 Hi, this is your host Abdul Bhartiya and welcome to another episode TFI. Let's talk and today we have with us Oha Mahlesh co-founder and CEO of N0 Oha. It's great to have you on the show. Great meeting you and great having on the show It's my pleasure and since this is the first time I'm hosting your hair on the show and you're also co-founder of the company So I would love to know a bit about the story of the company Also explain the story of the name of the company and what do you folks do? We are all about the move for the cloud to code. If you're familiar with infrastructure as code, terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, that totally changes how the cloud operates and with this new mode of cloud it comes the need for new type Of solutions. So we empower DevOps engineers to have governance for their changes while still have maximum productivity and collaboration. Back to the name NVENV like environment cloud environments and zero we really like the company OS zero That most of you are familiar with that got acquired by octa. So we thought it's a cool Combination of having something about what we do with the digits zero. So that's why it's uh We came to the name N of zero. Excellent. Great name. Uh, and I love the story as well Now let's quickly talk about infrastructure as code talk a bit about about infrastructure as code in today modern, you know, distributed decentralized cloud native word Unlike a few years ago when you had monolith and a database now cloud applications are way More distributed into small micro services of different types. So it's unscalable anymore uh For DevOps engineers to continue clicking those buttons in AWS GUI or Azure or GCP You have too many buttons and too many things to click. So instead everybody's moving to code The de facto standard is terraform, but there are some alternatives mentioned earlier columi as multi cloud open source or cloud formation as the AWS vendor only A framework, but whatever you choose eventually those DevOps engineers today write Code their code sits on github or github or beat bucket whereas their cloud resources sits on Sit on totally different system like AWS Azure and GCP So how do you keep empowering those DevOps engineers to work well together having collaboration productivity while still having confidence and governance To their changes. Thanks for explaining that In such a way Let's also talk about the the cultural evolutions that we are seeing in the market itself, of course all the way from developers To DevOps now we're talking about that from engineering, you know, and then we look at the infrastructure as code It makes a lot of things. It simplifies a lot of them repeatability and all of things It simply simplifies for a lot of team So talk a bit about how does infrastructure as code Enable companies, you know to to embrace adopt all these new technologies Do not they don't slow down and they also don't make compromises with a lot of critical observability security and other things I think it's all about scale and empowering developers so 20 years ago developers only needed to write code and don't care about the implications of their code But then came some solutions about performance like datadog and uralic and came some solutions about security Like sneak or aqua security and everything is shifting left and so does infrastructure the infrastructure is now in the hands of the developers and with a very small Co-change You now can do something that Impacts your entire Infrastructure it can be your servers virtual machines can be your kubernetes compute clusters. It can be your Databases so now engineers have even more power to influence their applications with changing the infrastructure using code so it's more responsibility like spider-man once said with great power comes great responsibility so now the developers are like spider-man in a way in my understanding talk a bit about The adoption of because once again when we do talk about These technologies this culture shift all this paradigm shift cultural movements There are two things one is that we do keep an eye on where word is heading when we start talking about things And the second is that where the word actually is how much of these you know are actually in be in practice So talk a bit about the adoption of infrastructure's code and How big the market is yeah, sure. I think every company today uses infrastructure's code There have been some trends in the last decade or so it's done with basic scripting Bash or python then came the configuration management solution chef puppet Ansible but those are not built for infrastructure. Those are more built for application Then came terraform cloud formation And and the other so basically every company And that uses the cloud today Probably doesn't do it manually and do it programmatically with some code and now in the hands of those engineers You can influence The infrastructure. That's the only way to really manage today's cloud In scale no longer manual operations. Everything needs to be fully audited and managed And actually everything is moving to code. It's not just AWS or Azure gcp or other cloud vendors It's also the other side solutions if you're using octa if you're using datadog Good chances You're no longer clicking on a button in order to change some configuration But maybe instead you change some code. Maybe they're terraform provider all of those solutions today have terraform provider in order to manage every solution whether it's cloud or a sus In scale so basically we see Infrastructure is called everywhere in the market. It's increasing dramatically and the need for solutions to manage that in scale are Basically everywhere now. We have laid very good foundation to talk about the company the market is growing adoption is growing Let's talk the rule N0 is playing in the market once again to make things even more You know easy for developers as I mentioned every company is using cloud Then every company is using infrastructure as code. Let's say terraform. So terraform is a free open source Framework, which is a great tool if you Execute something in terraform cloud resources will be provisioned will be updated. Maybe it will be destroyed, but that's a technical Solution it's not the management solution think about the difference between git and github. Okay In a similar way git is a technical cli, but github is the solution that organizations need. So that's why a new category of solutions Emerged maybe you've heard about Hashi core terraform cloud or hashi core terraform enterprise and then zero competes With hashi core terraform cloud terraform enterprise. Whereas n of zero is not just for terraform We took the approach of multi framework because we see that customers like multi cloud a few years ago that customers Decided to choose different technologies for different needs. So we see the same with Multi framework and customers have terraform terra-grant cloud formation Pulumi and others and we manage that in scale, but even if you're just terraform and Again, m0 provides the governance the confidence while still having productivity self-service for your Developers who since you're talking about how it's helping how m0 is helping. Can you talk about quickly? Like kind of summarize catalog the the service that offerings you have For for the customers it starts with the basic things called git ops So again your code sits in git But it basically represents Operations in the cloud that you want to happen. So git op means when you change a code When you merge it to the main branch you want to execute that code and prevent drift drift is another Basic problem that a lot of organizations today face You have code, but you have cloud resources and somebody Changes cloud resources manually without changing The code. Okay, so that's like very basic value that m0 provides allowing you to manage code and cloud resources together git ops Availing avoiding drift shifting left and for example Showing you all the data right in your pull request even before you merge to understand. What are the implications if I am to merge That code how much it's going to cost Cloud cost becomes even more important today with the market trending and trying to save every every dollar So maybe your engineers Are about to change some code that looks nice makes sense But about to cost a lot of money for organization You want to catch those things very early before they enter the cloud and even before They enter the main the main branch code the main code branch So those are like the basic things that m0 allows you When you manage cloud with code, can you talk about the evolution of n0 solutions any updates new features functionalities? So if we look at n0 two years ago We did the the basic things that i've I mentioned that as we evolve we add more and more layers to our engine and granularity to our mechanisms, so the basic thing for example Is role-based access? How do you manage role-based access of executing code not changing code that concept doesn't exist in In github or github so m0 two years ago allowed you to be In those basic role-based access layers, can you execute the code or maybe you can just initiate what's called a plan? now for example in m0 you have Dozens of different Custom permissions That you can basically assign to developers what exactly they can do with that code What exactly can be executed how exactly a code execution is being approved? So those layers of sophistications of granularity of workflows Dependencies basically allow you to manage Cloud with code your way and not building an in-house solution In order to do that. I remember 15 years ago I had to build my own github because there was no such thing as As github it was based on another framework SVM Then it makes sense to build an in-house solution to do some Collaboration and management capabilities for your code now. It's clear that for code changes you need something like github So we're seeing the same for infrastructure code Maybe you have an in-house solution But with those granularity the sophisticated engine Basically, you just set n of zero or a competition. By the way, not necessarily of zero you set that new solution And then allow your DevOps engineers to run fast develop fast with minimum risk while having governance visibility predictability For your cloud deployments. Can you also talk about when we look at infrastructure's code because the focus Goes back to developer. We talk about developer experience a lot of these days What are some of the pain points that you said the developers are still picking because you know, we do try to shift focus a lot on DevOps DevSecOps, but that is not a different team It's like you are asking developers to do those things that those things start falling in developers pipeline So talk a bit about some of the pain points that you see and how you are trying to make it easier for them Yeah, so we mainly see the pain points for DevOps engineers That today have tons of responsibility with dangerous code They don't really understand the implications Of that code execution. It's super super dangerous super powerful but also Super dangerous in a click of a button or in some code execution You can destroy a lot of cloud resources You can provision or update the wrong things causing downtime You can provision maybe too many or too expensive resources. You can provision resources in an unsecure way changing your firewall very easily two decades ago changed networking And you had to actually move some cables So you had more attention to what you're doing now. It's part of the code changes and it feels Okay to do those things easily, but it's super dangerous when it comes to infrastructure, especially for obviously your Your production environments and what we feel is that those DevOps engineers really lack the confidence in making Changes they are very worried that their changes are going to cause Actual risks actual Bad results. So that's why they dramatically slow down And do manual approvals and reviews on infrastructure changes And you cannot have the DevOps team To slow down the entire business depends On that very often bottleneck So that's the problem DevOps engineers want to help their organizations But on the other hand They have important tasks that are very risky and that's changing the infrastructure So n0 allows them to collaborate with all of the teams efficiently While having confidence, that's the main pain when it comes to managing cloud with code. It's The confidence is missing. Let's talk about the the big news which is series zero Talk a bit about the series around. What are your plans? What are the areas where you'll be investing these resources into? Yeah, so thanks for a great success with amazing Customers I can mention PayPal, MongoDB Virgin Media, Western Union and many others Thanks to this success. We also grow as as a company And we started our series a year and a half ago Microsoft led the series a with 17 million dollars And today I'm happy to announce that we extend that series a to 35 million dollars So we've raised additional 18 million dollars, especially in today's market. That's a great achievement for a company. We have amazing amazing Additional investors who led this series a extension I'm talking about Ben Nye and his new VC named the venture guides Ben is and his team are ex bank capital And Ben was up until recently the CEO of Tubonomic that got acquired By IVF for two billion dollars. So Ben has vast experience in building infrastructure Companies and today with the new money and the new support we get from our investors We are ready to take him zero to the next step Amplify our brand awareness our brand credibility improve our product And just help DevOps engineers managing infrastructure as code with confidence Thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about the company and of course, congratulations on Series a funding line and also your achievement. You know, you almost the doubled. I think if I'm not bad at maths So once again, uh, it was great talking to you and I would love to have you back on the show whenever you have something, you know I'm pretty sure there'll be so many Announcements coming out from the company, but I really enjoyed the show and I would love to have you back on the show Thank you Thank you very much. Well, it was a pleasure meeting you and talking to you today You