 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2018. Brought to you by the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of KubeCon 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier with Lauren Cooney, my cohost this week. Our next guest is Jim Ramji, VP of Product at DigitalOcean. Fast-growing startup, now growing company. Congratulations, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So you guys got some hard news. You got product, Kubernetes product, and you guys just upgraded your status on CNCF. Let's jump into the product news real quick. What's the hard news? Yeah, so we just announced a Kubernetes product and service on our platform. And we've had a lot of customers who actually have been deploying Kubernetes on our platform, either themselves or through a managed provider. And a lot of customers, specifically businesses, have been asking us to provide native support for Kubernetes. So now, this is native support for Kubernetes on the DigitalOcean. What does native support for customers mean specifically? Is it managing the workload down to, what level of granularity, I guess, the question? We're specific about the support. Yeah, yeah. So essentially, typically developers who are deploying container workloads or Kubernetes workloads do this themselves. Now we make it very, very easy. So you can come into our platform and within a few clicks deploy a Kubernetes cluster with your typical integrations of monitoring or container registry and the Kubernetes dashboard. So you basically just select a couple of features and they can go from there. It's just run again. It's just a few clicks and you are running. And the reason why we did that and sort of the history of the company is really focused on removing friction for developers to get started. So we make it very, very easy from a product experience perspective and also from a cost perspective. So we remove all the barriers for any team size to get started. And so that's why we've made the product very, very easy to use, very simple. And then we also plan to have a lot of tutorials around containers or containerizing an application and scaling in the microservices. That's great. Talk about the security aspect of it. It's been a big topic here. We were talking about in our intro, Lauren and I, around that it's evolving in real time. Things are moving fast. Upfront work needs to get done. How do your customers think about security in context of the Kubernetes off? Yeah, so we have a story for that. We are trying to essentially deploy some native integrations, some open source projects that help us do security scanning. So the goal is to essentially let our customers know of vulnerabilities that they may have based on the images that they are deploying. And you know, all of us are guilty of it. We will get a public container image and launch it and then realize that there's some security flaws. And so that's something we do want to address as we continue to roll out additional features throughout this year. I know we've interviewed you guys before, but I want you to just take a minute and explain for the folks watching who might not know DigitalOcean, what you guys do, your value proposition, who you guys target, how you sell the product, what's in the service, all that good stuff. Share a one minute update on what you guys do. Yeah, so we are a New York based company. They were founded in 2012 out of Techstars. And the value proposition is very simple in that we want to be the cloud platform for developers and their teams so that they're focused on software that changes the world. And what that means is we take all of the complexity in our product development process, essentially to make it very easy for a developer to go from concept or idea to production as fast as they can. Once they get there, we want to also enable them to scale reliably on our platform. And essentially all of the features that we've launched have been driven by customer demand. So they tell us that we're scaling on your platform, we really need these additional features. And that's how we respond. So we are very developer obsessed and focused on that specific persona and help them get to the cloud as quickly as possible. So you're solving the problem for the developer. Big pain points are what? So there are three. We think of learning as the first one as a barrier to developers. So this is why we've built a library of tutorials to about 1400 plus tutorials. We get about three million unique visitors on our platform. And about 80% of our customers actually came from one of the tutorials. So that's such a great source of documentation. Documentation is so important. So important. So that's the first one. The second one is building. This idea of let's remove all friction for you to go from zero, essentially an idea to production as fast as possible. So there are two things we do there. One, we try to make the product very simple and easy to use. And two, we are very price competitive. So we have a very competitive price to performance ratio in the market with the idea that if you want to keep your total cost of operations as low as possible. And so that's another reason why developers, teams and also businesses are now, we are in their consideration set because they're like, well, developers love this product and I can get a cost benefit. Why would I not do that? And then the last one is scaling, which is once you're growing your application, you're going to get ability to scale and support. And so we provide free support to all of our customers regardless of the size of your workload or the size of customer or business. And I think that's a very important value proposition. So who do you compete against? Like, who are a couple of your competitors? So the best way to answer that is to see, is to go to our customers and see who they compare us with. And typically we are compared against AWS and Google. Okay. And so they are the ones who will come to us and say, hey, we're about to launch an app or we're considering moving your workloads. You know, here's what our setup looks like in Google or AWS, you know, can you provide us similar capabilities? And a lot of the time tends to be, you know, our developers already love you. If you have these capabilities and feature set, we would love to move our workloads. So that's- You've got a tremendous amount of active developers as well, correct? Yes. So, and you're growing that exponentially. What is kind of your growth look like year over year? Yeah, so last year we signed the one millionth developer on our platform. There's essentially one million developers have created an account on our platform. And we sometimes have developers that come in and out of our platforms, if you've done with your projects, if you're a student. But we have about half a million active developers on our platform and growing rapidly. And we also foster a community which is growing tremendously. So we have about three and a half million active developers in our communities, reading articles, and going through Q and A, and posting very interesting projects. Those are some great numbers. I mean, they're up there with Salesforce growth. So that's tremendous. Yeah. And also other news is you're upgrading your membership cloud native compute foundation, CNCF. Talk about that dynamic. Why, size, did you fall into new bucket? Or you guys are increasing your participation. What's the news? Yeah, I mean, we were founded really on this idea of we believe in helping the community. And so free and open source software is what we've built our business on. And so as we got active with Kubernetes ourselves, and we've been using Kubernetes for two years internally. So we have lots of lessons of our own. And as we were bringing this product to market, it was the right time for us to really upgrade our membership to gold with the CNCF and with the goal of getting to their platinum level where we can contribute to standards and bodies and really influence the evolution of all the tooling around containers and microservices. So it was the timing was right and it's the right evolution of us continuing to support the community. Making some good profit, contribute that and help out CNCF. Absolutely. As the VP of product, you have the keys to the kingdom, as they say in the product management world. You got a balanced engineering management with product and then you got to look through the market for the needs of the customers. Of course, they're helping you. Big time developers aren't afraid to share their opinion of what they need pain points. So it's a good job there. What is on the roadmap for you? What's next? How are you looking at the short, mid, long term evolution of digital oceans, product strategy? Yeah. So I'll break it down in three different areas. The first part is really having a core complete feature set for a modern application that's being built in the cloud. So this is where over the last 12 months we've developed, we've deployed, developed and deployed load balancers, cloud firewalls, object storage, block storage, a new control panel experience and a bunch of networking features that we have released. And so we have some new features coming this year which allow you to do the VPC feature specifically that allows businesses to have private networking and peering that's been a top requested feature. So that's something that's going to come later this year to round out our core platform. And then beyond that, we have two or three, two or three different things we're doing. So the first category is just having a better developer experience. So this is everything from the experience you have when you are launching any cloud resource, whether it's for a control panel or API or CLI. So continue to make that frictionless. So we have a few updates coming there to our control panel improvements for API and adding a bunch of integrations so that if you're using different products to manage your cloud infrastructure, we make that very, very easy. The second thing is marketplaces. So a lot of, as you know, lots of other providers have marketplaces and different versions of marketplaces. A lot of our customers and vendors are now coming to saying you have a really big audience and customer base. We really want to integrate our products so we can make it easy for them to spin up those resources. So marketplaces is the second large category that we're working on later this year. We'll have a lot of updates on that. And then the third one is tied to developer access but it's essentially the Kubernetes product that we're launching. We also have plans to enable marketplace-like integrations and a lot of the CI CD integration so that once you're up and running with your cluster, you got to get your CI CD pipelines and tooling working. So that's it. I want to ask you about multi-cloud and where you guys are at with multi-cloud and kind of connecting to the other cloud providers that are competitors, but your users are going to want to use as well as your solution. Yeah, this is where I think Kubernetes fits really, really well with the multi-cloud story for us, which is why sort of, why now for us? If your workloads are on Kubernetes and this is why we're going to support all of the latest community versions that are available, if your workloads are on Kubernetes, it becomes very easy for you to move those over to our platform. And so I think we're going to see a combination of sometimes customers will have split workloads, sometimes they'll run different types of workloads on our platform. And so I think Kubernetes really opens up that possibility to do that. There's still some more tooling to be done, but that's essentially what we're doing. How many employees do you guys have now? What's the number? We are roughly north of 400. So still very small. Congratulations, you guys are growing company. Great to have you on the queue. Thanks for sharing the news. Thank you very much. You did a great job. Digital Ocean, hot startup growing rapidly. I'm sure they're hiring like crazy, so go check them out. The news here at KubeCon is positive industry. Rising tide floats all boats. That's a philosophy we had, had seen on theCUBE in great ecosystems, of course that's happening here. More live coverage here in Copenhagen, Denmark, after this short break, stay with us.