 Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's AWS startup showcase. This is season two of the startup showcase, episode one on your host, Lisa Martin. Pleased to be welcoming back one of our alumni, Alexis Richardson, the founder and CEO of WeWorks. Alexis, welcome back to the program. Thank you so much Lisa, really happy to be here. Good to see you again. Likewise, so it's been a while since we've had WeWorks on the program. Give the audience an overview of WeWorks. We were founded in 2014, pioneering GitOps, automating Kubernetes across all industries, but help us understand and pack that a bit. Sure, so my previous role was a pivotal where I was head of application platform and I was responsible for spring and V fabric and some pieces of cloud foundry. And you may remember back in those days, everybody wanted to build like a Heroku, but for the enterprise. And so they were asking, how can we build more cloud services? And my team was involved in building out cloud services, but we were running into trouble with the technology that we had. And then when containers appeared, we thought this is the technology for us to roll out cloud services. So with some of my team, we decided to start a new company, WeWorks, really intending to focus on developers because these new containers were pretty cool, but they were really complex, operational centric tools and enterprise developers need simplicity. That's what we'd learned from things like spring. They want simplicity, productivity, velocity, all of that stuff, they don't want operational complexity. So WeWorks mission is to make applications easy for developers with the containers. Talk to me about how you've accomplished that over the last seven years and some of the things that you're doing to facilitate DevOps practice within organizations across any industry. Yeah, well, our story is pretty interesting because of course in 2014, all of this was incredibly new. You couldn't even take two containers and put them together into a single application. So forget about enterprise. What we did was we build a network which gave the company its name, Weave, but then we spent several years building out more and more pieces of the stack. We decided that we should go to market commercially because we're an open source company with a commercial SaaS. And we thought we would be like New Relic, that there'll be lots of customers in the cloud and therefore they would be monitoring and management. And we started writing a SaaS based on Kubernetes which was what we chose as our platform back in the day. Very, very, very early. We were one of the very first companies to start running Kubernetes in production other than Google. And so what we learned was customers didn't want to have management and monitoring for applications in the cloud based on Kubernetes because they were all still struggling to get Docker working, to get basic Kubernetes clusters set up. And they kept saying to us, this is great, we love your tool, but we really need simpler things right now. So what we had done was we'd learned how to operate Kubernetes. And we discovered that we were doing it in this specific way, a way that meant that we could be reliable, we could set things up remotely, we could move things between zones. And so we called this approach GitOps. So we named the practice of GitOps, which is really DevOps for Kubernetes. We decided that it was exciting after we had an outage and made a very quick recovery, told people about it, and they said, well, we can't even get Kubernetes started, let alone you never recover it from a crash. So we started evangelizing GitOps and saying to people that we knew how to set up and run Kubernetes as operators for developers of apps based on this experience. And people said, well, why don't you help us do that? So we pivoted the company away from a SaaS business doing management and straight back into enterprise software, providing a solution for people to run Kubernetes stacks, deploy applications, detect drifts and operate them at scale. And we've never looked back and since then we've built very successfully a big business out of telco customers, banks, car companies, really global 2000s, starting from that open source base, continuing to respect that, but always keeping in mind helping developers build applications at scale. So in terms of that pivot that you made, it sounds like you made that in conjunction with developers across industries to really understand what the right direction is here, what's the approach, what's their appetite. Talk to me about a customer example or two that really you think articulate the value and the right decision that that pivot was and how you're helping customers to really further their DevOps practice. Well, one of our first customers was actually Fidelity in this new world. Fidelity has a very advanced technology organization, a very forward-thinking CTO who I seem to recall is CEO who I think is female, really is into technology as a source of velocity and business strength. And we were brought to Fidelity by our partner, Amazon. And they said, look, Fidelity have been using your open source tools. They want to run on Kubernetes, the early EKS service on AWS, but they need help because what they want is a shared application platform that people can use across Fidelity to deploy and manage apps. So the idea Fidelity had was they were going to split their IT into a platform team that was going to provide this platform and a bunch of app teams that were going to write business apps like risk management, other financial processing, a pass basically. And we came into help Fidelity and what we did was help Fidelity roll out using GitOps, a Amazon-wide application platform. We also helped them to build. This is very early days for us in the poster pivot. We really helped them to build an add-on layer. So you could take any Kubernetes cluster and add other components to it and then you'd have your platform right there. And the whole stack would be managed by GitOps which nobody had done before. Nobody had come up with a way of managing the whole stack. So you could start and stop stacks wherever you wanted at will correctly. I mean, if you talk to people about what's hard in IT and I'll tell you shutting down Kubernetes is hard because I know I never going to know how it started again. So being able to start and stop things, move them around was really crucial. What Fidelity also wanted, which made I think the whole thing even more exciting was to duplicate this environment on Azure and actually also on-premise later on. So where Fidelity are today is the whole Fidelity platform runs on Microsoft and on Amazon and on-premise using three different implementations of Kubernetes but using this platform technology and GitOps that we helped Fidelity roll out. And if you want to know a bit about the story, type Fidex F-I-D-E-K-S into Google and you'll find a video of me three or four years ago on stage at KubeCon talking with the Fidelity Chief Architect about the story. It's pretty exciting. And those are early days for these new Kubernetes platforms. Early days, but so transformative and I can't imagine the events of the last two years without having this capability and this technology to facilitate such pivots and transformation where we would all be. Well, I'm going to kind of dig into some use cases because one of the things that you just mentioned with the Fidelity example got me thinking use case of hybrid, multi-cloud but also continuous app development. Talk to me about some of the key use cases that you work with customers on. Well, you just named two, these are so hybrid and multi-cloud is absolutely critical. And also sovereign, which is when you're actually offline and you only update your cloud periodically. That's one of the major use cases for us. And what customers, what bear is they want consistency. They want a single operating model across all of these different locations so that all of their teams can get trained on one set of technologies and then move from place to place. They're not looking for magic where apps move with the sun or any of that stuff. They just want to know they can base everything on a single homogeneous skillset and have scale across their teams, maybe tens of thousands of developers all who know how to do the same thing. That's a really important use case. You also mentioned continuous delivery. That's probably the second really critical use case for us. People say, I've got Kubernetes set up now and I have Jenkins, a JPMorgan, I think they once told me they had 40,000 Jenkins servers or something like that. Jenkins at scale and they're like, okay how do I push changes from Jenkins into the cloud? So GitOps provides a bridge between the world of CI and the runtime of Kubernetes. So one group of our customers is help me to put in that middle piece of CD that gets you CI CD to Kubernetes. That's a classic. And then what they're looking for is an increase in velocity. And what we typically see is people go from deploying once every six months to deploying once a week to deploying once a day to deploying several times a day. And then they split things up into teams and suddenly, wow, that vision of microservices has come and everybody's excited because the IT velocity has gone up by two acts. Another really, sorry, carry on. Go ahead, I was just going to say in terms of IT velocity, it sounds like that's a major business outcome that you're enabling for whether it's telco financial services or whatnot that velocity is as you just described is rapidly accelerating. Yeah, if you go to our website you'll find a bunch of these use cases and one that I really like is NatWest Metal, which is another financial example. They're not all financial, by the way, but there's some metrics in there, getting people up to two X productivity, which at scale is huge and really makes a difference. Also mean time to recovery. And if you know the metric space, you'll know these are all Dora metrics and Dora, which was acquired by Google a couple of years ago is a really fantastic analyst in the space that came up with a bunch of ways of thinking about how to measure your performance as a business and IT organization, you know, recovery time and things like this that you really need to focus on if you're in this world. Well, from an IT velocity perspective, if I translate that to business outcomes, especially given the dynamics in the market over the last two years, this is transformative and probably helped a lot of organizations to pivot multiple times during the last couple of years to get to that survival mode and then to that thriving mode enabling organizations to meet customer demand that was changing faster, et cetera. That's a really big imperative that this technology can deliver to the business. Yeah, I mean, that's been huge for us. So when the pandemic first began, obviously we had some road bumps and there were some challenges. But what we found out very quickly was that people were moving into digital much faster. And we've been mostly enabling them, not just in finance, as I said, but also car companies, utilities, et cetera. The other one, of course, is modern operations. So everyone's excited about the potential for automation. If I have thousands and thousands of developers and thousands of applications, do I need thousands of operations staff? And the answer is with Kubernetes in this new era, you can reduce your operational load so that actually very few people are needed to keep systems up, to do basic monitoring, to do redeployments and so on, which are all boring infrastructure tasks that no developer wants to do. If we can automate all of that, we can modernize the whole IT space. And that's what I think the promise of Kubernetes that we're also seeing as well. So applications, speed first and then operational competence second. So you guys had a launch, here we are in early calendar year 2022. You guys had a launch just about six or eight weeks ago in November of 2021, where you were launching, announcing the GA of Weave GitOps Enterprise, which is a licensed product building on the free open source Weave GitOps core. Talk to me about that and what the significance of that is. Well, this is an enterprise solution that helps customers build these critical use cases like shared service platform, or secure DevOps or multi-cloud using GitOps, which gives them higher security, lower cost of management and better operations, higher velocity. And all of it is taking all the best practices that we've learned, starting from those days of running our own Kubernetes stack, and then through those early customers like Fidelity into the modern era where we have an at scale platform for these people. And the crucial properties are, it provides you with a platform, it provides you with trusted delivery and it provides you with what we call release orchestration, which is when you deploy things at scale into production, using tools like Canaries and other modern practices. So all of it is enabling what we call the cloud native enterprise, application delivery, modern operations. So what's the upgrade path for customers that are using the free open source tier to the enterprise package? What does that look like? The good news is it's an add-on. So I have been in the industry a while and I strongly believe it's really important that if you have an open source product, you shouldn't ask people to delete it or uninstall it to install your enterprise product unless you really, really, really have to. And I'm not trying to be picky here. Maybe there are cases where it's important, but actually in our case, it's very simple. If you're already using one of our upstream tools like Flux for example, then going from Flux to we've getups enterprise is an add-on installation. So you don't have to change or take out what you're doing. You might be using Flux without knowing it. You may not be aware of this, but it's also inside Azure AKS and Arc. It's inside the Amazon AKS anywhere bundle. It's available in Alibaba. VMware have used it in cartographer and Tanzu application platform. And even Red Hat use it too in some cases. So you may be using it already from one of the big vendors who are partners of ours as a precursor to buying we've getups enterprise. So don't be scared, get in touch is what I would say to people. Get in touch. And of course folks can go to weave.works to learn more about that. And also we want to watch the weave.works space because you have some news coming out relatively soon. That sounds pretty exciting Alexis. Well, I mentioned trusted delivery. And I think one of the things we've learned is no CIO wants to go faster unless they also have the safety wheels on. Let's face it. And the big question we get asked is I love this getup stuff, but how can I bring my team with me? How can I introduce change? Can I have all of these approvals mechanisms in place? Can I move those into the world of getups? And the answer is yes, yes you can because we now support policy engines as baked into our enterprise product. Now if you don't know what policy is it's really a way of applying rules to what you're seeing in IT. And you can detect whether something passes or fails conditions, which means that we can detect if something bad is about to happen in a deployment and stop it from happening. This is really critical. It also goes hand in hand with things like supply chain and security, which I'm sure we read about in the news far too much. Yeah, pretty much daily supply chain and security is one of those things that we're all and every generation is concerned about. Well Alexis, it's been a pleasure having you back on the program talking to us about what's new at WeWorks, the direction that you're going, how you're helping organizations across industries really advance their DevOps practice. And we will check We.Works in the next couple of weeks for more on that news that you started to break a little bit with us today. We appreciate your time, Alexis. Thank you very much indeed, take care. Likewise, for Alexis Richardson, I'm Lisa Martin. Keep it right here on theCUBE, your leader in hybrid tech event coverage.