 Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. Hello, welcome back everyone. Live here in Mountain View, California, Computer History Museum, the heart of Silicon Valley is theCUBE covering Cisco DevNet Create. I'm here with Lauren Cooney, our next guest is Jim LaGuardia who's the founder of Nirmada, CUBE alum. Here last year at our inaugural coverage of DevNet Create, multi-year, back to back. Welcome back. Thank you, John. Good to see you. All right, so last year we kind of talked about multi-cloud. I think I just did it a word search of the transcript last year. 13 times we mentioned multi-cloud. Kind of, Mark Zuckerberg last year mentioned, yesterday they mentioned AI 20 times in Senate hearing. Pretty popular. So what's the update this year? What's changed from your standpoint? Yes, so certainly the trend that we saw is starting with containers and now with Kubernetes as an operations management platform. The movement for enterprises to start adopting multi-cloud whether it's hybrid or even multiple public clouds, this continues to grow. I mean, we're seeing a lot more Kubernetes growth this year. A lot's changed in one year. I mean, well, it's been a full year since last year, like 10 months. But still, CNCF, KubeCon is coming up and Kubernetes will be there. And just in general, the open source is kind of essentially ratified de facto Kubernetes. Yes, and that's been great for the community as well as for enterprises, right? Because when we had multiple orchestration platforms, several contending platforms and solutions, enterprises were staying on the sidelines trying to still decide which way to go. What's new with your business? Give us an update on your company. So 2017 is also the year when we announced our Kubernetes focus solution. So we're completely focused on operations management, off Kubernetes workloads as well as clusters. We, of course, operate multi-clouds, so hybrid, public, and private. What's the big trend in Kubernetes? Obviously, Istio's got a lot of buzz. Sidecar containers, interesting. What's your work, what's your analytics and your operations management software? Tell you about some of the trends in Kubernetes. What's hot, what's real, what's in production? Who's playing with what features? Yeah, so there's runtime trends, but there's also organizational trends and patterns, which are very interesting. And one major shift we're seeing is, whereas in the past, it was lines of businesses or product teams directly starting to consume cloud services or Kubernetes, now it's IT operations, right? It's also very interesting that with Kubernetes, with containers, private cloud continues to grow in a strong fashion. And we're seeing as many private cloud deployments as public cloud deployments, with Kubernetes becoming that central management. Yeah, I think it was a research firm, Wikibon, that predicted private cloud growth. I think we nailed that one. Everyone didn't see that coming. They thought public cloud and hybrid cloud, but I mean, private cloud is happening. That's where the action is to prepare for hybrid. You see that same thing? Absolutely, so we see two factors of that. One is of course, highly regulated, like we are working with the energy company where in their environment, they will have to obviously deploy in their private network itself. However, even enterprises where they have several workloads today, they are not moving away from private cloud, but they're using public cloud for new workloads, for new applications. And they shift some of their, I won't say baggage, but their less core workloads to the cloud, analytics, other things. Now let's talk about multicloud. Obviously, we debated it last year. I've been debating it all year since. I'm not, I mean, I'm bullish on multicloud in the sense it's a choice, but the notion of multicloud to me doesn't yet exist. I mean, having apps on Azure that run on Azure and having different apps that run on Amazon, that's multiple clouds, that's not multicloud. Sure. So we're starting to see some movement of people starting to think about a data layer, control planning, stuff. Where are we with multicloud apps that are moving workloads? What's your, what's your- Yeah, so before we get to the application layer for multicloud, there's also the software infrastructure services that need to become multicloud. And that's a lot of what we're doing at Nirmata, right? Like so Nirmata itself as a common management plane, a common control plane across several Kubernetes clusters, whether those are running public cloud or private cloud, and creating a common set of policies. So that in our opinion- For infrastructure or for the apps? For both the clusters, as well as workloads which go into the clusters. Because certainly even if you take a containerized Kubernetes app, how you run it in production may be very different than how you run it in DevTest, right? So something has to govern those policies and make sure that each cluster is set up in the right manner. And so those infrastructure services first need to exist. And I think the application side of things will come. We're seeing still great a lot of innovation in the storage space. So that is still a problem that needs to be solved. So foundationally you agree that when you guys working on is foundationally get the clusters, handle the infrastructure, get that right. Exactly. That's what's going to be dynamic, so. Absolutely. Don't worry about the apps yet, that can happen. Yeah, and having the ability, like one of the demos we show is the ability to take an application and to be able to create a like application in a different cloud. Now it may not be, we might not migrate the storage because in production that's not something, it's not a realistic use case. But you still want to be having the choice of being able to choose where that application gets deployed, that's a huge benefit. Okay, so let's go put our IT ops hat on for a second, just throw some of that shit. So I'm an IT ops guy like, hmm, we got some on-prem, we got some Azure, I got some Amazon, so I got EC2 S3 and bunch of other stuff on Amazon. I got Azure, I think what they use for storage, is not S3, that's Amazon, and then in-house I'm running all my own provision stuff. What the heck, do I have to hire three guys? What's the, where's that come together? People get stuck there. Sure, yeah, so obviously if you're using multiple cloud providers and multiple systems, you will need some skill sets, some expertise there. But more and more the abstractions that are again created by Kubernetes and then with software like Nirmata is decoupling applications from that, right? So it's that clean decoupling, something that you've always wanted in the space of infrastructure from applications, that's finally happening and that's really exciting. It'd be great when we see Office 365 running on Amazon. Yeah. You know, we may, you know, multi-cloud. Or at least on Linux, right, so that will happen. Great, well, when you look at these applications that you're decoupling, and I fully believe in a loosely coupled environment as well, what about the data that they can actually pull from the network? What is valuable that you kind of want to build into that application? Yeah, so certainly that the types of data that you would, you know, then there's systems of record and sort of systems of, you know, interaction, right? So the type of data that you would probably want to keep towards your private cloud is still those systems of records and because of regulation, because of other types of requirements. But so the engagement data that that can be shared, distributed, using some of the more innovative sort of, you know, storage concepts, distributed storage across these clouds. Great, so when you're working, you know, you've got a set of customers that, you know, you're doing pretty well. Are you finding that you're working with these customers that are still kind of in the old IT age and you're kind of bringing them up to speed? Or do these guys, do they get it and they're looking for your help to really get there further and faster? Yeah, so when we started and Nirmata was founded in late 2013, so a lot of the conversations we had back then were why containers, why microservices, those terms didn't even exist at that time, right? So all containers did, but in a different form. But now it's more, enterprises know they want to go towards containers, they want to use Kubernetes, and they're looking for help and guidance in how to get there. So the conversations are very different than the other, you know, another major trend we're seeing, like I mentioned, is the centralization of that function. Because larger enterprises are realizing that doing this in a distributed fashion, having each team build their own expertise with every cloud provider is just not scalable or cost effective, yeah. What's your definition of serverless? I mean, this is like a hot trend. Right. Lambda's got functions as a service. Really interesting, people are driving to it. What's your, how would you define serverless for the folks that you talked to say, you know, what is serverless? Yeah, yeah, so there, one definition obviously, the popular definition is where developers don't have to worry about the servers or any of the infrastructure, right? They're providing a function and then somehow, magically, the rest just happens, right? But I'm a software developer, I come from a development background, and in any programming language, you know, we have object-oriented, we've had Lambda functions and Java as a programming language, but Java is also object-oriented. So my belief and what we feel is going to happen is applications are going to be a mix of things like serverless or Lambda-style functions and stateful functions and stateless services. You need all of these in an enterprise application. It's not one or the other. And what's the glue layer in this? Yeah, so that's where we feel again, Kubernetes is the right choice. You see things like OpenFaz being built on Kubernetes. We completely believe in the mission of the CNCF and how things are rolling out there. And the fact that even technologies like serverless have to start becoming decoupled from a particular provider or vendor and more of an industry standard. All right, so here's a question for you. So if someone asks you, hey, how should I look at the big cloud providers? Got Amazon and Google, Microsoft, you got Oracle, IBM, Alibaba. Well, certainly if you're Chinese, you go to Alibaba, they're going to cut you a deal. But I have to make some decisions about what's going to happen in the next five years as setting the foundation for architecture. As a software engineer, what's your advice on that? Just getting the playbook ready, thinking about the first few steps to start thinking about, okay, I'm going to be dealing with multi-cloud. Assuming some things happen that we see connecting the dots, what's your advice? Yeah, so the first question is for your business and all of this has to be driven by business needs requirements, right? Is it okay to be locked in into a single stack, a single vendor or provider? And in a lot of cases, if you're a startup, if you're five people starting out, that may be a very good choice and that is the most optimal path, right? So maybe you do that for a first couple of years, but as you grow, if you're an enterprise with several different teams, several applications, and if your business requires you to run on different platforms, you're going to make some different choices. So that's when you would want your applications to be portable. So definitely it makes sense to leverage cloud providers for infrastructure services, but locking in your applications to a single provider has to be carefully thought about and driven from a business perspective. You have a choice. Yeah. All right, what's up, Normada? What's your action this year? What are you guys looking at doing? What's the next step? I'll see CNCF is doing great. Good bet you guys are making. What's the product roadmap look like? What's some of the value proposition? How is it evolving? How's it evolving? So certainly what we see in this space and what we're excited about, we're growing in terms with our customers, of course. At this point, we're well-funded, we're looking at doubling our headcount and also- How much did you guys raise? So we haven't publicly announced that, but we're- Okay, but do you have venture capital? Yeah, for the next 18 months, we're kind of funded. A good runway. Yeah. And certainly we have- Do you have customers? Yes, of course. How many customers you have? So they're approaching the dozens now, so, but what we're doing- Good size customers. Yeah. And we are focused on mid to large enterprises, right? So what we do is we, our appeal is to IT operations teams who are looking at deploying Kubernetes as a service for their business. And as they, and IT is now sort of in some ways taking on this function of being able to leverage multiple cloud providers, choose where workloads go, and manage the efficiencies, manage these in their deployments. Yeah, I mean, Ops is not going away. Absolutely. Everything's Ops now. Yeah, right. Well, thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. You can see, thanks for the update. Let me see you around the KubeCon or some of the CNCF events. It's great to see you. The KubeCoverage here in Mountain View, California for the cloud native DevOps community at part of Cisco's new foray into DevOps, DevNet Create, it's a part of DevNet, but this is an extension to the DevNet core Cisco Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier, Laura Cooney. Be back with more after this short break.