 So we are here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon and today we have with us Neeraj. Neeraj, can you tell us a bit about yourself and the company that you created? Thank you. It's great to be here today. We are here in Copenhagen and it's been wonderful in terms of conference. I am Neeraj Chitolia. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Casten. We have started based in California in the Bay area and we are focused on how do we make it easy for everyone to build, apply and manage stateful CloudNative applications that have started to emerge across the board. You're talking stateful and people are talking about serverless and all those things. But we'll get into that later on because there are so many things to talk about. What's the story of the name Casten? That's a great question. So Casten is actually a German word so the roots are from that language. It means box a container so it's quite apropos given the community be a part of and given the products we build. So there's a hidden message in there. Why did you pick German? Do you have a German connection? Yes, so through the family actually our logo designer who has done work for us in the past, they are right now working. She's in Spain but working on philosophy in German. So that's how some of the branding happened there. And when we ran into the name we knew this was it. We didn't have to discuss any further. That's exciting. And now you're in and there's K in the name and K in Kubernetes. So you are here at KubeCon. Today is the last day of the conference. How has been the conference so far for you? The conference has been great. So this is the third or fourth KubeCon we've been at. This is the second KubeCon we are sponsoring and overall I'm honestly amazed about the conference for a number of things. Just in terms of growth of the community, the people that have come here and the depth of knowledge that they have. And I've seen this change for the community from people just learning about Kubernetes and trying to figure out how it can help them to be running in production and having very deep technical questions as to some of the pain points are running into how they would get addressed. So from every angle that I can look at, I have been very, very happy with KubeCon and in particular in Europe. It's traditionally been this scenario where European conferences run somewhat smaller than the corresponding US ones. And in this scenario, it's larger than the US one. And I'm very happy to see that also come out. What is the reason? I think it is the interest both from the developer as well from the operator side of things. And the fact that what we have seen is that the cloud native ecosystem is causing a very rapid shift in enterprises that traditionally people would classify as boring whether it be manufacturing, pharma, things of that sort. People have seen that there's no always no silver bullet in the communities we live in. But there is this notion that this can really rapidly help people take things to market faster. And so this doesn't need to wait for someone else to adopt it first. People are jumping onto it. There's a lot of folks that try it out and say, look, this is the right thing for the organization to push it up. Sometimes from the developer upward point of view, sometimes it's the operators because it makes a life simple. They can focus on things that matter for the business. And so and you'll see that adoption across the world. And that's why we're also looking forward to KubeCon China and seeing what's happening on that side of the world too. This will be, I think, the first KubeCon in Asia. Yes. When you are here and you meet all these players, some are partners, some are competitors, some are users, what are the pain points that you, because Kubernetes is related to technology and a lot of their software, what was the, you know, you're like, oh, this is the pain point that, you know, we are trying to solve or we should be solving. Okay. So I'll talk about it for some of the community perspective and we'll talk about it also from our perspective. Generally, what we have seen as also a mindset shift in the people in the community is they've gone from evaluating this technology, looking into whether this can help meet the needs to now using it. So it has switched over from day one to day two kind of operations. We've also seen the growth of multiple groups within a larger organization running Kubernetes in particular. And that comes with now how does the central platform steam or central operations team help with these issues and managing things at scale, security comes up, running in multiple environments, multiple public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, all of those things are becoming increasingly important to the people we speak to. And in particular, what we cast in as a company is focused on is looking at operator pain points for data management. So a lot of, you know, you touched upon serverless and a little while ago, but when we go look at customers, people have gone from doing somewhat simplistic, stateless applications to more complex, stateless applications to now more complex, stateful applications. So we've seen this shift and all of those coexist obviously together. And even when you talk about things such as serverless, which Kubernetes is making a big push to also handle the multiple platforms that can run on it, CNCF as a landscape that it publishes. And in that ecosystem too, we're not saying that state has gone away. State is still there. It's just been pushed off to manage data services that might be running either within the cluster outside of the cluster. And all of those things, it go, they go together. What really makes up the application is not about does it run as events or functions in some service or running as containers. It's a collection of all these resources that make up the application. So then what does it mean to manage that? So if you're running a retail site or if you're a financial firm, how do you make sure ransomware attacks suddenly doesn't bring your business down? So what does backup and recovery mean for that? Or how do you deploy the same stack across multiple cloud environments, your database stack on different storage infrastructure? How do you take care of the migration use cases, whether it be for test, we often run into customers that code that works amazingly in staging environments falls over in production because the data sets might be synthetic or might not have been recently updated in the staging environment. So how do you automate that on a regular basis? How do you move to another cloud region or cloud provider for disaster recovery? So all of these data management actions are things that we focus on today as a company. Okay, and now from challenge, let's switch to new use cases or exciting use cases. What have you seen here? So in terms of new and exciting use cases, I think the way that people are approaching the problem is dramatically shifted. Traditionally, when you go look at vendors, you look at infrastructure players, people generally think of it from the bottom up, that they look at it from the perspective of use my disks, use my networking, use my load balancer, things of that sort. What has been amazing is how the mindchats have shifted to be application first and developer first, that people start thinking about it from a top down point of view, which is very aligned with how these platforms have been built. So it's about the application as the organizational unit. It's about the application as the unit that one manages, one operates, one deploys. And then you worry about infrastructure. Yes, the application as a load balancer component and the application as a security component in a state that runs on disk or maybe in an object storage system. It's a collection of that and how you think about it first, that I find exciting because it's the right way to do it. And what is different here compared to doing this in the traditional VM world is a well defined API. You don't need to infer anything. You can introspect, you can figure this out at runtime. And that allows for the creation of a lot more powerful tools that can operate on this. We've seen the controller and the operator patterns emerge. There have been a number of keynotes around this. But that is just, I believe, the start of the journey where we see Kubernetes now being treated as the platform you program against. And it's still early on in there. And we'll see a lot more work happen that makes it more approachable and usable for developers. But I think this is a start of a journey that's going to be very exciting over the next couple of years. Right, right. Another thing is, which is interesting is that everybody is talking about Kubernetes, Kubernetes. And a few years ago, we used to hear the same thing about OpenState and Docker. I was having the same conversation earlier also. And is it because whenever a new technology comes in, industries and companies, they get excited how they can use it. So the hype cycle is created. Though the technology itself evolves at a natural pace, but there is an artificial hype that gets into it. What do you think is going on with Kubernetes? So we were involved with some of the OpenState components in a previous life, too, at a different company. So I've seen that OpenState ecosystem grow. I'm seeing the Kubernetes ecosystem grow. There's some parallels in terms of rate of growth, but there are very large differences in terms of not just how the community is structured and organized, but how development is happening in this space. So I think that's a very good sign for the health of the ecosystem that we live in. So there is obviously this A aspect of hype. People want to figure out, right, how things will be valuable, things of that nature. But from the perspective of when I looked at and compared to the OpenState community, and OpenState has done a lot of good things. We cannot just dismiss OpenState. No, I don't dismiss it. I said, you know, it's natural. They're a bit unnatural, but we, I mean, I don't say we, but you know, industry created a hype around it. But a lot of the hype around industry when you look at OpenState had tended to be vendor-led, right, if you remember. With a lot of vendors trying to say, how do I commercialize this? How do I make sure that, you know, how do I sell OpenState as a product in some way, shape or form? In this case, we still see vendors in the ecosystem, and that's a healthy sign. But it's not based on, you know, really how do I create another Kubernetes distribution, things of that nature. It's more based around the pull from people using this in production, right? And how do I service those pain points? And that's a far healthier sign than saying, this is how I believe it should be versus saying, here is how people are using it. Here is what we need to do to get it to the next stage. And the multiple efforts there. Vendors are working much better together as far as also pushing things forward. And I think a lot of the leaders in all the sakes of the special interest groups and within Kubernetes, whether you look at six storage gaps, really put the vendor relationship out of the view and consider on what it means for the user, for the developer, for the application. And that's the right approach. And that I think will make sure that, you know, at some point in time, the hype ties off. But it makes sure the ecosystem is very healthy at that point in time. And I feel I may be wrong that Linux Foundation has a long experience either way. You know, they have so many projects. So it also helps, you know, having that experience. And because there's a lot of cross-pollination happens. So people have had, you know, their chance to learn and make mistakes and then fix them. Yes. And I think Linux Foundation does a great job. Linux Foundation has the parent project, CNCF underneath that, because there's not only just strong leadership out there. As you mentioned, the strong leadership that has seen this happen in multiple different contexts and that can influence things in the right way. I really like the fact that they are not here to say this is a winner or right. This is the one that we bless. But they're pushing the open source ecosystem, which is a great thing in this space, but they're making sure that the community evolves in the right way. And sometimes it's a thankless job. So really, I would like to thank everyone in CNCF that does this because, you know, everyone doesn't when they don't get what they want, it leads to issues for them. But they've taken the right decisions in that space. And that's working for them. One more thing that I like about CNCF or Linux Foundation in general is that they're focused on diversity. They want, they co-handle, you know, he's, you know, from VMware, he would like, you know, we should hire more women, we should, but it's not just diversity, not just for the agenda, you know, there are a lot of other things. What do you think about, you know, diversity in this community space? Okay, so there are two or three things. What I love about the community is not just about things like code of contact, but the fact that we are very welcoming and open. We already see a lot of representation from underrepresented minorities in the space, the string of conferences giving talks, serving all the program committees. So all of those things in my mind are a positive thing. That said, I still think we need to do a lot more. When you go look at the show floor today, we are still, as a community, predominantly male. We need to make it more open, more accessible for people from different backgrounds and not traditional backgrounds that might not have done computer science from an early career point of view. So how do we do that is going to be important as this community grows and people of color. And we have, me personally, this is something I care a lot about, right, in terms of teams I've built in the past as well as teams we're building at Cast and we try to make sure that it's about diversity is a big thing, but it's not just about diversity. And this is another thing where CNCF is doing the right thing. It's also about inclusion, right? So diversity, at least in my mind is somewhat simplistic, but it's about making sure there's representation across the board. But inclusion is making sure that it's not just we have people from these other backgrounds, but making sure we have the right environment for them to succeed in. That they have a seat at the table, that the other people that get promoted, that the other people that get the opportunities. And helping them serve as some of that is I think where also more focus needs to be. That is how do we also build not just a diverse community, but also an inclusive community here. And I think that goes that goes from every layer in the stack in some sense, from companies that get set up, communities that form around special interests are all the way to broader organizations like CNCF today. Right. And I also see them as a vector of change and influence because it's a CNCF organization, but they have member companies. So when the influence then it trickles down to those companies and influence those companies as well. You're right. These days while there are a lot of efforts going on, the situation is still needs to know. So I think there should be a blind hiring that you know, you should the HR manager should not be able to see your name and sex and you know, everything, gender, sorry, gender or you know, race or whatever it is. It should be based on your GitHub repo or whatever it is. So I think so anyway, sorry, I don't want to interrupt you, but how at Cast and how do you issue? Okay, it's a great question, right. So a lot of things I think are sometimes the way we run it and how we encourage this first of all is from day one having a diverse team, right? Especially at once your company grows to a certain stage. It's very hard to change culture. It's not impossible, but harder. So I think starting off with the right things in mind sorting for the right core team definitely helps. And we did that. The other thing is in terms of a hiring process, the way we run things a little different, right? There is some amount of anonymization you can do for resumes, but it's more about how we set up the interview structure, where how do we surface the strengths of candidates? How do we set up the interview structure for people to succeed versus it be a way to filter people out or to get them in bluntly to fail? So setting people up for success is more valuable in my mind because it helps surface candidates that might not have the, you know, I started programming in, you know, when I was a freshman in high school kind of scenario where people that might have come from a different background into computer science or into the space. And then how do you expose their strengths as to what value they bring to the team, right? And then there's a culture mindset as to when you bring people in and letting people know what we value in an organization. That is we do not want group thing we value diversity of thought. It's not just diversity of, you know, people of color or gender or orientation, but this is about diversity of thought there too and what we value. And that also has an impact on the hiring. Obviously, right, there are other things that we can do to improve just the hiring pool that one selects from because if you go to traditional venues to go look at hire, that can be an issue. But something we've started looking at more recently is what are nontraditional places to go look at to also be able to attract candidates. And I think that will be another tool in a toolbox to help build a more diverse team out there. Because what happens is different cultures, they have different ways of solving the problem. So when you put everybody in the mix, you can solve the problem in so many different ways. I was talking to Brian Bellendorf and he was like, if your open source community does not look like our global community, it won't sustain for a very long time. And that's kind of true, especially in the open source world, where you're getting you know, diverse, you know, from different, you know, yeah. And that goes to write also how you set up when you talk about open source, it's about how you set up communities that people that might have never seen each other. How do you ensure that people are kind, respectful, because code is a component of what we do here today. But the health of the ecosystem is based around people. And it is based around how welcoming we are to new contributors. It is based around how we how quickly we can make them feel like they're part of the community. And all of those things you think starting off from scratch, we've talked about what CNCF does, but I think there's more awareness in this space, which really does help because you mentioned people with different cultural backgrounds, how do you make sure that they're comfortable for really what is truly global organizations today. And the thing is no matter what you're using, whether you're a Kubernetes user, in the end, it's going to help, you know, some person, you know, some individual, it's going to help people in all these technologies are not for the sake of technology. So people around the center doesn't matter, and user, or the product label. Let's just switch topics from culture and everything. What are the new trends that you're seeing in this space, because you have been in this space for a while? So the new trends that I see in the space, or other, you know, things that people have talked about that are becoming more reality today, is people really running in some sort of planet scale environment. It has traditionally been harder to do, but now we have customers that run across multiple data centers all over the world. And it's not just about multiple public clouds or hybrid where you have on prem stuff with public clouds. But it's really about how do I treat all of this together, in some sense. And what does that mean for my applications, for my development process, for my end customers, especially if they external to the company. So we see a lot of talk about planet scale stuff, whether it be planet scale databases, multiple clusters in use. And we see definitely that is emerging. There's a lot of interest in serverless. It's still very old days. But there's a lot of talk around that. And I think they'll have a dramatic impact on how applications are built over the next few years. It's still early. We see people running a lot of pain there. Just once you have finished your first application, once you want to scale up, not from the process of how many IOPS you can handle, but the number of applications, what it means to be an application. There is at least some pain there. But I think as a function, it allows you to or rather allows developers to focus on what they care about most while delegating other things to the underlying infrastructure. And I think that's going to be quite powerful in terms of technology trends. We've touched upon communal odds. I won't cover that. But just really how people from different places are coming together to build these technologies is a very big deal. And a more power to everyone working in this field to do that. I think those are things that really jump out top of mind today when we look at all of this stuff. You mentioned serverless and we talked about that earlier also. When you talk about function as a service, it's mostly today when we see it's tied to the public cloud. There are three providers which also create a risk of vendor lock-in. And when we talk about open source, the whole idea is to bring the vendor lock-in. What's your thoughts about that? So I think that's a very genuine concern. It's not just about vendor lock-in. It's also about when you go look at the success of some of the related technologies in the cloud-native world. It's because a developer can do the same thing on the laptop that they can do in production. That's why Docker was successful and really there's a big push around that. I think the same thing applies here. And I really like what I'm seeing in the community with some of these serverless or function as a service platform, even based on Kubernetes as an example. And I think that would be one of the ways forward around this where obviously all cloud vendors would like sticking us on their platforms. But developers, larger companies would prefer the independence or portability. And I think this gives you the happy middle ground there. Pretty much every public cloud provider has Office Managed Kubernetes as a service. And some of the serverless platforms that run on that give you this portable way of being able to move things across things. Obviously, this is all great in theory. Ultimately, what really makes function as a service or some of the serverless stuff useful is not just that, but all the community dependencies that it has, whether it be object storage or SQL system or structured database, a message queue, and all of that ecosystem needs to come along with it, apart from just that one framework. But I think given the fact Kubernetes is already multi-cloud and global today, building serverless platforms on top of this will give you the portability aspect of things which people are looking for right now. Do you think we can talk a lot about a lot of things? But I think we touched on some broad topics. Is there anything else you would like to touch on? No, I think this has been a really good conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. It was nice meeting you. And we will be seeing you again in the next cube corner. Definitely. Yes, definitely. Really looking forward to it. Thank you.