 Welcome everyone to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year, two live sets, two remote studios with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We've got over a hundred guests on the program this year going deep as we enter the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome for the first time at theCUBE John Kodemal, the CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. John is here to talk about modern DevOps with feature management. John, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Lisa. Great to have you on the program. Let's talk a little bit about LaunchDarkly. I know it's been on theCUBE a couple of times, but it's been a while. Give the audience an overview of LaunchDarkly. What it is that you do and what's new? Yeah, LaunchDarkly is the leading platform for feature management. We allow developers, product managers, anyone in the practice of building software to leverage feature flags to deliver better software faster, better product experiences through the use of feature flags. One thing that I noticed on the website is you guys have some big customer names, Square. I noticed I also saw Adidas, NBC, at least you've got some pretty big organizations that are relying on LaunchDarkly to deliver and control their software. What can you tell us about it from a customer perspective? Yeah, it's an amazing thing. We have over 30% of the Fortune 100 using the LaunchDarkly platform for feature management. And I think it's been incredible to see how basically anyone building software can leverage feature flags to deliver better customer experiences. So the companies you named, I mean, they're all over the map in terms of the kinds of products they deliver to consumers from Square to Adidas. I mean, those are totally different companies, but I think the thing that they all have in common is that they're increasingly becoming, they're either already a software company or they're increasingly becoming a software company. And that's where we help our customers, the customers that are delivering more digital experiences to their consumers. That is table stakes these days. You mentioned all companies, rather, becoming software companies. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around much longer. And you're right, you mentioned, that's quite a variety NBC to Adidas as I talked about there, but in terms of what they have in common, talk to me a little bit about feature management. What is it? And how can it help to bridge the divide between the developer folks, the business side of the organization? Absolutely. I think the fundamental thing that feature management provides and the simplest thing, the thing that people first utilize LaunchDarkly for is to separate the processes of deploying software from releasing software. So it used to be in a pre-LaunchDarkly world when you deployed a new piece of software, you packaged the artifact up, you put it out on your servers and then your entire customer base was experiencing that new version of the software. So if things were going wrong, if there was a bug, something wasn't working right, your blast radius was enormous. Literally your entire customer base was impacted. And one of the things that LaunchDarkly does, the first thing that we do, the first piece of value that we provide is we help you sort of reduce that risk. So when you release a change, you can deliver that change to a much more targeted, smaller, safer cohort of users, measure the impact of what's going on. Is it, are there any bugs? Are there any performance problems? Or is everything smooth sailing? And if it is, then you can use LaunchDarkly to rapidly and with a lot of visibility control, scale that release and scale that rollout out. And that's the most fundamental value that we provide. Big value there. Speaking of value, let's talk about the partnership with LaunchDarkly and AWS. And now you have a lot of experience working with AWS for many years, back when you were at Atlassian, but give us an overview of the partnership and that shared developer audience that you're both working with. Yeah, I've got a number of years of experience working with AWS. So you mentioned my time prior to starting LaunchDarkly, I was at Atlassian for many years. And I was at Atlassian during that time period where Atlassian was switching from traditional hosting providers to public cloud to AWS specifically. And the capabilities that are unlocked not only for our operations teams, but for our developers were pretty incredible. One of the things that we launched almost immediately on my team was the ability to sort of like preview environments through AWS hosting and have that experience not happen on the local developers desktop, but rather in the cloud. And that was incredibly helpful for improving our velocity and helping us preview changes. Since starting LaunchDarkly, I mean, we've leveraged cloud and AWS and in particular from the earliest days we started the platform on AWS and we've been consuming more and more services through AWS and seeing more and more value. From a partnership perspective, we're incredibly excited because we have a massive number of customers that are either just beginning their public cloud journey or are making significant migrations or significant infrastructure changes. And they're using the LaunchDarkly platform to control the release of those changes to mitigate risk. We have customers using us to do migrations from one cloud provider to another or go through modernization efforts and push change out safely as they migrate to providers like AWS. Talk to me about some of the things that you've seen in the last year and a half, 20 months or more probably since the pandemic started we've seen so much acceleration to cloud so much cloud migration. It's so many companies not only becoming software companies because they need to be competitive but understanding it's not why move to the cloud, it's when. How have you, how have you helped organizations from the NBCs, the media folks to the retailers to undergo those migrations safely but quickly in a time of such dynamics? Yeah, I mean, that is exactly what we saw during the pandemic a massive amount of change not just in the move to digital and digital experiences but also in the need to sort of adapt to rapidly changing conditions. We had customers in, for example, food delivery that needed to rapidly change the way their software behaved in response to changes in regulations or guidelines around things like COVID. And our platform really was transformative for many of those organizations as they sort of needed to become more flexible and adapt not only to changing rules and regulations but changing consumer behavior and changing end user behavior. So it was an incredible year. It was a year that was sort of fraught with uncertainty but it was a year where launch darkly our platform really helped many of our customers sort of navigate the waters and figure out how to get the experiences they needed to and the change they needed to in front of their customers rapidly. Yeah, rapid being a keyword of the last 20 years both 20 years, it feels like 20 years, doesn't it? Two years, party and slip there. But talk to me a little bit about some of the other trends that you're seeing from a cloud perspective. We talked about the acceleration of migration. What are some of the other trends that your customers are facing and how is launch darkly helping them to address those trends? Yeah, one of the trends that we're seeing is the rapidity of change is forcing companies that even companies that were really software driven at their heart to iterate more rapidly. And I think there's this story around modernization that is becoming more and more common where you normally think of modernization as sort of like legacy companies, sort of non-software driven companies having to make that shift and modernize their software stacks. But the rapid pace of change is shifting things into a world where even companies like my own company like launch darkly are having to modernize our stack. Our company is seven years old and some of the things that we were doing seven years ago they've been eclipsed in terms of like processes, tools, technologies and use. And so we've had to go through modernization as well to keep up with the times and to give our developers the quality of tools and processes that they expect. I think that's an important point, John, that you bring up is that modernization isn't just for legacy applications, legacy businesses. And I'll be honest, that's how I normally think about it. I don't think of a company as a young as launch darkly needed to modernize, but you bring up a point that really what it is is an ongoing process for businesses in any industry. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about what the landscape looked like seven years ago and you fast forward to today, so many of the practices are different. So even companies like us were having to change. I mean, seven years ago, it wasn't really clear that Kubernetes was going to be a platform that was going to end up being the winner in sort of like the orchestration space. And so when we were starting out, none of our workloads were on Kubernetes. And even today, we're not really significantly using Kubernetes. We're sort of like legacy container-based. And that's just us, we're still a startup and we're still able to move pretty rapidly. But even for us, we're having to sort of like revisit the technologies and use and modernize our stack and kind of look around and see what's not working anymore and what we need to change. It's certainly a pace that is massively different from a company that is relying on a legacy software stack. I don't want to pretend like LaunchDarkly is, I would compare us to a company that's moving off of mainframes and COBOL or anything like that. But it is still something that we're cognizant of and something that we have to invest in. But you bring up a good point is that it's, and as we talk about this when we're talking with any vendor about, from the customer's perspective, it's a journey. It's the same thing that you're talking about here. It's evaluating what you have under the hood, what's working, what needs to be better as the markets change, as the dynamics change, as trends change. Yeah, that's exactly how I think about it. And that's how a lot of these companies that are becoming more software driven are thinking about it too, just sort of like assessing the catalog of tools and technologies and saying, what's working, what's not working. And I think one of the trends that we're seeing is that reevaluation is happening more and more frequently and the frequency of new technologies and tools being adopted is increasing. And so it's something that you have to spend an enormous amount of effort just to stay ahead of the game and stay ahead of what's modern and what's the practices that we've determined are really working for organizations. Right, exactly. So I mentioned a few customers by name that work with LaunchDirectly. But can you tell me an example of one of your favorite customer stories that you think really articulates the value that LaunchDirectly is delivering to your customers across industries? Yeah, one that comes to mind is TrueCar. TrueCar has been a LaunchDirectly customer for a long time, they're great partners of ours. We have a case study up with them. And one of the stories that they talked about was their own cloud migration. They shifted their workloads from one cloud provider to another. And feature flags were sort of instrumental in that. So feature flags allowed them to sort of gate the flow of traffic from one cloud to another and to sort of in real time assess whether things were working or not as they did that migration. It took a process that would have been incredibly risky and scary and made it sort of business as usual for that organization. So that's a company that I think of that really understands the value of LaunchDirectly and has really leveraged us to our full potential. Awesome. Something I want to ask you about as well is this concept of release impact. Compare and contrast that to like the traditional optimization focused A-B testing. What's the difference? What are the similarities? Yeah, you know, A-B testing has been around for a long time and its use in software definitely in the past decade has grown tremendously as a piece of the software development experience. But when I think about the practice of building deep product experiences and contrast that to sort of like A-B testing on a marketing site, testing out the layout of a page or testing out which call to action button color ends up creating more engagement. That's a very different world than, I'm building a SaaS product and I'm building this a new feature within that SaaS product. Traditionally, you wouldn't really A-B test that and part of the reason for that is it's really too expensive to build software. It's not really a reality that most companies have where they can take a team and have them go build a feature for multiple weeks or months, try it out in production and then say, you know what, that didn't work. That million dollar expense that we just made, we're just going to roll that back and not use it. So that's sort of the way I think about the difference between traditional optimization focused A-B testing where it's sort of like smaller bets designed to move the needle on a metric where if it doesn't work, you can turn it off versus these deep product experiences where what you're more interested in is being more quantitative about the impact of that release but you're not necessarily interested in sort of like A-B testing focused optimization picking a winner in a short period of time. One of the things that we've realized at Launch Sharkly is those are two separate tasks. They're two separate processes and they require different analyses and different tools under the hood. And so we're really excited at Launch Sharkly to be innovating on one sort of both fronts. Not only just providing a platform for optimization focused A-B testing but providing a platform where product managers can be more quantitative about the capabilities that they're building and not thinking about it in terms of optimization but just in terms of measuring the impact of the work that they're shipping to customers. The impact and of course it's all outcomes focus as we talk about with customers and vendors in any industry. Last question, John, for you as we're coming up on re-invent in-person what are some of the things that attendees can learn and see at the Launch Sharkly booth? Yeah, you're going to learn a lot about if you visit our booth, you're going to learn a lot about sort of like the direction that we're taking which is I think the exciting thing about Launch Sharkly as a platform is we really provide two capabilities for engineering teams, we help you mitigate risk we help you move more efficiently. That gives you more at bats as a team. It lets you ship more product and see whether it's working. Launch Sharkly also though provides something on the flip side of that which is the ability for product managers to measure whether the changes that they're making are the right changes for their customers. And when you combine those two things in one platform you get the ability for the engineering team to have more at bats, to create more change in production and see whether it's working and then you get product managers the ability to measure the impact on their customers and you combine that together and at the end of the day what Launch Sharkly provides is the ability for you as an organization to deliver business value better more quickly through the R&D investments that you're making the software that you're producing. And that's critical. I love that baseball analogy more at bats. Fantastic. John, thank you for joining me talking to the audience about Launch Sharkly what you're doing, the trends that you're helping customers address the partnership with AWS and what folks can learn when they visit the Launch Sharkly booth at re-invent. We appreciate your time. Thank you so much, Lisa. I really enjoyed our conversation. Me too. For John Kodemal, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021.