 From Seattle, Washington. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE on the ground at OpenStack Day Seattle 2015. Now, here's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here in Seattle for a special CUBE on the ground. OTG is our new series, video series. We go out on the ground, talk to thought leaders, get the data shared that with you. I'm John Furrier. Our guest here is Subit Singh, founder and CEO of App Formix here at the OpenStack Innovation Day. Great to see you. Great to see you too, John. We'll see you next week at the OpenStack SV event and get some big news, we won't telegraph that, but talk about your company. You guys are a growing entrepreneurial venture. You guys are funded by August Capital, big venture capital firm tier one. What's going on with you guys? Talk about your company and what your opportunity is. So App Formix thought about two years ago. We based out of San Jose. We're now quite large by talking about startups with 20 people. And what we do is we build monitoring and control solutions for cloud platforms. So think of any OpenStack cloud or any public cloud as well. What we do for you, what we enable for you is real time monitoring of your entire infrastructure. We make visible for you how the different applications, VMs, containers, any workload that's running in your cloud infrastructure, how they're consuming the resources. We do very sophisticated analytics to show you in real time what's working and what's not working with your infrastructure or if the applications are performing or not performing and what the root cause for that problem is. And then from there, we also give you the ability to control the resource usage in your infrastructure. So from one single dashboard, you can monitor how your infrastructure is being consumed. You can analyze how it is, if everything is working as it's supposed to be working and then control and make sure that things are actually delivered as they're supposed to be. It sounds too good to be true. I mean, this is the nirvana, the single pane of glass to see the enterprise and cloud is what everyone's wanting. It seems that what you guys have is that oversimplifying. This is the holy grail for cloud because management ultimately in a cloud services market is what everyone wants. Is that what you guys are providing? That's the goal. And I mean, specifically if you look at the open stack ecosystem, what coming in and looking at what was going on, what I realized was that, hey, there was a lot of investment that was going in. What's the distribution? And how is the distribution deployed? But truly the cloud experience is not about just finding that distribution and deploying it. It's about keeping that cloud up and running. It's about ensuring that the applications are getting the SLAs, right? And that's the gap that we wanted to bridge at App Formics. We've been working on this for two years now. We're just emerging from stealth. We've started to pick up customers now. But it's taken time. And the- The markets have all been, I mean, cloud now, people are standing up production clouds of open stack. Certainly Amazon's been around for over a decade. And enterprises now with private cloud want this, want their workloads at production. Now, it's also a moving train from a technology standpoint that Kubernetes, you got containers. Management seems to be the area that's most critical to kind of keeping the glue, if you will, or keeping on top of things, whether it's security or management. Is that right? Is that the key challenge? Absolutely. Completely. That is the key challenge. And as you're saying, right, it doesn't matter whether it's open stack or Kubernetes. It doesn't matter whether it's VMs or containers. That is the key challenge. How are you managing your infrastructure? And how do you continue to manage your infrastructure? It's not just getting it up and running. You did the epoch, but now these clusters are in production. And how are you getting that best performance in production? That is the key challenge. Talk about the old days. And I'm old, so I can reflect on the old days. General purpose computers, network architectures that were stable. You do an architectural plan. And it's baked and it's baked for five, 10 years. That's changed. I mean, you're seeing different approaches. The diversity of solutions are driven by workloads, whether you're a Facebook as an app that has underlying platform, and it has a variety of apps that's underlying platform, aka Cloud. Mobility is now a challenge. What is different now? And what's the challenge on the engineering side, as well as the management side? And where does that tie together? Because that seems to be the hotspot right now. You look at the old days, oh, you architected once, and then you run stuff. Now it seems to be an agile architecture. I hate to use the word agile, but in this case, it kind of makes sense. Absolutely. So if I can just talk about that same thing. I think we're on the third transformation. The first one was, as you pointed out, you made your, let's just say, your pod, which was purpose-built for a particular application. You ran that application on that pod. Then came virtualization. And we said, hey, let's start to consolidate. And we virtualized that same pod and just got a higher level of consolidation on it. But we still ran that same application on there. And then from there, we get into this new world of cloud where we want to make one common infrastructure. And then on this one common shared infrastructure, we want to run all our different applications. There's no custom hardware or custom pod that is per application. It's that same cloud. And everything, all the applications are now running on that cloud. And in terms of management, that's a very big nightmare because you have this single environment and you're going to run everything on this single environment. And the reality is that every app that you spin up in the cloud thinks it owns the entire cloud. And it's going to behave as such. And it's going to assume it owns the entire cloud. And it's going to try and use all of the cloud for itself. And then you're going to spin up the second application and the third one and the fourth one. And then how do you manage performance of all these applications as they coexist in the cloud? This is classic policy. I mean, it's like having a kid. You've got to keep them the rules of the road. So with these apps, this is where the policy piece comes in. Policy-driven infrastructure, dynamic. Right, absolutely. But I think that policy-driven infrastructure needs to go one step further. Initially, when we talked about policy-driven, it was still more static in terms of, hey, I'm going to spin this app up. And this is what I want for this app. Now we're getting to that point where your environment is constantly changing under you. We're going from VMs to containers. You spin up containers at will. You spin them down. I mean, you shut them down at will. And you could have 10 running, or all of a sudden you could have 100 running or 1,000 running. So in this environment, what you need is a very fluid infrastructure as well, because your workloads become so fluid. So really, the key challenge then really comes back to management. How are you going to manage your infrastructure so that all this workload that's so fluid is effectively running on it? So I've got to ask you, so IT was the old model. IT seems to be going away to be some sort of abstract level of services. So we were talking to Sabu from eBay, and we were talking, it's a software problem. It's not an IT problem. Compare and contrast that approach now, because if you believe that you have this environment where apps can take control of the unlimited resources potentially in a dynamic and agile environment that can be configured on the fly, new kinds of virtualization, all kinds of new software, what is the software problem that the customers have to solve, and how does that relate into some of the management innovation that you guys are working on? I think what happens as we get to this app-driven economy is that the IT teams need to evolve and evolve in a way where they become more self-service. And that's the software challenge. And that cloud that they're running in-house is no longer like the traditional IT, which is based on trouble tickets. You want everything to be real-time. You want to deliver all of the analytics, all of the information to the applications and the owners of the applications in real-time so that they can make the right judgment calls on how to deploy their applications, how to run their applications, how to scale their applications. So then the software challenge, what it comes down to is that, hey, I have this cloud environment. How do I ensure that this effectively runs as a multi-tenant cloud environment? How do I enable the APIs and extend them all the way to the end users within the organization? How do I, me as an IT administrator, take myself out of the path so that the developers, the apps, they can innovate faster. The apps can scale on their own. So the challenge really is in defining all of these APIs in software. It's a software-driven economy. Because we're back to OpenStack now. So tie that together now. What is your approach in OpenStack? And how do you guys sell your services? Is it by a license? How do customers buy from you guys? And how do they use that in context to this OpenStack-growing environment? Right. So what AppFormics is, it's a platform for both monitoring and control of your cloud environment. We work both with OpenStack and with Kubernetes. So it's not just limited to OpenStack. But essentially, what we, you can think of us as an add-on. It's, you don't, you have your running OpenStack infrastructure, you really, what it's come down to is click a button, and we automatically learn from your OpenStack controller what your infrastructure looks like, automatically deploy onto your infrastructure, and enable this new set of APIs and this new real-time dashboard for you. It's, it's, it's, what I call- Is there a command center for OpenStack? Absolutely. And, but the way it works though is that you continue to manage OpenStack through your OpenStack dashboard. What, what we enable for you is, is this real-time visibility as to this is how your infrastructure is currently behaving, right? And we then, you know, by doing sophisticated analytics and all the raw data can also predict for you that here is where we feel, you know, there could be problem areas where there's bottlenecks in your infrastructure where you should be paying attention right now, you know, to, to put the pictures in. And so you give them the software, they license it from you, they deploy it on their clusters? Absolutely. It's, it's, it's designed for enterprises to be deployed in enterprise clusters. And most of our early customers, they've been very, they're very sensitive to sending their operational data to the cloud. So they prefer this model where they can deploy entirely inside their enterprise, contain all their data within the enterprise. We also have some service provider customers which work the, work the same way. They enabled us, you know, the visibility service for their customers using our product. Well, congratulations on your success on entrepreneurial venture you got going on, entrepreneur here innovating at OpenStack Innovation Day in Seattle. Good luck. We'll see you next week. It's been seeing the CEO of App Formix here on the ground, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. We're here in Seattle.