 Welcome back to Prokona Live. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. As you know, we go out to the signals, or we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we're day two here at Prokona Live, Santa Clara Convention Center, the heart of Silicon Valley. John had to step away, so I'll be going solo on this, and we're excited to invite to theCUBE Lane Campbell, CEO and co-founder of Blackbird. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So Blackbird is a new name I saw in my notes. What was it called before? Well, we are a merger of two companies. PalominoDB has been a long time sponsoring contributor at Prokona for about seven years, and is focused on my SQL database operations and consulting. DriveDev was an operations shop with a DevOps focus, and we decided to merge together, take everything up the stack, build a company that could operate everything with a heavy database focus. Awesome, so when did you complete the merger? Probably 30 years from now, but technically we did it in January first. Okay, very good, congratulations. Never that fun to complete all the processes behind the merger. Absolutely. But good deal, so we caught you, I guess in between two keynotes here at the show. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you were covering earlier, and what are you going to cover in the not too distant future as soon as you get to your slides after we finish the interview? Absolutely, I'm doing a melange of Amazon Web Services talks this time, so I just finished scaling my SQL on Amazon Web Services, where I talk about both options of Amazon's RDS and EC2 opportunities, and the next session is a deep dive into RDS, so the relational database service. Okay, great, so we were just at Amazon Summit last week in San Francisco, we were at Amazon re-invent last year, we'll be at Amazon Summit New York City in a couple of months, I think July, and then of course back at re-invent in October. So clearly Amazon is changing the world, the cloud service has been completely transformative, and the enterprise is disruptive, everyone's running to catch the Andy Jassy and the team at the show just released, it's like an avalanche of feature improvements, feature improvements, as the breadth of services gets wider, the depth of the services gets deeper, and then I think they announced their 43rd consecutive price decrease at the show, so there's just relentless innovation, both in terms of the feature set as well as the pricing pressure. So how did you get involved in working on the Amazon side, and what are you seeing in the marketplace with some of your customers, and how is it transforming? Absolutely, we started with Amazon when clients were going to it, and it was obviously something we needed to support, particularly we've always been a very bespoke company, we do make sure to support our customers, but like Amazon we can't do everything, so Amazon will start with a core, and then they'll evolve based on customer need, they'll start digging out new features, new functionality, and so we did the same thing, and as more customers used Amazon, we moved to Amazon, as more customers used RDS, we started using RDS, and yeah, at this point I would say about 75% of our customers are in some sort of cloud, whether it is Amazon, Google Compute, Rackspace Cloud, and even some folks are building their own private clouds as well, and realistically that's the way it's gonna go, in a few years every piece of infrastructure will be abstracted, and this isn't a really exciting time to be part of the move towards that, as we evolve our own maturity matrix for customers to show them where they stand on the DevOps maturity matrix, being in a virtualized environment where one can evolve very agile configuration, management and infrastructure as code is crucial, and so we, at this point, we're helping a lot of our customers get to that point, we're helping a lot of our customers not need operation staff and managing everything ourselves, which is much easier in a virtual cloud environment, and also letting people know when it's not the right choice for them. So, on the Amazon side, right, they have the service, so your value add then is helping customers, is it a configuration piece? Is it how they set it up? Is it what apps are they using? I mean, where is your value add sit on top of the Amazon infrastructure that they're purchasing directly from Amazon? So Amazon themselves are utility, that's all they want to be, and they're not interested in running systems that sit on their environment, and so we will help customers from a strategic view deciding which virtualized environment, whether it's Amazon or something else, is the right choice. We will help them choose which of their architectural components should use an Amazon service versus their own service that they would run anywhere, and once we do that, we help people migrate to Amazon, and we can run it, the whole thing. Okay, so you help them run it operationally? Yes. And then are you guys playing an open stack as well? We do have a few customers in open stack, it's growing a little earlier, but yes, absolutely. So talk a little bit about when customers are talking about making the moves to the cloud and they want to use Amazon or they want to use a service like that. What are some of the strategic gates you walked in through and making a decision as to what should be where, what workloads should be in a public cloud, what workloads should be maybe on their own or behind the firewall or where a hybrid is more appropriate? Absolutely, and I will say that up until recently we have predominantly worked with startups who are about in their mid-level of maturity, so not as much enterprise clients who might have a much more hybridized environment. Realistically, a lot of the folks that come in don't have large operation staff, they don't, and the staff that they do have want to be working on features, right? What we call development velocity, and so we look for customers who recognize that and at this point, I don't think a virtualized environment is optional anymore, and more often than not, unless they are an enterprise or unless they have a large commitment to an existing data center, going with something like OpenStack doesn't make a lot of sense. But that being said, we do make sure with anyone that we are bringing in that we set everything up with a mitigated risk so that it is easy to get them out. Even though we've never had an issue with any specific provider for risk purposes, it makes a lot of sense to use multiple clouds or to use an on-premise and other hybrid. So if their startups are most of the applications that you're getting involved with, they're new applications that they're building as part of their startup game or whatever, I wonder if you can give any examples. So we're very much in their retail vertical and the gaming vertical. We do have a few others in healthcare, and sometimes ITs, sometimes infrastructure, but predominantly most of the verticals we work with are either retail or gaming, and in those environments, we will either be brought in for a system that has grown past. Often that's already in Amazon, but it was not architected for scale, and we will come in and help them get to that next level more often than not. We do have, of course, some greenfields. We're doing a large infrastructure change right now for a new acquisition for Shutterfly, and in that environment, we're going right to RDS and using that. So one of the potential knocks on a cloud environment or infrastructure as a service is is there a point in time where the cost of rent suddenly becomes more than it would be the cost to buy, where often for speed of implementation, getting started clearly renting a service is the easier and lower friction. Do you find that with your customers, or is Amazon able to keep up in terms of the pricing reductions where they tend to stay kind of Amazon pure as opposed to hitting kind of this breaking point where maybe we really should put in our own infrastructure and it's getting prohibitively expensive to continue to kind of rent the service. Absolutely. In RDS, there was a point where people were getting priced out of RDS, which is more expensive than the instances underneath. And at that point, we had a lot of customers coming to us asking to move. The new, I think they dropped most of their prices in RDS by 40% last week. So it's amazing, right? So it gets a lot better. Some of the larger systems can be very significant, but at this point, you can get a managed database server that is fully redundant for about $6,000 a year. And it's pretty impressive. What we will find is we'll help customers manage costs. One of the things people forget is you have a whole new component of infrastructure management in how do you, whether it's using reserved instances, spot instances, auto scaling up and auto scaling down, removing snapshots. There's so many opportunities to manage costs that people forget about and we make sure that that happens as well so that people don't get runaway bills. So to really fine tune their instance at AWS or kind of cost optimized based on, because there's a lot of choices, right? There's a lot of variables in a lot of Amazon purchase. Yes, and there are absolutely tons of ways to save money. It's essentially just another facet of automation becomes the cost management part of it. And that's one of the most amazing things of Amazon is particularly for a customer that can leverage elasticity, whether it's because of peak seasons retail during Christmas, education during semesters. Any customer that can rely on the dynamicity of Amazon can scale up, can scale down, can shift out and really pay when they need to pay and not pay when they don't. So you've been doing this for a while. From kind of a longer term perspective, right? There's a lot of new entrants into the public cloud space. Clearly, Google Compute and Cisco just announced a billion dollar initiative I think last week for their new public cloud. You've got HP cloud, Azure, there's a lot of clouds out there. But clearly it appears that Amazon's got a giant lead. I think Andy said it was their eighth year of the AWS Summit. What's your kind of perspective as a kind of a service provider looking at the market and trying to deliver value to your customers as to Amazon's position relative to everybody else kind of jumping in the game? So at this point, we predominantly work with either Amazon, Google Compute or Rockspace. And that is where we focus. We don't do a significant amount of windows so we haven't really played too much with Azure. At this point, we are predominantly working with what our customers already have. If it is completely greenfield, which it's pretty rare they'll bring in a service provider that early, we would tend to focus on a combination of those two. And that of course will depend on the strategy and the goal. We don't want to overbuild something before they actually have the revenue and the business model supporting what they need. There's a lot of options out there. Like anything, it's a matter of managing risk. And I am a CEO but I was a database administrator by trade and managing risk is core. So I will not go to a new database release in its first year and I will not go to a new cloud and probably it's first three to four years unless there's some extraordinarily compelling feature that just makes you be willing to accept huge amount of risk, right? Okay, so let's shift gears a little bit and talk about, we're here at Percona Live. Show's growing. I think as somebody said it's the 10th year of the show. Why is this an important event? What's the feeling you're getting here at the show from the community? So I started coming to these back when it was an O'Reilly show and it was the O'Reilly MySQL conference versus Percona who took it over. Open source is a huge deal and it still is extraordinarily relevant. I believe very firmly that open source technology and the access to code, the access to tech and to software and the access to open source education is what's going to help us get into the next level of the technological workforce. At this point I'm not sure. You probably know the numbers since I know you do this more than me but even in Silicon Valley there are 300,000 Latina families who don't have access to computers and internet. So any organization like Percona Live and like MySQL that is based on open source needs to be supported because that is going to be what helps a child in Kenya solve cancer, figure out cancer and get us to the next level. So that's why it come out here. We support closed source databases too but wherever possible we're going to come support an open source product. So let's shift gears again because I know you're passionate about diversity in tech and you've talked about some of the digital divide with families and people having access to the tools and then of course the education and the focus on STEM. We're big fans of women in tech and diversity in tech. All of us have, we don't have a lot of women hosts but we all have a lot of daughters. So we're pretty passionate about it and growing up here in the heart of the valley. Clearly girls need to learn how to code. So can you talk about some of the things that you get involved with to support that effort in terms of diversity in tech? Absolutely. One amazing incident actually is that Percona Live last year they did not have a code of conduct and we had a bit of an issue and some conversations had and this year Percona Live now has a code of conduct which helps women come out and feel like there's a clearly written statement that they will not be harassed, they will not be intimidated, that they are welcome and that is a huge step in and of itself and it was really an issue last year in the year 2013. There always is, there always is. It's amazing when you actually start looking at women speaking out about harassment and even abuse at conferences how it quickly devolves into them being attacked, stalked, harassed, it's pretty radical. So I was very happy that Percona took that on and got that in place. I was on the content committee for this conference and I was in the beginning, there were only about five proposals out of 400 from women and they were really very nice about helping me extend it and get out there and get more women presenting at the conference here which is great. I'm speaking at a bright role hosted data-driven women event in about a month and wherever I can, getting out there, I think that's he just invited me to code his craft to talk about that at their meetups as well and that's he's an amazing organization for bringing women into tech. Good, it seems to be getting more exposure so just a shout out for, we've got a great women in tech, playlists of women in tech that have been on theCUBE if you go to SiliconANGLE.tv, look under playlist, women in tech, I think we just looked before we came on air, we have 97 women of all roles, responsibilities, seniorities, size of companies who've been on theCUBE and you'll be joining that list shortly. Excellent. So we're big fans and it is amazing in 2014 that this is still an issue but we do see more and more at these conferences that there's often kind of a women in tech lunch track or special networking event or things to really encourage to women to be not only involved but really kind of take a leadership position. We saw that back at EMC World last year with Cheryl Sandberg as well, so that's great. So what's kind of next? You've been doing this a long time, you've been involved in this community a while, what's kind of the next big hill to take in terms of the MySQL community? Well right now for us it's DevOps and I don't know if you're familiar with it but this culture of bringing the development operations teams together as we have more infrastructure as code as we get to a point where you cannot compete if you cannot continually push code out, push change out, that's why we merged and with every customer we're working on we're pushing development velocity, getting them to have the ability to push code out as fast and as rapidly as they want and as safely as they want. We just announced today an open source toolkit for continuous delivery for databases that is starting with MySQL and we feel like that's going to be the next step. Big data of course is there. We are in the middle of ramping up a Cassandra team which is a very good addition in the data ecosystem to a relational system like MySQL and the demand for it is insane so we're very excited to have just brought on our second full-time experienced Cassandra DBA and are building that out as well. So in the clients, right, there's a lot of huge trends right now. There's kind of mobile-first, right? It was racing to get to mobile-first as a driver. There's the dev ops culture and agile software development just gets stuff out in this continual pace of improvements and bug fixes and rolling and then finally the data-first which is kind of the newer trend. Within your clients of those three things what's really the primary driver if you had to pick one of the three? I will answer that in a way that doesn't answer your question but goes further. That happens often. Excellent. Right now I believe it's dev ops. In a few years no one will know what that is anymore. It will be ubiquitous. It is an opportunity right now and then it's going to be data. At this point, we're in the cloud environment and it is the next revolution, this virtualized environment infrastructure as a utility just like the electrical and industrial revolutions but data really is it. And how to get the data in right now we're in the basics. How do you get all of that data in there? How do you keep it available? How do you manage these huge farms of data? But soon it will be about the machine learning and the continued evolution of pulling insights from it and that's what we're going to be seeing. Awesome. Well Lane thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. We've been here with Lane Campbell, the CEO and co-founder of Blackbird we're at Percona Live 2014 Santa Clara, California. You're watching theCUBE. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, get the smartest people that we can find in the room, bring them on theCUBE, ask them the questions you'd like to ask them. So thanks for staying with us. We'll be back after this short break with our next guest.