 Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re-invent 2016. Brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners. Now here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to SiliconANGO Media's production of theCUBE at AWS re-invent 2016. Worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Leo Chang is the vice president of strategy and business development at Solano Labs. Leo, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. All right, so first, if you could give us a little bit about Solano Labs, just kind of the thumbnail of the company and your role there. Yeah, overall Solano Labs, we're trying to harness the power of the cloud to make software development and deployment faster, more reliable, and at lower cost. So we have a flagship product, Solano CI, which is continuous integration and employment product. We have some other things to talk about later in addition to that, but my role there, the strategy in business development is to basically manage the business side of the house. We are a startup, but certainly the business side of the house is something that I look into. All right, so we talk at the AWS show a lot of times, started out with all the hoodie crowd, you got those developers, I think here's things like software development, CI CD kind of speaks into a lot of what they're doing, and then there's the enterprise, and the enterprise way of doing things, seeing a lot more blazers here at the show, and things like that. Tell us, what's your customer base look like? What's your product set? Yeah, so our customer base looks mainly anywhere from SMB to some of the enterprise folks. When we first started back in 2011, some of the smaller customers with us back then include small guys like New Relic and the Honest Company and Hotel Tonight, who are now IPO bound or have IPOed, we certainly have helped our customer scale through that growth, through the scalability and automation of our platform. All right, so you said New Relic, the Honest Company, so I wonder how many people in this audience would rather hang out with the New Relic guys or Jessica Alba? Yeah, well they're both great groups of people, I'll tell you that much. Yeah, and what led them to work with your company? Yeah, so when they're very in the inception stages of these two companies, they're both evaluating a continuous integration and deployment platform, both of them are looking at Jenkins, which is a very popular open source continuous integration platform. It's great to start up with Jenkins, however once you want to really focus on your objective, focus on customer critical issues and not worry about infrastructure, that's when you want to use a platform like ours, which allows for automation, allows for scale, and then you can really focus on the task at hand and not have to deal with something like manager parallelization or manager configuration. Solano's CI focuses mainly on unlimited parallelization, unlimited scalability and so far it's been able to work well for small companies as well as large ones. Leo, it's interesting, I think about, we've got kind of this weird dynamic when I listen to the keynote this morning. On the one hand, people are like cheering and super excited for every new compute and storage instance that's out there, and on the other hand, they are super excited for things that are going to be able to get them to forget about their infrastructure entirely, things like you were talking about, things like the whole serverless movement, so that's interesting to name it. What do you see or hear from customers? I mean, they have their customers, are all of your customers in the public cloud or how does that work? Yeah, yeah, all of our customers are in public cloud, some of them are okay with using the open cloud, others are, it must be behind their firewall, so today the open cloud versus VPC product that AWS offers and on-prem, those lines are kind of blurring, but certainly most of what customers want is the agility and the cost savings of the cloud without having the headache of managing it, so this is where automation through partners, AWS partners like us really come in to help them. Okay, and can you help draw a picture for us as to kind of the Amazon services that you guys mesh with? They didn't make an announcement today that kind of obviated your product line, did they? No, no, certainly we have, so other than the CI product, we have two other products, the SpotMark products help people save money on compute and that really drives at using, leveraging spot instances on EC2 so you can get the best, most cost effective work done on EC2 and not have to pay the full boat price. The other product we have that's also on our private beta is our Project Cobra, which allows people to get EBS block storage at near S3 costs, but so the interesting about the launch this morning is Athena actually allows for customers to then quickly analyze and run big data analysis on their S3 bucket, which ties in very well with Project Cobra. We haven't had time to write up this blog post to talk about exactly the integration, but certainly this will allow customers to take EBS data into S3 and then quickly analyze it through Athena. Really interesting stuff. We've been on theCUBE and watching the big data space since before we were calling it big data, a lot of discussion at Data Lakes, and I said, what do you call it Data Lake when it's in the cloud? Looks like AWS Athena is attacking that space. Definitely. Yeah. All right, you mentioned kind of cost savings a few times. Amazon's not opposed to how we can streamline and get greater utilization. You have any facts or figures? How much do you save customers? What are their proof points you've got along those lines? Yeah, so I think there are two things to talk about here. One is Solano CI, and we've been able to help customers move. Well, one customer I have in mind in particular is actually a customer in the Child Protective Services software development space. They have a whole slew of federal and state compliance issues, and that leads to hundreds of hours of testing. So we've been able to take harness four, six, or more of the largest AWS instances across hundreds of worker in that parallelization to help them get 40, 60, 100 hours of testing down to roughly 45 minutes. And that kind of power, the cost savings there is really more measured in developer hours, not so much the infrastructure. The second thing I want to talk about is SpotMark. So SpotMark is a way for us to programmatically access EC2 spot instance so you can get spot prices, which is way cheaper than on-demand, and then get the same quality compute at that lower cost because much like financial analysts have modeled energy prices, we have modeled EC2 spot prices to predictively say, understand when it is that prices are going to go up and down. Much like how if you do your laundry in the evenings, it would be much cheaper. You can offload your compute costs in the off-peak hours and get more compute for a much less cost. Yeah, and Leo brought up a great point there. Kind of there's one there's, you know, it was with the infrastructure or my cloud costs or my licensing costs there. And second, there's the people. I mean, you know, one of the biggest things that I spend money on, of course, is my people. And if I can save them time, make their lives easier, you know, that's awesome. I've been watching CI CD kind of, you know, for a while. Seems people kind of understand what it is, but kind of adoption and really embracing it, you know, is still that there still seems to be a number of barriers. What are you hearing from customers? You know, how are they, you know, you know, getting on board or, you know, what are your customers that are actually taking advantage of this? You know, what are some of the first steps? Yeah, generally people, the first step to CI CD comes with a form of Jenkins. Either, it's really interesting. There's no one particular person that's the archetype. It could be the CTO driving it. It could be some developer who's simply sick of not having automation. And they'll start out with Jenkins and they do this thing and then they realize they have to really run into problems such as updating their Jenkins plugins, which then leads to other sort of maintenance issues. There's a lot of care and feeding that goes into a CI system if you are to maintain yourself. So really the trade-off here is between, it's a make or buy decision, right? Do you want to spend your resources focusing on your customer critical issues or should I offload this sort of infrastructural thing to all these experts at AWS and at Solano in order to take care of that? Does that answer your question? Yeah, no, that's great. So wait, so when I do this, all my jobs are gone, right? I've just kind of outsourced it all. The cloud takes over. I don't need my developers, it just kind of lambda functions, they'll decide everything, right? Not exactly, but I think that coffee time is an interesting concept we talk about. I think when I talk about people that have tests that run 100 hours, 20 hours, even if it's an hour, I think for the most part people would say, oh yeah, my build and test turn around is an hour and that's pretty good. But really when you think about it, we have this concept of coffee time, hashtag coffee time where we say the time it takes for you to do your build and test should be approximately the time it takes for you to get up, get a cup of coffee and come back. And the reason this is important is because context switching is very, very much something top of mind for developers and that's something important for business people to understand is that, you know, imagine if your word spell check took 10 minutes or an hour or 20 hours to get done, you'd never be able to finish a piece of writing that you've been working on. The same thing with developers, the faster you can get that build and test turn around time done for them, the happier they are, the more productive they are, the cleaner their code and it's a fantastic thing, people should take advantage of. You know, that's awesome. You talk about worker productivity, there's something that's really important. You know, I date myself. I mean, think about, you know, how spoiled we are that everything's, you know, instant on, everything else like that, you know, think back, you know, 10 years ago when I worked for a big company, it's like I'd show up in the morning and I'd turn my system on and I'd know that I'd go down to the cafeteria to, you know, hang out with some people as they had coffee because you knew for the first 45 minutes it was booting and then going through all the security pieces that it had, all the patching that happened over the weekend, then you do work. Today it's like, you know, mobile, press a button, I'm live, I'm doing it. So we're giving time back, which means I've got more time to build things for the business. You know, what do your customers say? Is to, you know, you know, how transformational is what you're doing for them? Oh, it's night and day. I mean, you know, you've got folks that are saying, like, I used to have to wait for a weekend for my test to finish versus now I can get things done a lot faster. I think from a standpoint of, there's a point where developers are starting to move toward companies that want to actually have these advanced tools because, frankly, these developers don't want to work at companies that have these legacy tools that slow their productivity, is frustrating. They don't get to work on their favorite part, which is the code. Yeah, so Leo, you've got a strategy hat at Solano Labs. You talked about a couple of things that are in preview, but, you know, give us a little bit of a view forward. You know, we see you here at AWS re-invent next year in 2017. What should we be expecting to see? You know, show us a little leg. Yeah, so I think the, going back to the CICD continuous deployment and the DevOps movement, continually we're seeing a lot more companies moving in that direction, but really they're on a forefront of saying, how do I get my workload onto the cloud? Not so much into how do I get that workload to accelerate? How do I now make my storage cheaper or my compute cheaper or my developers productive? They're not quite there yet. They're all about, how do I adopt a hybrid architecture? How do I get the great folks at AWS to help me get there? But I think next year the conversation is going to be continually, even though the DevOps movement is alive and well, certainly, but I think that there's definitely an acceleration of that next year at re-invent. All right, so Leo, there's 32,000 people here, but for those that didn't come, you know, what's the excitement? You know, what's been impressing you for people that can't make? What would you tell them about this show? Oh boy, I think the level of growth is fantastic. I, in a former industry, former life of mine, I used to come to Vegas for CES. 100,000 people, that's great, but that took decades to build. Re-invent, in just a few years, we're at over 30,000 people. I can imagine that this has got to spiral into over much bigger than CES in probably the next coming five years. All right, well, Leo Chang with Solana Labs, really appreciate you sharing with us all the updates on what your company's doing. Love that kind of developer, CICD community that's going there. We'll be right back with lots more coverage here from AWS 2016. Here in Las Vegas, you're watching theCUBE.