 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Welcome back to the stands. We're live here in Las Vegas as theCUBE continues our coverage of re-invent, still a jam-packed show floor. It was like that yesterday. They're talking about 42 to 45,000 attendees. I don't think anybody's left the place yet. It's that kind of excitement that is certainly built within this community. So hats off to AWS for putting on such a great show. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Alok Oja, who is the senior product manager and the lead for container security at Cloud Passage. Alok, good to see you, sir. Good to be here. Welcome to your kind of breaking your maiden here on theCUBE right first time. First time here, yes. And it's a pleasure to be here. Oh, we're glad to have you. We've been talking about all kinds of fascinating things gaming and security. We might get into that a little bit later on. First off, tell us a little bit about Cloud Passage. I know you've only been there a short period of time, so not only what it does, but what you're doing there. Great, great. So Cloud Passage is a cloud security, cloud application security infrastructure, security company. We help our customers secure their workloads, whether they're running on servers, bare metal, servers, or VMs. And now yesterday, we actually made an announcement around container security, so we now support containers as well. All right, so go into that a little bit. I know you're pretty excited about that. Yeah, yeah, we're pumped about it. So what we're hearing from our customers is that they have been using us to secure their workloads today, right? Whether it's running on Amazon, Azure, Google, their own data center doesn't really matter. What they're really looking for is one single platform that helps them secure and be compliant across the board. And the next step in the direction, in the evolution, is to have support for containers. And we announced the support for container security. We call it pretty smartly, Cloud Passage Container Secure. How long did it take you to come up with that? That was been... It's a million dollars to actually fund somebody to get the idea. So we announced that yesterday. We are seeing a lot of excitement in our customer base. We actually had a pretty exciting beta as well, where we had 10 plus Fortune 1000 companies participating and a good chunk of them are actually looking at getting on board and using Container Secure. Yeah, look, I want you to step back for a second. Security's been going through massive renaissance. It feels every few years there's always discussion, oh, we're going to change the security model, but especially dev ops. One of the main changes, I talked to my friends that are developers, you read the literature, it's dev ops forces some of those changes in security. And while it's one of the challenges, it's really, really one of the huge opportunities. Maybe talk about your thoughts on that. You've been in this industry a while. I think it's one of the reasons that brought you to Cloud Passage. I'll actually take multiple steps back because I kind of look from a broad perspective. So when I look at trends, right, to me it's more about what's happening and how are the lives of people changing when it comes to people, process and technology, right? So I'll start with tech. If you look at tech, there are three major changes that are relevant to our customers. On the infrastructure side, you've seen customers using servers, moving to containers, moving to, you know, service architecture, right? And in between, there was this massive shift that happened between customers moving from pure play servers to VMs. And there was a huge concern about, hey, how do we handle security for VMs? Now we're past that. And now the next wave of questions and concerns are around how do you secure your containers running across your infrastructure. The second piece is people use the commercial of the shelf software. And that's moving on with companies like Amazon providing services like databases. We've had a huge set of announcements from Mandy, Jesse today in the morning about databases and some interesting comments made there. So we've seen trends in that direction. We're also seeing in the trend that people were building monolithic applications and now they're breaking it apart and building microservices. Now because of these major tech changes, we're seeing significant changes on the people process side, right? Which is what you're talking about. So you had people structured as IT operations and IT security, buying commercial software, providing security and compliance based on it and driving business. It changed as Mark Edison said, right? Software is eating the world. And as a result, you see more developers getting hired by organization, building software fast, delivering it to meet their respective customer needs. And as a result, there's a major shift happening driven by technology as well as needs from the customer where now we are looking at DevOps and DevSecOps. I want you to bring us inside a little bit that container security discussion. Remember back kind of two years ago, it was like, oh, well containers aren't secure, shove them in a VM. Oh, no, you don't want to do that. Oh, maybe the isolation of containers actually will give us an opportunity. So what is the state of security? What is your company doing? What's special about the offering that you have? And how does that fit in with kind of what Amazon's doing, the open source piece? I mean, it's a big hairy ball there. But yeah. It's interesting. So what we're seeing on the container side, right, is the reason why the industry is using containers is because it simplifies deployment. You build your application, mostly images, and it becomes easy to deploy them. Doesn't matter where you're deploying them, which infrastructure it is, who owns it, doesn't really matter. But from a security standpoint, there's a huge benefit that Docker provides as well, which is the whole namespace separation across processes, networks, so on and so forth. But the key challenge that we see is because Docker has inherent security, it's not still good enough. So if you look at the images themselves, that the developers are building, the images could have embedded secrets in them. They could have vulnerable packages in them, right? And you could have images that are getting deployed, introduction that are not authorized images, right? So you have to be kind of watchful of those things. When you look at the container runtime, right, you have to be aware of the configurations the container has, are they privileged, are they read-only, are there configuration drifts happening on the containers? At the same time, you have to look at the third pillar, which is the host on which, the Docker host on which the container is running, because containers are only as secure as the underlying operating system, the host. Yeah, where does the container strategy fit in with kind of the holistic security that the companies need to look at? So, as I said earlier, right, so our customers are looking for one platform where they can secure the host, the virtual machines, and the containers, and our strategy is solely focused on that. Going from VMs to containers, and we're also looking at supporting serverless and services. I was kind of kidding there off the top, but I said, we're talking about gaming, we're talking about all kinds of things here. We weren't talking about that, but on a different plane, but about generations. You said, yeah, as a parent, we have different problems, but they're the same problems. So in the security world, you have the same nature of problems, but the magnitudes maybe change. So what do you think the next generation of security issues, what is that going to be, and how do you think your colleagues and you, a cloud passage, are going to have to address that? That's a great question. So the trend that we are seeing, and I think a couple of years from now, what's going to happen is the IT security organization is going to go through a major transformation, right? Software is leading the world, and as a result DevOps is going to become front and center of what's going to happen. If I'm a VP of application development, I would like to have both DevOps and security part of the entire process, because I, as a business owner, I'm accountable for the brand, the use cases and the problems I'm solving for my customers, for the same time meeting security and compliance requirements, right? So security and compliance as a problem is still the same, but how people are building and delivering software where they are doing it, what infrastructure they are actually running on as to complexity, as to scalability problems, and not, last but not the least, because you're looking at big scales, automation is key. Yeah, Aloka, I'm curious how IoT fits into this, because I hear surface area, magnitude, huge kind of threat when it comes to security. So we don't do much in the IoT space, but I think what's happening is customers who are looking at using IoT for their infrastructure, they're using more and more of microservices and containers to deliver that service, which is where we come in. We are seeing, as they are adopting IoT and delivering services using IoT, tracking trucks, devices, and those pieces across their network, we are the vendor of choice when it comes to securing those pieces of the infrastructure, as well as virtual machines and hosts they are running on. You know, what kind of customer interactions you're having here? What are kind of some of the top issues that are driving customers to your booth and challenges that they're looking to solve? So customers are coming to us saying, hey, no, we have a mandate. The IoT security guys and the DevOps guys are saying, from the business perspective, we have a mandate to deliver software fast, right? We have to meet our customer needs and stay ahead and up our game every day, right? In order to do that, you have to look at how you move security to the left of the DevOps pipeline. So customers are coming to us and asking, how do you fix that? How do you help us meet those needs that we have? How do I secure my workload? How do I move security to the left on the DevOps pipeline? And while doing all of that, be continuously compliant. And we're having so many conversations on these topics that are customers and containers happen to be front and center of that. You said you've been five months, right? Cloud passage. Yep. What was in your mind, the most attractive element that pulled you in and what do you see then as you've created this business from scratch? I mean, what little bumps are you hitting along the way in your work? Forget your clients. For you, what you have to handle when you are trying to create this whole new enterprise within the system. So it's a great question. So when I looked at cloud passage, I was looking for two things, right? One, from a market perspective, I clearly believe in what cloud passage was doing back then when I was looking them. And it's still going to do that, which is enterprise IT is going through a significant change and DevOps and DevSecOps is becoming front and center. And cloud passage is solely focused on that. So it's a big check for me from a market trend standpoint. At the same time, it's a great team, great people. So I came in with a mandate to actually build and define the container security product which we announced yesterday. Moving forward, I think in terms of bumps, it's interesting as a startup, which areas do we focus on? Because when you look at containers, customers are talking about a very broad spectrum. I made security container runtime, but they're also talking about micro segmentation and different pieces. But what we are finding in general is that customers are still figuring out how to use Docker, how to containerize that application. And the challenge that we are facing and we are focused is, you have to solve the problem across visibility, use cases across the platform, be it VMs or containers, instead of going too deep vertically on the container side alone. So we are going broad, helping meet the needs of our customers as they're deploying it today. Yeah, good. I'd love to hear your viewpoint. What's it like being in the AWS ecosystem these days? It's amazing. I mean, the rate at which these guys are innovating, developers are adopting, they have their eyes and the ears of the developers. What that means is DevOps is going to speed up. What it also means is the use of infrastructure is going to speed up. What means for us is our customers are going to be requiring means to secure and be compliant with various regulations as they're deploying the software and containerizing different applications as they deploy an ECS, well, moving forward maybe EKS. And we are the vendor of choice to help them get there. I think it means good news. Great news. Yes. Well, congratulations on the news yesterday. And we certainly wish you all the well, all the continuous success down the road. Thank you. I know five months, probably felt like five days, right? It's been flying by for you. Of course. Good luck. Thank you. Thanks a lot. We're back with more here from Reinvent AWS, putting it on the show here in Las Vegas. We're in the Sands and we're live here on theCUBE. Back with more to bet.