 Good morning from Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live on our second day of coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, North America 2022. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, great to be back with you. The buzz is here, no doubt. We've been talking a lot about the developers and one of the biggest bottlenecks that they face in software delivery is when they're stuck waiting for access to environments. Yeah, this next segment is going to be very interesting. It's a company that's making downloads more productive but recognizing the reality is how people are working remotely, but also company to company developers. People are collaborating in all kinds of forms, so this is really going to be a great segment. Exactly, two new guests to theCUBE who know theCUBE but are first time on theCUBE from Release Hub, Tommy McClung, it's CEO and Matt Carter, it's CMO. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thank you. Thanks for having us here. So we want to dig into Release Hub, so the audience really gets an understanding, but Tommy, I want to get an understanding of your background. Sure. You've been at Release Hub for what, three years? Yep, I'm the co-founder. Before that you were at Truecar. I was, yeah, I was the CTO at Truecar and prior to that I've been a software engineer my entire career, I've started a couple of companies before this, and software engineer at heart have been working on systems management and making developers productive since 2000, a long time. So it's fun to be working on developer productivity stuff and this is our home and this is where I feel the most comfortable. Yeah, and Matt, you're brand new to the company as a chief marketing officer. Yeah, so I just joined earlier this month so I'm really excited to be here. I came over from Docker, so it's great to be able to keep working with developers and helping them not only get their jobs done better and faster, but just get more delight out of what they do every day. That's a super important privilege to me and it's exciting to go and work on this at Release Hub. Well, they're lucky to have you and we worked together, Matt, at Docker and in the past developer productivity has always been a key, but communities are more important. We've been saying on theCUBE that developers are going to decide the standards, they're going to vote with their actions and their code and what they decide to work on, it will be, it has to be the best and that's going to be kind of the new de facto standard. You guys have a great solution that I like and I love the roots from the software engineering background because that's the hardest thing right now is how do you scale the software, make things simpler and easier and things happen, you don't want to disrupt the tool chains, you want to make sure the code is right, you guys have a unique solution. Can you take a minute to explain what it is and why it's so important? Yeah, I'll use a little bit of my experience to explain it. So, you know, I was the CTO of a company that had 300 engineers and sharing a handful of environments really slowed everybody down. You'd bottleneck there. So in order to unlock the productivity of that team, you know, developers need environments for development, they need it for testing, they need it for staging, you run your environments in production. So the environment is kind of the key building block in every software development process. And like my last company, there were very few of them, one or two, everybody sharing them. And so the idea at release is to make environments available on demand, so if a developer needs one for anything, they can spin one up. So if they want to write their code in an environment based in the cloud, they can do that. If they want to test on a pull request, an environment will automatically spin up. And the environments are full stack, include all the services, data, settings, configuration that runs the app. So developers literally get an isolated copy of the application so they can develop, knowing they're not stepping on other developers' toes. Can you give an example of what that looks like? Is it like, do they have to pre-configure the environment? Or how does that work? Can you give an example? Yeah, sure, so you know, you have to, just like infrastructure as code, we call this environments as code. So you need to define your environment, which we have a lot of tools that help you do that, analyze your repositories, help you define that environment. Now that you have the template for that, you can easily use that template to derive multiple environments out of it. A key part of this is everybody wants to make sure their development and data is secure. It runs within the AWS account of our customer. So we're the control plane that orchestrates it and the data and applications run within the context of their AWS account. So it's really simple. What's the benefit? Well, bottlenecking, increased developer productivity, developer happiness is a big one. Matt talks about this all the time, keeping developers in flow, so that they're focused on the job and not being distracted with, hey, DevOps team, I need you to go spin up an environment. And a lot of times in larger organizations, not just the environments, but the process to get access to resources is a big issue. And so DevOps was designed to kind of let developers take control of their own development process, but we're still kind of bottlenecking, waiting for environments, waiting for resources from the DevOps team. So this allows that self-service capability to really be there for the developer. Matt, talk about, to the target audience as the developer, talk about though, distill that down into the business value. What am I, if I'm a financial services organization or a hospital or a retailer, e-commerce, what is my business value going to be with using technology like this and delighting those developers? I think there's three things that really matter to the developers. To the financial leader in the organization. It's like, A, developers are super expensive and they have a lot of opportunities. So if a developer's not happy and finding joy and productivity in what they're doing, they're going to look elsewhere. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that when you're running a business, there's like, productivity is one measure, but also, are you shipping something confidently the first time or do you have to go back and fix things? And by having the environment spun up with all of your, your namespace established, your tendencies, your manage, all of your data being brought in, you're testing against a very high fidelity version of your application when you check in code. And so by doing that, you're testing things more quickly and you talk a lot about shifting left, but it's making that environment as fully functional and feature as possible. So you're looking at something as it will appear in production, not a subset of that. And then the last thing, and this is one where the value of ephemeral is very important. A lot of times like you'll spin up an environment and you may forget about it and it might just keep running and chewing up resources. Knowing that when you're done, it goes away, means that you're not spending money on things just sitting there on your AWS instance, which is very important for companies. So I hear retention of developers. You're learning that developers obviously business impact their speed to value as well. And trust. You're enabling your customers to instill trust in their developers with them. That's right. And trust and delight can be across purposes. A developer wants to move fast and they're rewarded for being creative. Whereas your IT team, they're rewarded for predictability and consistency. And those can be opposing forces. And by giving developers a way to move quickly and the artifact that they're creating is something that the IT team understands and works within their processes, allows you to let both teams do what they care about and not create a friction there. What about the environment as a service? I love that position. It kind of makes it sound like it's scaling in the cloud which you have mentioned yet. You do that. Is it for companies that are working together? So if I want to spin up an environment, say we're businesses, hey, let's do a deal. I'm going to integrate my solution into yours. I got to get my developers to maybe test it out. So I'm spinning up an environment with you guys. Then what do I do? Well, as far as like, if you're a customer of ours, is that the way they're asking? Well, a lot of times it's being used in a lot in internal development, right? So that's the kind of first use case, is I'm a developer, you have cross collaboration amongst teams, so developer tools. And what you're talking about is more, I'm using an environment for a demo environment or I'm creating a new feature that I want to share with a customer. That's also possible. So if I'm a developer and I'm building a feature and it's for a specific customer of mine, I can build that feature and preview it with the customer before it actually goes into production. So it's a sandbox kind of product development area for the developers to be actually integrating with their customers very, very quickly before it actually makes its way to all of the end users. So it's like a demo. It could be a demo. It's like a collaboration feature. Sandbox environment. We have customers. We're seeing more of this collaboration with developers. This becomes a lot. Well, it's not even just collaboration with internal teams. It's now you're collaborating with your customer while you're building your software, which is actually really difficult to do if you only have one environment. You know, you can't have all the features right there. And that's a killer app right there. Yeah. Instead of like sending a figment to a customer, this is what it's going to look like. It's two dimension like this is the app. That is a massive, powerful difference. Absolutely. In terms of customer delay, customer retention, employee engagement, those are all inextricably linked. Can you share Matt the voice of the customer? I just saw the release with Trip Actions. I've been a Trip Actions user myself. But give us this sense of a note that you're brand new, but the voice of the customer, what is it? What is it reflecting? How is it reinforcing your value problem? I think the voice that comes through consistently is instead of spending time building the system that is hard to do and complicated and takes our engineering cycles, our engineers can focus on whether it's platform engineering, new features and whatnot. Like it's more valuable to the company to build features. It's more exciting for a developer to build features and to not have to keep going back and doing things manually, which you're doing a, this is what we do all day long. To do it as like sideline is hard and the customers are excited because they get to move on to higher value activities with their time. Right. And everybody wants that. Everybody wants to be able to contribute high value projects, programs to their organization rather than doing the math. And I think with Trip Actions specifically, a lot of platform engineering teams are trying to build something like this in-house and it's a lot of toil, right? It's, you know, work that isn't value added it enables developers to get their job done, but it's not really helping the business, you know, deliver a feature to the user. And so this whole movement of platform engineering, you know, this is what those groups are doing and we're a big enabler to those teams to get that to market faster. Targeting businesses, enterprises, developers. That's right. That's right. What's the business model? How are you guys making money? What's the strategy there? Yeah, I mean, we really like to align with the value that we deliver. So if a user creates an environment, we get paid when that happens. So it's an on demand. Like if you use the environment, you pay us if you don't, you don't. It's a typical cloud-based pricing. Yeah. Yeah, on demand. Usage-based pricing, yeah. And is there a trigger on certain of how it gets cost? Is it more of the environment size or what's the? Yeah, I mean, there's a different tier for if you have really large, complicated environments and that's the trend, you know, that distributed applications aren't simple anymore, right? So if you have a small little Rails app, it's going to be cheaper than if you have a massive distributed system. But manageable, you know, the idea here is that this should help you save money over investing deeply into a deep platform engineering team. So it's got to be cost-effective and we're really cognizant of that. So you guys have a simple approach, which is great. Talk about the alternative. What does it look like for a customer that you want to target? What's their environment? What does it look like so that I would, I'm not a customer, I would know, I need to call you guys at Release Hub. Is it sprawl, is it like multiple tool chains, chaos, mayhem, what's have, what does it look like? Yeah, let's have Matt, Matt could do this one. When you look at the systems right now, I think complexity is the word that keeps coming up, which is that, oh, you know, whether you're, you know, talking about multi-cloud or actually doing it, that's a huge thing. Microservices proliferation, they're happening over and over again, different languages. What I'm excited about with Release is not to similar from what we saw in the Docker movement, which is that there's all this great stuff out there, but there's that common interface there so you can actually run it locally on your machine to your dev and test and know that it's going to operate with, you know, am I using, you know, couch base or Postgres or whatever? I don't care, it's going to work this way. Similar with Release, like people are having to build a lot of these bespoke solutions that are purpose-built for one thing and they're not designed as a platform. And the platform for platform engineering gives us a way to take that complexity out of the equation. So you're not limited to what you can do or, oh, Prud, I want to move to something else, I have to start over again. That process is going to be consistent no matter what you're doing. So you're not worried about, you know, evolution and success and growth. You know that you've got a foundation that's going to grow. Doing it on your own, you have to build things in that very bespoke specific manner. And that just creates a lot more toil that you'd want to get if you were using a platform and focusing on the value after your company. Yeah, Matt Klein was just on here. He was with Lyft. He was the one who open-source Envoy, which became very popular. We asked him what he thought about the future. And he's like, it's too hard to work with all this stuff. He was mentioning YAML code, but he went out to get triggered a little bit. But his point was, there's a lot to pull together. And it sounds like you guys have this solution back on the old days, spin-ups of EC2 compute. Similar way, right? Hey, I don't want a version of server. Got a version of server, rack and stack, top of rack switch. I'm going to go to the cloud, use EC2. Yeah, I mean, just think about it. You're an environment version of that. Why wait for it to be built? Yeah. Is that what I'm getting at? Yeah, I mean, like, you know, an application today isn't just the EC2 instances, right? It's all of your data, it's your configuration, building it one time is actually complicated to get your app to work. Doing it lots of times to make your developers productive with copies of that is incredibly difficult. So you saw the problem of developers waiting around for someone to provision an environment so they can do whatever they want to do. Test, ship, do, play around, test the customer. Whatever that project scope is, they're waiting around versus spinning up an environment. Yeah, that's what you do. Absolutely, 100%. And that's the service. That's what it is. Save time, reduce the steps it takes, make it more productive. Build an amazing developer experience that your developers are going to love. It's, you know, if you're at Facebook or Google, they have thousands of DevOps people building platforms. If you're a company that doesn't have that resource, you have a choice of go build this yourself, which is a distraction, or invest in something like us and focus on your core. Okay, so you got Matt on board, got a new CMO, you got enterprise class features and I saw the press release. Talk about the origination story, why you developed it and then take a minute to give a plug for the company on what you're looking for. I'm sure you're hiring. What's going on? Yeah, you know, I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. My last experience at TrueCar, I saw this problem firsthand. And as the CTO of that company, I looked into the market for a solution to this because we had this problem of, you know, 300 developers, environments needed for everything. So we ended up building it ourselves and it cost multiple millions of dollars to build it. And so as the buyer at the time, I was like, man, I would have spent to solve this and I just couldn't. So as a software engineer at heart, having seen this problem my entire career, it was just a natural thing to go work on. So yeah, I mean, for anybody that wants to, you know, create unlimited environments for their team, just go to releasehub.com. It's pretty self-explanatory, how to give it a shot and try it out. So, environment is a service from someone who had the problem, fixed it, built it. That's right. For other people. What are you guys hiring, looking for some people? Yeah, we have engineering hires, sales hires. Matt's got a few marketing hires coming, so selfishly he has that. The team's growing and it's a really great place to work. We're 100% remote. Part of this helps that, you know? We build this product and we use it every day so you get to work on what you build in dog food. It's pretty cool. We like remote development environments. Being here and watching that process where building a product and a feature for the team to work better, like, wow, we should share this with customers. And like the agility to deliver that was really impressive. Definitely, you know, reinforce like, how excited I am to be here because we're building stuff for ourselves, which is a privilege. Well, we're a site that you're here in theCUBE. Matt, what's your vision for marketing? You got a hiring plan, you got a vision. I'm sure you got some things to do. What's your goals? What's your objective? My goal is really like, there's this, you know, the statement of people saying, you can't market to developers. And I don't want to market developers. I don't make sure developers are made aware of how they can learn new things in a really efficient way so their capabilities grow. Like if we get people more and more successful with what they're doing, give them joy, reduce their toil and create that flow. Like we help them do things that make you excited more creative. And that's to me the reward of this. Like we teach people how to do that. And wow, these customers, they're building like the greatest innovations in the world that can be part of that, which is awesome. Yeah, Delighted Developers has so many positive business outcomes that I'm sure organizations in any industry are going to be able to achieve. So exciting stuff, guys. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the program. Good luck with the growth and congrats on what you've enabled so far in just a few short years. Thank you, appreciate it. Thank you so much. Our pleasure. Thank you. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live in Detroit at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 22. We back after a short break.