 Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of DockerCon 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Agent Ioniel, CEO and co-founder, Chairman of Mirantis Cube Alumni. Adrian, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE here for DockerCon coverage. Good to see you. Hey, John, nice to see you again, Cube. So, obviously, open source innovation continues. You guys are at the forefront of it. Great to see you. What's new with Mirantis? Give us the update on what's happening. Well, I mean, what's interesting is we've had one of the best years ever last year and this very much continues into this year. It's pretty fantastic. We've won about 160 new customers. Kubernetes is definitely on a tear. We see customers doing bigger and bigger and more exciting things, which is absolutely great to see. Lens is getting tremendous traction. I think we have a five-fold increase in user base within the year. So it's a lot of fun right now, what they're doing. Customers are definitely pushing the boundaries of what Kubernetes can do and they want to get the cognitive infrastructure and they want to get it faster and they want to do big and exciting things and we are so happy to be a part of the ride with them. You guys are investing in brand new open source solutions for customers. Give us an update on why and why do they matter for your customers? Well, let me unpack this a little bit and there are really two elements to this. One is why open source and what's new and what matters. So open source is not new, but open source is being embraced more and more heavily by companies everywhere because it's just a very flexible and cost efficient and highly innovative way to use innovation and to consume new software and a lot of innovation these days is happening in the open source communities which is why it's super exciting for many users. Now, what's new with us? I think there are two really terrific things that we brought to market that we see get a lot of interest and attention from our customers and increase value. One is this idea of delivering a cloud-related infrastructure that's Kubernetes based as a service for some of the largest new spaces out there for very large enterprises who want to have a cloud experience on-prem just like they have it in public clouds that is absolutely fantastic and that's new and different and very, very exciting for customers. The second thing that's new and compelling and exciting is these lands which is this Kubernetes IDE that has empowered in the meantime close to 180,000 Kubernetes developers around the world to make it much, much easier to take advantage of Kubernetes. So you can think of it as a IDE and a debugger for anybody who's using Kubernetes on public clouds or on private infrastructure. That is getting tremendous traction and adoption. The interest in Kubernetes has been unbelievable. I mean, in KubeCon we saw Kubernetes almost become boring in the sense of like everyone's using it and it's still now it's enabling a lot more cloud native development. Why does that lens matter? What is the benefit? Because that's a killer opportunity because Kubernetes is actively being adopted. The general consensus is it's delivering the value. Yeah, so let me unpack this in two aspects. Why is Kubernetes important? Why people adopting it and then how is the lens adding value on top of it for people who want to use Kubernetes? Kubernetes tremendously important is because it solves some very, very fundamental problems for developers and operators when building cloud native applications. These are problems that are very essential to actually operating in production but are really unpleasant for people to solve like availability, scalability, reusability of services. So all of that with Kubernetes comes right out of the box and developers no longer have to worry about it. And at the same time, Kubernetes gives you a standard where you can build apps on public clouds and then move them on prem or build them on prem on public clouds and anywhere in between. So it gives you kind of this universal cloud native standard that you as a developer can rely on. And that's extremely valuable for developers. We all remember from the Java times when Java came online, people really value this idea of right ones run anywhere. And that's exactly what Kubernetes does for you in a cloud native world. So it's extremely, extremely valuable for people. Now, how does lens add value in this context? It's also very exciting. So what's happening when you now build these applications on top of Kubernetes is that you have many, many services which interact with each other in fairly complex and sometimes unpredictable ways. And they also very much interact with the infrastructure. So you have, you can imagine kind of this jungle, this leg ball building of many different cloud native services working together to build your app or to run your app. Well, how are you going to navigate that and debug that as a developer as you build and optimize your code? So what Lens does is it gives you kind of like a real-time cockpit or console console. You can imagine like you're a fighter pilot in this jet and you have all these instruments kind of coming at you and gives you like this fantastic real-time situational awareness. So you can very quickly figure out what is it that you need to do either fix a bug in your application or optimize the performance of your code or make it more reliable, fix such security issues. And it makes it extremely easy for developers to use, right? So the benefit solution has been hard to use, complicated. This makes it super fast, easy and a lot of fun. You know, that is really the great theme about this conference this year. And your point exactly is developer experience making it simpler and easier, okay? And innovative is really hits the mark on productivity. I mean, and that's really been a key part. So I think that's why I think people are so excited about Kubernetes because it's not like some other technologies that had all the setup requirement and making things easier to get stood up and manage. It's huge. So congratulations, great point, great call out there, great insight. The next question I want to ask you is you guys have coined the term software factory. Yeah, and this kind of plays into this. You have all the services, you can roll them up together with blends and those tools. It's going to be easier, more productive. So that means it's more software. Obviously open source is the software factory too. What does that term mean? And how do they leverage it? Yeah, so here's what it means to us and he has helped arrive at it. So as you know today, soft is being produced by two groups working together to build software. Certainly the core people are the developers. These are the people who create the core functionality imagine how the software should be architected and ultimately ship the code, right? And maintain the code. But the developers today don't operate just by themselves. They have their sidekicks. They have their friends for often platform engineering and platform engineers. These are the people who are helping developers make some of the most important choices as to which platforms they should use, which services they should use, how they should think about governance, how should they think about cloud infrastructure they should use, which open source libraries they should use, how often they should refresh those libraries and so forth. So these platform engineers create if you want the factory, the substrate, and the automation, which allows these developers to be highly productive. And the analogy you want to make is the chip design, right? If you imagine chip design day, you take advantage of a lot of software, a lot of tooling, a lot of pre-packaged libraries to get your job done. You're not doing it by yourself, just wiring consistors together or logical elements. You do it using a massive amount of automation and software libraries and tools. So that's what we aim to provide to customers because what we discovered is that customers don't want to be in the business of building the software factories. They don't want to be in the business of building platform engineering teams if they can avoid it. They just do it because they have no choice. But it's difficult for them to do. It's cumbersome, it's expensive, it's a one-off. And really it doesn't create any unique business value because the platform engineering for a bank is very similar to the platform engineering for let's say an oil gas company or an insurance company. So we do it for them turn key as a service so they can be focusing on what Madison is with them. That's a great insight. I love that platform engineering enabling software developers. Because you know, look at SaaS, throwing features together being a feature developer is cool. And the old days of platform was the full stack developer. Now you have this notion of platform as a service in a way in this kind of new way. What's different, Adrian? You've seen these ways of innovation certainly on open source that we've been covering your career for over a decade with Miranda and OpenStack and others. This idea of a platform that enables software, what's changed now about this new substrate you mentioned? What's different than the old platform model? That's a wonderful question. There are a couple of things that are different. So the first thing that's different is the openness and that everything is based on open source frameworks as opposed to platforms that are highly opinionated and are locking. So I think that's a very, very fundamental difference. If you're looking at the initial kind of platform as a service approaches, they were extremely opinionated and very rigid and not always open source or just the combination between open source and proprietary. So that's one very big difference. The second very big difference is the emphasis on, and it goes along with the first one, the emphasis on multi-cloud and infrastructure independence where a platform is not wedded to a particular stack where it's a AWS stack or an Azure stack or a VMware stack, but it's truly a layer above that's completely open source center. And the third thing that is different is the idea that it's not just the software, the software alone will not do the job. You need the software and the content and the support and the expertise. If you're looking at how platform engineering is done at the large company like Apple, for example, Facebook, it's really always the combination of those three things. It's the automation framework, the software. It's the content, the open source libraries or any other libraries that you create. And then it's the expertise that glues all this together and is being offered to developers to be able to take advantage of this like software factory. So I think these are the major differences in terms of where we are today versus five years ago, 10 years ago. Thank you for unpacking that for me. I think that's great captures the shift in value. This brings up my next question for you because you take that to the next level, DevOps is now also graduating to a whole another level. The future of DevOps and software engineering more and more around Kubernetes and your tools like Lens and others managing these points. What is the new role of DevOps? I see DevSecOps, but DevOps is now changing too. What's the future of DevOps in your opinion? Well, I believe that DevOps is going to become more and more integrated to where our ops is going to become something like zero ops where ops is going to be fully automated and something that's being delivered entirely through software. And developers will be able to focus entirely just on creating a shipping code. I think that's the major change that's happening. The problem that's still yet I think to be solved like 100% correctly is the challenge of the last mile like deploying that code on the infrastructure and making sure that it's performing correctly to the SLAs and optimizing everything. I also believe that the complexity when it is very powerful, but at the same time it offers a lot of room for complexity. There are many knobs and dials that you can turn in this microservices-based architecture. And what we're discovering now is that this complexity kind of exceeds the ability of the individual developer or even a group of developers to constantly optimize things. So I believe what we will see is AI machine learning taking charge of optimizing a lot of parameters, operating parameters around the applications and that are the employment benefits to ensure those applications perform to the expectations of the OS. And that might mean performing to a very high standard of security or it might mean performing to a very low latency and certain geographies might mean performing to a very low cost structure that you can expect and those things can change over time, right? So the challenge of operating an application in production, when it is substrate, is I think dramatically higher than on just additional cloud infrastructure or virtualization because they have so many services interoperating with each other and so many different parameters you can set. So that's the problem for machine learning and AI. I love the machine learning AI and I'd love to just get your thoughts on it because I love the zero ops narrative because that's day one, zero ops. Now that you hear day two being discussed and people are also hyping up AI ops and other things but this notion of day two, okay, I'm shipping stuff in the cloud and I have to have zero ops on day two, three, four, et cetera. What's your take on that because that seems to be a hot air that customers and enterprises are getting in and understanding the new wave, riding it and then going, wait a minute, I'm pushing new code that's breaking something over there I built months ago. So this notion of day two ops, they call it. But again, if you want to be zero ops, it's got to be every day. I think you hit the nail on the head. I don't think there's going to be a difference between day one, day zero, day one and day two. I think every day is going to be day zero and the reason for that is people will be shipping all the time. So your application will change all the time. So for the application will always be fresh. So it'll always be day zero. So zero ops has to be there all the time, not just on the first day. It's a great slogan. Every day is day zero, which means it's going well. I mean, there's no problems. So I got to ask you the question because one of the big things that's coming up as well as this idea of an SRE, not new to the DevOps world, but as enterprises start to get into an SRE role where with hybrid and now edge becoming people and not just industrial, there's going to be a lot of activity going on on a distributed basis. So you're going to need to have this kind of notion of large scale and zero ops, which essentially means automation, all those things you mentioned. Not everyone can afford that. Not every company can afford to have, hardcore DevOps groups to manage and their release process, all that stuff. So how are you helping customers and how do you see this problem being solved? Because this is the accelerant people want. They want the easy button. They want the zero ops, but they just, they can't pipeline people fast enough to do this role. Yeah. What you're describing is the central differentiator we bring to customers. It's this idea of an as a service experience with guaranteed outcomes. So that's what makes us different versus the traditional enterprise infrastructure software model, where people just consume software for vendors and system integrate themselves and then are in charge of operations themselves and carrying the technical systems themselves. We deliver everything as a service with guaranteed outcomes with a true cloud native experience. That means guaranteed SLAs, predictable outcomes, continuous updates, continuous upgrades. Your on-prem infrastructure or your edge infrastructure is going to look and feel and behave exactly like a public cloud experience where you're not going to have to worry about SREs or the end of maintaining the underlying. So this is being delivered to you as a service. That's the big part. That's a central part of what makes us different in this space. That's a great value proposition. Can you just expand, give an example of a use case where you guys are doing that because this is something that I'm seeing a lot of people looking to go faster. And you know, speed is good, but also could kill, right? So you could break things if you go to. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I can give you several examples where we're doing this and we're very exciting companies. So one company is hooking.com. hooking.com has a massive on-prem infrastructure that also massive public cloud consumer. And they decided they want to bring their infrastructure to a cloud level of automation, cloud level sophistication. In other words, they want to have their AWS on-prem. They want to do the open source center. And we were delivering this to them with very high end SLAs exactly as a service turnkey where there is nothing for them to system in grade or to tune and optimize and operate. It's being really operated 24 seven with guaranteed SLAs and outcomes by us through a combination of software and expertise that we have at massive scale and to the standards of hooking.com. This is one example. Another example, and this is a very large company is at the opposite side of the spectrum. We have a customer called Netscope, super successful software as a service company in the security space growing in leaps and bounds with very high technical demands and security demands. And they want to have an on-prem cloud infrastructure to complement public clouds. Why? Because security is very important to them. Latency is very important to them. Control of the customer experience is very important to them. Cost is very important to them. So for that reason, they want that in a network of data centers around the globe. And we provide that for them turnkey as a service then before seven, which enables them to focus 100% on building their own SaaS software, the functionality which matters to their customers and not have to worry about the underlying cloud infrastructure in the data centers. All of that gets provided to them as a guaranteed cloud experience to their end users. So this would be three examples of how we're doing this. It's a great service. People are looking for a great job. Adrienne, great to see you. Thank you for coming on theCUBE here at DockerCon 2021. Take a minute to put a plug-in for the company. What are you guys up to? What are you looking for? Hiring, obviously you've got great tracks with customers. Congratulations on the lens. Give a quick update on what's going on. I'm happy to give an update on the company. So here are the highlights. We're super excited about what we achieved last year and then what we're up to this year. So last year, what we're proud of is despite COVID, we haven't laid off a single person. We've kept all the staff and we've hired staff. We have gained 160 new customers. Many of them, some of the world's largest and best companies and 300 of all existing customers have expanded their business with us last year, which is fantastic. We also had a very strong financial result, a casual positive. It was a tremendous, tremendous year for us. This year, it's very much a growth year for us and with an incredible focus on customer outcomes and customer experience. So what we are really, really digging in super hard on is to give the customers the technology and the services that enable them to get to ship software faster and easier to dramatically increase the productivity of the software development efforts on any cloud infrastructure, on-prem or public clouds, using containers and capabilities and to do that at scale. So we're extremely focused on customer outcomes, customer experience, and then the innovation is required to make that happen. So you will continue to see a lot of innovation around lens. So the last beta release of lens that we brought out has now a cloud service and had a lot of feature where you can share all your cloud automations with your buddies in your development team. So the lens used to be a single user product. Now it's a multi-user and team-based product which is fantastic. Continues to work very quickly and then container cloud as a service. It's still a very big bet that we're meeting on the infrastructure side. So that's what we're trying to do this year. Quite the open source cloud company agent. Congratulations. We've been, again, following even on the many waves of innovation, open stack, large scale, open source software. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, bye-bye. Okay, DockerCon 2021. This is CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier here with agent INL CEO, co-founder and chairman of Mirantis. Sharing his perspective on the open source innovation with their products and also key trends in the industry that is changing the game and accelerating cloud value, cloud scale, cloud native applications. Thanks for watching.