 Hello everyone, my name is Savannah Peterson, coming to you live from the Kim Kahn show floor on theCUBE here in Detroit, Michigan. The energy is pulsing. Big event for the CloudNative Foundation, and I'm joined by John Furrier on my left. John, hello. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for being our new host. You look great. Great segment coming up. I'm looking forward to this, Savannah. This is a great segment. A CUBE alumni, an OG in the CloudNative world, or Clouderati, as I call it. Been there, done that. A lot of respect. A lot of doing some really amazing. I call it the super cloud, all the grail, but we'll see. Your favorite word. We'll see your word. It's a really strong segment. Looking forward to hearing from this guest. Yes, I am very excited, and I'm going to let him tee it up a little bit, but our guest and his project were actually mentioned in the opening keynote this morning, which is very, very exciting. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Bassam Tabara. Bassam, thanks for being here with us. Okay, so good to be back here on the show, and this exciting energy around us, so super awesome to be here. Yeah, it feels great. So let's start with the opening keynote. Did you know you were going to get that shout out? No, not at all. It was really cool to see. I think Cruz was up there talking about how they were building their own platform for autonomous cars and what's running behind it, and they mentioned all these projects, and we were like, wow, that sounds super familiar, and then they said, okay, we're cross-plane, they mentioned cross-plane, they mentioned upbound, they mentioned the work that we're doing here in this space to help folks effectively run their own layer on top of cloud computing, and then- Bassam, we've known each other- We're going to do a bingo super cloud, so how many times is this super cloud, so- Super cloud is super services, super apps around it, so you enable a lot of great things. Brian Grace had a great podcast this week on super services, so it's super exciting. It's a super great time on theCUBE. Wow, that's a super cloud conversation. All seriously now, we've known each other for a long time, you've been to every KubeCon, you've been at OpalSource, you've seen where it's been, where it is now. Super exciting that in mainstream conversations, we're talking about super cloud and distractions and around interoperability, things that were once really hard to do, even back in the OpalStack days, now we're at a prime time spot where the control plane, the data planes are in play as a viable architectural component of all the biggest conversations. You're in the middle of it, what's your take on it? Give some perspective of why this is so important. I mean, look, the key here is to standardize, right? Get to standardization, right? And what we saw like early days of cloud native, it was mostly around Kubernetes, but it was Kubernetes as a, you know, essentially a container orchestrator, the container of wars, Docker, Masos, et cetera, and then Kubernetes emerged as a, the winner in containers, right? But containers is a workload, one kind of workload. It's, I run containers on it, not everything's containers, right? And the, you know, what we're seeing now is the Kubernetes API is emerging as a way to standardize on literally everything in cloud, not just containers, but, you know, VMs, serverless, Lambda, et cetera, storage, databases, all using a common approach, a common API layer, a common way to do access control, a common way to do policy, all built around open source projects and, you know, the cloud data of ecosystem that you were seeing around here. And that's exciting, because for the first time we're arriving at some kind of standardization. Every major inflection point has this de facto standard evolution, then it becomes kind of commonplace, great Agria Kubernetes. The question I wanted to ask you is, what's the impact to the DevOps community? DevSecOps has absolutely dominated the playbook, if you will. Developers, we're saying, will run companies because they'll be running the applications. IT's not a department anymore, it is the business. If you believe the digital transformation finds its final conclusion, which it will, at some point. So more developers doing more apps, more stuff. Look, if you, I'd be hard pressed to find somebody that has a title of DevOps or SRE that can't at least spell Kubernetes if not running in production, right? And so, from that perspective, I think this is a welcome change. Standardize on something that's already familiar to everyone is actually really powerful. They don't have to go, okay, we learned Kubernetes, now you guys are taking us down a different path of standardization or something else has emerged. It's the same thing. It's like, we have eight years now of cloud native, roughly, and people in the DevOps space welcome a change where there are basically standardizing in things that are working, right? They're actually working, right? And that could be used in more use cases, in more scenarios, that they're actually, become versatile, they become ubiquitous as well. Take a minute to just explain what you guys are selling and doing, what's the product? What's the traction? Why are people using you? What's the big, big position? Value statement, you guys. Yeah, so my company's called UpBound and we're the folks behind the Crossplane project. And Crossplane is effective, takes Kubernetes and extends it to beyond containers and to managing everything in cloud, right? So if you think about that, if you love the model where you're like, I go to Kubernetes cluster and I tell it to run a bunch of containers and it does it for me and I walk away, you can do that for the rest of the surface area of cloud, including your VMs and your storage and across cloud vendors, hybrid models, all of it works in a consistent standardized way, you know, using Crossplane, right? And UpBound's- What do you solve in a, what do you solve in a, or eliminate what happens, why does this work? You're replacing something, are you extracting away something, are you changing something? I think we're layering on top of things that people have, right? So you'll see people are organized differently. We see a common pattern now where they're shared services teams or platform teams as you hear within enterprises that are responsible for basically managing infrastructure and offering a self-service experience to developers, right? Those teams are all about standardization. They're all about creating things that help them reduce the toil, manage things in a common way and then offer self-service abstractions to their developers and customers so they don't have to be in the middle of every request. Things can go faster. We're seeing a pattern now where these teams are standardizing on the Kubernetes API and standardizing on Crossplane and standardizing on things that make their life easier, right? They don't have to replace what they're doing. They just have to layer and use it. And layer is probably an opening for you. That makes it sound more complex, I think, than what you're actually trying to do. I mean, you as a company are all about velocity as an ethos, which I think is great. Do you think that standardization is the key in increasing velocity for teams, leveraging both Crossplane, Kubernetes, anyone here? Look, I mean, everybody's trying to achieve the same thing. Everybody wants to go faster. They want to innovate faster. They don't want tech to be the friction to innovation, right? They want to go from feature to production in minutes, right? And so to that extent, standardization is a way to achieve that. It's not the only way to achieve that. It's means to achieve that. And if you've standardized, that means that less people are involved. You can automate more. You can centralize. And by doing that, that means you can innovate faster. And if you don't innovate these days, you're in trouble. You're out of business. Do you think that, so Kubernetes has a bit of a reputation for complexity. You're obviously creating a tool that makes things easier. As you apply Kubernetes outside just an orchestration and container environment, do you, what do you see those advantages being across the spectrum of tools that people are leveraging you for? Yeah. I mean, look, Kubernetes is a platform, right? To build other things on top of. And as a result, it's something that's used to, kind of on the back end. Like you would never, you should put something in front of Kubernetes as an application model or consumption interface or portals or, right? To give to your teams. But you should still capture all your policies, you know, automation and compliance, governance at the Kubernetes layer, right? At the, or with cross pane at that layer as well, right? And so, if you follow that model, you can get the best of world. Both worlds, you standardize, you centralize, you are able to have, you know, common controls and policies and everything else. But you can expose something that's a dev-friendly experience on top of it as well. So you get the best of both worlds. So the problem with infrastructure as code you're saying is that it's not this new layer to go cross environments. No, infrastructure as code works slightly differently. I mean, you can write, you know, infrastructure as codes using whatever tooling you like to go across environments. The problem with it is that everybody has to learn a specific language or has to work with understanding the constructs. There's the beauty of the Kubernetes based approach and the cross pane best approach is that it puts APIs first, right? It's basically saying, look, kind of like the API mandate that led to AWS being created, right? Teams should interact with APIs. They're super strong contracts, right? They're versionable. And if you do that, and that's kind of the power of this approach, then you can actually reach a really high level of automation and a really high level of innovation. And this also just to bring in the clouds here, but this might bring up the idea that common services create interoperability, but yet the hyperscale clouds can still differentiate on value. Baster processors of its silicon to better functions if lambda, right? So there's still, it's not killing innovation. It is not. And in fact, I, you know, this idea of building something that looks like a lowest common denominator across clouds, we don't actually see that in practice, right? People want to use the best services available to them because they don't have time to go, you know, build portability layers and everything else, but they still, even in that model, they want to standardize on how to call these services, how to set policy on them, how to set access control, how to actually invoke them. If you can standardize on that, you can still, you get to use these services and you get the benefits of standardization. Well, Savannah, we were talking about this, about the Berkeley paper that came out in May, which is kind of a super cloud version. They call sky computing. Their argument is that if you try to standardize too much, like the old kind of OSI model back in the day, you're actually going to, the work innovation is going to stunt the growth. Do you agree with that? And how do you see it? Because standardization is not so much ASPEC and ITEF thing, it's not an IEEE committee. It's not like that kind of standard. It's more of de facto. I mean, look, we've had standards emerge. Like, you know, if you look at MySQL, for example, and the Postgres movement, like there are now lots of vendors that offer interfaces that support Postgres, even though they're differentiated completely on how it's implemented, so you see that. If you can, stick to open interfaces and use services that offer them, like tons of differentiation, yet still, you know, some kind of open interface, if you will. But there are also differentiated services that don't have open interfaces, and that's okay too. As long as you're able to kind of find a way to manage them in a consistent way, I think you should, and it makes sense to your business, you should use them. So enterprises like this. And just not to get into the business model side real quick, but like, how are you guys making money? You got the project, you got the cross-plane project, that's community. You guys are charging, what's the business model? We're in the business of helping people adopt and run control plans that do all this manage services, and customer support and services. The plethora of things that people need, we're- While keeping the project. While keeping the project. Correct. That's correct. Yeah, you have to balance both. And you're all over the show. I mean, outside of the keynote mention, looking here, you have four events on, where can people find you if they're tuning in? We're just at the beginning, and there's a lot of looks here. Upbound.io is the place to find Upbound, and where I have a lot of talks, you'll see cross-plane mention and lots of talks and a number of talks today. We have a happy hour later today, we've got the booth set up, so. I'll be there, folks, just FYI. Thank you. And everyone will be there now. Quick update, what's new with the cross-plane project? Can you share a little commercial with the most important stories going on there? So cross-plane is growing, obviously, and we're seeing a ton of adoption of cross-plane, especially actually in large enterprise, which is really exciting, because they're usually the slow to move, and cross-plane is so central. So it's now in hundreds and thousands of deployments, which is amazing to see. And so the project itself is adding a ton of features, reducing friction in terms of adoption, how people ride these control planes and all through them, coverage of the space, as you know, controls are only useful when you connect them to things, and the spaces, like the amount of things you can connect control planes to is increasing on a day-to-day basis, and the maturity is increasing. So it's just super exciting to see all of this right now. How would you categorize the landscape? We were just talking earlier in another segment, we're in Detroit, Motor City, it's like, did you see someone had to drive a car? Kubernetes clusters, okay, switch the gears, like, don't hit the other guy, now once they learn how to drive, they want a sports car. How do you keep that progression going? How do you keep people to grow continuously? Where do you see the DevOps and or folks that are doing cross-plane, that are API, hardcore, because that's a good IQ that shows them that they're advancing. Where's the IQ level of advancement relative to the industry? Is the adoption just like, you know, getting going or people advancing? Sounds like your customers are heavily down the road on. The way I describe it is there's a progression happening, right, DevOps was make, initially it was like, how do I keep things running? Right, and a transition to how do I automate things so that I don't have to be involved when things are running, right? Now we're seeing a next turn, which is how do I build what looks like a product that offers shared services or a platform so that people consume it like a product, right? And now I'm, now transition becomes, well, I'm a developer on a product in operations, building something that looks like a product and thinking about it as a user interface. Ops of the new devs. That's correct. Yeah, there we go. Talk about layers. Talk about layers on layers on layers. I'm using it all, John. Well, you know, when they have the architecture lists product that's coming. Yeah, but this is what's, I mean, the devs are got so much DevOps in the front and the CI CD pipeline, the Ops teams are now retrofitting themselves to be data and security, mainly. And that's just guardrails, automation, policy. You're seeing a lot of that kind of network-like function. Yep. And they're composing, not, maybe coding a little bit, but they're not. Very much. They're in the composition, you know, as a daily thing. They're writing compositions, they're building things, they're putting them together and making them work. How new is this in your mind? Because you've watched this progress. You're in the middle of it. You're in the front wave of this. Is it adopting faster now than ever before? I mean, if we talked, five years ago, we were kind of saying this might happen, but it wasn't happening. Today it is. It's kind of amazing. Like everybody's writing these cloud services now. Everybody's authoring things that look like API services that do things on top of a new structure. That move very much has a ton of momentum right now. It's happening, it's becoming mainstream. Speaking of momentum for some, I saw both on your LinkedIn as well as on your badge today that you are hiring. This is your opportunity to shamelessly plug. What are you looking for? What can people expect in terms of your company culture? Yeah, so we're obviously hiring. We're hiring both on the go-to-market side or we're hiring on the product and engineering side. If you want to build a new cloud platform, I won't say the word super cloud again, but if you're excited about building a cloud platform that literally sits on top of the other cloud platforms and offers services on top of this, come talk to us. We're building something amazing. You're creating a super cloud toolkit. I'll say it. On that note, I think John Furrier has now managed to get seven uses of the word super cloud into this broadcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. I can't wait to see more of you throughout the course of KubeCon. My name is Savannah Peterson, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us here on theCUBE where we'll be live from Detroit, Michigan all week.