 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partner. Hi, and welcome back to KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. Here in San Diego, I'm Stu Minam, my co-host for three days of coverage is John Troyer, and happy to welcome back to the program. I was on the keynote stage earlier at the conference. Derek Collison, who's the founder and CEO of Sanadia. Yes, welcome. Showing the logo, thanks so much for joining us, Derek. Oh, thank you, I really appreciate it. It's been a while. Yeah, it has, so we've known you for many years. We've had you on the program. You look at our site, you've got one of those VIP logos because you've been on the show a few times. You've seen a couple of these waves. Latest thing, of course, you're talking a lot about Nats, but of course, Cloud Foundry, you built that. So you've seen a lot of these waves, but want to start with something you said I thought was really thought-provoking and interesting is a lot of people, when we talk about the cloud economy, we talk about the data economy, you talked about the connective economy. So explain to our audience a little bit what that means. So the general gist of it is, is, hey, where's the innovation and where's the value coming out of information technology, IT infrastructure, and things like that. And for a long time, we were swept up in the cloud economy, which was, how do you move from CapEx into OpEx, and things like that. And then of course, it was all about data. And it still is about data. But if you notice, it's not the data moving to where you're trying to process things, it's now it's all of a sudden being distributed. And so you take that, and you take microservices, and you take all these things, and at least from my perspective, I see the value driving out of these systems now, is it, how are they connected? How are you observing them? How are you securing and trusting them? And I believe that's where the value and the next wave of innovation is going to come from. Yeah, it's funny. I hear sometimes we talk about the pendulum of technology. And I look in the 10 years we've been doing this, really we're talking about the journey along the distributed architecture we've been trying to build. And it's not, you know, moving back and forth, but it's kind of, you know, it's kind of circling in some of the themes we're repeating, but it's growing that along the way. So, give us, you know, gnats and messaging, how this plays into helping to solve that communication issues, the kind of thing, you know, we read about, you know, the Google papers to, you know, global distributed architectures. Yeah, so the general gist is gnats was built to power Cloud Foundry, right? And that was the deployment mechanism for applications and such like that. And gnats, just like a lot of the other technologies was built for, you know, an itch I needed to scratch. And it was a silo technology. And so about two years ago, we had the opportunity to actually think about if we wanted to make a business out of gnats, right? Any time you say open source and commercial entity, there's challenges, right? And I don't think anyone has all of the answers. But the answer that we came up with internally as a team was, we need to build something that's value is greater than some of its parts. I personally, again, a lot of people won't agree with me and that's okay. I don't believe in the open core model, right? I don't believe in the fact that you, you know, make certain enterprise features and certain open source features. However, what I do believe is that if we could take a communication technology and make it a true utility, right? Like the global cellular network or the, you know, the internet and connect everything, we'd have these opportunities that no one could receive, for example, with the web or even with the global cellular network and what people think is about to happen with 5G. So we took gnats, which is a, you know, very mature technology, made it multi-tenant, made it very, very forward-looking secure, made it run in any cloud, Edge, IoT, with the hope that we could encourage people to connect everything, start isolated, but have the ability to say, hey, we want to start sharing data securely in an audited way that it's drop dead simple to do. It's not a, let's plan a six-month project to integrate your systems with these systems and things like that. And so that's the gist of what we're trying to do. We believe, you know, that running this thing as a service such as a utility, it's not just something for you or for you or me. It's that we're all using the same thing we're all connected if we want to be. We think there's value there. Derek, maybe let's go in a little bit on gnats and the service you're running too, but maybe educate us a little bit on the landscape here. We've already talked to IoT, you know, cloud-native app messaging, and I think people understand to a certain extent what a messaging system is. Sometimes it gets conflated with the streaming system. Maybe talk about what gnats does really well. You talk about security, you talk about a few other things you've teased already here, how should we be thinking about gnats? Well, I think outside of gnats, just in general, right? Any type of way of communications, we need to think secure by default, right? We can't do what happened with the internet where we go, ooh, it'd be really nice to do these kind of things, but we need security. And we had to wait as a group of, you know, excited individuals probably 15 years to get that. We can't do that in this generation with IoT and things. But when you look at gnats or any technology, there's essentially two types of patterns that anybody wants to support. Service-based pattern where I ask you a question, you give me an answer. 90 plus percent of distributed systems today, that's their main architectural pattern. That's right, I'm coordinating and asking a lot of questions of these services, microservices, you know, has become popular. Streaming is now becoming popular with things like Kafka and stuff like that. And it's been around for a while, but that's the second other pattern. So it's like I'm emitting events or data streams or things like that. And they could be persisted or not, but essentially if you want to make it simple, it's services and streams. And for us, we wanted a technology that did equally well in both of them, right? You didn't have to pick one technology for one pattern and another one for a different one. All right, let's talk a little bit about your business. So you talked a little bit about kind of the business model. So explain, you know, the business model, what you're doing, how bad that actually goes together. Yeah, and you know, for the viewers, right? This is our take on it, which means, you know, it's advice, you get what you pay for, it's free type stuff, but you know, been around the block a little bit. So when we started out, what we didn't want to do is ignore the old models. I don't think a long-term business model is the old models, meaning recurring support, consulting, NRE work type stuff. But I also seen startups that ignore that, you know, and say, oh, we're not going to do that at all. And I did a little bit of that prior company. So we embrace that, but we know long-term, that's not going to be it. So we deploy a global network, right? We have a global network, it's available, a single URL, secured by default, runs in every cloud, every major geo, and more importantly, you can extend it on your own, run your own servers with your own awe to do that. And we believe that SaaS model, that utility model where, again, its value is greater than some of its parts, allows us to keep everything open source, but there's a value in being connected to this network, multi-cloud, cloud to edge, all that kind of stuff. And what we want is we want customers to slowly transition to that. And there's, I've been telling people there's basic cable, which is like just the dial tone, then there's going to be premium channels on that that you can pay for, like storage, DR, secrets, you know, zero trust mechanisms, anomaly detection around communication patterns. People might opt in to say, ooh, we want to pay for those things because they're interesting to us. And then the last piece of that pie is there may be people who are running, you know, against the global utility, running their own servers, and they go, that service right there inside of that system, we'd love it, we want it on premise. Can we actually license it from you? So it's a combination of software as a service, license revenue, and recurring support. Okay, and so are you enabling partners to deliver those services? Is that Senadia does that themselves? Where do those premium services come from? So we're going to seed the market, but yeah, we want it to be an open marketplace. And what we will provide is things like billing and such like that, almost, not exactly, but almost like the App Store, the Apple, you know, App Store, where someone who wants to just write a simple service and that people like it, they don't have to do much, they just have it run and it's receiving stuff and they just get paid. So we do think that's a federated model. Believe it or not, we also feel running the network on a global scale is also federated. So we've designed it such that we don't have to be the only operators. As a matter of fact, if we're successful, we're the smallest operator going forward. But the system is always interconnected, right? So if John's trying to connect in and he's connecting to a Google server, I could connect to that server also, even though Senadia might have actually granted me the rights to access the system. And so we're working on that, we're thinking about that. But cloud providers are really good at running infrastructure and running services on an infrastructure. We want to embrace that. We just want to make sure that any user of the system, it's like a SIM card that's unlocked essentially, right? You can go to any provider you want and it works. That's what we want to make sure we set up for. Right, it seems like a great example of this next wave of companies that's being built on top of the existing cloud infrastructure. You don't have to be a host or yourself. You can take advantage of and partner with all the other infrastructure providers that have and interconnected in several different ways. I mean, maybe Derek, could you give us maybe an example of an app, what an app might look like that's globally distributed and what kind of messages would be being passed back and forth? Sure, so we're about to release something on Senadia where we truly believe at the base of everything it's just sending messages, right? And so most people think of NATS as a communication mechanism and it is. But when we say storage or state storage, they kind of say, oh, NATS doesn't do that. But we can send the message to a KV service that says kv.set, and I can send a message to say KVget and get it back. Now what's interesting is we can make that zero trust, meaning it leaves your app totally encrypted. So none of our servers, none of Google, Amazon, or Azure servers actually even understand what the heck it is. But what's interesting is you can connect to any of our servers worldwide or even run your own servers and connect to those and it works all the time. We have another one that's just a usage server meaning it tells you how much usage you've been racking up, let's say, over the month, kind of like a cell bill. And the way we built it was there's multiple servers that are running, collecting this data, totally independent, there's no consensus. Everyone has the same subject, NGS.usage. You send a request saying, what's my usage for the last hour? Yet the backend service, guaranteed secure, trusted, it receives a request that it knows it's John, right? It knows it's Stu, it knows it's Derek. And so it can say, oh, I'm trying to get John's usage, I'm trying to get Stu's usage. Yet the user experience is everyone does the same thing which we think is extremely powerful. And you don't have to do anything unnatural to get that with a system like NATS, right? Where we try to put security first and really think hard about what it meant. And that wasn't fun, it wasn't easy, but we think it's important. So Derek, I want to kind of step up level a second here because you've got some great viewpoints on things. So there's some people that look at a show like this or look at the industry and say, there's all this hype around multi-cloud, but there's a lot of challenges that's become least common denominator, how do these things work together? My definition that I've been saying for a while actually, use a phrase you've used a couple of times. If for multi-cloud to be real, the value that I get out of it has to be greater than the sum of its parts. You live through the PAS and the post-PAS error of done a number of environments here. So where are we today? Where do we need to go as an industry as a whole to reach that value statement that we talk about? Yeah, that's a great question. I even from day one at Cloud Foundry believe in multi-cloud, but I've watched how the markets have actually reacted and what they are doing. And the first wave in my perspective was posturing for better pricing. To be honest with you, it was Netflix go, hey, we're going to move to Google unless you give us a better price. And I've seen that time and time again. Where it becomes real though is when there's a class of service on a given cloud provider, that is extremely attractive. Amazon, just in terms of the breadth, Azure a lot for some of the big data stuff. Google a lot for some of the AI stuff they have. Where an organization has a legitimate use to say we really need best of breed in AI, best of breed in let's say big data, and they want to run an app in Azure and an app in Google. And that's kind of the realist situation I've seen. The notion of running something that's truly oblivious and can run anywhere, it's possible, but your lowest common denominator is compute and simple storage. And a lot of times that's not actually distinguishing. So I still see a lot of pricing pressure, posturing around multicloud just as a negotiation tactic. Where I see it being real is it's this class of app, we want to run it in this cloud provider to access these services that are differentiating. Derek, you have been around for a few generations of, well, stack wars, pass wars, I don't know what they need a name. Any advice to application architects and technologists who are choosing technologies here? I mean, here at this conference, right? Kubernetes is kind of a common assumption for a lot of what people are doing, not everybody, but there's a lot of other parts that plug into it and a lot of other decisions to be made about architectures and about everything from messaging to security to networking to storage and I can go on and on and on. So, I mean, how do you see, again, you've seen this happen a couple of times, people having to pick and make choices, worry about lock-in, whatever they're worried about. I don't know, what are your thoughts on what are the right ways to do this so you actually succeed? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And yeah, I have seen the pendulum swing back and forth quite a bit, but I think for the viewers I can simplify, at least from my perspective, it goes between choice and simplicity. So, if you look at even the Paz Wars versus IAS versus all that stuff, Paz was a swing towards simplicity, get stuff done, you know what I mean? And then it was like, oh, I can get stuff done, but I don't have enough choice, right? So, we saw the swing back and I think Kubernetes hit it the absolute perfect time to take advantage of, hey, we need choice with these base layers, right? And the way Kubernetes was architected was to give you that full choice. So, if a startup's coming along and saying, okay, given the fact the pendulum's over here, no one is going to be swinging back, and at least in my opinion, we're swinging back for simplicity, concentrate on how do you simplify what people are struggling with today? So, at this conference, there's a tremendous amount of people, you can get a lot of insight into what's going on. Ask them where it hurts. You know what I mean? What are you struggling with? How long have you been struggling with it? And then solve those problems, and especially when the pendulum you know it's starting to swing back around. Hey, can we do this in a more simplified way? Why does it have to be so hard? Those are the big opportunities right now. But again, it'll swing this way and then it'll swing back. Eventually, it'll get into the middle and then we'll pick a whole other class of problems to swing back and forth on. It's actually, it's not surprising to me that you're actually echoing a comment that Steve Herrod made on the program yesterday, saying when he goes and talks to all the companies here, it's tell me how you make my life better as a company and that's where we need to focus on. That wave towards simplicity, absolutely something we see, something we've been driving towards from Kubernetes, but an area that you're spending some time in, talk about the keynote, edge computing. And absolutely, we need simplicity for that to be able to come there. What are you seeing in the edge space? What's real customers you're talking to and you know, give us a little bit of a forward looking as to where you see that whole space going. Yeah, so I mean, for me edge and IoT, you can define a lot of different ways, but even for enterprise companies that are here, it's hey, do you deploy a piece of software out into the field or a hardware software combination? So Bose headsets, Peloton bikes, whatever, that's a kind of an industrial OOT type of a thing. I see a lot of people wanting to drag what they think works in cloud out to the edge, right? Kubernetes works here, we're going to drag it out here. We just got to slim it up a little bit and package it. I don't know if that's the right answer. What I think we need to think about is, is how do we get data and compute, compute meaning processing of that data, securely and in a trusted fashion out to the edge, however that works, it doesn't necessarily mean we have to have all the same pieces, but you have to say, I want to push an update and I want it to go over the air, so to speak, to the edge, I want to be able to trust that it's doing the right thing. And so I think there's a massive amount of opportunity around that and in how do you move all those pieces around what we're trying to do at Synadia is encompassing both, right? So we started with the secure by default trusting at the beginning and then if we say, hey, it's just messages. And in the keynote, I talked a little bit about our excitement around WebAssembly, but what we get excited about it is, is we give you a drop dead easy system to say, I want to digitally sign that WebAssembly for use in this certain situation at the edge. And then that shovels it out there and the system looks at it, verifies that it was signed by John, and says, yep, I can run this now. And so we're looking very heavily at those types of opportunities. We don't care how the things are deployed per se, but I would say that I think as you get further out, I think you're going to see more common denominators around WebAssembly, secure and signed WebAssemblies, than on how we actually deploy them. So you're going to see lighter weight things, not to say that Kubernetes might not have relevance out there, but I don't think it's needed to get to where we want. We need that trust factor, ubiquitous communications to really kind of light that field up. The other one at least that we feel we need to meet the customer where they're at is, most of the IOT type devices are MQTT. And so we talked also that in Q1, we're going to allow native MQTT apps to connect directly into a NAT server and the NGS ecosystem, meaning you get the best of both worlds as well. So then an edge router's running a NAT server can be a Raspberry Pi, thousands of devices all connecting in. We think that connectivity and that trust will light up a lot of opportunities. Well, Derek, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for all the updates. Thank you guys, I really appreciate it. All right, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. Thanks for watching the Q.