 Hi, this is your host up in Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFR newsroom and today we have with us Ali Eleanor Go phone of Tommy jar. Lee is great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me and today They are so much to discuss first of all congratulations for the series a of 25 million Ron and then of course Beta release of test containers allowed So there are a lot of things to talk about and I have to struggle what to talk about first So I'll leave it to you. What do you want to discuss first? The test containers cloud or the the funding round? I'm happy to discuss both. I think I'm most excited about the product So I'm let's go and talk about the product first. Happy to talk about the funding as well Talk a bit about the test containers cloud what it is and why are you launching it? What problem is going to solve for the for the industry test containers cloud is a is a product That makes it easier for folks to do testing to do Developers to do testing test containers as a technology has been around since 2015 Test containers allows folks to do developers to do testing with real dependencies So up until now you could do unit tests. You can do integration tests integration tests required an environment This test containers what you do is you write a unit test, but you write a unit test with real dependencies So you can say hey, let's run my unit test But run this unit test this Kafka this postgres There's whatever other dependencies and what it would do is what it would launch those dependencies for you Run your test against them and when you're done, it will it all of this will disappear This allows developers to write self-contained tests It allows developers to run tests that don't require a central environment It allows developers to be a lot more effective What we've done this test containers cloud as we said, okay, great test containers open source is very very popular What we're gonna do is we're gonna allow folks to run those those dependencies not just on the local machine, but on the public cloud and benefit from the scalability from Reproducibility from the fact that you can now have the same outcome of your tests whether you're running it as an individual developer or as In a whole team, let's start with Some of the features also unit testing, you know, it's something which is like kind of crowded a space there are other players Also, they're offering so talk a bit about what is unique about test containers cloud You did touch upon that and then we'll also talk about The beta phase. So I think in our case, there is lots of testing solutions out there in the market We specifically focus on developer led testing. So we we truly believe that You know the testing is something developers do every day They do it as part of their inner development cycle So this is before they deploy anywhere and we strictly focus on that particular niche How do we make it simple for developers to do better testing when they're writing code? right, and that is that is an incredibly powerful and incredibly Useful for developers, right? So lots of other tools that look at end-to-end testing that look at Environments and other things we say hey, let's go and empower developers with better tools to do better testing inside of the inner development cycle And of course it can be used in other ways and people use it in a whole bunch of creative ways But their focus specifically right now is to enable developers to do better testing I also want to talk about something which is contemporary, which is you're seeing in the market a lot of layoffs are happening In an industry which also means that you know teams are becoming smaller Actually, I feel that this might be a good thing because a big company They used to you know suck up all the talents and we used to cover stories about big gap in supply and demand of a skill Folks or now there will be a skill folks But talk a bit about how does test containers cloud kind of makes teams more efficient so that you know once again The teams are becoming more and more, you know, it's less about cost cutting. It's more about becoming more efficient Absolutely, so maybe I'll cover a couple of things have agreed in terms of current dynamics in the market You know lots of lots of companies are reducing their workforce and are looking for their developers to be more effective And this is where test containers comes in and that that's where test containers cloud comes in, right? So if you're seeing lots of folks who come to us Looking through this lens But maybe not just looking through the lens of efficiency We can look through the lens through the lens of satisfaction for the developer So if you think about the developer, right one of the things that motivates them is being productive and being effective What frustrates developers more is sitting and waiting for something to finish for the test switch to finish for an environment to be to be available developers love this this feeling of productivity of actually Developing code seeing it in In reality and being able to iterate as quickly as possible This test containers here able to do it and this test containers cloud You're able to leverage the power of the cloud to do it even more effectively So yes, it's it's a productivity tool. Yes, it allows you to be more productive But also it actually affects developer developer satisfaction But we're what we are hearing from from the folks who use us is they love this this this feeling of You know, I'm able to do a lot more with what I was what I have. I'm able to do it in Isolation, I'm able to reproduce it. I'm able to like it's It's hugely empowering for the developer since it's available in public beta Talk a bit about when do you envision that the final no general availability will be there? What kind of feedback you're looking through the beta phase and Last will be who can access it and who would you consider to be the ideal candidate for this beta phase? So first of all the beta is available for everyone You can go to test containers the cloud click the button and you will be able to run this test containers cloud in less than five minutes We specifically made sure that anyone can go in and and get going with it right now It's also absolutely free will not stay free forever Though you know, we still have to make a commercial Business out of this, but we're very excited where we are today in terms of who is it for? It's for any team that is looking to get more productive. It is right now People who would find the most use out of it as our folks who already are using test containers But we're seeing teams from all from from companies that don't use test containers come to us and want to learn and we're excited to talk to those folks we're excited to Show them the power that it enables them to have and to do demos and do and and and really Show them what can be achieved through the power of this technology I want to quickly talk a bit about the larger picture when we look at because you know, we're talking developers We kind of live in a world of DevOps developer depending on the labels that people like to slap, but you know internally the chemistry is a different Where do test containers fit into the larger Observability observability story where you know, of course ability come at a later phase You know when you have a very clear picture of but then we talk about SREs and chaos injuring But the thing is everything works together. So talk a bit about how does that fit into that larger picture? How does it help enables team, you know that things are you know fine tuned from the very beginning Maybe I'll tackle it from a slightly different angle, right what we've seen in the industry We've seen a lot of tools that say hey look we're gonna start with tools that were written for operators And we're gonna make them easier to use for developers, right? And you're seeing things like ephemeral environments. You're seeing things like, you know making more Operational tools better for developers The approach this from a slightly different angle They say hey, let's start from the tools that developers use today Developers use their IDEs Developers use their their right code. Let's actually give them more power more power in the In the medium that they're used to consuming it. So no longer do you need to you know, go and learn how to do YAML files or how to do Configure environments, we're gonna make it super simple for you to get the same benefits But without leaving your IDE and that's incredibly powerful, right? And of course observability comes it comes into the picture slightly later in the in the cycle and we're gonna go there Down the line right now. We're strictly focusing on the niche use case Which we actually find extremely powerful and we find that it delivers a ton of value for developers The value we are creating is through that unique value that our application is offering not maintaining and managing Yes, that is important. So talk a bit about what kind of culture shift you are seeing This is a borrowed question there from the developers movement perspective where you do see hey developers do need to We are seeing burnout is happening and then just you know a lot of so talk a bit about does this question make sense? That we should focus on developers experience as well. Absolutely. So the fact like this is very very core to our being right? VC developer being in the flow being so so important Right because development is a discipline is very different from others. It's very important like any disruption any delay any Anything that takes you away from that flow is is taking away from your productivity, and it's not linear and This is actually what what motivates us to build the commercial product that we're building Because what what the commercial product allows you to do is it allows you to paralyze lots of things So even when you're waiting for your test results as opposed to waiting for them to execute sequentially We can give you lots of resources that are available on the public cloud that those can run much much faster and you can get faster Faster feedback cycles and it's very core to staying in the state of flow right And you talk about developers being artists. They are but it's very But the artists are not just there for for for the artistic element of this. They're also incredibly motivated by You know outcomes and the outcomes that they're able to do and impact on the world the faster We're able to to allow them to iterate the faster They can they can learn the faster They can learn from their applications and their users and the faster the applications of their building can evolve This is all core core core to what any company is looking for and what we're super excited to help companies with No, let's just go back to test containers cloud and talk a bit about first of all you're in the beta phase What kind of use cases you're seeing there if you have visibility into those users or What are the use cases that you see will be ideal for test containers cloud? Awesome, we're seeing we're seeing a whole bunch of uses of test containers cloud through the spectrum Right, so we see small companies out there or individual freelancers that are trying at test containers cloud We're seeing huge companies out there Who use test containers cloud and who use it to? Really standardize and really be able to use test containers effectively at scale So those are the two if you're seeing people use it both in their desktop scenarios So people who are going and using test containers cloud to standardize how their team does test containers, right? So if one person on the team has a Mac book M1 Another person has a Mac book Intel and somebody else is running Windows If you check in test containers tests, you want them to run an exactly the same architecture for every single developer Right, so if you're seeing people come to us and say, hey, we want to we want to have consistency in the results that we're seeing, right? So that's one use case that we see a lot of a second use case that we see a lot of is we see people who come and say, hey, actually test containers slightly changes the computational kind of characteristics of my tests. In the old days, my tests used to be used to be fairly fairly small and they did not require lots of computational resources. Test container based tests by their definition require they launch dependencies. So, hey, can we do a lot, can we enable test containers cloud in RCI? Such that when we need dependencies, we can provision them on your cloud elastically and that's a huge use case that we're seeing companies use us for to be able again to have consistency between how they're running their tests in CI and desktop and also in terms of their computational infrastructure that you they're using in their CI. Now, let's talk a bit about the funding. Talk a bit about this funding loan and how you're going to use this funding, what are the areas where you will be growing? First of all, we are incredibly thankful to our investors that have invested in this round. The round was led by Insight Partners, but we had participation from all of our existing investors and from a number of high-impact angels that have participated in the round. In terms of how we're going to use the money, the money is absolutely going to go into gross and growing our team. We are currently a 23-person company in 10 countries and we're looking to grow both our engineering talent and we're looking to grow our go-to-market talent as well. So those are the two areas that we're going to go and concentrate on. Our intent is to come out of beta in the next months. We are because of the huge opportunity that we have in front of us. We've talked about the fact that Test Containers has 100 million downloads off our software. And by the way, most of those downloads have come in the last eight months. So it has a lot of adoption in the industry and we believe that our product serves the need of many of those who are starting to adopt it at their companies and we're excited to go and work with them and serve their needs. Since you folks are all about open source, there are two questions that I have for you. First of all, earlier I was talking about all the layoffs that are happening in the market, which also means that a lot of companies which are like suffer with not invented hair syndrome or they do it yourself solutions. So do you think that they will be looking at open source because the teams are tighter, shorter? So they will be looking at not only open source solutions, but also vendors that offer solutions based on this open source technology because the thing with open source is open source can very easily solve day one problem. If you're a large company like Google, you'll have massive teams who can do that. But day two is where the problem starts, where you need additional features, you need updates, you need security. So talk a bit about first of all, what do you see the adoption of open source this year? And number two is the criticality of commercialization of open source, which is critical to the sustainability and health of open source. I am a true believer in open source, and I think it's a great time to adopt open source, whether there are layoffs in the industry or no layoffs in the industry. I think it's a great time to be adopting open source. And even when there are layoffs and when there is shrinkage in the industry, yes, we're seeing lots of people turn to open source, but we think it's great regardless, because everyone benefits. We see people contributing to open source. We see people benefiting from the open source. In our case, we've been seeing lots of growth, which means people are trying to not reinvent the wheel. There is no point in reinventing the wheel and are turning to establish projects like ours to go and solve the problems that they have. In terms of commercialization, there has been lots of lots of approaches in the industry around commercialization. The approach we specifically chose is we chose the approach of actually not going open core. We decided to keep test containers completely open source and it's fully featured. What we are building is a commercial engine that helps the open source community. And yes, some commercial features will not, they're just impossible to do without a cloud back end. Yes, and they will be in test containers cloud, but we're not going to limit any functionality in test containers open source. So the way we view ourselves is we view ourselves as building a product for the open source community. We're going to continue investing in open source and we currently have four or five maintainers of test containers on staff of various languages and we're going to continue investing and test containers open source is going to stay open source and we're going to and we're going to continue pushing it. What we're going to do is we're going to go and build a product for people who adopt it, for people who want to adopt it at scale in organizations. And we're going to solve some of those issues that arise. So that's that's the approach that we take. And some companies are going to say, hey, we're going to build it all ourselves and we're going to be thankful for them using the open source. Ali, thank you so much for taking time out today. And of course, talk about the announcement of the test containers cloud and of course, 25 million round led by inside partners. Thanks for all those insights that you say today. And I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today and would love to be back on the show.