 From New York, it's theCube. Covering Escape 19. So everyone, welcome back to theCube coverage here in New York City for the inaugural multi-cloud event called Escape 19. This is a unique event where industry leaders are coming together to discuss and have conversations around what is multi-cloud, what does it even mean, how it will be laid out. It's really a foundational set of conversations and talks around it. Our next guest is Spoonz, known as Spoonz, that's his real name, but that's his nickname. He's the co-founder and CTO of LightStep, CUBE alumni in the past. We've interviewed them at CUBECon. Spoonz, thanks for coming on. Pleasure to be here. So first of all, your company's been, really has a lot of tech chops. We've interviewed your partner, Ben, before the CUBE. So much is going on in microservices. You can't even keep it straight these days. So take a minute to give an update on what's going on with LightStep real quick. Sure, sure. And why you're here. Yeah, I think what we're really trying to see is it's not just microservices, it's different cloud vendors, different third-party vendors that are really adding to the complexity, and that complexity really comes in the form of depth. I think people that are adopting microservices really feel it immediately, but for everyone else, it's a bit of a boiling frog situation. It comes on slowly. And I think where LightStep fits in is offering a simple solution for observing those systems, for understanding what's happening. So multi-cloud conversation, which I've called out on the CUBE is bullshit in the past because there are people kind of spinning it up and hyping it up. I mean, I recognize that people have multiple clouds, but there's no multi-clouding going on, per se. Yeah, we see a little bit with our customers. It's something where I think they think about it as a way to mitigate risks. It's a way for them to manage costs as well, so. Well, multi-vendor, I'm old enough to remember back in the 80s and 90s where you didn't want just IBM, or you didn't want just DEC, you wanted multiple vendors in there because more heterogeneous is better. Better IT. So now we're seeing that with cloud. This is not BS, this is real. So this is where I see multi-cloud being foundational. How do you see the architecture of enterprises where they're small, medium, growing, either born in the cloud, cloud native, or hybrid IT, hybrid dev building their own stacks? How should they be thinking about architecting for multi-cloud? Yeah, so I think that's one of the choices they have to make. And a lot of what I think they're trying to do is really allow teams to work more independently. So that might be that they can make their own choices about cloud, about vendors. It might be that they make their own choices about languages, frameworks, things like that. As they do that, they're building up this depth. And what that means is that there's a heterogeneity to that system. And really the problem there is that you've got a responsibility for the whole stack. You've got responsibility for everything from your service all the way down. Those all impact your performance. You only got control over your service itself. And so managing that tension is really where the pain comes in for a lot of developers today. You know, I've got to ask you a question. You're multiple degrees in computer science, entrepreneur, you're in the business. It's certainly a very rapid wave. It's really strong. And more waves are coming, bigger waves. You know, observability, network management becomes observability, configuration management becomes automation, RPA's the hottest trend, automating everything. So a lot of action going on with cloud scale, enterprises are just trying to vector in and figure that out. Observability has become such a hot area. And we kind of missed it. I mean, we covered it, but I missed that whole breakout. Whoa, what is this whole new category? What's going on? I think a lot of people miss it. I think it's easy to think about the orchestration, about the automation as the most important thing, because that's sort of in the critical path. But you have to have that to keep going. And it's easy to kind of think that your monitoring tools from, you know, 10, 20 years ago are still working. And I think what we realized when we were at Google and what we brought to LightStep is that they're not working anymore. That you've really got to rethink and you've got to put context that allows you to see that whole stack and not just think about individual machines, individual processes, but really understand it from a user's point of view, from your customer's point of view. I mean, it started to see tracing as a feature, but observability is now almost its own practice. Yeah. How should we think about holistic, how should people think holistically about observability from a technical standpoint? Yeah, so really, of course, you're going to need some logging, you're going to need metrics, but you really need those things to be put in context. You need to understand how they're affecting, affecting individual users, individual or segments of users. And so tracing is really the backbone of that context. It allows you to understand how a particular transaction passes through that system. If you don't have that, you're just going to get buried in this sea of data, whether that's logs or metrics or whatever. Tracing is really the thing that allows you to understand what's important and to filter, to aggregate and to really hone in on what can affect it. So that rabbit hole or that net or the drowning in that, as you said, but I feel like you said it was nice, is essentially rabbit hole. You can almost get stuck down there. Absolutely. And so you're getting much more real time. You also said contextual. So when I think of contextual, I'm thinking about, okay, I have to be integrated into the app and or I have access to data. So how does that work? Yeah, so really data comes from a lot of different sources and you need to get a way to integrate those things that can come from machine layer, from the infrastructure layer, but from the application itself as well. And we've partnered with some others to put together open telemetry, which is an open standard for getting the data out of the application. This comes on the heels of open tracing and a couple of other things. But that's really an open standard that allows application developers, allows framework developers to really open that spigot and get the data out of the application. Just to get your personal thoughts on the industry, there's a lot of, I have a lot of conversations with folks around, you know, we're the control plane for data. I mean, can there ever be a control plane? Is there an open, is Kubernetes going to be that, I guess, abstraction where everyone kind of has their own little land grab of control plane? Because data horizontal scalability makes sense. Why not? Yeah, there's a lot of different kinds of data and not all data is equally valuable. So the way that you think about data that's driving your revenue, like that's one thing, that the way that you're thinking about debugging your application, that's another thing. And I think you probably need more than one tool to handle that. It's just not going to be cost effective. And there's a home of the level of context right there. Exactly, exactly. So thinking about contextual and having integration points is probably a good starting point for someone who's kind of thinking about reassembling for multi-cloud. Yep, yep. All right, so what do you think about this conference multi-cloud first inaugural kind of true multi-cloud conference about multi-cloud only? Yeah, a lot of great people here. It's exciting. Yeah, cool. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it, Spoon. Yeah, updates, give a plug for LightStep. Take a quick second to explain what you guys are looking for, what you're doing, give an update. Yeah, so LightStep's simple observability for deep systems. Deep systems come about through things like microservices, but we have a lot of customers that are still working on a monolith or just stepping away from monolithic architecture. And really, observability means not just logs, not just metrics, but really providing that context through things like tracing that allow you to release faster, get those features out there, and at the same time, reduce mean times resolution, reduce mean time to innocence, right? Really making sure that your teams are able to understand who's at fault and who can fix the problems that you're seeing. And you guys recruiting, looking for people? Always recruiting on the engineering side, design, products, go to market, all those things, yep. Everyone's hiring. They get people these days. It is, it is. A lot of open jobs out there. Hey, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. See you around the neighborhood in Silicon Valley, and we'll see you at KubeCon. Great, thanks. All right, it's KubeCoverage here. I'm John Furrier, New York City for the first in all of Congress, Escape 19. This is the first industry gathering where the thought leaders of people who are making things happen are having conversations and talks around what is multi-cloud and laying down that foundation and headroom for more solutions. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.