 Welcome back to LA. We are live in Los Angeles at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 21, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. We've been talking to folks all day, great to be here in person. About 2,700 folks are here. The community, the CNCF community is huge. 138,000 folks, great to see some of them in person, back collaborating once again. Dave and I are pleased to welcome our next guest. We have Sarish Raghuram, co-founder and CEO of Platform 9. Sarish, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. Give our audience an overview of Platform 9. Who are you guys, what do you do, when were you founded, all that good stuff? So we are about seven years old. We were founded with a mission to make it easy to run private hybrid and edge clouds. My co-founders and I were early engineers at VMware. And what we realized is that it's really easy to go use the public cloud because the public clouds have this innovation, which is they have a control plane, which serves as a foundation for them to launch a lot of services and make that really simple and easy to use. But if you need to get that experience in a private cloud or a hybrid cloud or in the edge, nobody gives you that cloud control plane. You get it from Amazon, in Amazon, get it from Azure in Azure, Google in Google. Who gives you a SaaS cloud control plane to run private clouds or edge clouds or hybrid clouds? Nobody. And this is what we do. So we make it easy to run these clouds using technologies like Kubernetes with our SaaS control plane. Now, is it limited to Kubernetes? Because when you mentioned your background at VMware, is this a control plane for what people would think of as private clouds using VMware style abstraction or is this primarily cloud native? So when we first started, actually, Docker did not exist. So at the time, our first product to market was actually an infrastructure service product. And at the time, we looked at what is out there. We knew VMware vSphere was out there. It's a VMware technology. There was Apache Cloud Stack and Open Stack. And we thought, look, the open ecosystem around VMs and infrastructure as a service is Open Stack. So we chose Open Source as the lingua franca for the service endpoint. So our control plane, we deliver Open Stack as a service. That was our first product. When the announcement of Kubernetes came out from Google, we knew at that time we were going to go launch because we'd already been studying LXC and Docker. We knew at the time we were going to standardize on Kubernetes because we believed that an open ecosystem was forming around that. That was a big bet for us. This foundation and this community has proved that that was a good bet. And today, that's actually a flagship product. It's our biggest share of revenue, biggest share of install base. But we do have more than one product. We have Open Stack as a service. We have Bear Metal as a service. We have Containers as a service with Kubernetes. I want to ask you some of the, I'm looking at your website here, platform9.com. Some of the three marketing messages. I want you to break these down for me. Simplified day two ops, multi-cloud ready on day one. And we know so many businesses are multi-cloud and percentage is only going up. And faster time to market. Talk to me about this. Let's start with simplified day two ops. How do you enable that? So, you know, one of the biggest, if you talk to anyone who runs like a large VMware environment and you ask them, when was the last time you did an upgrade? Or for that matter, somebody who's running like a large scale Kubernetes environment or an Open Stack environment, probably in a private cloud deployment. When was the last time you did an upgrade? How did that go? When was the last time you had an outage? Who did you call? How did that go? And you'll hear an outpouring of emotion. Same thing, you go ask people, when you use Kubernetes in the public cloud, how do these things work? And they'll say, it's pretty easy. It's not that hard. And so the question, the idea of platform9 is why is there such a divide? There's this, you know, we talk about digital divide. There is a cloud divide. The public clouds have figured out something that the rest of the industry has not. And people suffer with private clouds. There's a lot of demand for private clouds. Very few people can make it work because they try to do it with a lot of like handheld tools and limited automation skills and scripting. What you need is, you need the automation that makes sure that ongoing troubleshooting, 24 by seven alerting, upgrades to new versions are all fully managed. When Amazon doesn't upgrade to a new version, people don't have to worry about it. They don't want to stay up at night. They don't want to deal with outages. You shouldn't have to deal with that in your private cloud. So those are the kinds of problems, right? The troubleshooting, the upgrades, the remediation when things go wrong that are taken for granted in the public cloud that we bring to the customers who want to run them in private or hybrid or edge cloud environments. How do you help customers? What does future-proofing mean? Like how do you help customers future-proof their cloud-native journey? What does that mean to platform9 and what does that mean to your customers? I'll give you, one of my favorite stories is actually one of our early customers is Snapfish. It's a photo-sharing company. It's a consumer company, right? When they got started with us, they were coming off of VMware. They wanted to run an open stack environment. They started nearly four years ago and they started using us with open stack and VMs and infrastructure as a service. Fast forward to today, 85% of the usage on us is containers and they didn't have to hire open stack experts nor did they have to hire Kubernetes experts but their application development teams went from moving from a somewhat legacy VMware-style IT environment to a modern self-service developer experience with open stack and then to containers and Kubernetes and we're going to work on the next generation of innovation with serverless technologies, simplifying, you know, building modern, more elastic applications. And so our control plane, the beauty of our model is our control plane adds value, it added value with open stack, it added value with Kubernetes, it'll add value with what's next around the evolution of serverless technologies, right, it's evergreen and our customers get the benefit of all of that. So when you talk about managing environments that are on-premises and in clouds, I assume you're talking hyperscale clouds like AWS, Azure, GCP. What kind of infrastructure needs to be deployed and when I say infrastructure, that can be software, what needs to be deployed in, say, AWS for this to work? What does it look like? So some 30% of our users use us in the public cloud and the majority of that actually happens in AWS because they're the number one cloud. And we really give people three choices, right? So they can choose to use and consume AWS the way they want to. So we have a small minority of customers that actually provisions bare metal servers in AWS. That's a small minority because there are specific use cases they're trying to do and they try to deploy like Kubernetes on bare metal but the bare metal happens to be running on AWS, okay, that's a small minority. A larger majority of our users in AWS or some hyperscale cloud brings their VPC under management. So they come in, get started, sign up with platform line in their platform line control plane. They go and say, I want to plug in this VPC and I want to give you this much authorization to this VPC. And in that VPC, we essentially can impersonate them and on their behalf provision nodes and provision clusters using our communities, open source communities, upstream CNCF communities. But we also have customers that said, hey, I already have some clusters with EKS. I really like what the rest of your platform allows me to do. And I think it's a better platform for me to use for a variety of reasons. Can you bring my EKS clusters in a management and then help me provision new clusters on top? And the answer is you can. So you can choose to bring your bare metal. You can choose to bring your VPC and just provision like virtual machine and treat them as nodes for Kubernetes clusters or you can bring pre-built Kubernetes clusters and manage them using our management product. What are your routes to market? So we have three routes to market. We have a completely self-serve, completely free forever experience where people can just go sign up, log in, get access to the control plane and be up and running within minutes, right? They can plug in their server hardware on premises at the edge in the cloud, their VPCs and they can be up and running. From there, they can choose to upsell into a grow into a growth tier or choose to request for more support and a higher touch experience and work with our sales team and get into an enterprise tier. And that is our second go-to-market, which is a direct go-to-market companies in the retail space, companies, tech companies, companies in FinTech, companies that are investing in digital transformation in a big way, have lots of software developers and are adopting these technologies in a big way but want private or hybrid or edge clouds. That's the second go-to-market. The third and in the last two years, this is new to us. Really exciting go-to-market to us is a partner led go-to-market where partners like Rackspace have OEM platform line. So we have a partnership, deep partnership with Rackspace. All of Rackspace's customers and they install base essentially, including customers who are consuming public cloud services via Rackspace, get access to platform nine and Rackspace working together with Rackspace's ability to kind of service the whole mile. And also, we have a very important partnership with Mavenure in the 5G space. So 5G, we think is a large opportunity and there's a joint product there called Mavenure, a web-scale platform to run 5G networks on our Kubernetes stack. So platform nine, why? What does that mean? Harry Potter. Harry Potter. So it's platform nine and three quarters, okay? We had this realization. Michael Farners and I were at VMware for 10, 15 years. And we were struggling with this problem of why is the public cloud so easy to use? Why is it so hard to run a private cloud? And even today, I think not many people realize. And that's the analogy to platform nine and three quarters. It's right in the middle of King's Cross station. You go through it and you enter the whole new world of magic. That secret door, that platform nine and three quarters is a SaaS control plane. That is a secret sauce that Amazon has and Azure has and Google has. And we're bringing that for anybody who wants to use it on any infrastructure of their choice. Where can customers go to learn more about platform nine? So platform nine.com, follow us on Twitter, platform nine sis, our own LinkedIn, you know. And if any of our viewers are here at KubeCon, they can stop by your booth. What are some of the things that you're featuring there? We are the booth. We have our product managers. We have our support engineers. We have the people that are actually doing the real work behind the product right there. We're talking about our roadmap. We're talking about the product demos. We're doing like specific talks on specific deep dives in our product. And we're also talking about some really cool things that are coming up in the garage in the next six months. Can you leave us with any teasers about what some of the cool things are that are coming up in the garage? Yeah, one thing that is a really big deal is the ability to manage Kubernetes clusters as cattle. Kubernetes makes node management and app management lets you treat them as cattle instead of pets. But Kubernetes clusters themselves, our customers tell us like even in Amazon, EKS and others, these clusters themselves become pets and they become hard to manage. So we have a really, really interesting capability to manage these as more as, you know, from infrastructure as code with GitOps as cattle. We actually have an announcement that I'm not able to share at this point, which is coming out in two weeks in the edge space. So you'll have to stay tuned for that. So folks can go to platform9.com, check out that announcement two weeks. Two weeks from now. By the end of October. That's right. Awesome. Sherwish, thank you so much for joining us. I love the fact that you asked that question because I kept thinking platform nine, where do I know that from? And I just Googled Harry Potter. That's right. Platform nine and three quarters. I'm dying because I didn't automatically make the correlation because my son and I are the most unbelievable Potter heads ever. Yeah, well soon. We have that in common. That's fantastic. Yeah. Oh, awesome. Thank you for joining us. Sharing what platform nine is. Some of the exciting stuff coming out. And two weeks, learn to hear some great news about the edge. Absolutely. Awesome, Sherwish. Thank you for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Our pleasure as well. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, live in Los Angeles. TheCube is covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon 21. Stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest.