 Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. We're here in the studios in Palo Alto, California, two great guests, Linda Tong, general manager of Cisco AppDynamics and Gary Glenn, architect of operations at match.com. Thanks for joining us. We're talking about AppDynamics, match.com and customer experience, mainly around cloud migrations to Linda. Great to see you and Gary, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you again. Thank you for having us. So, Linda, you're a CUBE alumni. We've talked about cloud migration, application performance, modern application development, all powered by the cloud, right? So, this is really key and people are relying on the cloud and cloud scale and data to drive the digital transformation, the digital services and applications right now. How has the pandemic affected your customers and their expectations for digital experiences? Oh boy, I mean, the pandemic has been, it's been rough for our customers. You know, and part of that is what Gary's going to tell you a little bit more about today, but folks are seeing this increase in expectants of accelerated speed and delivering innovation, building great applications and iterating on them quickly and frankly, their customers demands for engaging with them through digital services. And that has led to this massive increase in, one, the types of technologies that they're consuming to build and deliver these applications and two, the complexity upon how they actually wrap their arms around it and understand what's going on and deliver these great experiences. And so it's been a rough road for our customers and what we find with AppDynamics in Cisco is our ability to partner with our customers to help them wrap their arms around that complexity. Gary, I'd love to get your commentary on this because I'll say match.com has been at large scale for many, many years and now the pandemic comes in, now a new user experience, more accelerated, more action, more things are happening, right? So this is truly the hybrid world coming together. I mean, it is kind of the same game but kind of new patterns are emerging. What have you seen in the pandemic around expectations and the services that you guys are providing in the digital experiences? Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, match has been around for quite some time. We've been here for over 25 years. We have an interesting mix, heterogeneous technology, some old stuff, some new stuff, a lot of the mentality that we try to bring is to innovate. The pandemic brought a lot of uncertainty. We weren't really sure how people were going to react. Was it going to be everybody kind of hunkers down? Dating definitely is something that requires human interaction at multiple levels. And it turned out that people were still very much interested in getting to a place where they can find human connections and match as a premium product trust to make that delightful. And so we had our hands full, especially at the beginning, things like by-check of video features, how does that work? What are the expectations? Is that going to creep people out? If we try to just offer that, are they going to use it? How are they going to date? How are they going to talk? How can we make sure that they're safe? All these kinds of things went into it. And so when we've been using app dynamics for years now, well, before the pandemic, and we use that in order to get a gauge not just on the type of traffic and load, but also, hey, we've got these new features. How do they fit into this huge complex environment? And so some of those timelines that maybe were a little bit more relaxed were very much accelerated. And like a lot of companies, we had to figure out how to deliver on that. So, Linda, I want to get your thoughts. We've talked about in the past, app dynamics has been a leader in really accelerating value for customers. Now with the pandemic, you mentioned, these new experiences are being pulled in from the physical world, right? So you have things that were happening on digital in the application space. Now you have more experiences coming in because there's no places to meet face to face. Now it's coming together, but people have been seeing the value. Wow, I can, if I can't meet in person, match.com, I'm going to do some things, new things online, chat, whatever. This dynamic of old way, new ways changing and cloud is powering that. What are you seeing in terms of your customers journeys around what was once pre-pandemic and now post-pandemic? Well, big part of that is more and more of these experiences rely on digital services and these amazing sort of ways to connect with each other in a very digital space, expectations of customers have changed. So not only do you experience applications and you want it to be simple, easy to use, delightful and it delivers on the needs that you want, but on top of that, you expect it to be performant, you expect it to be secured, you expect there to be frankly no hiccups whatsoever because now this is your way to connect with others. This is your way to find dates or go on dates and the last thing you want is watching your screen pixelate as you're trying to have an important conversation and these kinds of experiences and these challenges as people build more and more of these digital services to build these connections, frankly require a lot more of folks like Eric and his team. They now have to deliver amazing experiences with perfect performance, no security risks, no bumps in the night and that's really tough, right? Expectations have gone through the roof. Yeah, the whole story on that one point just to kind of add live in this is that that whole concept of moving fast used to take months, right? I mean, weeks, months, now it's days and hours. So months to weeks, days and hours. Gary, this is the challenge, this is the opportunity with the cloud. Can you just take us through your cloud journey and your goals and some of the impacts that has had on your transition to the cloud? What does that look like? Yeah, so we've had our own firm data centers quite some time and we started putting our toe in, I guess, although it was kind of intense at the beginning, just trying to get people on board and just say, hey, this is possible. We started out with a fairly small SWAP team then managed within a couple of months working closely with our developers. We have a lot of smart people in background for all of our security folks, all of our devs to just demonstrate that we could do it. So we managed to take something like 80% of our front end traffic for most of a day just kind of spinning that up, learning lessons from that, knowing what we didn't know. Economics, if we didn't have that, would have been almost impossible to get a read. If for no other reason than just one little tidbit, we used to have a data center in Virginia and so physics being what it is, there's just been applied that we had to contend with. And for a couple of years, we hadn't had the 30 millisecond or so round trip latency on there. So all of a sudden we're going back to the cloud that reintroduced this latency. So what does that mean? Does that, well, he asked to sort of glide by and absorb it? How do we track it? How can we figure out what the delta is between, here's how we've done things on crime. Here's how it looks out here. Here are the cross calls. And, you know, App Analytics was what we used to be able to get a read and say, hey, look, it isn't as good as we know we can make it, but it's something in the starting point. Here's why we can show you the graphs, we can show you the data, let's do this thing. So we then pulled back and we have focused this year on actually our affinity apps, which is a collection of applications that are also being worried to be okay, Chispa. And so we've managed to get those completely migrated over. We're going to be running in hybrid notes for a while. We're going to need to be able to compare apples to apples, apples to orangutans, all that. And this is one of the main things for you to use for that. If I can just follow up on that just real quick, because I think this is a good point. You got the data point, you double down on that. You're looking at real data and then you look at success and you double down. That's the playbook. So, and the other thing is that you guys actually have a real operation that's running full throttle, right? So I can see that nice balance. What does the future look like beyond that? Because you got a business that's scaling, it's like changing the airplane engine out at 30,000 feet. You got to continue to push the envelope. Yep, so, and no, exactly right. Again, we're a premium product and so we got to back that up. And that means maintaining high availability. And so over the next few years, we're going to be looking at what can, what have we already moved? What can we move in piecemeal kind of way where it makes sense? What are the things that we can rethink? We're also using our dynamics as part of our containerization initiative. We've got lots of new virtual infrastructure, but was it, again, what does it look like on-prem in a container, go down the list of different things that might be different and then to be able to compare that to what it looks like running in the clouds. So it's going to be a while yet, but like a lot of companies, we got into this, we didn't think it was going to be done in six months. Even if we have to deliver those features at a much faster rate, the long haul, we got to make smart decisions and plan for capacity and get there. That's a real pragmatic approach. Linda, you and I both are sports fans. We've talked in the past about sports and the old adage, what inning are we in and growth? It's to use that baseball metaphor. I would say it's a double header. Game one, one by the cloud. Game two is happening now. The trend is this end-to-end mature, operationally focused customer base in IT where IT has shifted to the cloud right now and they're having this new view of what modern is. End-to-end understanding different stacks relative to applications. It's not as simple as it was before, but it's relevant. Can you share your views on how that's playing out because or do you agree with that and do you see that as an important part of the customer? Yeah, I mean, I think it's that complexity that IT organizations are seeing now as they fully adopt the cloud for all their new applications and start to migrate some of their existing applications over. That world is only increasing in complexity. The way that you can virtualize your applications, break them out into millions of services, the dependencies you have on third-party applications or SaaS services, these things only add that many more data points that you now have to cover and think about and make sure that those things deliver upon their SLAs. And wrapping your arms around that requires a partner to help you separate signal from noise because now you're going into a world without simplicity that you just mentioned has gotten to some point where it's beyond what you can actually sort of keep in your mind, beyond what you can just look at data and sift through and understand. You really need tools and systems that come together and understand that data for you and start to represent your business to you in a new way and abstract away those layers of complexity. While you do that, because I think as you talk about those innings, that first inning and second inning or rather first game, second game in the series, it's not a full migration to the cloud, right? There are going to be some applications that stay on-prem, that stay in their traditional environments and may never move. And then some of them are going to go hybrid. Some will keep parts of the applications on-prem and they're going to start to modularize components of it. And so it's not going to be sort of a mass-scale migration and then we're all in the promised land and we deal with the cloud complexity. It's going to be ever-increasing complexity as we now introduce so many variants of applications, so many variants of technology. And what people are going to need is someone who can help them cover that entire estate and understand it at scale. Yeah, I mean, I think it's the enterprise conversion, if you will, of cloud operations on-premises, because of the reason. And now you got the edge. Gary, this is the whole end-to-end stack conversation of you. And by the way, there isn't one tech stack to rule them all because you have different use cases. You might have an application that needs a financial gateway or have other capabilities. So integration's huge. This only increases the point Luna was making about complexity behind the scenes. How does AppDynamics help you with this for men? So we have an equitability infrastructure. A lot of it is shared. We also maintain sandboxes for user data and that sort of thing. And so navigating that space is always interesting. So for instance, one of the few things that we have coming out is a stir.com. It's out there right now. It's a data sector scared towards single parents. It does share some of the infrastructure, but realizing what that means, how is that different, how are registration flows different, how are subscription flows different? Where are the things that Dev is actively trying to improve on every think? That's one of the things that we try to focus on, when we're trying to kind of pick out like, is this a good candidate to move over to the cloud sooner or later? Is this a good candidate for something that needs to maybe bake a little bit more? And having established those baselines with the shared infrastructure and having a pretty good understanding of how they react, how they work, really helps us, you know, tee up these new initiatives and try to meet those needs in a more efficient way. So yeah, absolutely. What was some of the activity you guys seen? What's the peak activity on match.com these days? Yeah, so dating up in general, but on match in particular, we use a nested or pressed fractal peak. And it's a pattern that from what they told me back in the old days, took a little while to realize was a thing and not just like, oh, we changed something and then this produced that. So every evening is our peak basically. So we're taking time zones into account, at least in the United States, from about five to 10 o'clock at night or so, we get this growing burst of traffic so that can be anywhere from 23%. Sometimes it kind of varies. Then we have a weekly peak, where every Sunday and Monday, we expect a higher amount of traffic than we would other days. And it kind of makes sense from an archer psychology standpoint where you're coming off of dates, you're trying to set dates up. That's where a lot of that activity is. And then we have a yearly peak, which goes from around Christmas to President's Day. Believe it or not, it's President's Day, it's not Valentine's Day. And so that's the sort of thing where when we're trying to plan for capacity and we do a lot of what we call squeeze tests where not quite chaos engineering, but hey, what does it look like if we go down in capacity by 50%? What happens, where are the weak points? A January, Monday night is very different from a May, Thursday, and June. So we have to predict, we have to anticipate some of that, but we don't know for sure. We don't know, the lot can change in a year. So when we're preparing for our yearly peak, we really have to pay attention, we have to prep, we have to plan for that and work with that to figure out how we can get through it and maintain that level of service. That's awesome. AppTynamics has helped me to do that. I'd love to get a bot to give me the optimal dating times to share with my single friends. Great stuff. Linda, thank you for coming on. Great to see you. Congratulations on a great case study, great story. How large scale applications and are working in the modern cloud. So congratulations on your success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. Awesome, thank you. So good to be here. Okay, CUBE coverage of Reinvent 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.