 Hi, this is your host up in Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFR. Let's talk and today we have with us once again Wasam Tabara founder and CEO of a bound was some it's great to have you back on the show. Thanks Thanks for having me always always a pleasure and since it there has been a bit of a gap and you know We these in this we know this industry a lot of things change very quickly So it's a great idea to just remind our viewers What is a bound all about in today's word? So talk about the company so up ends the company behind the popular open-source project cross plane So maybe I'll start by describing what cross plane does cross plane is a Essentially a control plane a cloud native control plane and it's a project It's a CNCF project that that up on started and we donate it to the donated to the CNCF back in the May of 2020 cross plane lets you essentially standardize on Using the kubernetes control plane the kubernetes API to manage everything including the different cloud vendors or different services from cloud or Different cloud deployment models whether it's hybrid or private etc all of those can fit and connect up to a single control plane where you can standardize on access to you know all the different infrastructure and cloud vendors as well as standardize on policy and access control and cost controls and try to put everything under a single point of control, right? Because it's based on the kubernetes API that means it's immediately compatible with the entire Ecosystem, you know pick your tool pick your language pick your framework. It all works and What we see is people kind of using cross plane to build platforms That with cross been at the heart of them right platform engineering teams tend to be a thing These days and then you know Upbound is the company behind cross plane and we sell both products and services Around cross plane, but with the same goal helping platform teams Platform engineering teams essentially to build their own internal platforms using our building blocks and using our tools and services Can we talk about you know ever since you folks contribute the project to cncf? How has the kubernetes land escape evolved because It's in production. Of course. There's no question about that But the use cases are some something like beyond even our you know imagination So talk about how the the whole ecosystem has evolved and what role is cross plane playing today So the way I would describe it is that you know kubernetes obviously started As a container orchestrator right it won the container war as if you remember from 2016 17 And emerged as the as the standard for you know containers and running containers And is widely supported and deployed in different environments, right? In the last Five years four to five years. We're now seeing the approach that kubernetes took to manage containers Be extended to managing more than just containers and specifically managing Everything in the cloud right and that's where cross plane comes in cross plane You know extends kubernetes adds more capabilities to it adds new apis and controllers That let it basically manage infrastructure at aws or google or azure and everywhere else But the shift that we're seeing and no one the one way invested in early with the cross plane project and with upbound Is that transition that kubernetes? You know Expands to just being uh from just being a container orchestrator to becoming the standardized way of managing everything Right everything in cloud apps infrastructure tenants customers All fit and could be managed using the same approach that kubernetes pioneered right that That's you know, if you look at historically it's a the first five years of kubernetes What it's about it establishing itself as a container orchestrator And now it's basically trying to unwind everything about containers and go forward with The approach of a control plane and that's that transition is where cross plane came in and you can you know We'd like to think of cross plane as essentially continuing that charter that that kubernetes started and extending it to to you know managing everything how is Upbound itself evolving to serve this This changing market the first few years of up and we're basically creating cross plane and trying to you know Do all the things needed to create the community around it and the ecosystem around it In the last last two years we've been commercializing and You know, it's been super exciting the company went from about 20 people About a year ago year and some ago to about 65 70 people now. So we've more than tripled in size And primarily just Because we're seeing quite a bit of success with people that are taking cross plane to production People that are essentially re-platforming on cross plane And I and these are you know fortune companies household names that you see and recognize that that are doing this and you know As a company, you know, we had to basically put together a go-to-market team and start thinking about how we can support and these companies and grow our Solution teams and support teams and everything else But we also had to increase the size of our product and engineering teams And think about how we scale our product and ensure that we have a really healthy roadmap for our customers and Both balance open source and commercial the commercial side of this So it's been a it's been a busy couple years for for us here at Upbound and and and we're grateful to see the Both the adoption of cross plane and the You know increase in our customers that are that are using in production Can you talk about the growth of the company? Because you folks, you know, and also leaders also recently, you know, as part of growing the company I think one of one of the things that I had on my plate is so I also grow the leadership team And so you know, I was excited to for Tom Tom Anthony to join us And lead our go-to-market efforts, you know, both in terms of our enterprise sales motion All the way to the customer success and post sales Tom brings a wealth of experience here and and You know, probably one of the strongest names in the fields here and so grateful that he joined Upbound And then uh, oran or entire also joined us and he's uh, you know The way I've described it is that if you think about what platform engineers do They're all building their own platforms I would often joke about that as everyone's building their own heroku. Nobody uses heroku anymore, right But everybody's building their own version of heroku internally So oran Was actually at heroku. He was the sixth person in heroku and built out and was the gm of the entire The entire company and you know, even after after acquisition So he has a ton of experience and then went went to build You know cloud run and other developer-facing tooling at google So he joins us with a wealth of experience to Essentially take us to the next level in terms of, you know, the upbound product around cross-bind Super happy to have both of them on board and and at testament to kind of the growth that that we're seeing here at Upbound now, let's talk about The larger ecosystem market out there. You talked about platform engineering. We are talking a lot of discussions about platform engineering DevOps is that our SREs what I want to understand from you is that since you have been this space for so long How are you seeing the evolution of the culture people? organization structure of the companies and and when we do talk about of course DevOps evolution is quite clear with the cloud the whole developers versus operators, but talk a bit about This evolution DevOps SREs but from there and also do you look at look at it as an evolution? Or you look at it as a parallel disciplines that do, you know, so so let's let's look at it from that perspective Yeah, I mean look, I don't know if anything's dead But but DevOps or or whatever but but the the the more important point is I think We are definitely seeing a very clear pattern Across all our customers and a lot of people that are using cross-bind within the community and the pattern is organizationally These enterprises are forming what look like central teams Right, they're shared services teams and these teams are On one side, they own Managing cloud. They have the credentials to the cloud and you know, they own the bill Right and on the other side, they own and creating experience and experience for the developers That are within the company self-service experience that the developers have And so so that really hasn't changed right that that's there's a The folks working within these teams are the same folks. They're DevOps folks They're they can write code and they are really mindful about operations and scale and you know cost and cloud It's the same folks, right? But what they are what has changed is that We are increasingly seeing these teams building what look like internal platforms Which have an API which have a user experience around them Which centralized policy governance compliance, right? And it they're treating it more like a product as opposed to You know in an organic tool set or you know a plethora of different tools They're really thinking about it as if it was an internal product, right? In some cases, we even see front-end engineers working on this or you know, they're they have product managers working internally In other cases, they're using building blocks To piece together their own platform, right? So the in some ways It's a bit of a charter or architectural change. It's not a personnel change. It's the same folks Right, it's the same folks the same smart folks That that are working on all of this But the approach that they're taking is more of a platform and a product Approach, right? And that's why cross-plane is interesting because every platform vendor That's built any service or any platform of any scale uses control planes at the heart of it, right? That's why we're seeing the success of cross-plane is these platform teams that are now tasked to building platforms internally Are looking at cross-plane as a very structural piece Within their platform Assam, thank you so much for taking time out today and give us an update on the bone and also talk about platform engineering I really appreciate those insights and I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Yeah, thanks swap. Yeah, I've always a pleasure