 from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering ConsulConnect Live 2015. Sponsored by Consul, there's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in San Francisco for ConsulConnect 2015. This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLES flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder. I'm SiliconANGEL Jeff Frick, general manager of theCUBE. Our next guest is Shafiq Peck, lead engineer, network engineer at Zendesk. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. So lead network engineer, I mean, you're the chief firefighter, right? Yeah, amongst us, I think, yeah. Yeah. Sass, obviously the cloud, changing everyone's business models. A lot of stuff going on, SDN, a lot of transformation, DevOps, applications being deployed, API, vacation, all that stuff, we cover that all day long. But there's a lot of underlying plumbing that needs to get re-platformed. Talk about some of the issues and what's going on at this event and why is this event so important in terms of this new next generation internet? Well, because it has nothing to do with the internet, frankly. So everyone knows, you know, there's a lot of malicious activity out on the internet, right? And so when you're trying to run a business on the internet, you know, a lot of that, you're constantly in the back of your mind worrying about that malicious activity and when you're finally going to be targeted for it. And it's certainly not an issue if it's definitely an issue of one. So basically the reason that we're here is because we definitely recognize there's an importance in bypassing the internet and staying connected with your customers and also the applications that you use. And so the importance of this particular conference is it encompasses the importance of peering directly from business to business at the network layer. And so any chance that you're able to connect directly with the businesses that either you need to run your company or the other businesses that utilize your particular applications, you know, it's definitely a win, you know. Like I said, the internet's kind of the Wild Wild West, you know, and when you are a target for, you know, whether you're a direct target or just collateral damage of an attack, it definitely affects, you know, financially it has big repercussions. And also emotionally, you know, it hurts. Kind of like someone, you know, breaking into your house and, you know, sitting around on your couch watching television, right? Like you're going to feel a little violated. So with DirectConnect, you know, you're cutting out all the craziness of the internet, you're connecting directly with businesses, businesses that you work with, businesses that you trust, you know. So there's a certain hope that, you know, that a lot of the malicious activity that's out on the internet is going to be significantly cut down by peering directly with these. So if you talk about the perspective from the service providers, we talk to customers all the time and they're putting in Salesforce and they're putting in Zendesk and they're using these tools, but you've worked on the service provider side, the applications that are delivering via the cloud. How have expectations changed? How important is this DirectConnect for companies like Zendesk, companies like Salesforce, because it's obviously revenue and customer service to be able to DirectConnect into your clients to deliver service? Yes, I mean, we exist on the internet, right? So if customers are unable to connect to us, then that's major problems for our customers, right? You know, we're certainly not going to be SLAs, you know, we're not going to be able to provide the top tier availability that we want to provide for our customers. So if we're able to connect directly with our customers and, you know, cut out any sort of instability on the internet or any malicious activity on the internet, that's an absolute advantage to our business. And do you provide any financial incentives or other types of incentives to your customers to say, hey, this is an option you should consider, you know, we strongly suggest it, or again, maybe there's either carrots or sticks to help encourage that, or is that unspoken, it's kind of there? Yeah, I mean, as far as any sort of financial incentives or anything like that, we really haven't. I mean, it's more, from my perspective, it's more for the benefit of, you know, connectivity for not only Zendesk, but Zendesk customers and the applications that Zendesk uses to keep the lights on. So if there is any sort of financial give and take anywhere, you know, that's probably the least of my concerns. I'm more concerned with providing performance. So talk about the internet, obviously it was an alternative for the old way. I mean, talk about the transition from the old end and architecture from the network 90s, back in the 90s. Yeah, remote office, put a box out there, and then the internet became nice backhaul or transit for folks. And then now we're back to these secure connections. Talk about that. Why, what happened, cost? Was it cost was the issue? What was the driver between people moving from direct connections to the internet to now back? So I mean, what people, what enterprises we're using, you know, back in the 90s, I don't think can necessarily be compared to what we're doing today. Reason being is because, you know, everyone, you know, bought software, they, you know, bought software licenses, installed in the server and their data center and everything was there, right? But then, you know, there's also the hiring of those team members to, you know, service that one application, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, it was SaaS. I mean, the reason why it's such a big, big market these days is because it, for Zendesk at least, I mean, it takes an hour to set up the Zendesk. You're up and running with a customer service platform, you know, in no time, you know, as opposed to days, months, weeks, you know, however long it takes for, you know, your project management team to coordinate efforts to install any sort of software platforms inside your data center, you know, SaaS brings it down from, you know, months of project planning and all that stuff to literally hours. So they're, you know, now, with that being said, there's now all of a sudden your enterprise has a huge reliance on the internet, right? So again, going back to, you know, the craziness of the internet and, you know, everyone's using the internet for various purposes, traffic's going here, there, and everywhere. And so, you know, when your enterprise is relying on these SaaS applications, if there's anything that disrupts that, your company's, you know, especially if it's, you know, if it's a critical financial software or, you know, customer service software where it helps your customers connect to you. Effectively, your business is down, right? So what Direct Connect brings is it's not really a step backwards or, you know, revisiting the past or anything, it's just a new way of thinking and it's a new way of connecting to your applications. It's basically, you know, the old school idea of having an application run inside your data center, you know, over a network that's within your control. Now you're still, it kind of gives you the best of both worlds because you're still able to use these SaaS applications, but you're still, the network is still, you know, somewhat under your control. Yeah, so it's... Talk about the trade-off. Some people will, some just played devil's advocate here. Yeah. Well hey, you know, you know what? Internet trends is dropping, like costs are dropping really low. I can just off shift some of the savings into better engineering. So, I'm going to pass on console. What's the hidden cost in that shift? So in traditional peering, I admit there's a huge cost for it. So for companies like Zendesk that live on the internet, it makes sense for us to build into internet fabrics and peer with, you know, whoever we can peer with on these internet fabrics. And the cost is just the cost associated with doing business, right? So, but if you're an enterprise, I'll admit, yeah, it probably doesn't make financial sense for you to go and build into the various fabrics around the world, just to connect to these various applications that you use. What console is proposing to do is break down that barrier to entry for enterprises and make it cost effective for them to get onto these peering fabrics and peer with, you know, all the companies that they use on a daily basis. So give me an example of when someone qualifies as a direct peering connection. Is it API based stuff? Is it just joint application support, customer? I mean, what are some of the examples where the direct connection would be valued? I mean, if you're moving any amount of data on a daily basis to a particular organization, it makes sense to peer. I think the more companies that you can peer with, the better. I mean, even if you're sending, you know, tiny amounts of traffic to particular, you know, application or pulling down data, even if it's minute amounts, you're still, you know, if there's still a reliance on maintaining connectivity to that particular entity, and it's absolutely important to have direct connection. Like Dropbox is a probably a good example, right? I mean, hey, I'm using file sharing service. Yeah, yeah. Just creating SLA, why have it out in the cloud. Exactly. And kind of out in the wild. Yeah, and so for a company like Dropbox and for Zendesk, I mean, if we're able to connect over these, you know, these private lines to our customers, it's less that we have to worry about our SLA. We know that the network portion is one piece that can be taken out, you know, that it's just, you know, maintaining the application and making sure that our servers and services are running. You know, the beautiful thing about cloud, we cover the cloud stuff pretty heavily. And one of the things that the trend always seems to be pointing to is freeing up time for other innovations. So let's just take that point, okay? Let's just say, okay, hey, you know what? I've got a customer, we're sharing, you know, 50 megabits per second, staying per day, bigger customer. Now, what does that mean for your staff in terms of creativity? What do you guys do with all that? I won't say all that free time, but you know what I'm saying, where's the innovation side of it? The cost I get that in the security, the hidden costs and DDoS and all that stuff, probably pretty large and you can justify that pretty quickly. Where's the upside on the innovation? The upside on the innovation? I mean, it's exactly what you were just referring to. I mean, those points about DDoS and all that stuff. I mean, that's, we have a part of our team currently that, I mean, that's all they're working on is DDoS mitigation strategies, you know? Instead of being able to automate capacity builds and stuff like that, a lot of our time is spent on DDoS and firefighting. And so, I mean, it's that small portion that consumes a lot of our time, you know? And for the most part, a lot of our network outages aren't self-inflicted, you know? It's stuff that's going on the internet, it's security issues that we're worried about. So, I mean, if we can even, you know, by the smallest amount, just, you know, get some of that free time back to look towards automation, you know? It's kind of a no brainer. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, it just makes sense for us. How bad is the DDoS stuff out there? Give us some color between like, I mean, how freaking bad is it? People say, oh, DDoS, I mean, Bill Norton was kind of sharing some color on that. What's your take on it? It's bad, it's bad. And especially for companies that are multi-tenancy like Zendesk, I mean, it's few and far between that the hosting companies are actually the targets. It's usually their customers, you know? And we have a lot of customers from various industries and one of those industries that we host is the gaming industry. And, you know, you have a lot of kids out there that, you know, they're upset with this particular gaming company and so they, you know, they attack them. And as collateral damage, you know, we feel the pain points. And it's increasing, you know? And it's, you know, when I first started working at Zendesk, you know, we get one maybe, you know, few and far between, once every six months or so. But, you know, as time is progressing, you know, it's happening a lot more frequently and enough so that, you know, I certainly lose sleep over it. And, you know, like I mentioned, we have guys on our team that are just dedicated to working on DDoS mitigation at this point. So, I mean, it's definitely affecting us. It affects our business, you know? Everyone in the entire organization is well aware of the effects of DDoS and... We love the term dev ops, but since it's an ops kind of show, it's ops dev that's how you look at it, right? Which side of the room you're on. So, the ops side is really critical in this whole new app developer market. What's your take on that? As you look up the stack and you see demand, right? Hey, I want programmable infrastructure. And you guys aren't against that, obviously. But people are like, hey, you know, if I take away free time, I got to create a programmable infrastructure. Does this help in any way with console, create more engineering around that? And what's your view about dev ops and ops dev? I mean, it's the whole dev ops thing. I mean, it's not a fad. I mean, even the largest enterprises are moving to the dev ops methodology. Just to, I mean, you get the software out quicker, you know, a lot quicker with the dev ops methodology. And so, and with all the automation stuff and APIs and all that stuff, you know, any bit that we can leverage to not have to manually go through any sort of process, you know, at any time we could click a button and fix something, you know, we're going to absolutely leverage that. Automation, service cataloging, all that good stuff that you hear about that. Yeah. Okay, well on dev ops, one thing is resilience. Yes. I mean, agile, I should say, agile's thing. Resilience is what network should be. Right. The way does this help with console and the conversations here at Console Connect make the networks more resilient? What specifically can you share that's more resilient about new features? So, I mean, with console, I mean, there's a, in traditional peering, you know, that you have to, there's a lot of manual intervention involved. You know, you have to figure out which color you're going to build into, which, you know, which customers or which applications you want to target to peer with, right? And then so you have to build into those data centers and it could take weeks, months to actually get, you know, your equipment in there and then you have to worry about private lines and all that stuff. With console, you connect to the IAX environment. I mean, you have an entire catalog of various customers that are also connected and you say, hey, you know, I know that we use this company. I want to peer with them. At the click of a button, you're on their social media page to get console. And so you can see, you know, exactly what the, you could actually see who the peer coordinator is that you're chatting with. You know, there's kind of a LinkedIn type profile on the engineers and the engineering team and also the company and what they do. And so you can just click on a button and say, hey, I want to peer with you. And once they accept, I mean, you're up and running. It's kind of like a social network means networking. Yes. Yes. Real networking. Real networking. Well, you know, you got some money on the other end, any kind of questions, obviously. Yeah. And so there's also a lot of built in data. So a lot of times when you're working with peer coordinators, you know, you have to say, oh, you know, I'm providing X amount of routes. This is my bandwidth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so, I mean, if you forget any of that information, they're going to come back and say, hey, what's the criteria on this, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, with console, all that information is automatically populated for you. And you can obviously adjust it, but it just makes the interaction a lot easier. And with being able to see, you know, who was on the other end of this request, you know, it adds a human touch to it. Final question for you is, what's this event about? For the people who aren't here that are watching this video, what's the big, uh-huh, this event? Why is console Connect 2015 important? Why is it important? Because it lowers the barrier of entry to the peering world. And for businesses, as I previously mentioned, for businesses that rely on the internet to, you know, to run their business and provide services out on the internet, it's being able to peer without having to build out a peering infrastructure. I mean, that's paramount, you know. It brings down the cost, brings down the barrier to entry. You don't have to have an expert-level network engineering team to be able to peer with businesses around the world. It's just the old days of provisioning in Cirque, all that hard, plumbing that would have to be connected. Yeah, I mean, basically, you just have a connection to IAX and then from there, you're able to connect to whatever you want. All right, thanks for sharing your insight. We really appreciate it. Down the trenches, ops dev, one click of a button you're peering, social network of a network. Great stuff here at console. It'll be right back with more live from San Francisco in a short break.