 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE, helping to extract the signal from the noise here at OpenStack Summit 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for the week is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program, Atmail, which is an email as a service company. We have Jay Cill, who's the European Sales Director, and we have Jason Brown, we'll call JB for the rest of the interview, is Solutions Architect. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks very much for having us here. All right, so Jay, email as a service. Tell us a little bit about the company, and you know the state of email. Have Office 365 just taken everybody over? Well, so most people don't want to talk about email, but it's still essential. So Atmail is a 20-year-old company. We are probably one of the largest pure-play, white-label email providers in the world. We have about 170 million mailboxes out there in the wild. But we provide not-to-end-user businesses. We service the service provider and telco market. So a lot of our customers you would have heard of, we're more the brand behind the brand. So we provide the email to their end-user subscribers, but he's very much the telco ISP that's up front that you would hear about. Yeah, excellent, and that's been a discussion we've been having at this show a lot is, OpenStack itself is kind of something that gets in there, the telcos and the service providers, you know, a big place. So, Jay V, tell us a little bit about your role and bring us into the involvement with OpenStack. Sure, so I'm the solutions architect for Atmail. I kind of helped bridge the gap between the technical and the non-technical. I helped Jay out with explaining the technical details to the sales team, and then bring back the, you know, like the non-technical details of feedback that Jay gets and we get from our customers into development and operations so they can actually improve the product in a way that's fitting. And so we started with OpenStack a few years ago through a partnership with Dreamhost here in North America to move from, we kind of had a traditional email, like a hosted email solution, or an on-premise email solution, but it wasn't a true cloud solution. And so, took a big step back, looked at our architecture, what it actually looked like, what it needed, and it just turned out that OpenStack was the best direction for us to go to make that move. Jay, can you clarify, when you say a true cloud solution, what did you mean by that? What were kind of the requirements and what did that? So, we had for years, we would just take our on-premise solution, and we would run it in a data center that we had a rack in, we had four to use were the servers, and I was the guy at the time that was responsible if something went wrong. I got a call at three o'clock in the morning to drive to Spokane to go to our data center to fix something, replace a hard drive, or do something like that. And that just was, it didn't scale horizontally or vertically, to be honest. That was just limited to what we could do with it, and so we really wanted something where we could save the cost by distributing in the load as we needed it. And I think that's really the difference, is you can spin up instances for front end or spin up an instance for a back end, whatever resource you actually need, you can spin that up as a service in a cloud infrastructure, whereas you can't really do that as easily or as cost effectively on bare metal. Jason, I want to bring it back to the business. Your customers, what does OpenStack mean from them and the ultimate end user? I don't think I've seen emails that say, sent to me via an email service powered by OpenStack, but walk us through what that means for the business and your constituents. Well, so they are both commercial and technical benefits. If I look at the commercial benefits first and foremost, what OpenStack allows us to do is to provide a solution quickly and efficiently. The first thing that people want from email is they want a stable, robust service. It's a bit like turning a tap on at home and then getting clean drinking water. You really don't give it a second thought. It's only when that tap stops working and it's not coming out properly, then you think about it. So first and foremost, our customers want a stable, mature, reliable service. They also want to make sure that it's secure. And that allows us, you know, the OpenStack initiative that we've undertaken allows us to achieve that. The commercial other benefits that we obtain from that is being able to reduce our cost base or controlling our cost base. And as a result, that's passed on to our customers so they can then not only mitigate their risk but they can control their costs as well. From a technical point of view, I mean, J.B. can touch upon some of the technical benefits, but one of the things that we found because we are a small vendor in terms of the DevOps team that we have, what OpenStack allowed us to do was to gain from the knowledge that the community had and really benefit and accelerate our solution to market. And when you talk to some of our DevOps guys, the first and prime word, foremost thing that they say is that we couldn't have achieved this without the help and support of the engineers and the OpenStack community. So the depth of knowledge out there really helped us accelerate those services. Awesome. That's great. Is the fact that it's OpenStack, it seems like at this point, one of the themes we've been talking about is OpenStack ubiquitous, mature, a lot of talk here about containers and other things, but the stack itself is well known and mature and that seems like that that would also have an impact on things, something that Telco understands, right? It's a well-known stack, yeah. JB, so this is your first time, you said that this was your first time at a summit. Kind of curious, before we dig in to kind of maybe what your stack looks like, OpenStack looks like, what did you think of the summit, the level of kind of conversation here as the sessions and that sort of thing? So far it's been fantastic. I've had a complete, not a 180, but there's so much here that I'll be able to take back to our DevOps guys and our QA guys, and we're looking at the Zool stuff, really heavily the CI-CD stuff, just a huge benefit that'll streamline all of our development and testing and pushing that to market. It'll be huge. Yeah, anything specific, because one of the things we look, there's a number of CI-CD offerings in the market today. What specifically about Zool is, because you're using OpenStack, that it makes sense and fits a lot. Yeah, I like that it fits with OpenStack really well. I like its level of maturity, and I like the gated looking at the future as opposed to looking at the past or looking at the present for your testing specifically. Gotcha, that's interesting, yeah. Can you talk a little bit maybe about your, so your stack, is it, so it sounds like, well, yeah, talk a little bit about the OpenStack, your OpenStack deployment in terms of, there's a lot of components, are you using kind of the core components then, and the other thing else that it interacts with, the other theme here, right, is OpenStack has to talk to a lot of other systems. So we use pretty, we use the OpenStack storage module and the networking module, and I don't know all of the little names to all of the little pieces, but we do use the storage and the networking. The networking was a really big help for us, because we were actually able to offload some of the system load into the network layer, moving into OpenStack. Whereas before, we would have, with an email system, you have all of your actual email traffic or your IMAP traffic, it can create a significant load by being able to move some of that load into the networking layer, we're able to provide a better customer experience because all of those edge services aren't as taxed. And so when the user goes to check their email or send an email, they're not waiting because of a high load. And you see this, especially if when something goes wrong in a system, because they're systems and things do happen. And so when that happens, the time to recover is faster on our backend and the overall, the way that's presented to our end users is much better for us. A lot of business benefits, yeah. Jay, I have to think in the regions that you play, kind of the governance and compliance, something you need to worry about. It's also, it's May 2018, so I have to ask you about GDPR and how that fits into your business these days, so. Absolutely, Stu. So GDPR comes into effect this Friday. We've had a team dedicated on working on that to make sure that we are compliant. Obviously, our telco users, service providers, rely on us implicitly to make sure that we are fully compliant. And I can assure you that we are. We have seen a number of high profile breaches of other vendors. It's not something that we want to have an experience of. So we have worked diligently in order to make sure that we are fully compliant. Any commentary you want to share on security these days, too, is people always, you know, governments asking for things, hackers, it's a complicated issue. It is, and it's interesting, because email, I think, represents the largest surface area of attack in any organization. You know, you can get from a CEO to anyone in the organization via email. That's how powerful it is. And again, as we were talking off record earlier, it's not something you give an awful lot of thought to. Email is like turning on a tap at home and clean drinking water comes out. You don't give it a second thought. But when it stops working or there's an issue, that when it becomes a problem. And you know, you could regress back into the dark ages because you can't do business, you can't send that message, you can't communicate or connect to the audience that you want to. So yes, we have a lot of issues around that that we need to make sure that we are fully on top of. Our aim is to provide a stable, mature, reliable and secure service to our customers and their end users. And security is something that we take seriously, as do a lot of other vendors. But it's something that is always constantly changing and evolving, you know. By the time the latest attack comes out and you've checked that you are covered, the next one has come out. You know, and we've seen a lot of attacks over the last few months. They come in waves. You know, we had WannaCry last year that really hit UK and Europe hard as with other regions. And I'm sure there'll be more coming out soon. JB, containers and, well, secure containers, one of the topics of conversation here. Containers in general have been a big topic. Kubernetes, how are you all looking at that application at orchestration layer? Containers with an email system are kind of tough. Security is a big reason for that. And it's not that we can't use containers, but by the time you take a container and wrap all of the security around it and everything that you need for something you would use with an email system, it almost negates the benefit of using the container to start with. Gotcha. So we're constantly looking at other ways that we can take advantage of that. And, you know, Kata, I think today just released their version one of their solution which secures it down into the actual core of the system. And so that changes the game a little bit on what might be possible now, not having to worry about some of the security issues that we are concerned. Right, right, so even now, your cloud portability strategy, per se, is your app runs inside an OpenStack context with OpenStack configuration. You run, I think, at least two, on two different instances of OpenStack. So that's part of your, you are a multi-cloud in that sense. We are, yes. That's great. And that actually made it really, the move into our EU data center was so much smoother because of our experience with OpenStack on our initial deployment. We were just able to just launch it and go. All right, well, I want to give you both just the final word as to, you know, your takeaways here at the show so far is being first time attendees. So from a commercial point of view, I mean, the networking has been tremendous. You know, I've had conversations with people over email, over phone, that I've actually met face to face here and made that connection. So for me, as a salesperson, those networking events, et cetera, have been invaluable. What I also like about the show itself and the community as a whole is that there is this openness and there's this willing to share ideas which you don't always find in other arenas. It's much more of a closed, well, I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing because it's a trade secret or it's going to give me an advantage, whereas here it is very open. It is, we want to collaborate, we want to share. And that's been very refreshing from my point of view. Yeah, the community is a big part of it for me. All of my work in development or operations has been from the open source community. So to come back and see that thriving and pushing this forward the way that it is, it's just so reassuring. Well, JNJB, we really appreciate you being open with sharing your story with the practitioners. So thank you and congratulations at mail for all that you've done here in the community. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, lots more coverage here at the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.