 Hi, this is your host, Sapni Bhartiya and welcome to our 2023 Predictions series. And today we have with us once again, Julian Fischer, CEO and founder of AnyKnights. Julian is great to have you on the show. Oh, it's great to be back. Thank you for having me. Yeah, before I ask you to grab a crystal ball and share your predictions with us, tell us quickly about AnyKnights. What is the company all about in today's world? Well, AnyKnights is focused on the construction and operation of application developer platforms. We're helping companies in the journey of cloud transformation. And we have a strong stance in the area of data service automation. Excellent. Now it's time for you to grab a crystal ball and share with us what predictions you have for our viewers. I believe that in 2023, the questions evolving around how to run and how to manage data in Kubernetes, maintaining a healthy dependence or independence from infrastructure providers will be one of the focused topics. I also think that the question of operational efficiencies in the Kubernetes when running a lot of Kubernetes clusters will remain a major challenge and will also be one of the major topics in the Kubernetes ecosystem. I also believe that furthermore, I believe that application security will be a major topic in 2023. A question on how application and any code that's deployed in Kubernetes can be scanned and for security vulnerabilities automatically as part of the CI-SED pipeline will be in the focus as well. One thing I can imagine people will think about in 2023 is also how do you declare an entire application development system, including Kubernetes cluster, the Kubernetes cluster, including the data layer as well as the application layer. Because that requires orchestration in a declarative way that goes beyond a Kubernetes cluster but includes infrastructure or platform resources. We've seen with cross-plane technologies who use the Kubernetes paradigm to do that, so I'd be curious to see that more people use that to make those more comprehensive declarative systems or application management systems possible. Thanks for sharing these predictions. If I ask you what is going to be the focus of any lines in 2023? We've been doing the same things for decades now but it's the exact prioritization that's always interesting to see. We've been working on several topics last year and there will be a shift of focus in the upcoming year. We have learned that for example, managing data in Kubernetes environments where there are a lot of Kubernetes clusters is much more demanded than, for example, running data within Kubernetes. Both are hot topics but we've seen a spike in demand asking our existing data service automation to be integrated within Kubernetes rather than running data services on Kubernetes. It's not saying anything bad about running data in Kubernetes but it's just within the customer base. That's one of the shifts we are going to make in response to the demand. What are some of the biggest challenges that you will see will be there in 2023 and some of those challenges that any Nines would like to help customers navigate through? I still believe that building application development platforms is incredibly hard. When you think about the marketplace problem, browsing products that are available to the application developers, creating graphical user interfaces for them, making declarative management of resources around Kubernetes clusters available, including application workloads, extensions and data, that's something that still needs to be addressed and that's where our focus will be. It will be less focused on providing Kubernetes as a service, which is something we have made many experiments within the last one or two years. We are moving up the layer. That's a shift in focus at any Nines. Julian, thank you so much for taking time out today and once again share these predictions with us, focus on the company and the challenges that are ahead of us in 2023 and which you will also help solve. Thanks for all these insights. As usual, I would love to sit down and chat with you again, hopefully next year, if not next year. Absolutely. Hopefully there's going to be a conference in Europe where we'll be able to meet. Otherwise, see you at the next conference in the US or in the next Zoom call. I enjoy talking to you so much, so hopefully see you soon.