 Hi, this is your SAPI Zubatia, and we are here at KubeCon in Chicago. And we have with us, once again, Martin Fan, field CTO of Cloud Casa of Ecologic. Martin, it's great to have you back on the show. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, it's my pleasure to host you again. We are here at KubeCon again. Last time we were at the previous KubeCon. Talk a bit about, once again, from Cloud Casa's perspective, how has been this event so far? This KubeCon has actually been great, actually. We've met a lot of interesting customers, a lot of more customers looking to do backups and migrations of their Kubernetes clusters. So it's been a great event for us. Because when we do look at Kubernetes or any other technologies, data is the most important thing. It might not be the sexist, the shiniest, but data backup, all this disaster recovery, that is critical for business sustainability, business survival. So talk a bit about, from Kubernetes perspective, what does data backup mean? What are you saying? We've been a backup data protection company for over the past three years now, right? So we've known a lot about data protection. We knew how Kubernetes changed the landscape of data protection. But I think it's more than just data protection now at this point. A lot of use cases that we're counting on the show floor is due to migration, due to debugging and test devs. So having a snapshot copy or being able to take a snapshot copy of your clusters and being able to spin them up anywhere and migrate them to any managed cloud service provider is going to improve that flexibility of the Kubernetes use case. And that's really where we're starting to see the data protection use case of the cloud cloud so the platform evolved more towards a migration perspective and a debugging perspective. When it comes to data, what are some of the pain points? It could, as you said, data migration. Ingress can be a big challenge. What are the pain points that you see that folks are facing here when they come to the booth and you learn back? A lot of the pain points are just the details and the inconsistencies of restoring or migrating application, right? What needs to happen in terms of remapping storage classes, renaming namespaces, ensuring that you're capturing all the persistent volume data, higher quiescing databases. So these are all the details that we're hoping CloudCasa as a platform that users can use, not just for data protection, but also for this migration purpose can help ease and facilitate, right? And as your Kubernetes user base and customer base becomes larger, more people are using the applications, more people are looking to protect those applications and ensure their restorability. That's when you're going to start seeing more users have requirements for role-based access control organizations and that's really what CloudCasa is going to hopefully bring together as a single pane of glass for these types of users. What is CloudCasa doing to solve some of this problem? Did you folks made an announcement here? Our latest enhancement is with regards to having self-hosted. We've been trying to follow the market from a perspective of what customers are actually using in terms of a data protection product and looking at the landscape, we saw Valero, right? The open source backup program for Kubernetes, right? Open source backup for Kubernetes here and with regards to Valero, we realized that Valero had 99% let's say the market share and rather than reinvent the wheel here, we decided to piggyback off of those Valero customer environments and build that into our own CloudCasa portal, right? So from a, I guess, in the application integration perspective, Valero has been still kind of our focus but carrying forward that message from a improvement or CloudCasa platform improvement perspective, we discovered that as more Valero customers were coming to and using our CloudCasa platform, they were requiring more options from a self-hosted perspective, right? And I have secure environments here that I can't necessarily target or use a software as a service platform and that's why we had just now self-hosted as being an option for our CloudCasa platform. Talk a bit about the need for self-hosted in the context of the whole data sovereignty and what kind of audience industry market you are targeting with this announcement? So self-hosted is just the option for users that may not have the ability to connect to our software as a service, provide them with the option of hosting CloudCasa in their own environment. So we're talking government sites, government clouds, people that really don't want to have their any network traffic flow out of their internal Kubernetes networks, right? So, and I think you can have a wide range of use cases from let's say Cloud partners that are looking to host some type of data protection on their own managed services, Cloud managed services, they are able to take advantage of our self-hosted options, have our CloudCasa server deployed from their marketplace and provide their customers with the data protection options for their Cloud managed services. So I think they can have a wide range of opportunities and be able to fit into a lot of needs from a customer or a vendor perspective. Is there any specific target audience? It could be in a public sector and in private sector specific industries. All the above, right? So I mean, we hear, I mean, most of the time you're going to find this requirement from the federal public sector, just users that are looking for that additional level of security or not wanting to have traffic flow out of the environment. And, you know, we had those data sovereignty options within our product initially, right? From being able to bring your own storage, being able to take advantage of, let's say private links for data traffic, but there's always that requirement of, you know, having to communicate back to the CloudCasa server, right? All the control messages, having to go back to our CloudCasa server. And because of the way CloudCasa has been designed, it was built in Kubernetes for Kubernetes. We realized that we could, you know, with few minor tweaks, we could package it up. We can basically say, hey, we're going to provide you with a helm chart to deploy our CloudCasa server and you just need to connect to our Docker Hub repository, download our application, deploy it within your own cluster, and away you go. And now you have all the benefits and features of CloudCasa. So I think, you know, we, if you look at it from a public private sector, we're just looking at users that you have or want that, want or need that on-prem requirement. And that's the whole reason behind the self-hosted option there. Let's also talk about the importance of partners, you know, service providers, you know. How does this offering or CloudCasa help them or does it mean anything to them as well? Oh, definitely. So with the self-hosted option now, we have the option to allow our partners to possibly OEM our product deploy within their clouds. We also have provided other partnership opportunities in terms of destination storage to backup to, right? Another recent announcement from this CubeCon event is our ability to support Azure Container Storage from Microsoft. So that is the abstraction layer behind, in front of Azure Disk, but our software works with that. So now it just extends the use cases that, or migration use cases that a customer might have from, let's say, being able to deploy in an Amazon Cloud one day and then be able to migrate and backup from an Azure Cloud the next day. I mean, we have been talking about the literal, the kind of adoption. You touched upon that briefly in the beginning also. Just also, you know, since we are back in CubeCon, what kind of, you know, adoption you're seeing there, what kind of community response, what kind of response from the ecosystem? So I think the last time that we had talked at CubeCon was back in Detroit and at that point when I checked it, it was about 50 million plus pools from Dogger Hub, the Valera application. And since that time, I think after three or six months or so, after that initial interview event, it had gone from 50 million to 100 million plus pools. So I mean, the adoption for Valera has been going like gangbusters. We realized that we didn't want to reinvent the wheel or fight against that current. The best way in order to get adoption and users looking at our platform was to provide an option that actually used the power of Valera but incorporates some of the functionality offered by CloudCosta, the full stack recovery, the multi-cluster manager, the UI, the reporting. So all that capability of CloudCosta Bro built in and carried over into CloudCosta for Valera, I think has been very popular amongst the Valera community. Such to the point that, you know, our developers are leaders in the Valera communities and they contribute to the enhancements that are going into Valera and some of the upgrades and updates from that perspective. So. I also want to talk about some new use cases that are emerging. Genitive AI is one of them. How do you look at it? And we can look at it from two different lenses. One would be CloudCosta, a data backup recovery for Genitive AI or Genitive AI helping CloudCosta? I don't think we play in like one specific area, right? I mean, what we're looking at in terms of data protection is just from an overall generic data protection use case. So I think we're primarily in the area of just, like that lowest common denominator, right? Kubernetes, cloud native, general cloud native applications, databases, typical things that would cause a user or incentivize the user to start containerizing their applications, right? And once we start moving from that monolithic legacy style application into more of a containerized platform and stateful data, that is where our application is going to come into play and be most effective. Last question before we wrap this up is that, of course, there are a lot of things that you folks are already working on internally. You may or not may be able to talk about, but just give us a teaser, a glimpse of what to expect next from CloudCosta. So I think we're just continuing to follow in the marketplace from a perspective of how users are going to continue to protect their data and what their requirements will be for protecting their data. I think what you're going to see from, I guess, a CloudCosta perspective is more features and options from a data protection use case and perhaps more of a data reuse case, but also a larger outreach for other cloud service providers and vendors. So if I had a crystal ball, and I'm not actually part of this committee, but if I had a crystal ball, I could see us branching out into more cloud vendors and cloud object storage and being able to provide a wide range of options to allow users to, regardless of where they're hosting their clusters, either on-prem or off-prem, be able to take advantage of CloudCosta for their data protection use cases. Martin, thank you so much for taking time out today and of course talk about all the progress that you folks have made with Valero, of course, that option is growing. And also give us some insight into where market is heading. Thanks for all those insights and I would love to chat with you again. Thank you.