 Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Madura Meskasky joins me again, co-founder and VP of product at Platform 9. Madura, it's great to see you. Welcome back to the CUBE. Lisa, great to see you again. Thank you for having me. So I think we last spoke with you, I think it was KubeCon a few months ago. What's going on at Platform 9 since we last spoke? Give us the scoop. Yes, lots of things happening. I think the most recent one that I'm very excited to share is 5.8 release of Platform 9 Managed Kubernetes and Managed KubeWord is out. And just a quick note on KubeWord is not many people are familiar with what KubeWord is. It is Kubernetes native virtualization technology. So KubeWord really enables you to run VMs, virtual machines side-by-side with containers on your Kubernetes clusters. It's a Kubernetes, it's a, you know, one of the CNC of validated Kubernetes add-ons. And it has been in development for several years now. And we at Platform 9 are finally ready to release it as a generally available as a GA-ready version as part of Managed Kubernetes. So that's the exciting news. Exciting. What's the tagline for 5.8? I know there's a lot in there about controlling cost, but what's that overall tagline? And then can you kind of break it down into some of the key features that are going to be available for your customers? Yeah, so, you know, our mission has always been to accelerate your cloud-native journey, right, in the fastest and the most cost-effective way possible. And so the tagline on 5.8 is very consistent with that. It is essentially help you accelerate your existing legacy workloads as well as your new cloud-native workloads all on the same underlying hardware footprint, whether it's in your private data centers or in a public cloud with a cost focus, right? So cloud-native acceleration with cost focus is still the overall tagline, but there is details around how exactly 5.8 in a specific way enables that for you. So target audience, IT infrastructure, platform engineering, developers, DevOps teams, walk us through some of the ways in which this will help organizations control cost, because obviously that's a huge priority for every business. Absolutely. So definitely target audience, like you said, is the IT organizations. Lots of large existing virtualized environments, right, that typically have VMware installed in them or some of the other more traditional virtualization technologies or stacks like CloudStack or OpenStack. We ourselves have been big promoters and deployers of OpenStack for several years. And prior to that, I spent several years at VMware, so we have a really good understanding of the lay of the land as far as virtualization goes. So those are the target environments and target profiles for this release. And what PMK with Q-word with this 5.8 release really enables is it allows you to take hundreds or 1,000 of your existing virtualized workloads, right? Let's say you have a large VMware environment on a traditional data center across one or multiple data centers, thousands of virtual machines, right? You can now with this release take that environment with a specific migration plan and tooling that Pacman will enable and provide to you and carve out a strategy to move all of that over to Kubernetes and Q-word with Pacman and PMK. So enterprises can migrate using hundreds, even thousands of VMs from legacy virtualization products. Obviously, there's some significant cost benefits there. Talk about some of the key solutions or use cases that 5.8 is really targeted to solve. Yeah, so two sort of common use cases, right, which are also kind of key target use cases for Pacman 9. One is traditional virtualized environment but with a very heavy focus on cost saving, right? So that's a primary environment. You're a large enterprise running virtualized environment. You want to continue using virtualization, but you want to cut your costs down by a third. And that's in general a big team, right? Today, given the macroeconomics, cost savings is really top of the mind for all enterprises. And Q-word really plays extremely well into that narrative because it gives you access to a modern, cloud-native virtualization technology. So you don't compromise on any of the key features, functionalities that in your virtualization stack you love today and you rely on, such as high availability, like migration, SLA for your VMs, performance. So you don't compromise on any of that because the Q-word technology is mature enough to now be able to address all of these enterprise use cases. And it has been for a while. But by moving over to Q-word, you will save on at least, you will bring down your costs to potentially a third or so, which is a pretty significant savings, more than 70% of cost savings. So that's definitely one key use case. The second key use case is if you're running edge environments, right? And edge locations are potentially for telco customers or retail stores. The resource footprint or bandwidth at the edge site is always a challenge. You have maybe one to at the most three physical servers and you need to run your entire environment there. And so being able to run both VMs with containers on an edge location with limited resource footprint and bandwidth is another very key location. And we, in fact, have large-scale customers that use us with Q-word and Kubernetes for that use case today. Out at the edge, we know some companies are struggling out there. You know, we think of the retail edge and so many of the implementations that happened during that pandemic. What are some of the challenges that you see customers facing and how is 5.8 going to really eliminate those challenges at the edge? Yeah, so, you know, the common challenge is, you know, the pattern with edge sites is you have hundreds and thousands of them, potentially thousands. So think of them as a large footprint of micro data centers. When you have such a large and diverse footprint and their geographical locations may be spread all across the world, you want to utilize as much automation as possible all the way from your physical servers all the way up to when your application gets deployed. And a lot of existing technologies will focus on automation when it comes to deploying that app, but not necessarily on the automation all the way down to the stack. For example, what happens once you rack and stack and power on a physical server in a coffee store, you know, who needs to go in there in person and configure some things install some Windows apps, etc. Maybe so that you can then do some automated app deployment on top. And so we address that problem. We think that's one of the biggest challenges, right? Around being able to, around, you know, retailers, telco companies being able to leverage a lot more of cloud native technology and a lot more of just, you know, more of the recent cutting edge technologies in general, right? Because technology adoption gets hampered if you don't have as much automation in your stack. So that's the problem that we address at its heart. The platform is all about complete, you know, software as a service powered automation. And so we enable that by taking over your environment from the moment your servers are powered on and we do everything from operating system install all the way to installing Kubernetes, Qboard, and then your applications. Talk a little bit about some of the testing that you guys did at scale. We talked earlier about hundreds of thousands of VMs, but you guys tested this at scale, few nodes and thousands of locations for edge cases, hundreds of nodes and a few locations for data center or public cloud regions. Talk a little bit about some of the testing at scale that platform did for 5.8. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the benefits we have is we have existing large scale enterprise customers that are actually deploying us at really high scale. So the product does get tested on a regular basis through that, but specifically for every GA release of offline products, whether it's the 5.8 release or otherwise, we invest in a significant scale testing exercise, right? And so one of those we did for this release, specifically with networking focus, because some of our customers are planning to run large scale, you know, VNF workloads, you know, which are very networking heavy and they rely on certain core network acceleration technologies like DPDK and SRIOV, et cetera. So we invested in a very large scale testing exercise with a large, you know, server footprint, large VM footprint on top and we specifically tested for these networking heavy workloads. And in fact, in some cases that we found for this one specific customer where their existing environment was CloudStack, which is one of those virtualization technologies that we spoke about, we found that the performance for components like the Apollo Auto Firewall VNF, for example, improved by about 300% or so. So a pretty significant performance improvement compared to what they were used to or what they've been running so far. That's nice. That's a significant performance improvement. What's been some of the other customer feedback on 5.8 that you guys have gotten that really excite you in terms of the trajectory that the technology is on? Yeah. So I think the consistent feedback has been that the product and technology combined with the core benefits that platform already offers, right? Which is completely savings on your operational costs, savings on your migration costs, et cetera, through a, you know, SaaS managed model, also available on-prem, but, you know, in both form factors, combining that with Qboard being generally available and completely production ready, really allows going back to those two use cases for the, you know, the traditional environments, as well as the Edge workloads to now run efficiently while keeping the cost as one of the primary elements, right? So from some of our customers, we've heard that these performance enhancements, for example, are really enabling them to move away from that legacy virtualized environment to this modern stack with the faith and peace of mind that this stack is completely production ready and it will cover them for all of their key use cases while saving costs. So that's been kind of the general theme of feedback. Got it. So for customers that you talk to or prospects where they're struggling with IT modernization, their initiatives aren't as successful, what's your secret sauce? What's your superpower? Why platform nine? What do you say? Yeah. So I think typically that struggle comes from not being able to see a cost-effective and concrete plan towards migrating from what you have today towards the end state that you know you want to achieve and you have a view of what that is. And so we attack that problem at every phase of it, right? Starting from migration and being able to provide the automated migration tools, which by the way tends to be one of the biggest challenges which is I have say large-scale VMware environment. I've been utilizing that for 10 years. I want to cut my costs. I want to go more cloud-native, more Kubernetes, but I don't have even a good way to take my thousands of VMs and I don't even know if they will run well on Kubernetes. So people even have fundamental questions and lack of knowledge. And so we kind of attack that problem at the entire, you know, all of those phases from being able to educate you on how the migration is going to work to actually completely owning and driving that migration for you to then giving you a 99.9% SLA for your workloads once you start running them on platform nine, right? Which means our neck is on the line. We owe you service credit if we are not able to meet that SLA for a certain period of time, which is a very high level of commitment. And that also helps us build a level of trust with our customers. And it, you know, lets them know, it gives them the assurance that there's a partner in this journey that is always going to have their back. Oh, and that's so critical. That trust that you mentioned, it's currency, right, these days and your customers know and trust platform nine and what you guys are delivering. You talked about controlling costs. You talked about some of the key features and functionalities. What's the general availability plans when and where can customers get their hands on this? Yeah, so 5.8 release is actually generally available now. So the best way to learn more about it is to go to our website, go to the documentation side, read about the release notes, read just in general about more about the release and then the best way to get their hands on it is to contact us if you are a new prospect. If you're an existing customer, reach out to support and they'll make sure that you get the latest bits of the release. Excellent. Madure, do you have a favorite customer story in all your years of being co-founder and VP of product that you think really just nails the value prop of what platform nine delivers? Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are many, there are many, right? So one of the things we are extremely proud about is our 100% CSAC score year over year and that's also why many of our customers stay and grow and expand with us over multiple years. I think most recently, one of our customers an edge environment, right? And they have a very large distributed footprint across multiple store locations and one of their Kubernetes upgrades was a particularly challenging experience, you know, which typically, which is not uncommon, upgrades are some of the most complex components of Kubernetes or area where things may go wrong and the way that a combination of our product and our customer success team using our software, right? Which gathers, one of the things that our software does is it gathers all the intelligence about what's going on in your environment and collects that data and feeds it back to our support team. And so when the support team works with the customer, it's like they have some super visibility into your environment that you may not even have. And so I remember and quote the customer's words, there were some magical heroics that went into place in helping us go successfully through this challenge in the Kubernetes upgrade. And I really took those words to heart and it also resulted in a big expansion for Black Online with that customer. So that was just one of the recent ones. But yeah, many such experiences and it makes you feel grateful and happy for doing what you do. Absolutely. There's nothing better than that customer validation. I always think there's nothing more potent and powerful than the voice of the customer really articulating that value prop and showing big significant performance, improvements, cost reduction, et cetera. Last question for you as we, I think we talked to you in the fall, I think John did and it was 5.6. Here we are just a few months later, 5.8. What is on the horizon that excites you in your role? Yeah, no, absolutely. So there's multiple things happening at Platform Line right now which are extremely exciting on one end we just spoke about virtualization. That's a trend we're really focusing on and investing in. On the other end, with the overall cost-saving theme, with that in mind, there are the other biggest area where customers, environments, et cetera, face cost pressure is running Kubernetes on the public cloud and we're building something really exciting in that area as well that should help customers save a ton of money when running Kubernetes on the public cloud. Just in general, this theme of helping customers save cost while running their cloud-native technologies is really, really exciting to us. Hugely valuable. Madura, thank you so much for joining me today and from what I understand, there's a free consultation that folks can get with experts. We're going to pop a link in below. Madura Moskowski, co-founder and VP of Product App Platform Line. Thank you for coming on theCUBE and joining me as this CUBE conversation. Thank you, Lisa. Have a great day. You too. We want to thank you for watching and say keep it right here for more action on theCUBE. 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