 Akamai has the benefit of coming into the cloud space with sort of years of observing and hearing from our customers with the challenges that they've been seeing. And so as we come into this, what we're really trying to encourage our customers to be cognizant of is designing applications that take advantage of the best of various cloud providers. Hi, this is your something Bharti and we are here at KubeCon in Chicago and today we have Matt Burke, VP of cloud at Akamai. Matt is great to have you on the show. It's great to be here Swap. Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure to have you here and today we are going to talk a lot about cloud, cloud native, cloud native design. Of course, one of the focus is, you know, this whole cloud native and future. Before we go there, let's just try to understand what does cloud native really mean? What is this cloud native design? We think of cloud native in contrast to platform native, you know, what we've seen are a lot of the applications and a lot of the customer challenges that we're seeing are because, you know, customers have designed with componentry that locks them into a specific platform. When customers take a cloud native approach, it unlocks portability, you know, an ability to run and workload across multiple cloud providers and across multiple regions as well. When we look at this whole cloud native, of course, we can look at vendors also. Do you think sometime that portability gets lost? What I've seen from customers is they go in with the intention of designing for portability, but oftentimes fall into a trap where, you know, some aspect of their architecture has a dependency that prevents them from being able to move from one cloud provider to another or to run their workload across multiple regions within cloud providers. And now just look at cloud native cloud, cloud native design from the lens of Akamai. What does it mean for Akamai? Akamai has the benefit of coming into the cloud space with sort of years of observing and hearing from our customers with the challenges that they've been seeing. And so as we come into this, what we're really trying to encourage our customers to be cognizant of is designing applications that take advantage of the best of various cloud providers. And so, you know, Akamai's cloud offers a much more distributed presence. We have much better cloud data transfer economics for our customers. And so applications that can leverage those aspects that make Akamai a better cloud, we want them to use it. But if there are things that need to stay in other cloud providers, you know, we are not looking for you to lock into a platform native design that will prevent you from taking advantage of those things. And then we look at cloud native cloud design. Of course, the whole Kubernetes came out of, you know, it was not a technology created for user. It was being used internally. It's a complicated, cumbersome technology. Who do you see is the audience? And because now the focus is a lot on developers, you know. So what does that mean for developers? We oversimplify, you know, the term when we think about our audience. We talk about, you know, finding the builder persona, the developer that has pride in building something unique and taking advantage of various open source capabilities. And so, you know, a big part of our cloud native design is building an ecosystem of partners who offer open source alternatives to the managed first party services that many other cloud providers offer. Does that overwhelm developers, developer team, and sometimes they might feel, hey, you know, we are totally disconnected from this world? There is more challenges. You know, certainly some of the managed services that cloud providers offer is an easier entry, but it is an entry that then the door closes behind you. And so, you know, there's an expression, anything that easy isn't worth it. Well, you know, it will be, it takes more technical acumen. But when you meet with the developers here at QCon, they are excited about the technical challenges. They're excited about taking advantage of what new modern clouds offer. What role is Akamai playing with the realization that this complexity is going to be there, but reduce some of these challenges for the team's developers, team DevOps teams, you know? Yeah. Great question. So, you know, I think at least two things come to mind. One is making sure that the cloud primitives we offer are very simple. You know, whether it is making sure there's great documentation, very easy to leverage our services through automation, Terraform, Ansible, various other things. So don't really simplifying the experience of the users when they're on our platform. That's number one. Number two is, you know, working with this ecosystem to vet various technologies that run well on our platform and highlighting those capabilities, the use cases that those partner components running our platform can unlock. And you know, that's some of the things that we're really focusing on right now. And if you look at Akamai, first of all, you folks predate all this cloud, you know, cloud, you folks acquired Linode, you know, that also predates AWS, you know. So you folks have been around for a while, also security is one of your strengths, you know, and when it comes to cloud, sometimes we don't talk about all these things. So I also want to talk a bit about looking at your own longer history, the experience, you know, that you folks have, which kind of sets you apart from a lot of other cloud providers. Yeah, definitely. We are also, because of some of these acquisitions, you also understand the pain parts of developers. Yeah. All right, well, you're going to get me excited here, Swap. So, you know, I've had the benefit of being at Akamai for 20 years. And Akamai's logo is three crests of a wave, right? Our first, you know, crest of the wave was content delivery. That is what we built to help solve the challenges that were present on the internet 25 years ago. Our second crest of the wave is associated with cloud security. You know, we saw customers and the challenges they were facing with things like DDoS and layer seven attacks. And we understood how we could help them solve that challenge. You know, I like to say the third crest of the wave for us now is with cloud computing. And we have the benefit of that legacy that you just described, Swap. You know, many of the other providers were built in an environment where they were compute and storage rich, but network constrained, right? And so Akamai comes at it from the opposite angle. Akamai has this globally distributed network. And so that is one of our assets that we're bringing to the market. Can you also talk about what kind of potential you see for edge computing? Now, it will be hard to define edge computing, but what do you see there? When Akamai talks about our edge, you know, it is, it may be different than others. You know, I've spoken with people this week who talk about the edge being what's available, you know, from the capabilities on a mobile device. But, you know, in general, I think we're all sort of chasing the same challenges. How can we run, you know, our compute? How can we have data reside as close as possible to where it is being consumed? And by having a more distributed platform, by having compute that can run closer to users, closer to where the data is being consumed, or even sometimes it is closer to where, you know, data resides, that's a huge advantage of our platform for customers. While we're talking about distributed and edge, we're also, I mean, if you just look at the consumption, video games, VR is picking up. Next year, Apple will come with Vision Pro, so we will be creating a lot of content, it will be consuming a lot of content. And once again, all the CDN, you know, Netflix, they have their own edge, you know, data centers near users. So with this explosion of consumption, how do you see the cloud will change? I think, you know, Swap, you described a paradigm we see play out very interesting in content delivery. You know, Akamai had the benefit of sort of pioneering the idea of this distributed architecture. And over the time we've seen our competitors try and get closer to closer to users, and it really validated the logic and the genius that went into to Akamai's foundation. We're seeing the same thing play out in cloud. You know, Akamai has the benefit of having this globally distributed network 4,000 points of presence. We're seeing others trying to get out close. And you described it, there are more and more use cases, whether it's VR, whether it's gaming, you know, some of the AI and ML inferencing that needs to happen close to where it's being consumed, that is creating more and more of a need for things to be closer to users. And I think we have the benefit in that legacy that I described of having a leg up in terms of that footprint, and really a architecture that was set up to handle these types of use cases. And interestingly, if you look at Kubernetes, they're lightweight Kubernetes, you know, the merantis at KZeros, and you know, Suzar, Rancher, they have K3S. Is Akamai also betting on these lightweight Kubernetes distributions also? It is something that, you know, you talked about Akamai's acquisition of Lenovo 20 months ago. It has moved us forward so much in terms of our ability to address the needs of what we're seeing with the modern developer, taking advantage of, you know, various versions of Kubernetes and finding ways both offering a managed Kubernetes offering, as well as things what, you know, people want to build their own on top of us. So, you know, I think the Akamai computing platform will continue to be a place where developers can choose to either make use of something that we built or build something on their own. And we'll go back to the logo of the waves. You have seen so many different waves, you know, container wave was there. When we look at Kubernetes, you know, I'm not going to date you, I mean the company. But when you look at Kubernetes, do you see that this is the technology of the same stage as Linux kernel? Or you see that, hey, this is a technology that came and maybe we should be looking at something else, which is easier. I am not the expert on this topic, but I will give you my opinion swap. And when I look around this show, I think it speaks to the power of what Kubernetes opened and has continued to foster. Meeting with companies throughout this week, it's amazing, you know, the various enhancements and improvement they've made to make the developers life easy. I really, you know, I really applaud the efforts of these various companies that have, you know, taken something that was really, you know, I don't know if everyone realized what it was when it was first created and has opened up a world of possibilities for people to build really next generation applications. There are things like chat GPD, which is more or less a hype, but there's a lot of, I mean, here I talk to a lot of vendors, they are now leveraging generate UI for products that they are shipping to their customers. What role do you see of generate AI? Was again, since you have seen so much early and is Akamai going to bet on it as well? You know, so far the, you know, what we've seen where we believe we're really well positioned is for the inference components of various LLM models. So, you know, there are other providers that may offer more compute density in where you would do training for a model, but when you're actually wanting to take action and make inferences based off of that data set, you know, our platform is very well positioned to offer a lower latency, better performance, more economic experience. And I think, you know, one of the things we've seen is over time, there are certain technologies that rise in prominence. And at some point, you know, there becomes a business model that needs to, you know, help support the experimentation in the work that's done. We've seen that play out in media and gaming, e-commerce, various industries, particularly as corporations and companies start to make greater use of some of these large generative AI capabilities, they're going to need to find a way to do it economically. And that's where our platform and the benefits we have of what we built over time will really shine. Are you seeing any pattern where you're saying, hey, these are the pain points that folks are still, you know, in this ecosystem? Or you're like, since Kubernetes is mature, it's in deployment, is it just like any other technology where, of course, some pain parts are obvious? Or you're like, hey, this is the pattern we are seeing that may need to be addressed? Yeah, one thing that sticks out to me, and maybe there's a recency bias from my last answer, I just see the amount of companies that are focusing more now on observability, both to improve the reliability and the performance of their applications, but certainly with a lens towards cost and optimizing, you know, the use. I think cloud has unlocked a wealth of possibilities. It has also taken away from the wealth of customers. And I think as they think about the right business approach to cloud, we're seeing much, you know, many of our customers review, you know, how they did their sort of first foray into cloud. And you're seeing a lot of companies here that I think are really focused on that customer problem. It's, you know, cloud is costing them much more than they had projected it to. There are a lot of industries that might not fully rely on data center, which is far from them. They want global political scenarios also changing. There are a lot of companies for sovereignty reason for law. They want to have things locally. I mean, we can talk about GDPR, we can talk about California law. Now, that's another exciting opportunity for swap based on what we're hearing from customers. The local data residency requirements, you know, you know, throughout various geographies or within certain industries are making customers, you know, understand, you know, where their data resides and are seeking alternatives. You know, and so one of the advantages of being distributed is that you have more points of presence where you can meet the needs of those customers. Since we are at KubeCon, it's an open source event. What does open source means for Okamai? Okamai is learning very much, you know, about the right place for us to participate in the open source community. We've had the benefit of working, you know, with Linode and now more recently on that who are heavy participants in the CNCF community. And so we continue through Alex Cherkopp and the Adena team to participate in some of the initiatives focused on storage. But, you know, it candidly swap where I see the best opportunity for Okamai is focused on emerging trends and edge. You know, there is an opportunity for us to participate and show the way, you know, for the best way to make use of the distributed platform I've spoken about today. And that's where I'm excited about where Okamai can participate more in the open source community. What kind of emerging technologies where you see are in the radar of Okamai? I think what we've seen is that there is a more growing need for data to live closer to where it is being leveraged. And so EVs are a great example where, you know, historically, Okamai has worked with many of the auto manufacturers of EVs to help them make sure that the latest software version is running, make sure that they're getting the correct updates. But now, more and more, some of that inferencing that I spoke about earlier, there's great opportunities for bidirectional data flow between, you know, various end user devices and our cloud. And we're well positioned to help customers with some of those challenges. Of course, we are here this event, you know, and it's almost end of the year, right? And it's also a nice time to see, you know, what other things we should look forward to. So of course, there are a lot of things, I mean, it's a big company, so a lot of things you folks are working on, you cannot talk about it. But just give us a teaser, a glimpse of where we are heading, what to expect from Okamai, which problems you folks are looking at solving. As we approach the end of 2023, it's a nice opportunity for us to sort of look back. So Okamai acquired the node in March of 2022, and we're very impressed with what they had built. You know, they had 11 global data centers. We very quickly realized, you know, to reach the type of scale and reach that we wanted. We needed to invest. And so you are now at 23 of these, you know, core regions that we offer the market. We'll add another two before the end of this year. As we go into 2024, one of the things we're really exciting is taking some of the node capabilities and then bringing them onto that Okamai global platform that I spoke about. So, you know, we'll be launching additional locations. And many of these locations will be places where our customers haven't been able to run their Kubernetes or VM based workloads previously. And so we're really excited about bringing more of our cloud computing stack closer and closer to users throughout 2024. Matt, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about these wide range of topics related to cloud. Thanks for all those insights. And I would love to chat with you again. Thank you. Swap, thank you for the time. And I heard that you're also an Okamai cloud computing customer. So thank you for being a member of the platform. And we look forward to staying in touch.