 Hi, this is Osopal Bhartya and welcome to a special edition of TO4 Let's Talk here at KubeCon in Amsterdam in the lion's center. Today we have with us once again Haseeb Boudhani, CEO and co-founder of Rapids Systems. Haseeb is great to have you on the show here in person. Good to see you in person actually for the first time I think it's nice to be here on the show again. Yeah and meeting in person is a totally different you know chemistry totally different experience which also brings to the point of you know you are here at KubeCon. What kind of you know experience you had here what kind of conversations you had here? Over the last I would say six months as a trend I'm seeing in our industry which is we're going from folks kind of doing Kubernetes in a in a sort of a vacuum small teams doing Kubernetes or some dev team doing Kubernetes to the enterprise standardizing on Kubernetes. So the rise of platform engineering teams right this is what we talked about before also offline. It's happening consistently. In fact the reason why I walked in seven minutes late to this conversation is because I was with a customer who is trying to bring the central team concept together in a very very large enterprise and we spent time talking about how they would do it. This is a consistent trend. Platform engineering is a is a is a new concept in our in our industry and it's a good idea for enterprises because they get to take the smartest people put them in a room and they come up with the right ideas and deliver real value to developers so the developers can focus on writing applications. This this was always going to happen. The question was when and the fact that it's happening now speaks to the maturity of Kubernetes right and the adoption of Kubernetes in the enterprise. This is great. And when you do talk about platform engineering how different is it in your opinion from DevOps because you know DevOps is here it will stay there but I think as the organizations evolve over time they do have to embrace platform engineering approach but how different is it from your perspective. So here's what I'm seeing you know what I what I think perhaps is not as important as what I'm seeing and I'll talk about that. So I'm finding that the platform engineering teams seem to be becoming the owners of the infrastructure right so the landing zone in the cloud the Kubernetes namespace that's that's the function that they are adopting so they're building sort of these environments for developers then separately there are DevOps organizations that are focused on the deployment of the applications. So they own the pipelines right the CD platform and potentially the CI platform they own the the backstage right so they enter the IDP for the developers is owned by the DevOps organizations in some cases and this is how lines are being drawn infrastructure versus application delivery and then the developers are then you know sort of kind of customers of both DevOps and platform engineering right and the more I think about it I mean seems like a really good idea but you create kind of this triumvirate of developers and DevOps and platform engineering I think this is a good way to allocate resources for enterprises where they can actually make fastest progress with the fewer number of people because look the biggest problem in the industry is not platform engineering versus DevOps it continues to be a skill set problem right we just don't have enough people so let's specialize making the few people we have do everything that is unfair on our on our team members right let them specialize some people want to focus yes you let them do that some people really enjoy writing automation for for cloud deployments let them do that and then some people write applications that's what actually makes money we are here at KubeCon from once again Rafa's perspective when we look at the emergence of KubeCon like new technology but now when we look at hey it's quite old because in today's world you know technologies immerse so quickly what kind of adoption you are seeing of you know platform engineering approach cloud native approach Kubernetes in the enterprise space of course you know when we walk around it's look like you know all the big vendors small players they're all using Kubernetes all these technologies in production so that is not even the question now but what kind of adoption you're seeing and when this adoption grows you know companies start running into problems you know cost is becoming a big challenge you know cloud cost because of potential recession layoffs teams are getting a smaller so let's talk about the adoption in the enterprise space and what kind of challenges enterprise are seeing when they're adopting these technologies we've been coming to KubeCon for a long time a really long time at this point and because we are in it we feel like it's been around forever I would say that true enterprise adoption of Kubernetes happened at some point in the last 18 months or so for the majority of the world yes there's some shops who have been doing this for five six seven years yes of course they are but for the majority of the world it's new it's still very new for the developers and the same companies it's actually not new they've been working with Kubernetes a long time but for you know generally speaking the IT function right platform engineering is a subset of IT this is a new concept this is maybe a year to a year and a half or so I think they're also learning what to do what not to do right so so that's to me is a adoption yes it seems it's been here forever it's new we are at best in our second innings of Kubernetes but then in terms of challenges the challenges are arising because we think it's mature but actually it's new right so we all think that well we've been doing this long enough so all the things that should have been learned all the lessons that should have been learned had been learned already no we're learning them now because now people are taking real applications to production and then they find all kinds of challenges and well then they are learning on the job right and that actually is the biggest challenge I see in in enterprise they don't know what they don't know till they hit these crazy problems and then the you know leadership is saying hey maybe we should look at options that are off the shelves for some of the problems that we're trying to solve and that is by the way very very good right that again speaks to maturity when IT functions start buying technologies versus you know letting people thinker this is how IT works right that's when you know IT feels this is really mission critical I need to put some governance around this I need God wills around this that it feels like it's constricting actually it's great it means that this is serious right enterprises if it's a serious thing they're not gonna just let you do whatever you want right they're gonna want to have some control over it and control doesn't mean a bad thing right and the I find that the the real beauty of our industry is that this these people learn so fast right so now enterprises have one control so they said no problem we'll give you control but then we'll be the best possible developer interface backstage behind backstage is all this control that is possible in our world so so this this is how in my opinion the market is moving now when we go back to reference number you folks what role are you folks playing in this space mm-hmm so our job is actually quite simple you adopt Kubernetes and as an enterprise you have an expectation of management governance controls card rails ready these kinds of things that's what we do for our customers the analogy that I use with my customers is look back in the day when you're using the m's right so from BMR you would buy a stack which would have ESXi which is the you know sort of the hypervisor which is arguably like the orchestrator right in thematically and then you'd have vSphere vCenter to manage so Kubernetes is thematically not technically but thematically like you know ESXi right because it's on which intention so the question is what is your vSphere strategy what's your vCenter strategy for Kubernetes well today the strategy is every enterprise is building one right so what is it that they're building they're building they're solving for multi-tenancy access management audits provisioning of clusters add-on management policies for Kubernetes network policies that is a different problem how do I have visibility everywhere to have the right dashboards for the right people oh by the way I need to do this across multiple clouds so I want to use EKS and GKE so that means I may have to build three different sets of tools to build these things and I have to upgrade them and this is a lot of work right this is on top of Kubernetes Rafa is not a Kubernetes company Rafa is a Kubernetes management company that's the problem we solve for customers and the interesting part is something that if Rafa doesn't exist and this is a conversation we have a lot right whether you buy from me or not you're going to solve this problem anyway that is not up for discussion that you have to do these things you're an enterprise you have to do these things the question is how will you get there there are two paths in front of you you can go down this journey and it's a it's a panelist journey it takes a lot of time it takes a lot of effort it takes a lot of people or you can buy the best practices framework that we sell as a product and you can be up and running with the right governance and the right control and the right automation most importantly now and we have a lot of very heavy customers and who are these customers who do you like know what is the ecosystem that you are serving yeah so we have a very large number of financial services customers we have a number of health care sort of you know former customers and then we have a bunch of high-tech customers on the platform what's really interesting about these customers is there's one thing that is common across all of them which is the customer for us is consistently a platform engineering team and then they have internal customers my customer has multiple customers my customers not the developer my customer's customer is the developer so we understand what problem we're solving for and for whom my customers platform engineering they have to solve for multi-tenancy they have to solve for repeat repetition and in in configuration management they need for the standardization some of their customers are in AWS some of their customers are in Azure they can't say no you have to solve for all this when you have clarity on your your ICP your your your buyer a lot of things become very obvious to you what do you have to work our roadmap is easy these people tell us what they want and we just built for them it's as if they they have a new person on their team I said this a lot it's like you hired a guy named Rafi you're hiring people you hired a guy named Rafi but this guy named Rafi comes with 200 people right and we're gonna bring all this automation governance that you would have solved for anyway and when you're talking about these industries some of these industries are very well regulated they have to so does you know Rafi play any role in there as well or that is also the scope I mean we're not a compliance company per se but in terms of configuration management and standardization that these things help right so one of the things that enterprises do is you know they have a center of excellence organization right so you know it's got people from DevOps and development and security and platform and these folks come together and come up with a blueprint of what things must run on a cluster who has access to what I want to make short people can see this versus that so the the implementation of those things is done with Rafi's platform so so we're just the doer right I mean in the grand scheme of things right they create the policies because we don't create policies our enterprises customers know they know exactly what they need but then the manifestation of their of their asks right Rafi is the tooling that they use to apply those in the Kubernetes context and that's our job right we understand what a job is we're the doer right and we do it really really really well and we do it as a SaaS product if you look at Rafi systems if you see you know that as you said the adoption is in the phase two what does it mean for the company what are the things in your pipeline what are the things when you come to these events when you as you said these are not your direct customers but you know they give you the pulse you know where the industry is heading so what does it mean for Rafi what kind of things we should be looking at then look at your company yeah so there's two demos we're doing this week there are new ideas for us and we you know we're doing them because we want feedback from the from the from the developer customer right one is we built a number of backstage plugins and we're showing them because yeah we want to make sure because end of the day they'll be the one using it they will not be the ones buying from us but their platform engineering will be buying from us but they'll be the ones using it are we doing all the right things I hope you are and if you're not no problem we're going to go make it better right the second thing we're showing is what we call an environment manager so the idea is that okay you built a Kubernetes cluster but your application is not just in Kubernetes you have RDS you have kinesis you have an advocate where you have to set up all these things that live around Kubernetes to make your application maybe use lambda I don't know right so how do we help a platform team create a templatizable pipeline to deliver infrastructure like a full landing zone in one how do you do that right Kubernetes is a part of that it's an important part but it's it's not the whole thing it's one thing so we want to start kind of thinking about a broader sort of cloud landing zone concept that we can help our customer solve this platform is designed to plug in nicely with Terraform Cloud or MZ or any of these sort of Terraform framework companies which are there are multiple of them and they're all doing very well this should plug into that and help my customer the platform team deliver an end to an environment based on the identity of the user if you're a springboard developer your environment is different if you're a data scientist your environment is different but you should be able to go to a backstage page and say I need an environment and the platform will know exactly what that means and just make it happen for you so we're we're we're doing a preview right now usually we write new code we keep it in preview for two three months and then we make a GA so we can get feedback and we're eager to get feedback right so folks watching this if you if you won't mind please watch our demos of our environment manager platform if you want to see a demo in a call happy to do it because I'm convinced that this is a problem I see every enterprise struggling with us maybe we can help Haseeb thank you so much for taking time out there and talk about the company the whole you know evolution of the you know platform engineering and where that option is going and what RAP is planning so thanks for sharing all those insights and as usual I would love to have you back on the show thank you I look forward to doing this again thank you for having me today