 Hello, brilliant humans and welcome back to theCUBE. We're live from Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined here with John Furrier. John, so exciting. Day three. Day three, cranking along, doing great. Final day of KubeCon as it wraps up. This next segment is going to be great. It's about WebAssembly, the hottest trend here at KubeCon that nobody knows about because they just got some funding and it's got some great traction. Multiple players in here, people are really interested in this and they're really discovering it. They're digging into it. We're going to hear from one of the founders of the company that's involved. So it's gonna be great. Yeah, I think we're right at the tip of the iceberg really. We started off the show with Scott from Docker talking about this, but we have a thought leader in this space. Please welcome Matt Butcher, the CEO and co-founder of Faryon. Thank you for being here. Welcome. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. All right, favorite thing to talk about is WebAssembly. After that is coffee, but WebAssembly first. Hey, it's morning. We can talk about both of those on the show. Might get confusing, but I'm willing to try. If you can use coffee as a metaphor to teach everyone about WebAssembly throughout the rest of the show, that would be awesome. All right, I'll get that in mind. So when we were talking before we got on here, I thought it was really fun because I think the hype is just starting in the WebAssembly space. Very excited about it. Where do you think we're at? Set the page. Honestly, we were really excited to come here and see that kind of first wave of hype. We came here expecting to have to answer the question, what is WebAssembly and why is anybody looking at it in the cloud space? And instead, people have been coming up to us and saying, this WebAssembly thing, we're hearing about it. What are the problems it's solving? We're really excited to hear about it. So people are literally been stopping us in restaurants and walking down the street. Hey, you're at KubeCon. You're the WebAssembly people. Tell us more about what's going on. You're like a Watson celeb. I love this. Yeah, and the description I use was I expected to come here shouting into the void. Hey, anybody, somebody, let me tell you about WebAssembly. And instead it's been people coming to us and saying, we've heard about it. Get us excited about it. And I think that's a great place to be. One of the things that's exciting too is that this kind of a big trend with this whole abstraction layer, conversation, multi-cloud. It reminds me of the old app server days where there was a separation between the backend and front end. And we're kind of seeing that now with this WebAssembly wasm trend where the developers just want to have the apps run everywhere. And the coding to kind of fall in. Take a minute to explain what this is. Why it's important. Why are people jazzed about it? There's other companies like Cosmonica's in there. There's a lot of open source movement behind it. You guys are out there. Doc or? 20 million in fresh funding. Why is this important? What is it? And why is it relevant right now? Why are people talking about it? I mean, we can't, there is no panacea in the tech world much for the good of all of us, right, to keep us employed. But WebAssembly seems to be that technology that just sort of arose at the right time to solve a number of problems that were really feeling intractable not very long ago. At the core, what is WebAssembly? Well, it's a binary format, right? But there's built on the same strain of development that Java was built on in the 90s and then the .NET runtime. But with a couple of little fundamental changes that are what have made it compelling today. So when we think about the cloud world, we think about, okay, well, security's a big deal to us, right? Virtual machines are a way for us to run other people's untrusted operating systems on our hardware, right? Containers come along, they're a, you know, the virtual machine is really the heavyweight class, right? This is the big thing, the workhorse of the cloud. Then along come containers. They're a little more, a little slimmer. They're kind of the middleweight class. They provide us this great way to sort of package up just the application, not the entire operating system, just the application and the bits we care about and then be able to execute those in a trusted environment. Well, you know, serverless is the buzzword a few years ago, but one thing that serverless really identified for us is that we didn't actually have the kind of cloud side architecture that was the compute layer that was going to be able to fulfill the promise of serverless. And, you know, at that time, I was at Microsoft, we got to see behind the curtain and see how Azure operates and see the frustration with going, okay, how do we get this faster? How do we get the startup time down from seconds to hundreds of milliseconds? WebAssembly comes along and we're able to execute these things in sub one millisecond, which means there is almost no cost to starting up one of these. Sub one millisecond. I don't want to let everyone rest on that for a second. We've talked a lot about velocity and scale on the show. I mean, everyone here is trying to do things faster, obviously, but that is a real linchpin. That makes a very big difference when we're talking about deploying things. Yeah. And I mean, when you think about the ecological and the cost impacts of what we're building with the cloud. Right. When we leave a bunch of things running in idle, we're consuming electricity, if nothing else. You know, the electricity bill keeps going up and we're paying for it via cloud service charges. If you can start something in sub one millisecond, then there's no reason you have to leave it running while nobody's using it. Doesn't need to be in the background. That's right. The lightweight is awesome. So this new class comes up. So like Java was a great metaphor there. This is kind of like that for the modern era of apps. Yeah. Where is this going to apply most, do you think? Where is it going to impact most? Well, you know, I think there are really four big categories. I think there's the kind of thing I was just talking about. I think serverless and edge computing and kind of the server class of problem space. I think IOT is going to benefit. Amazon, Disney plus, yeah. Edge, baby, yes. And PBS, sorry, BBC. They all use WebAssembly for the players because they need to run the same player on thousands of different devices. I didn't even think about that use case. What a good example. It's a brilliant way to apply it. IOT is a hard space period and to be able to have that kind of layer of abstraction. So that's another good use case. Yeah. And then I think this kind of plugin model is another one. You see it with Envoy proxy using this as a way to extend the core features. And I think that one's going to be very, very promising as well. I'm forgetting one. But you end up with these kind of discreet compartments where you can easily fit WebAssembly in here and it's solving a problem that we didn't have a technology that was really adequately solving it before. No, I love that. One of the things I thought was interesting, we were all at dinner and we were together on Tuesday. I was chatting with Paris who runs DevRel at Apple. And I can't say I've heard this about too many tools but when we were talking about WebAssembly and she said, this is good for everybody. And it's really nice when technologies come along that will raise the water level across the board. And I love that you're leading this. Speaking of, you just announced a huge Series A, $20 million just a few days ago. What does that mean for you and the team? I mean, there's a little bit of economic uncertainty and it's always nice to know. Just a little bit. A little bit. It's come up on the show a little bit this week. Smidge, and it's nice to know that we're at a critical time developing this kind of infrastructure layer, developing this kind of developer experience where they can go from blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes or less. It would be a tragedy if that got forestalled merely because you can't achieve the velocity you need to carry it out. So what's very exciting about being able to raise around like that at this critical time is that gives us the ability to grow strategically, be able to continue releasing products, building a community around WebAssembly as a whole and of course around our products. At Fermion, it is this little smaller circle in the bigger circle and that's why we are so excited about having closed around that's the perfect one to extend a runway like that. Well, I'm super excited by this because one, I love the concept. I think it's very relevant. I like how you progressed heavyweight, middleweight. Maybe this is a lightweight class. No, I'm here for the analogy. No, it's great. It's great. Maybe it's a lightweight class. And we're slimming, which not many of us can say in these times. So that's a huge awesome. Maybe it's more like the tractor trailer, the van. Now you got the sports car. Yeah, I can go with that. I'm getting Detroit-y on us. I was trying for a coffee one. I just couldn't figure it out. So you got 20 million. I noticed the investors amplify very good technical, VC, early stage firm. Insight, they do early stage, big early stage like this. Also there on the board of Docker, Docker was, tend to put a tool out there. There's other competition out there. Cosmonic is out there. They're funded. So you got VC funded companies like yourselves and Cosmonic and others. What's that mean? Different tool chains? Is it going to create fragmentation? Is there a common mission? How do you look at the competition as you guys enter the market? When you see an ecosystem form, right? So here we are at KubeCon. The cloud native ecosystem at this point. I like to think of them as like concentric rings. You have the kind of core and then networking and storage and you build these rings out. And the farther out you get, then the easier it is to begin talking about competition and differentiation. But when you're looking at that core piece, everybody's got to be in there together working on the same stuff because we want interoperability. We want standards-based solutions. We want common ways of building things. More than anything, we want the developers and operators and users who come into the ecosystem to be able to instantly feel like, okay, I don't have to learn, like you said, 50 different tools for 50 different companies. I see how this works and they're doing this and they're doing this. Are you guys all contributing into the same open source? All the different other funding companies? Both CNCF and the Byte Code Alliance are organizations that are really kind of pushing forward that core technology. You mentioned Cosmonic, Microsoft, SUSE, Red Hat, VMware, they're all in here too, all contributing. And again, with all of us knowing this is that nascent stage where we got to execute it and do it together. How are you guys differentiating? Because open source is a great thing. Rising tide floats all boats. This is a hot area. Is there a differentiation discussion or is it more let's see how it goes? Kind of thing. Well, for us, we came into it knowing very specifically what the problem was we wanted to solve. We wanted this serverless architecture that executed in sub one millisecond to solve, to really create a new wave of microservices. Developers love performance. They want to run their stuff on the fastest data. Yeah, that's right. And it should be a roadblock, you know. And you look at someone like Single Store, who's a database company, and they're in it because they want to be able to run WebAssembly's close to the data, right? Instead of doing a SQL select and pulling it way out here, munging it, and then pushing it back in, they move the code in there and it's executing in there. So everybody's kind of finding a neat little niche. Cosmonic has really gone more for an enterprise play where they're able to provide a lot of high level security guarantees, whereas we've been more interested in saying, hey, this is your first foray into WebAssembly and you're interested in serverless, we'll get you going in like a couple of minutes. I want to ask you because we had Scott Johnson earlier opening his keynote kind of fireside chat, one-on-one, and it went off-form X. I really wanted to talk to him because Docker has emerged as one of the most important companies since their pivot when they did their little reset after the first Docker kind of, and they sold the enterprise off to Mirantis. Then they've been doing really, really well. What's your relationship to Docker? He was very bullish with you guys, insights, joint investor. Is there a relationship, do you guys talk? What's going on there? I mean, I'm going to have to admit a little bit of hero worship on my part. I think Scott is brilliant. I just do. And we have, having come from the Kubernetes world, the Fermion team, we've always kind of kept an eye on Docker, communicated with a lot of them. We know Justin Cormack for years, Chris Cormack is the director today. I mean, yeah. And so it has been a very natural sort of opinion. By the way, the queue's been at every DockerCon and we've did the last three years on the virtual side with them. So we know them really well. But do you have a relationship besides a formal relationship or is it more of more pass-shoot score together in the industry? Yeah, no, I think it's kind of the multi-level one, right? You come in knowing people, you work together before and you like working with each other and then it sort of naturally extends on to saying, hey, what can we do together? And also, how do we start building this ecosystem around us with Docker? They've done an excellent job of articulating why WebAssembly is a complementary technology with containers, which is something I believe very wholeheartedly. You need all three of the heavyweight, middleweight, lightweight. You can't do all with just one. And to have someone like that with a voice profoundly be able to express. Look, we're going to start integrating it to show you how it works this way and prevent the sort of needless drama where people are going, oh, Docker's dead, now everything's WebAssembly. And that's been a good work. It's a fight that's been going on. I mean, Docker, Kubernetes, WebAssembly, containers. We've seen on the show and we both know this hybrid is the future. We're all going to be using a variety of different tools to achieve our goals. And I think that you are obviously one of them. I'm curious because just as we were going on, you mentioned that you have a PhD in philosophy. Which is a wild card. You're actually our second PhD in philosophy working in a very technical role on the show this week, which is kind of cool. So how does that translate into the culture for me on? What's it like on the team? Well, you know, a philosophy degree, if nothing else, teaches you to think in systems and both human systems and formal systems, right? And so that helps. And when you approach the process of building a company, you need to be thinking both in terms of how are we organizing this? How are we organizing the product? How do we organize the team? We have really learned that culture is a major deal. And culture, philosophy, we like that. You know, we've been very forward. We have our chip values, curiosity, humility, inclusivity and passion. And those are kind of the four things that we feel like each of us every day should strive to be exhibiting these kinds of things. Curiosity because you can't push the envelope if you don't ask the hard questions. Humility because, you know, it's easy to get cocky and talk about things as if you knew all the answers. We know we don't. And that means we can learn from Docker and Microsoft and the person who stops by the booth that we've never met before and says, hey. And inclusivity, of course, building a community if you don't execute on that well, you can't build a good community. The diversity of the community is what makes it stronger than a singular. You have to come in and be cohesive with the community. The app focus is a really, I think relevant right now, the timing of this is right online. I think Scott had a good answer, I thought, on the relationship and how he sees it. I think it's going to be a nice extension to not a Docker extension that way, but like probably will be as well. Almost a pun there, John, almost a pun. There actually might be an extension, but evolution of what we're going to get to, which I think is going to be pure application server like form performance for new class of developer. Then now the question comes up and we've been watching developer productivity. That is a big theme, and our belief is that if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, IT and developers aren't at departments serving the business, they are the business. That means the developer workflows will have to be radically rebuilt to handle the velocity and new tech for just coding. I call it architecturalists. I like that, I might steal that. It's a pun, but it also brings up to provocative questions. You shouldn't have to need an architecture to code. I mean Java was great for that reason in many ways. So if that happens, if the developers are running the business, that means more apps, the apps is the business, you've got to have tool chains and productivity. You can't have fragmentation. Some people are saying WebAssembly might fork tool chains, might challenge the developer productivity. What's your answer to that? How would you address that objection? I mean, the thread of forking is always lurking in the corner in open source, right? In a way, it's probably a positive threat because it keeps us honest and keeps us wanting to be inclusive again and keep people involved. I honestly though, I'm not particularly worried about it. I know that the W3 as a standards body, of course, one of the most respected standards bodies on the planet, they do HTML, they do cascading styles, it's WebAssembly is in that camp. And those of us in the core are really very interested in saying, come on in, let's build something that's going to be, where the core is solid and you know what you got. And then you can go into the resurgence of the application server. I mean, I wholeheartedly agree with you on that. And we can only get there if we say, all right, here are the common paradigms that we're all going to agree to use. Now let's go build stuff. And as we've been saying, developers are setting, I think are going to set the standards and they're going to vote with their code and their feed, if you will. They will decide, if you're not aligning with what they want to do, on how they want to self-serve and or work, you'll figure that out, you'll get instant feedback. Well, again, I tell you, I'm a huge fan of Docker. One of the things that Docker understood at the very outset, is that they had an infrastructure tool and developers were the way to get adoption. And if you look at how fast they got adoption versus many, many other technologies that are profoundly impactful. Wilds. And it's because they got the developers to go, this is amazing. Hey, infrastructure folks, here's an infrastructure tool that we like. And the infrastructure folks who are used to code being tossed over the wall are going, are you for real? I mean, and that was a brilliant way to do it. And I think that that's what we want to replay in the web assembly world, is making it developer friendly and the kind of infrastructure that we can actually operate. Well, congratulations to the entire community. We're huge fans of the concept. I kind of see where it's going, we connect the dots, you guys getting a lot of buzz. I have to ask you, my final question is, the hype is beyond all recognition at this point. People are super pumped and enthusiastic about it. People are looking at it, maybe some challenging it, but that's all good things. How do you get to the next level where people are confident that this is actually going to go the next step? Hype to confidence. We've seen great hype. Envoy was hyped up big time before it came in. Then it became great. And it was one of my favorite examples. Hype is okay, but now you got to put some meat on the bone, the sizzle and the steak, so to speak. So what's going to be the steak for you guys as you see this going forward? Yeah, you know, I talk about our first guiding story was, you know, blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes. That's what you need to win developers initially. So what's the next story after that? It's got to be, Framianne can run real world applications that solve real world problems, right? That's where hype often fails. If you can build something that's neat, but nobody's quite sure what to do with it to use it, maybe somebody will discover a good use. But if you take that gambling aspect on it. That makes the difference. Yeah, yeah. So we say, all right, what are developers trying to build with our platform? And then relentlessly focus on making that easier and solving the real world problem that way. That's the crucial thing that's going to drive us out of that sort of early hype stage into a well-adopted technology. And I talk from Framianne's point of view, but really that's for all of us in the web, absolutely. It's very well stated, Matt. Just to wrap us up, when we're interviewing you here on theCUBE next year, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't say today? All the stuff about coffee we didn't cover today. Yes. But also, yeah. Here for the coffee show. All the analogies. That's a great analogy. I want to walk here and say, last time we talked about being able to achieve density in servers that was 10 times Kubernetes. Next year I want to say no, we're actually thousands of times beyond Kubernetes that we're lowering people's electricity bill by making these servers more efficient and the developers love it. That your commitment to the environment is something I want to do an entirely different show on. I learned that 78% of all the world's power is actually used on data centers through the show this week, which is jarring, quite frankly. Yeah, tragic would be a better way of saying that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm holding back, so you don't go over time here, quite frankly. But anyways, Matt Butcher, thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. You are worth the hype you are getting. I am grateful to have you as our web assembly thought leader in addition to Scott today from Docker earlier in the show. John Furrier, thanks for being my co-host and thank all of you for tuning into theCUBE here, live from Detroit. I'm Savannah Peterson and we'll be back with more soon.