 Emily, I'm here on theCUBE at Node Summit in San Francisco. I'm joined today by Charlie Robbins, who's the CEO of Node Jitsu. It's a Node.js platform as a service. So my first question, Charlie, I think is what is on everybody's mind who's heard about Node Jitsu, is when can I sign up? The public beta is gonna be rolled out probably in the next six weeks to two months. Right now, we're running over a few thousand servers. We've got a lot of people on there. But one of the things we're really focusing on is an infrastructure agnostic platform. There's a few things that we need to tweak before we're ready to roll that out. Okay, so far you've been running on Rackspace, but it sounds like then you're gonna be able to run it on other infrastructure. Right, exactly. The goal is multiple infrastructure providers and we can co-locate with other add-on providers where they need to be. Because these days a lot more matters about where you are than necessarily some of the backend tooling and the support that you have. And we've seen that a lot as Node continues to develop as part of a development stack. You have a legacy app or a Greenfield app that you may have running in a particular data center, a particular cloud provider. And it really matters that your Node app be co-located with that to address latency concerns. Okay, so how did you guys get started on Node Jitsu rather, where were you before? What's the background of the founders? So, Maroc and I actually went to neighboring high schools out on the Andalung Island. And we kind of became good friends again after college and we had worked on some cloud ideas that didn't really work. And then very quickly, we got sort of sucked into the Node community or fell in love with Node itself. This was November, December, 2009. So a little bit more than two years ago. And one night we were just hanging out. We were like, well, what if we kind of apply these concepts to Node? And very quickly, that became a real possibility. Node Jitsu was founded in August of 2010. So we've been around for about almost two years. And we've been working hard on it ever since. And you've got a few beta customers already. Yeah, we've got about a thousand people running in terms of people that we've onboarded. We've been very selective about the people who we let in. You have to actually be enthusiastic. And it's actually a very easy way to get in is to just hang out at IRC room for an hour. And then we'll activate your account. OK. So we've been seeing a lot of other platforms of service companies become polyglot. Polyglot is sort of the word of the day here at Node Summit. But you're going the opposite direction. Or you're staying very focused on Node so far. It seems like do you think that's a disadvantage for you guys? Well, I think that it's very difficult for a company who does everything to do all of it as well as it does everything else. Something is going to be a preference. For example, Heroku may be a polyglot platform. But their node support is not as good as their Ruby support. And I know they're working hard to improve it. But it's very difficult to focus on all of these things at the same time. And the other thing about Node Jitsu is that as we went out and built the platform, we realized that the tools that were in the DevOps space for monitoring and provisioning and configuration management and deployment were not up to snub with what we had expected. And so sort of behind the scenes, we have built a lot of orchestration and infrastructure tools that we realized about six months ago themselves are an interesting enterprise product. So we're really expanding beyond just platform as a service to be an orchestration in infrastructure company. So you're going to be releasing some automation, some DevOps type tools for the enterprise, is that right? Yep, that's correct. Are you in a position yet to talk about any of those? Not yet. But I mean, they really do cover all of those bases. And we think by unifying all of those tools together in a single product, you can get an economy of scale inside of your DevOps organization in the same way that we have as we've built them out. But on the other end, you have open source quite a few packages. Can you talk about a few of those? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we like to think of it as three layers. There's the infrastructure layer, which we don't touch. That's the rack space and the joints and the Amazons of the world. There's the orchestration layer, which is really, you know, other tools in that space are New Relic, Puppet, Chef, RightScale. And then there's the platform layer. And we have open source strategically parts of the platform layer that we feel are geared towards individual developers and not towards organizations. That's kind of our litmus test for open source but at Node.Jitsu, is that if the target is an individual developer, it will be open source. And if the target is a large organization, it will not be. So the two big tools that we open source, one is Jitsu, which is our command line interface, which not only allows you to create apps, start them, stop them, but also do tarball-based deployment similar to NPM. It's actually based on a large part on top of NPM, the Node package manager. And the other one is Hibu. Hibu is our application deployment server, which is sort of the other end of those tarball-based deployments. We pipe a tarball to our API endpoint, it selects a server and pipes to that, which then pipes it to disk and untars it, all in Node. So we're actually installing your dependencies before the entire tarball has hit disk. Okay, so would you say your primary differentiators in the market then are deep experience with Node and your orchestration layer? Yeah, I think that's a really good way to put it. And I think over time, as this whole DevOps movement grows out and people start to see the value out of a lot more automation, they'll see even more value out in tightly integrating those tools together. I like to use the analogy of sort of the cathedral and the bazaar, right? We are very much living in the bazaar today and I guess we're trying to build a small church around Node.js. Okay. So what are some of the trends that you've been seeing in the platform as a service market as it develops? Are you seeing, how does it compare today compared to a year or two ago when you were first starting out? I mean, two years ago there really weren't a lot of competitors, to Heroku that is. Now I think we're seeing a large commoditization of the platform as a service offering in the public cloud. And most of those platforms are built on top of Amazon. They don't really offer a lot of flexibility in terms of where you put your app or sort of let you tune the dials of, well I don't actually want an LXC container or Ubuntu operating system, I want to be on Red Hat and the instances need to be this large as opposed to a 300 megabyte container for these reasons. And it's a DevOps competency that platforms naturally hide because it makes things easier for them and it also sort of takes away complexities that users don't want. But I think a larger and larger set of users as they get more familiar with these platforms want that sort of functionality back. So there's sort of a trend towards showing people inside the black box, so to speak. Yeah, well one of the more interesting platform plays I've seen over the last year or two is Elastic Beanstalk from Amazon Web Services. And it sort of points one possible future direction that you said you're not touching infrastructure and you're trying to be infrastructure agnostic. But on the other hand, somebody like Amazon can provide somebody with a lot more visibility into the whole stack by offering a platform as a service that could work out of the box or you can customize it extensively and go further down the stack if you really need to. Yeah, I mean I'd be interested to see how Amazon responds to some of the push towards private cloud, so to speak, because a lot of people just can't be in their data center. They need to own those servers themselves. They need to pass compliance issues that might be outside of the scope of how Amazon is dealing with things. I'm obviously not very familiar with how Amazon operates internally, but that push towards doing things on-prem is something that even if there is a large infrastructure player, they might not be able to do or might not want to do or be in their business. Right, and we have been hearing a lot more about private pass. Cloud Foundry is obviously the big player there. Are you playing on doing a private version of Nojitsu? Yeah, yeah. It's pretty much a no-brainer for us, right? If we have this orchestration layer and in the public space, we have some really nice integrations with our platform layer and the orchestration tools that we offer. Offering the whole package to our customers is a pretty natural extension of that. What do you think about Cloud Foundry? I think it has a pretty interesting architecture. Overall, having a single point of failure in your message queue, in terms of I think they're running RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ, one of those two, can be dangerous in a private scenario because depending on what the internal network structure is, that really is a big single point of failure. But I think the community outreach has been well received and as people continue to use it, maybe some of those issues can be resolved. Would that be something that Nojitsu would consider contributing to? You know, that's a good question. We spoke with VMware early on in the project and I don't necessarily know if there's enough compatibility there for anything that we would want to do to be meaningful since it's all Ruby in terms of our core competency. We don't write any Ruby, so if we were gonna add functionality there, we'd kind of be detracting from the other things that we've built. So, can't really comment definitively, but that is kind of our reasoning when we went back and revisited it. So you're pretty much going on alone right now? Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of Red Bull in the office, how can I say? Great, well I think we're gonna take a break here pretty soon. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about before we? No, I think we really covered it. I mean, you know, one of the things I really like to say about Node is that it's the easiest way for two computers to talk to each other. And when you start to think about building complex distributed systems, it's really a natural way to build platforms of service. Great.