as a managed service. It's Confluent. It's Spark. Right. It's Cockroach that I can go consume as a service. Or you have the workflow vendors. But I've said, great, I'm going to give you a common multi-cloud DevOps way of consuming that and deploying your workload out there. And I think those are the two patterns that work. It's so exciting. This new wave is great. It's just the beginning. We're multi-cloud here. I got to get your take while you're here on cloud 2.0. It's something that I've been kicking around inside the CUBE team as a goof on Web 2.0. Because Web 2.0 is a big goof. Oh, it is Web 2.0. And it caused a lot of fun. Cloud 1.0, if we just say is Amazon, compute, storage, not so much networking, but large scale born in the cloud, goodness. Great. But now the reality of the enterprise and hybrid, things are emerging. Observability is important. Right. Automation is important. Workflows. How would you define cloud 2.0? What's the, if you had to take a stab at that kind of architectural definition where there's new subsystems emerging that are important? Like observability is just network management, but it's super important. Right. Automation, configuration management, but it's now automated. Those are now little white spaces that have become very important. Right. What do you see the building blocks of cloud 2.0? So I think with cloud 1.0, I think it was characterized largely by like a lift and shift, right? You said, okay, I can kind of see how it looks similar to my on-prem. I'm just going to lift and shift the same thing. Versus cloud 2.0, I think the phrase we like to use is it's multi-everything, right? Your multi-cloud, right? It's multiple public clouds in on-prem. It's multi-platform. It's not just lift and shift of VM. It's great. I have my VM-based workload, but I have my container, I have my Kubernetes, I have my serverless. So I have a ton of different platforms that I'm consuming. And it's also multi-service, right? We talk about microservice sort of patterns. It's not just take my monolithic Java app and move it to the cloud. It's decompose that one app into 50 services, summer containers, summer serverless, summer VM, and mixing and matching all of that. So I think that 2.0 world is much more sort of dynamic, much more of sort of a diverse set of technologies that you're using. But to your point, that brings in a bunch of enterprise reality of it's not managing one simple app anymore. There's a ton of complexity in managing the multi-cloud, multi-platform nature of it. So I think there's a lot more investment in sort of management tooling and process to actually make that sort of sane. Well, what's next for you guys? You guys are doing some great work. Again, congratulations. HashiCorp has really earned great reputation, great user base, great following. People sing praises about your tools and software, what's next? What's conquering next? I think, you know, there's two things we recently announced. One was our sort of Terraform Cloud service, which was, hey, how do we take Terraform from just desktop tool, make it sort of a cloud experience where you can collaborate on it as a service, sort of use APIs to hook it into your other systems. And then similarly, we announced a partnership with Microsoft on a console on Azure service, right? So I think we're starting looking at that and saying, really, how do we kind of, I think the irony of HashiCorp is, we're a cloud infrastructure company, but we sell desktop software, right? Like there's an obvious disconnect there. So I think how do we sort of write that and sort of say, okay, really, people want to consume this stuff as a service. How do we meet them where they are, right? And I think we're starting with- And offer both options. Exactly. Exactly. Well, Armin, thanks a lot for coming on, sharing you. I know you super valuable time coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thanks for seeing you. HashiCorp here in the CUBE conversation, talking about what's going on in this dynamic world of modern infrastructure, modern software, where software is a core competence and multi-cloud reality is coming. CUBE coverage is here. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.