 From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2019, where we see the emergence and connections between virtualization and cloud computing. Happy to have on the program a user at the event, Kanji Bates, who is a senior integration engineer with PS Lifestyle. Thanks so much for joining us. Nice to be here, Stu. All right, so PS Lifestyle, let's start there. Tell us a little bit about that in your role as a senior integration engineer and what that means. Okay, so PS Lifestyle, we're a national hair salon. We're in 37 states and we have a super niche angle. All of our salons are in senior assisted living communities, so we focus exclusively on seniors. And we're trying to make senior life more enjoyable. Okay, well, that's excellent. We always talk about jobs of the future and where there is growth. We know the Boomer generation is creating lots of people in healthcare and part of health is making sure you're feeling happy about how you look. So I don't need to worry too much about my hair these days, but glad to know that the older generation is taking care of it. Yeah, we do some of the massage services and well-being. Very cool. Definitely not something we've talked about on our program and after nine years and thousands of interviews, it's nice to have some interesting angles to talk about. So you're a senior integration engineer. My understanding from some of the prep is you're really working on cloud-related activity? Primarily so. I am, so I came on board about a year ago. I switched out of an operations role into a development role. And PS Lifestyle are looking to bring the internal systems forward. They've been doing a lot of writing, the stylus in the field, but I end up writing out their services that they perform every day, which doesn't really scale. So yeah, they're trying to bring the services into the present and get away from having to write everything down. So we're building out like a, it's not quite a point of sale system, it's somewhere between point of sale and like an internet so that everyone in the field can automate what they're doing, our accounting team, doesn't have to re-input everything that comes in, and just make things flow smoother. Okay, so bring us inside a little bit. What cloud services are you using and there's some coding that you're doing as part of that also? Yeah, so right now we're developing in a PHP framework called Laravel, and we're deploying to both Elastic Beanstalk in AWS and ECS, and we're building, so we have our front-ends all Laravel in Elastic Beanstalk and our back-ends. We're building APIs in Lumen and the microservices are in ECS so we can have better scaling. And cloud seems an obvious solution for a highly distributed environment like as retail to often is and your locations are. Is that, how long can you bring us a little bit as to you've been on for a year, but how long has that cloud journey been going on? Actually, yeah, yeah, I came in. Just as the company started developing, this has been on the horizon for about two years and as I started ramping up, they brought on additional people, such as myself, just to stuff up so that we can actually work through it. Okay, and was there AWS, obviously, the leader in the space? It was there some consideration as to which cloud they'd be using? No, they were already using AWS to some capacity for WordPress hosting. So it was just a natural continuation of that. With me coming on board, I've been looking at, well, what if we do want redundancy? Do we try multi-cloud? That's now an option. Maybe we start exploring technologies like Terraform so that we can actually duplicate environments, just in case on the very rare instance that AWS does go down, we have an option. Is that a concern when people say AWS going down? Does an availability zone sometimes have issues? Sure, but can't you architect around this? No, I mean, we've had issues where AWS has been unavailable to us for non-technical reasons, and in that case, it's like we were trapped. Unfortunately, we were not in production at the time, but that's a lesson you learn once, and then you think, well, all right, I need a backup, just in case something does happen, and I know it's very unlikely to happen, so that then informs, what is my backup? How much do I invest in the backup? Great, yeah, because multi-cloud is one of those things that people talk about when you dig down, it's like, okay, can we understand why? Is that something you're doing? Because I want to have price leverage of one against the other, is there a service that I want in one that might not be available to other, or is it it's kind of insurance, in your case, that's saying, in the case that, are you saying, I think, from an architectural standpoint, I'm not looking to run in both clouds all the time, but if I have an outage, I should be able to kind of fail over almost and spin something up relatively fast in another environment. Exactly, so it's like, we were talking about possibly looking at Azure, maybe that's a little overkill, maybe we could just do with a droplet on digital ocean, because our entire environment we develop in Docker, so that's pretty easy just to pick up and move somewhere else, and maybe if our standby environment is nowhere near as powerful, at least it's still running. Yeah, and so great, you've got the containers as kind of the base level for how you're developing, one of the challenges out there is digital ocean, great for developers, works with containers, but please correct me if I'm not getting this right, cloud today isn't a utility, so I can't just say, oh, I'm running on AWS, and let me just take everything and throw it in Azure, throw it in DO, or Google and the like, there's usually some work in prep to make sure that I've got what I need. There is, there is, so it's like, so right now it's like we're focused on AWS so that we can work with their tooling, and then as we start getting more comfortable, we can start looking at extending that tooling to be a little more flexible to work with multiple providers. And Cloud, some people are concerned as to, how do I make sure that my costs just don't kind of spiral out of control, is how does kind of the internal control, is their budgeting process in place? Do you have a good understanding around what you have today? Is there much growth going on in what you have and what it'll be down the road? We've been actually very surprised in the resources that we get on our tier of AWS, like we're not even scratching the surface. So we keep looking at, we need to, everyone says, oh, you need to worry about scaling, you need to worry about this and that, and I go, we haven't even touched what we have, so right now our focus is more on just making sure things run, and then start scaling as we run into that issue. All right, Ken, do you last thing? What brings you to this event? So obviously it's been doing more than virtualization, it's been doing cloud for about five years now. What brings you to this show? The community is fantastic. So I've been working with, in the previous life I worked with VMware, which is how I got into VTUG, and the community around virtualization is just incredible, very supportive. So it's like I try and give back, so come back. So just a quick follow-up on that. I know the virtualization community, very welcoming and the like, do you find in the cloud world similar types of communities? Yeah, so it's, I've actually just started up a VMware user group and an AWS user group, and both of those communities have been fantastic so far. I work in also with PHP, as I said, and that's an entirely different community. I'm not saying it's not friendly, but it's a different style. Yeah, absolutely, you find different cultures in these various ecosystems, and yeah, it's very different. The early VMware ones, you've had people, it's like, oh, I'm used to being able to have to do a little bit of building on top of it. AWS is definitely builders in what they're doing, and yeah, on that. So, Kenji, really appreciate you joining, sharing your experiences on what's happened in the cloud and the communities involved, and yeah, thanks for running user groups. Those are always super helpful, and it's usually done out of the passion and doing it, it's not like that's your day job. No. All right, Kenji Bates, thanks so much for joining. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks so much for watching theCUBE.