 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE conversation. Really excited to have a startup in the serverless space here in our studios in Palo Alto. Welcome to the program. First time guest, we have Nate Taggart, who's the CEO and Farah Campbell, who's the ecosystem manager, both with Stackery. Thank you so much for joining us. Stu, thanks for having us. Thank you. All right, so Farah, I know you're just in from Vegas from the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Why don't we start there a little bit? You know, DevOps, this big wave, a lot of changes. What's the energy you're hearing? You know, what are people talking about? What's exciting them these days? A lot of things are exciting them. I think that the whole ecosystem is changing. There's so much happening. It's almost kind of like the 80s and 90s, you know what I mean? We're like, there's like the dot-com era, I guess. You know, like there's like so much new technology that's out there and that's available. I think that there's people are really trying to understand where they should go. Maybe I've already started with containers. Now people are talking about serverless. What do I do? Yeah, it's a great point. When you look, these waves of technology come so fast. What I say, when people write their strategy, you might not even want to write it in ink. You might be drawing because Clay Christensen always says it's something you should revisit. You should go like at least once a quarter. It's directionally where I need to go, but things change. All right, Nate, stackery. Bring us back. First, give us a little bit about the team's background, yourself and what led to the formation of the company. Yeah, thanks. So my founding team actually comes out in New Relic. We were early employees there, stayed until the IPO. So we've worked building dev tooling for a long time and managing at scale infrastructure. And one of the things that we found was, I mean, New Relic was a high velocity engineering team and the bottleneck in many cases was infrastructure. After New Relic, I went, worked with the data science group at GitHub. Again, building massive data infrastructure and the bottleneck was not figuring out what to do. It wasn't the work in front of us. It was the underlying kind of undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure. And so Chase Douglas, my co-founder and I, when we saw AWS Lambda come out as the first example of a wave of serverless services, we got really excited and realized like, this took away a lot of the barriers and a lot of the burden of building new applications started playing with it. And then over the, this was three years ago and over the next few years, we've been working with all the serverless pioneers figuring out what are the changes that they're experiencing from their operation cycle, from managing the life cycle of an application, how are their teams and the dynamics changing the workflow? We took those best practices and built it into Stackery which is now a software product to accelerate serverless operations. All right, so we've been watching this for a while. I want to help give us a little bit of perspective first as to there's something different about this serverless wave or functions as a service. I'm an infrastructure guy by background and we've always wanted to not have the boat anchors of network and storage slow us down. But I live through the virtualization wave. I've got the scars of over a decade of working in the ecosystem of trying to fix that. Everybody got super excited when containers, Docker helped bring that to the mainstream but it was like tools helping us move up the stack a little serverless to me. When I look at it, it's really start from the application level down and there's still lots of infrastructure stuff. It's not like it disappears. I've got the great t-shirt from the cloud guru people about it's like there is no cloud at someone else's computer, they have the longer version of that for serverless. So I'd love your viewpoint because the new relic, they'd seen, they track, they monitor that. You had a great way to look at it. GitHub, of course, but what's the same, what's different about, what's so important about serverless and what it does for companies? Yeah, so fundamentally we're looking at just two different patterns and neither one of them is right or wrong but they have different use cases, different applications, areas where they excel. New relic was a big champion and early pioneer of Docker. We used a lot of containers, a lot of orchestration technology and so I'm still a big proponent of that. I think when I look at the serverless market today, it's tempting to look at it as an abstraction layer, this function as a service, it's maybe a micro container type view. That's not really the pattern we're seeing in industry. What we're actually seeing is people are saying it's a managed service and it's not just Lambda, it's not just compute as a managed service. It's me stringing together the managed components I need to develop quickly and deliver business value to focus on business logic instead of the plumbing. And so I think API gateway is managed service. I think there's managed databases that are managed service. There's event stream, you pull all the pieces together and Lambda may be a component of that but in that way it actually fits in and complements a container program. Yeah, absolutely and I guess what I was trying to say is for a while I was like, oh well, containers kill VMs and serverless kills this. It's like, you know, kind of like cloud is more of an operation model, serverless is more of how I build my applications and services that I can use, not the unit of how I build something. Farrow, when I look at it, the conversations I've had with users, it's not the, okay, let me take the person that did some silo and teach them to code or put that together. You know, I've talked to marketing people that are like, I got involved and I can do this. What are you seeing from the personnel and that who's using it, how is it just very different from what we've seen in the past? I think it opens up a lot of doors. I think it makes the unattainable attainable. You see people that, you know, you can go from front end to full sec. You know, it takes you to the typical technology. I'm mentoring a woman that is using serverless as a way to get a nap out and she doesn't understand infrastructure, she doesn't understand all the ops and how to set all those things up. And it would take a long time to figure all those out, right? I mean, it's also harder to, you know, those are harder doors to open, right? There's, everything's been done the same way for a very long time. But it's also, there's like this free like knowledge is shared here. Like serverless as an ecosystem is, it's kind of like a community, right? Where everybody's kind of working together, sharing knowledge and trying to actually, you know, build something bigger and better. Something that feels, you know, something good to be a part of. We have a lady that's working at our office coming out of code school and she is a killer engineer. I mean, she's doing a ton of, you know, you can talk more about, you know, what Anna's doing for us at Stackry, but I mean, she's coming out of a code school and is operating as she's a full stack engineer. Yeah, and I think that's the, really the compelling story behind serverless is focus on business value. And that's the mission of every software engineer. And it's the reason most of us got into software engineering was because we wanted to solve puzzles. We wanted to work with logic and idea. We wanted to build. We didn't want to like sit and configure infrastructure as code templates in order to stand up, you know, some basic EC2 server so that we can run our application, right? Yeah, maybe throw in a little bit for us. You know, what specifically, what does Stackry do in this ecosystem? What are you helping customers? If you've got any customer examples, we'd love to hear that. Absolutely. So first off, the development model is changing. If you want to do serverless, serverless again is a managed service. I can't replicate all of AWS on my laptop. In order to work with these managed services, in the development cycle, I'm shipping code to the cloud. I'm provisioning resources in the cloud, maybe in my own account or a developer account, but I have to know how to provision those resources and then configure those resources. And if I'm doing this in a professional environment, then it means I need to do this in a way that's automated, scalable. I can hand off to someone else, they can replicate. And this is kind of the workflow, the tooling, the guardrails that Stackry brings to your serverless program. So we make it so that a developer can take a branch out of version control and deploy their own instance of it in their sandbox environment within their AWS account. And it's this kind of automation workflows, handling of configuration templating, being able to pull a resource off the shelf. I need to put my database in a VPC and boom, it's pre-configured and ready for you to go. And that's also like, Stackry also enables you to work on your core problems. I'm not busy trying to research how the 1400 services are gonna interact with each other. I don't have time to do that. I'm trying to focus on my project. I'm focused on a deadline. I'm trying to get a specific task done. I don't have time to research for a week to try to get that, to figure that out. Not only that, it's not actual, it's not a language. So focusing time on trying to figure out and formulate cloud formation, I mean, it seems like a waste of time. You know, the flip side of this is that that is some of the most important mission critical work that teams are doing. You can't provision into your production AWS account if you have misconfigured IAM roles. You don't wanna open access to that account to every single person in the organization. You don't want misconfigured resources. And so this new model, this new development change where the application is kind of at the heart of the life cycle, if we're not helping people to quickly stand up correctly configured resources, then we're putting more load on the ITT, more load on the operational team and actually slowing down development. Yeah, bring us inside. When is it usually, when do you usually get engaged? Who's driving those engagements when you talk about right? What were they doing before? And what does this enable them to do once they're engaged? Yeah, so even though serverless feels like an infrastructure solution, it's actually the application development side of the house that tends to be the leading adopter. I mean, a lot of cases they're trying to unbottle neck of their operations team or not send them maybe low criticality workloads. So a typical entry point might be something like a cron job. We have this little function, it just needs to run once a day. Do I really need to have a capacity planning meeting with the ops team to get this out in production? And so they go, okay, we'll write the code, we'll ship it as a serverless function, we'll get it up out the door. And that works really well when you're a single principal engineer with maybe elevated privileges in your cloud accounts. It doesn't work so well as a replicable process that you can then scale across the org, right? And I don't think ops leaders want just like let's open the gates to our kingdom. And so instead, what we see is that four companies to go through a maturing curve of kind of embracing this technology where they go from background tasks, data pipelines, cron jobs, kind of low visibility work to maybe more core services that can extend their product or deliver more customer facing value. They have to answer a lot of questions in terms of how do we change our process and our culture in order to embrace the velocity of serverless without losing the control that our ops team has been providing for us. And also like setting your team up for success. Anybody knows that like if I'm working on a specific task or we have a project I'm working on, if I don't understand it and can't figure it out, I'm gonna get frustrated. I'm not liking my job anymore. I hate this problem that we're working on. This is like this initiative is dumb. I don't wanna be a part of this. But if I like stackery allows somebody, it means you feel good about it. Like all the things that you can accomplish. We have a customer that's using us right now that they are moving faster than they ever thought it was possible. And it's been so much fun to like see their excitement and more things that they learn about that they're using. They're like, look what we just did. And now they're like, they even like they had these things like they're gonna pull out the white board. He's like, let's not use the white board. Let's just pull out stackery. That's awesome. So it's really fun. So we open Slack channels for some of our customers and it's like so exciting to watch them get so fired up about being able to self-serve, being able to actually deliver value and hit their milestones very quickly and successfully. So you were talking about what segments are driving this. One of the interesting patterns that we've seen is that it's not like the cutting edge infrastructure team. In a lot of cases, it might be the underserved software teams in an organization. One of our first customers was an enterprise company doing retail and it was their marketing enablement team, a business enablement team that says like, hey, our work is important. It drives revenue. It's critical to our business, but it feels like a busy workload to the ops team and it's hard to get priority on this. For them to be able to self-serve, to relieve some of that back pressure but then deliver the business value, it was like an immediate measurable win for them. Yeah, it's interesting. We often talk about the future of jobs so often it's like, oh, well, really you need to be a data scientist. You should go get all this training. You need to get there. It sounds like the bar's kind of low to be able to jump in here and really get a, don't necessarily need to go through certifications to start getting real results. Yeah, and I think maybe instead of saying the bar's low, we're opening the doors wider. We're saying that you can be successful by being able to write software and deliver business value and that you don't need to learn also how to configure cloud resources or write infrastructure as code templates or manage kind of an operations life cycle personally to be able to ramp up and add value to your organization. All right, Nate, how many people in the company tell us what you can about funding and what should we expect to see from you and the team throughout the next kind of six to 12 months? Absolutely, well officially our company's now two years old, we're a team of 15 and we've raised seven and a half million dollars led by Voyager Capital and Hummer Windblad. Okay. I wanna add that I have been involved in a number of startups. This team is different. We have five women on our team. When I joined at 10, there was four and we have one in ops and three women engineers and that was, I know, but that's what I'm saying but I talk about when I started and that is like you don't see that. I wonder, there's certain shows I go to when I go to the Cloud Foundry show, when I go to the Kubernetes show, when I go to more of the developer centric shows, I do tend to find a higher percentage women. Is it, are we seeing it or is that really? Oh, for sure. I mean, okay, so my first conference that I went for when I started Stackery was Serverless Conf. It was awesome. I walked into this hackathon really, I'm actually scared to death because I've been to them before and was basically laughed out of there, you know, like what are you doing here? Because I asked to be a part of a team that had to build a product and we had to demo it and I went up to and told them that I knew nothing about, I'm not an engineer, I can't write code at all but I could, I did understand business problems and I was trying to understand like where Serverless could be useful or what Serverless would be useful. And they were like, let's find you a team and they had me like working on the business plan why they were doing all the coding and I was like, let's do check-ins every single hour. So just that feeling like of being like, like a welcome, you felt welcome there and as a woman working in tech, I haven't felt welcome at a number of conferences and not a lot of hackathons but I definitely felt welcome there. It's great to hear. I know that there was, I saw on Twitter the other day and it was like, could you just imagine if for the last thousand years we had actually used the brain power of the entire human race not having kept 50% of the population from contributing. Nate, wanna give you the final word. Serverless, it's growing fast. There's a lot of excitement but what do you see as kind of the biggest challenges? What does the industry need to work on? What's exciting you that when we come and sit down in 2019 you're hoping we've moved the ball more. Yeah, I think that one takeaway that I wanna make sure your audience has is that if you're sitting here saying we're not doing serverless, you're wrong. Someone in your organization is doing it and if you have this self-serve model where pockets of the organization, this is the old like shadow IT, right? Where they are self-serving, they're configuring resources, they're provisioning and it's kind of outside of your purview, you're gonna wanna start putting proactive steps in place to make sure that they're able to be successful with that mission because if they're not successful with that mission they increase risk on your cloud strategy as a whole. They put more workload back on the operations team if that team ends up being a bottleneck for these needs. And so I hear a lot of IT leaders going, I don't know if we're doing serverless today and it's like, no you are, I've talked to two of your engineers, I know you are. No, absolutely right there. When I interviewed Andy Jassy when we had him on theCUBE last year it was serverless becomes the underlying foundation for everything that AWS is doing. It is, leave the audience with it is not a single product or necessarily a single tool but this is what all the cloud is doing and it's moving there pretty fast so it's something that the users can get involved with. All right, Nathan Farah, thank you so much for joining us. Look forward to watching Stackery and seeing the updates and make sure to check out that theCUBE.net for all of our coverage, all of our big coverage of course from AWS reinvent in Las Vegas, lots of other shows. I'm personally always excited about what's happening in the serverless and emerging trends. So thanks so much for watching theCUBE. Thanks.