 Hi everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS startup showcase, open cloud innovations. This is season two, episode one of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from AWS ecosystems. Today, episode one theme is the open source community and open cloud innovations. John Furrier, your host. We've got two great guests, Webb Brown, CEO of KubeCost, and that's the Lynn Head of Business Development at KubeCost. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE for the showcase AWS startups. Thanks for having us, John. Great to be back. Really excited for the discussion. Webb, great to see you theCUBE alumni from many, many KubeCost go. You guys are in a hot area right now, monitoring and reducing the Kubernetes spend, okay? So first of all, we know one thing for sure. Kubernetes is the hottest thing going on because of all the benefits. So take us through you guys macro view of this market. Kubernetes is growing. What's going on with the company? What is your company's role? Yeah, so we've definitely seen this growth first hand with our customers in addition to the broader market. And I think we believe that that's really indicative of the value that Kubernetes provides, right? And a lot of that is just faster time to market, more scalability, improved agility for developer teams. And there's even more there, but it's a really exciting time for our company and also for the broader cloud native community. So what that means for our company is, we're scaling up quickly to meet our users and support our users. Every metric at our company has grown about four X over the last year, including our team. And the reason that one is the most important is just because the more folks and the larger that our company is, the better that we can support our users and help them monitor and reduce those costs, which ultimately makes Kubernetes easier to use for customers and users out there on the market. Okay, so I want to get into why Kubernetes is costing so much, obviously the growth is there. But before we get there, what is the background? What's the origination story? Where did Kube cost come from? Obviously, you guys have a great name, cost, Kube. You guys probably reduced cost in Kubernetes, great name. But what's the origination story? How'd you guys get here? What itch are you scratching? What problem are you solving? So yeah, John, you guessed it. Oftentimes the name is a dead giveaway there where we're cost monitoring, cost management solutions for Kubernetes and cloud native. And backstory here is our founding team was at Google before starting the company. We were working on infrastructure monitoring, both on internal infrastructure as well as Google Cloud. We had a handful of our teammates join the Kubernetes effort, early days. And we saw a lot of teams struggling with the problems we're solving. We were solving internally at Google and we're solving today. And to speak to those problems a little bit, you touched on how just scale alone is making this come to the forefront, right? There's now many billions of dollars being spent on Kube. That is bringing this issue to make it a business critical question that is being asked in lots of organizations. That combined with the dynamic nature and complexity of Kubernetes makes it really hard to manage costs when you scale across a very large organization. So teams turned to Kube cost today, thousands of them do to get monitoring in place, including alerts, recurring reports, and dynamic management insights are on the nation. Yeah, I know, we talked about KubeCon before, web. And I want to come back to the problem statement because when you have these emerging growth areas that are really relevant and enabling technologies, you move to the next point of failure. So you're scaling, there's abstraction layers, now services are being turned on, more and more Kubernetes clusters are out there. So I have to ask you, what is the main cost driver problem that's happening in the Kube space that you guys are addressing? Is it just sheer volume? Is it different classes of services? Is it like different things are kind of working together? Different monitoring tools? Is it not a platform? Take us through the problem area. What do you guys see this happening? Yeah, the number one problem area is still actually what the CNTF FinOps survey highlighted earlier this year, which is that approximately two thirds of companies still don't have kind of baseline visibility in to spend when they moved to Kubernetes. So, even if you had a really complex, charge back program in place when you were building all your applications on VMs, you moved to Kubernetes and most teams, again, can't answer these really simple questions. So we're able to give them that visibility in real time so they can start breaking these problems down. They can start to see that, okay, it's these deployments or staple sets that are driving our costs or no, it's actually these workloads that are talking to S3 buckets and really driving egress costs. So it's really about first and foremost, just getting the visibility, getting the eyes and ears. We're able to give that to teams in real time at the largest scale Kubernetes clusters in the world. And again, most teams when they first start working with us don't have that visibility, not having that visibility can have a whole bunch of downstream impacts, including kind of not getting cost right, performance right, et cetera. Well, let's get into that downstream benefit, problems and or situations. But the first question I have just throw a naysayer comment at you, would be like, oh yeah, I have all this cost monitoring stuff already. What's different about Kubernetes? Why, what's the problem? Are my other tools going to work for me? How do you answer that one? Yeah, so I think first and foremost, containers are very dynamic, right? They're often complex, often transient and consume variable cluster resources. And so as much as this enables teams to construct powerful solutions, the associated costs and actually tracking those different variables can be really difficult. And so that's why we see why a solution like Kube cost that's purpose built for developers using Kubernetes is really necessary because some of those older, traditional cloud cost optimization tools are just not as fit for this space specifically. Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Alex. And I would add to that just the way that software is being architected, deployed and managed is fundamentally changing with Kubernetes, right? It is deeply impacting every part of software delivery process. And through that, decisions are getting made and engineers are ultimately being empowered to make more cost impacting decisions. And so we've seen organizations that get real time kind of built for Kubernetes or built for cloud native benefit from that massively throughout their culture, cost performance, et cetera. Well, can you just give a quick example because I think that's a great point. The architectures are shifting, they're changing. There's new things coming in. So it's not like you can use an old tool and just retrofit it. That's sometimes that's awkward. What specific things you see changing with Kubernetes that environments are leveraging, that's good. Yeah, one would be all of these Kubernetes primitives or concepts that didn't exist before, right? So I'm not managing just a generic workload. I'm managing a staple set and or three replica sets, right? And so having a language that is very much tailored towards all of these Kubernetes concepts, abstractions, et cetera. But then secondly, it was like, we're seeing this very obvious push towards microservices where typically again, you're shipping faster. Teams are making more distributed or decentralized decisions where there's not one single point where you can kind of gate check everything. And that's a great thing for innovation, right? We can move much faster. But for some teams, not using a tool like KubeCost, that means sacrificing, having a safety net in place, right? Or guardrails in place to really help manage and monitor this. And I would just say lastly, a solution like KubeCost because it's built for Kubernetes sits in your infrastructure. It can be deployed with a single home install. You don't have to share any data remotely, but because it's listening to your infrastructure, it can give you data in real time, right? And so we're moving from this world where you can make real time automated decisions or manual decisions, as opposed to waiting for a bill, a day, two days or a week later, when it may be already quote too late to avoid these. You're fired by the end. Or he got the extra cost. And nobody wants that. And he got to fight for a refund. Oh yeah, I threw a switch or wasn't paying attention or human or code because a lot of automation is going on. So I can see that as a benefit. I got to ask the question on developer uptake because you mentioned a good point that's another key modern dynamic. Developers are in the moment making decisions on security, on policy, things to do in the CICD pipeline. So if I'm a developer, how do I engage with KubeCost? Can I just download something? Is it easy? How is the onboarding process for your customers? Yeah, great question. So first and foremost, I think this gets to the roots of our company and the roots of KubeCost, which is born in open source, everything we do is built on top of open source. So the answer is you can go out and install it in minutes like thousands of other teams have. It is the recommended route or preferred route on our side is a helm install. Again, you don't have to share any data remotely. You can truly lock down namespace egress, for example, on the KubeCost namespace. And yeah, in minutes you'll have this visibility and can start to see really interesting metrics. And again, most teams when we start working with them either didn't have them in place at all or they had a really rough estimate based on maybe even a KubeCost Grafana dashboard that they installed. How does KubeCost provide the visibility across the environment? How do you guys actually make it work? Yeah, so we sit in your infrastructure. We have integrations with, for on-prem, like custom pricing sheets with cloud providers will integrate with your actual billing data so that we can listen for events in your infrastructure say like a new node coming up or a new pod being scheduled, et cetera. We take that information, join with your billing data whether it's on-prem or in one of the big three cloud providers and then again, we can in real time tell you the cost of any dimension of your infrastructure, whether it's one of the backing virtual assets you're using or one of the application dimensions like a label or annotation, namespace, pod, container, you name it. Awesome, Alex, what's your take on the landscape with the customers as they look at cost reductions? I mean, everyone loves cost reductions. Certainly I love the safety net comment that Webb made, but at the end of the day, Kubernetes is not so much a cost driver. It's more of a, I want the modern apps faster, right? So, so people who are buying Kubernetes usually aren't price sensitive, but they also don't want to get gouged either on mistakes. Where is the customer path here around Kubernetes cost management, reduction and scale? Yeah, so I think one thing that we're looking forward to here in this upcoming year, just like we did last year is continuing to work with the various tools that customers are already using and meeting those customers where they are. So some examples of that are working with like CI CD tools out there, like we have a great integration with Armoury and Spinnaker to help customers actually take the insights from Kube cost and deploy those in a more efficient manner. We're also working with a lot of partners like Grafana to help customers visualize our data and integrate with D2IQ or Rancher, which are management platforms for Kubernetes and all of that I think is just to make cost come more to the forefront of the conversation when folks are using Kubernetes and provide that data to customers in all the various tools that they're using across the ecosystem. So I think we really want to surface this and make cost more of a first class citizen across the ecosystem and the community partners. What's your strategy at the biz dev side? As you guys look at a growing ecosystem with KubeCon, CNCF, you mentioned that earlier. The community is growing, it's always been growing fast. The number of people entering in are amazing, but now that we start going, the S-curves kicking in, integration and interoperability and openness is always a key part of company success. What's KubeCost's vision on how you're going to do biz dev going forward? Absolutely, so our product's open source, that is deeply important to our company. We're always going to continue to drive innovation on our open source product. As Webb mentioned, we have thousands of teams that are using our product and most of that is actually on the free, but something that we want to make sure continues to be available for the community and continue to bring that development for the community. And so I think a part of that is making sure that we're working with folks, not just on the commercial side, but also those open source types of products. So for FANA's open source, Binnaker's open source, I think a lot of the biz dev strategies just sticking to our roots and make sure that we continue to drive a strong open source presence and product for our community of users. Keep that DNA and open source and keep it stable. Webb, I got to ask you, obviously the wave is here, I always joke going back, I remember when the word Kubernetes was just kicked around pre-open stack days, many, many years ago, it's the luxury of being old cube guy that I am 11 years doing the cube, all fun. But we remember talking earlier in the early days is that with Kubernetes, if it worked, the phrase was rising tide floats all boats. I would say right now, the tides rising pretty well right now. You guys are in a good spot with the cube cost. Are there areas that you see coming where cost monitoring is going to expand more? Where do you see the Kubernetes, what's the aperture if you will of the cost monitoring space that you're in that you think you can address? John, I think you're exactly right. This tide has risen and it just keeps rising, right? Like the sheer number of organizations we see using Kubernetes at massive scale is just mind-blowing at this point. What we see is this really natural pattern for teams to start using a solution like cube cost, start with again, either limited or no visibility, get that visibility in place and then really develop an action plan from there. And that could again be different governance solutions like alerts or management reports or engineering team reports, et cetera. But it's really about phase two of taking that information and really starting to do something with it, right? We are seeing and expect to see more teams turn to an increasing amount of automation to do that. But ultimately that is very much after you get this baseline, highly accurate visibility that you feel very comfortable making potentially critical, you know, very critical related to reliability performance decisions within your infrastructure. Yeah, I think getting it right is key. You mentioned baseline. Let me ask you a quick follow-up on that. How fast can companies get there? When you say baseline, there's probably levels of baseline. Obviously all environments are different. No, not all ones the same. But what's just anecdotally you see as that baseline? How fast do people get there? Is there a certain minimum viable configuration or architecture? Just take us through your thoughts on that. Yeah, great question. It definitely depends on organizational complexity and you know, can depend on application complexity as well, but I would say most importantly is the array of cost centers, departments, complexity across the org as opposed to technological. So I would say for less complex organizations, we've seen it happen in hours or a day less, et cetera because it's one or two or smaller engineering teams they can share that visibility really quickly and they may be familiar with Kubernetes and they just quote, get it right away. For larger organizations, we've seen it take kind of up to 90 days where it's really about infusing this kind of into their DNA when again, there may not have been visibility or transparency here before. Again, I think the bulk of the time there is really about kind of the cultural element and kind of awareness building and just buy in throughout the organization. Awesome, well guys got a great product, congratulations. Final question for both of you. It's early days in Kubernetes, even though the tide is rising, keeps rising, more boats are coming in, harbor's getting bigger, whatever metaphor you want to use, it's really going great. You guys are seeing customer adoption, we're seeing cloud native. I was talking with my friends at Docker, the container side's going crazy as well. Everything's going great in cloud native. What's the vision on the innovation? How do you guys continue to push the envelope on value in open source and in the commercial area? What's the vision? Yeah, I think there's many areas here and I know Alex will have more to add here, but one area that I know is relevant to his world is just more really interesting integrations, right? So he mentioned Kube costs insights, powering decisions and say Spinnaker, right? I think more and more of this tool chain really coming together and really seeing the benefits of all this interoperability, right? So that I think combined with just more and more intelligence and automation being deployed. Again, that's only after the fact that teams are really comfortable with his decisions and the information and the decisions that are being made. But I think that increasingly we see the community again being ready to leverage this information in really powerful ways. Just because as team scale, there's just a lot to manage and so a team leveraging automation can supercharge them in really impactful ways. Awesome, great integrations, Alex, expand on that. A whole different kind of set of business development integrations when you have lots of tool chains, lots of platforms and tools kind of coming together, sharing data, working together, automating together. Oh yeah, so I think it's going to be super important to keep a pulse on the new tools, right? Make sure that we're on the forefront of what customers are using and just continue to meet them where they are. And a lot of that honestly is working with AWS too, right? Like they have great services in EKS and managed for Meteos. So we want to make sure that we continue to work with that team and support their services as they launch as well. Great stuff. I got a couple of minutes left. I thought I'll throw one more question in there since I got two great experts here. Just a little bit change of pace, more of an industry question. That's really no wrong answer, but I'd love to get your reaction to the SaaS conversation. Cloud has changed what used to be SaaS. SaaS was, oh yeah, surface of service. Now that you have all these kinds of new kinds of integrations, you have automation, horizontally scalable cloud and Edge. You now have vertical machine learning, data-driven insights. A lot of things in the stack are changing. So the question is, what's the new SaaS look like? Is it the same as the old SaaS or is it a new kind of refactoring of what SaaS is? What's your take on this? Yeah, it's a web. Please jump in here wherever. But in my view, it's a spectrum, right? There's customers that are on both ends of this. Some customers just want a fully hosted, fully managed product that want to benefit from the luxury of not having to do any sort of infrastructure management or patching or anything like that. And they just want to consume and create products. On the other hand, there's other customers that have more highly-regulated industries or security requirements, and they're going to need things to deploy in their environment. Right now, KubeCost is self-hosted, but I think in the future, we want to make sure that we have versions of our product available for customers across that entire spectrum so that if somebody wants the benefit of just not having to manage anything, they can use a fully self-hosted set or a fully multi-tenant managed SaaS or other customers can use a self-hosted product. And then there's going to be customers that are in the middle, right? Where there's certain components that are okay to be SaaS or hosted elsewhere, but then there's going to be components that are really important to keep in their own environment. So I think it's really across the board and it's going to depend customer to customer, but it's important to make sure we have options for all of them. Great, guys. Web, SaaS, same as the old SaaS, what's the SaaS playbook now? Gosh, I think it is such a deep and interesting question and one that it's going to touch so many aspects of software and our lives. I predict that we'll continue to see this tension or real trade-offs across on the one hand convenience and then on the other hand, security, privacy and control. And I think, like Alex mentioned, different organizations are going to make different decisions here based on kind of their relative trade-offs. I think it's going to be of epic proportions. And I think we'll look back on this period and just say that, this was one of the foundational questions of how to get this right. We ultimately view it as like, again, we want to offer choice and make every choice be great, but let our users pick the right one given their profile on those trade-offs in those areas. I think it's a great common choice. And also you've got now dimensions of implementations. Multi-tenant, custom, regulated, secure, I want to have all these controls. It's great, no one SaaS rules the world, so to speak. So it's, again, great dynamic, but ultimately, if you want to leverage the data, is it horizontally addressable? Multi-tenant, again, this is a whole nother ball game. We're watching this closely and you guys are in the middle of it with cube cost, as you guys are creating that baseline for customers. Congratulations, great to see you, Web. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Thank you so much for having us again. Okay, great conversation. AWS startup showcase, open cloud innovators here. Open source is driving a lot of value as it goes commercial, going the next generation. This is season two, episode one of the AWS startup series with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.