 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 here in Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome you to the program. First time guest, founder and CEO of a startup, solo IO, Edith Levine. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. All right, so one of the things we were talking in the open, Lauren Cooney, who you know and I were talking about, well, you know, Cloud Foundry, talking about digital transformation and enterprise for years, but there's always these new technologies. It was, you know, Kubernetes came this wave. Now, serverless is the wave and you know, Amazon's kind of overarching, you know, discussion in the marketplace. That's why I'm glad to bring you in because your company, a startup plays across a number of these, you know, emerging spaces in the Cloud Foundry space. So, give our audience a little bit about your background and what led to the foundation of solo.io. Yeah, thanks. So, I was in startup all my life, I work in a dynamic cove, we got acquired by VMware, so VReal, I see if you remember. And then I moved to another startup, got acquired by Verizon, so Cloud Switch, who was moving back on the day for on-prem to off-prem. And then I moved to the EMC, to the city office and that was great because what I was doing is basically started the dojo of Cloud Foundry. So, me and Brian Gallagher, if you know him and Patrick Dennis, we are the three of us started it and we basically collocated with the Cloud Foundry team and we worked very, very closely with them. And what we did is, what I was doing a lot is bringing innovation. So, we created some open source project, like Unique, if you heard about it, about Unicarno, building and running Unicarno, we worked with a lot of the ecosystem. And the reason we started solo is because I really felt that in EMC it's a great place, but it's sometimes slow you down because of the big organization and I felt that we can do much faster outside. So, that's why we started solo. And all the purpose with solo is basically playing two trucks. One of them is, we really, really want people to use our products. So, we want to target the people who has the problem which is the enterprise. So, that's where we really, really target in and help them move to what we really must do, which is the open source community. So, all the innovation. So, that's exactly what we're doing. We're basically helping them to take their monolithic application, move them to microservices and to serverless, but by using very, very unique and innovative technology, like Envoy and a lot of ladders. Okay, so we hear a lot of times, it's, you know, of course, companies, they need to move faster. They need to go through this transformation. It's the API economy. And that's, I think we're glue fits in there. So, glue spelled D-L-O-O. Right. What's a function gateway? How does this help with kind of, you know, we say, is it API sprawl these days? Or, you know, all these various services? You know, how is this the glue that brings everything together? So, as I said, we're working in two ecosystem, right? The first one is the enterprise. So, the main use case that we're trying to solve, as I said, is the movement. We wanted to make sure that people would be able to take their monolithic and at least extend them to microservices like Lab Foundry and Kubernetes and to serverless. And also, on the free time to kind of like move it. So, that was kind of like our purpose. But we needed some technology for that. And we looked outside and discovered that the first thing that we needed is probably a very good API gateway. But you need to route on the function level and you need to discover the function. And a lot of technology that just wasn't exist back then. So, what we did, we basically built one, which is glue. That's the first thing that we needed because we had no choice. There wasn't anything that actually we seriously, and trust me, I'm looking very well of all the open source project. There was nothing like what we built out there in terms of the quality of the technology and what we're capable of doing. So, that's why we built it. We didn't plan to make it a product, but that was our purpose. And the second thing now, now we're building more stuff and we need maybe to extend to service mesh or function mesh like we call it. Again, not because we want it, because we have no choice, right? So, this is not a core product. What is really rebuilding is about re-targeting everything that related to this use case and we're trying to move. Okay, so Google and Microsoft in their keynotes talked about an API gateway, open source project. I hear service mesh, I'm thinking about Istio. How does glue fit? So, as I said, that's the beauty of it. We are not competing because, as I said, in the beginning, my purpose, look, I go, look at the Istio, I said, that's awesome. We can use it, but they're just not moving fast enough for us as a startup. So, we had to actually create it. Now, when we created it, we created it specifically to our use case, right? We needed the function that we knew that our purpose was to take all those ecosystem of monolithic microservices and serverless and look and see what is the smallest unit of compute that come in between them and cut everything to it and that's the function. So, basically, what we're doing, we're taking all these ecosystem, cut everything to function and then reassemble or movement between them. That's something that they just didn't give us. So, we had to build it, but the beauty of it is because we are, you know, we are really innovative and that's what we know how to do. We decided to leverage the open source. So, for instance, it's built on Envoy, right? Because it's the best proxy that exists today. And we extended it because we needed some functionality. So, we created a lot of filter, right? Because it was really important to us to make Envoy basically has this functionality. So, we are not competing with none of them because mainly that's not what we're doing. We're just focusing on the use case. But theoretically, if you look at an API gateway, I will say ends down with probably the best that exists out there, which is, that's not what we're selling. Yeah, it's really smart. You know, no small startups gonna be, oh, we're gonna, you know, in Silicon Valley, maybe they think they're gonna take down the giants and break the world and compete against everything. But, I like you actually spend some time working in the EMC CTO office. And there were certain things we would always look at and say, there's this gap. Here's what we have today and here's absolutely we know where the market is going. So, you know, the analogy I hear today is like, well, customers, they've got their applications and they need to modernize them. So, it's been the last year or so, there's been this discussion of lift and shift and many people cringe. I said, you know, I lived in the virtualization way, one of the biggest challenges there was I took this old application, which, to be frank, stunk. And I kept it alive for years longer, even though the server was no longer supported, the OS was no longer supported, but I could just virtualize it and that was great. I want to get to 12 factor microservice architectures. Maybe serverless might be the foundation that I'd like to build this. I cannot lift and shift to get to serverless. There is no path from old to there. So, it sounds like you're trying to attack some of that there, am I getting that right? Yes, I mean, basically, I will give you an example of a customer that we have, right? So, they came, they're monolithic application, right? And they really wanted to move and it's really hard to maintain this. So, they said, you know what? We really wanted to move to serverless. That's the engineering part, right? They sang, we wanted to move to engineering. They came to their boss and they said, well, what we want to do is to take it, rewrite it and put it as a green field, right? Basically, as a serverless. So, the boss said, no problem, go, value at how much diamonds we'll take and then come back to me. So, they went and they did it and they basically came with nine months. So, the boss said, okay, so no. And the reason is because nine months mean a year and also, and didn't get any feature on this year, right? They will fire me. So, what we're doing is we're saying, take this monolithic application, it's working, don't touch it, extend it. First of all, extend, on the new functionality, going to the serverless and to microservices and we're supporting everything. I mean, I can start telling you what is the platform that we support you. It's almost everything. And then, the second thing is that on your spare time, start breaking it. Now, there's no magic. I know people saying there's an algorithm, it's never going to work. Trust me and I did a lot of software in my life. You can't guess this stuff. You actually need to rewrite them. But on your spare time, when you're available and on the way, you know, on your pace of learning. And I feel that that's what we're giving. We basically give them the freedom to do that on their spare time and we're giving a lot of other tools. Like for instance, debug. So, we create, we open source a project called squash that basically be able to attach debuggers to microservices, to serverless and to monolithic and different language, different everything and jump between them. So, you basically can create what I call hybrid app and jump across that. So, I feel that what we're targeting is basically make this movement easy with any technology that we can put out there. Yeah, the whole application modernizations are real challenge. If I look at, you know, in this space, Pivotal's acquisition of Pivotal Labs is what helped them. So, a lot of services, things that we're looking at Pivotal going public, how much of their business is actually services? How much of it, you know, is subscription and software? How much are you, is this just tooling you're building? Are you helping customers get through some of the services? Maybe it's time for you to talk. How many people do you have on your team? I look at the website, I see like five people. Yeah, that's actually what we are. So, I mean, specifically we are five. We are started. We got actually really well funded from tour ventures and great, great investors. And what was important to me is not to do a lot of mistake of the other cloud startup doings which is basically scale too fast, right? I want it first. I'm putting a product out there. I want to see what's going on. And today, because we open source and because we all can use Amazon and so on, we don't need a lot of money to actually create the traditional project. So, that's what we did specifically. I can tell you I'm getting a lot of resume and right now I'm actually pushing them back because it's really, really important to me to scale on the right side. Now we're starting to have customers who will have to scale, right? Okay. So, that's that. In terms of how much, so that's enough. We are five and as I said, it's good but we are not in the services. Actually, people that are doing an amazing job, we don't want to touch that. What we do want to make sure is that they're giving the tools to do them themselves and there will probably people talk to do the services. Are you able to share how much funding is the true ventures is one of the funding? So, we got 2.5 from true venture and then we got 500 for Haystack and another 250 from way venture capital. Okay. And five people you're hiring to? What are you looking for? Yeah, so we are definitely going to hire tomorrow. We need a full-stack engineer. We need a system engineer. Right now it's very flat architecture. A lot of really, really good people. I mean, my engineers are people who was in the Israeli army as lacquers, you know, very, very technical. People who work with me in EMC and so on. Very, very good people. And our purpose is to grow as system engineers a little bit, UI, and we also need somehow to scale. And you're located here in Boston, correct? I am, I am. I have one engineer in Seattle, the rest are here. Okay, and the products itself, you know, open source and things are available, so... For now, so we started as an open, we did put it as an open source project. This is the platform, I feel it should be open source, but there will be features that we will not open source. A lot of more things that makes sense for the enterprise, we will not open source. But yeah, right now everything is open source and we wanted to share for the community. Okay, and from the customers you're talking to, what's their biggest challenge? Things like serverless, are they getting their arms right, especially out here on the East Coast as opposed to some of the startups and the like? So actually, people in the enterprise, I mean, I think I nailed the use case because I'm talking a lot in conference, QCon is one of the conference that I really, really like, I talked a lot. And when I talk there to the people, everybody has this problem, which I have a monolithic, how do you move them? Most of them trying to move to container right now, that's where it is. But the beauty of how we build glue, and that was totally in purpose, is the fact that, and I have actually a diagram sharing it, today there is enterprise that are only using monolithic, I don't know, like probably Bank of America, I think is only monolithic. Then if you're looking, there's people only using microservices, probably Google and others. And then there's companies like iRobot for instance, that's going all the way to serverless, that's all there, right Ben, which is amazing. But, and there is companies that's sharing it, right? I mean there are microservices and serverless, so monolithic and EMC for instance, they have like serverless, microservices and monolithic. What we're trying to do is basically the beauty of what we build is basically a platform on top of an envoy. So we can actually create a customized offer for you, that will be only what you need. And what we will help you is to basically glue, this is what they name, glue your environment. So it will give you one experience that you can manage it all, you can miss and match, you can do whatever you want and it's really, really clean. So when I'm talking to customer today, mainly where they are is like monolithic to microservices, but they love this use case. I mean, I didn't meet the customer yet that I show him the demo of how we're taking a Spring Boot application and move it. And he said that I don't want it to proceed. So it's good. Fascinating stuff, really appreciate you sharing. Definitely we hear from customers all the time. It's moving from the old to the new. I need to live in both of those worlds and it can't split those teams. It can't be islands. I need to pull this together. It's definitely a multi-cloud and it seems like it's happening in the development environment too. So, Edith Levine, solo congratulations on where you've gone. Look forward to catching up much more in the future. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.