 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. And when we kicked off this program, Cloud Native Insights, we wanted to talk about the innovation and agility that's happening, not just cloud as a location. We're going to drill down a little bit into, of course, one of the very important pieces of a company. And that's their websites and their applications that lived in that environment. And of course, that's gone through a lot of changes over the years, any of us that have been in tech for a couple of decades have watched from the early days to, of course, today's multimedia, globally distributed environment. And everyone during the global pandemic, of course, has been stressing and straining their use of the internet. So really excited to welcome to the program the two co-founders of Netlify. I have Matt Billman, who is the CEO and his co-founder, Chris Bach, who is the president. Both of Netlify, really the company behind Jamstack, which we're going to explain and talk about a bit. Matt and Chris, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. All right, so let's start with just some of the basics. I expect that some of our audience is not familiar with Jamstack. You do a quick Google search and it's JavaScript, it's APIs, it's Markup, and you say, okay, I understand what a plunge of that means. But if you could give us kind of a counter-contrast to what web development was before and how Jamstack's really helping to revolutionize what's happening in the space. Yeah, so for many years we built websites and web applications with an application-based architecture where every website or every application would be this monolithic application with typically like a load balance or a set of web servers, application servers and a database and every request to a page would go through this whole stack, it would pass through the application layer, talk to the database, fetch template, merge data and template, build HTML on the fly and send it back to the user. And basically what we saw happening and what's been happening with the Jamstack is this decoupling of the actual front-end presentation layer of the websites and web applications and then the back-end layer. And the advantages there is that if you can really like pre-build the front-end application layer, you can take the actual HTML or an application shell and distribute it across a globally distributed network, you can get it into the hands of the user's browser very quickly. And then the back-end, what we've seen happening there is that it's split up to all these different APIs and services, you no longer have your one monolithic back-end, you have all these different services where some are your own, but a lot of them are other people's services like Stripe or Twilio or Algolia or Contentful. So we've seen this shift to this architecture where you can say that in a way the stack has moved up a little from the old tooling where something like the LAMP stack would be common, really naming like the programming language, the specific web server, the Linux server, the operating system and so on, right? And then up to a level where it's really about getting an application into the browser, using JavaScript as the runtime and talking to all these, to this whole new economy of APIs and services. Yeah, Chris, I wonder if you could bring us inside your customers and the companies that you talk to. I think about for the longest time it was, maybe I just outsourced my web development, but website is one of those key components that I share my value, I share what's going on, I want to be able to change it pretty often and there's so much more that I can do today than I could have done 10 years ago. We've watched that march. So help us understand what skill sets do people need to have? What type of companies are using Jamstack and bring in if you can, Netlify, how is this a business and not just an open source standards movement that's helping to revolutionize what's happening? Absolutely, I mean, first of all, people using this and companies using this is extremely wide, right? It's very horizontal. This is anyone with a digital property basically, right? But I think what we've seen all the time is that we have a lot more challenge that we used to have, right? So we started off just maybe having the one dot com, right? With limited functionality. And today you have a multiple channels, right? You have landing pages, you have domains, you have lots of activities online. You have mobile apps and commerce is often a big part of it. And I would say especially in the last few months, there's a lot of people that had the digital convergence points as one of many and now it's the only ones, right? So I think it's becoming extremely important. I also think that when you look at your web infrastructure in general, it has been very complex, right? And you need a lot of different people, right? And you need to maintain staging environments, production lines, development environments. You need to have a wide set of skills to maintain these things, right? And if a web developer wanted to do a lot of things, right? They have to go and tap DevOps and so on on the shoulder, right? And I think what the jam stick is about is saying, hey, you can get so much further as a web developer. Now, if you take the modern built tools, you can take the git workflows and you wrap around the browser that has become a full-fledged operating system and the AI economy as Matt was just talking about, you have these workflows or you potentially have these workflows where you can get so much further, right? And that's very much Netlify's mission. So Netlify saw this opportunity of decoupling the front end for the back end and the building from the hosting of creating an approach to making websites that would be many times faster because you have multiple points of origin and you don't feel very risk. It's many times safer. There's not that huge surface area of attack. It's much more scalable and so on. It was sort of a win-win-win, but the problem was that there was no viable workflow. If you take a traditional CDN and you put it in, it doesn't matter really if it's one or the other. As good as they got services, they're all meant to sit in front of an origin, right? They're meant to buffer some. And if you have the jam stick, there is no origin in that way, right? The network in itself has to be an origin. So it has to be architected quite differently. And then there's a lot of things around CDCI and how you serverless and so on that all had to be sort of re-imagined. And Netlify is that blue layer. It is that platform that takes you from local development all the way out to edge nodes. And what allows you to mix and match any tool. So it's not program-independent. So you can say, well, we use a built tool and that's PHP or Ruby or the JavaScript or React or Next or whatever it might be, right? And we use these APIs for this server, for this property. Over here we have a commerce site. Over here we have a .com that needs a huge enterprise CMS with tons of stakeholders. But the thing is that all of those now become something that plugs into your website rather than have to drive the website itself. And that sort of frees up the silos. So when we see people using Netlify, we have companies using Netlify. Big fitness company, for example, that home fitness company that uses us for developer documentation for all their marketing sites but also for that .com. But even if you go to the equipment that people have at home and you log in, that's actually using some very nifty identity and remote-based access control for Netlify and when you, if you watch the video there, it's also going through a Netlify player, right? We have fast food change that has that .com and their marketing sites, but also the kiosks down in the store, like the menus, the screens there, rather than being an old Windows NC server running some .net application in a dusty corner. Why not have it like that? And so both the category but also Netlify sort of brings in a solution and because it's decoupled from all those architectural choices, that means that you can now use the solution in a much, much wider setting. And we were sort of first to market during this. The Git serverless approach where you just push your serverless functions to Git, that's a Netlify first feature. The poor previews were invented by us and so on. So the Jamstack is an extremely wide, fundamental architectural approach that matches basically anyone that wants to build web properties. Netlify is this agnostic, wide platform that just makes it possible. Yeah, Chris, actually, I saw the Peloton use case up on the website and you're right, a very different experience rather than I bring my device, is it sync? Does it work with it? It really integrates those solutions. And you just brought up serverless, which is actually how I got connected to talk in Netlify. So Matt, sorry, I think you wanted to jump in there but was wondering if you could help us. I look at serverless and what the promise of serverless of course is that I don't need to think about that underlying infrastructure. I just like developers build our applications. Feels like that's really the same mission that you have and the serverless is a piece of your story. So maybe explain and tease that out a little for us. Absolutely, right? I think it ties in, right? Like the, basically what we saw just from an architectural perspective, right? Was this approach of really decoupling of decoupling front end and back end and so on, right? And working in a new way that gave a lot of benefits to the end users and performance and security and so on, right? But on the other hand, early on what we saw was that to adopt that approach, like developers had to deal with a lot of different moving pieces, like CI, CD, CDNs, what to do about like the API endpoints that didn't need to be dynamic and so on, right? And as Netlify, what we saw was that we could give like one end to end workflow for all of this and make it extremely easy for developers to work with this deck. And serverless plays a really important piece there, right? Because when Amazon pioneered AWS Lambda and took it to the world, right? Like I think the promise also for like the front end web developers of being able to simply write code and then not have to worry at all about like, where is it actually running? How are we scaling it? How are we operating it and so on, right? Like that's a really powerful promise, right? But at the same time in the same way, what we saw early on was that for a front end team to actually adopt serverless functions as part of the Jamstack, it introduced another level of complexity of now having to like manage your serverless functions independent from your front end, figuring out like API gateway endpoints for every one of them. And how about like deployment pipeline for your functions layer versus deployment pipelines for the actual front end layer that's supposed to talk to those front ends? How about staging environments versus production environments? How do you manage all that, right? So we saw that there was this inherent like incredible potential, but also a lot of complexity, right? And as Netlify, we saw that if we could give front end developers again, like a web developers in general an end to end workflow where they can work both with the front end framework, write the code that will get deployed into the browser, but also just have a folder where they can write their serverless functions and then know that Netlify will take care of all of the wiring, right? Of when you open a pull request and get with a new function will give you a URL on our globally distributed CDN where you can view both the whole front end but also the function and sidesteps sort of all of the complexities of linking together API gateways to functions of managing CIC pipelines and test environments and so on. And in the end, like the serverless functions starts becoming a really important part of this jam stack approach, right? Because you have this world where you have a front end that's often talking to many different APIs and services where again, some are your own and some are other people's services, but really often you need some place to glue those together or to build your own custom API endpoint that talks to a couple of them and it has access to server side secrets and so on, right? And this idea of not having to suddenly operate and manage a whole set of servers and infrastructure just for that part of it but simply just writing the code and then knowing that you don't have to worry about the operations or scalability or anything around that code. That's a really powerful paradigm. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the real challenges with cloud is you talk about the paradox of choice. There's so many ways to do things not necessarily simple, you know, anybody, you know, I was a blogger for many years and it was like, well, I'll just use the self hosted WordPress because I don't want to have to worry about that piece of it. You know, Matt, I've watched it. You did a presentation talking about if I wanted to do WordPress hosted in AWS, that absolutely is not simple. I even heard a podcast from one of your board members Tim Preston Werner talking about, you know, we need to be more opinionated. We need to be able to give more guidance to developers. Maybe Chris, if you could, you know, how are we, you know, when the proliferation of choice, you know, keeps increasing, you know, making sure that people can, how do I make that decision tree and how do we try to keep it simple? Absolutely. I mean, and I actually think that that's a super relevant question because you have a lot of choice as a web developer today. Frontend developers used to cut up Photoshop files and turn them into HTML, right? Now that you advanced markup and they have all these frameworks and flavors of JavaScript to choose between and there's these powerful build tools and, you know, all those workflows and the browser can do everything you can imagine, right? And so yeah, there is a lot of choice out there, right? And I think, and for Net Define, what's extremely important is that we are opinionated in the right places. And so when it comes to, for example, frontend tooling and build tools and these things that web developers are often sort of faced with having to choose between, our role is to make it as simple as possible as to use any of them, but also give you the opportunity of saying, well, this new paradigm allows you to actually mix and match, right? It allows you to use this tool for this property and this tool for this property and it gives you a ton of flexibility, but still, you know, come under one roof of a platform like Net Define. And I think that is very powerful. And so we also don't want to choose for you. We want to inform your choices and we want to make it as easy as possible to go and say, hey, these are my needs. What should I be going, what direction should I be going? And of course, we work with enterprise clients on migration services and so on, right? And where we help them a lot with that. But if we lock down on a single flavor or a single build tool, or a single frontend framework, then we also limit the application of what we bring to market and we want to remain a little more open-ended there. But I think there is a lot of complexity. A platform like Netlify is all about simplification. So all that wiring that Matt just mentioned, that at least goes, right? You don't spend hours configuring bondage caching and trying to find those edge cases, it just works. And that's a huge game changer for a lot of people, right? But there's definitely parts of the ecosystem that has a lot of choice and we do our best to inform. And I think on the hand-holding part, adjacent to that is the story of, well, do we then stop using content management systems? Like is this a whole new? Is it out with the old and in with the new? And I would say, you still have a lot of those needs, right? You still have non-technical people, for example, that needs to be able to opt and create and maintain content and so on, right? And create content. And so you very often will need an e-commerce solution or content management system and so on. But what we're seeing there is that we're speaking basically with every single major CMS out there that are saying, we're working on a headless system or we already have our headless version or we've just gone full headless. That means that we've worked decoupled so we don't no longer need to build the site which is provide like an independent source of content. And then it plugs into a platform like Netlify. So that can bring a lot of simplicity. So now you just have to maintain your content but you don't have to worry about all the different environments and what is up to date and how does my infrastructure look like? You press a button and it commits to get you get a deploy preview and it looks the same everywhere. I'm curious, what impact the current global pandemic has had on Netlify and your customers? I saw you've got a COVID tracking project that you've done but also now just there's different considerations when I think about what services I need to access from the web and what kind of connectivity the ultimate end user would have. So what learnings have you had? What's involved there? And I mean, obviously we, it depends a lot on as Chris mentioned, right? Like the GenStack is adopted horizontally across all kinds of areas and businesses and so on, right? So we've of course seen businesses in sectors that are having hard time. And on the other hand, we've seen businesses in sectors that are exploding, right? Like we did immediately when the lockdown started happening and the pandemic started happening, we set aside like a free plan for projects working in the space of tackling the information sharing around COVID and finding solutions and so on. And that was really interesting to see. You mentioned the COVID tracking project, right? Which was a project like built in a short time by a small group of distributors that incredibly talented front-end developers and scientists and so on, right? And I think it was interesting to see like how the GenStack and our tooling and so on also really made it possible for them to build as a small distributed team this set of data information and tooling to a global audience, right? Seeing huge traffic peaks at time and just knowing that the architecture and our infrastructure could handle it for them. All right. Chris, I've got one a little bit off to the side here when I look at what Netlify is doing you talk about having an open and independent web and while we are fully supportive of that we're a little concerned sometimes if you look at what's happening across the globe there's a lot of discussions will the internet actually fragment will certain countries fall off certain environments any concerns there? What do you look at? What are you hearing from your customers when you talk about that mission? It is, I mean it's one of the big challenges of our time, right? I mean, I think we all maybe took for given the internet as the standard it became, right? The way that you can publish without permission is pretty magnificent, right? And it would be indescribably painful for civilization if we lost that, right? And I think fragmentation is something that we all have to sort of worry around from the way we see it is that the web, the traditional monolithic approach, right? To where led to a web that wasn't secure enough and wasn't scalable enough and wasn't performing enough and that's for example, what opened the door for for mobile applications, right? Where it just didn't make sense to pull in the UI every time you turn the page so we ended up with a form that said we pre-built the application, we downloaded and then you speak to servers for anything then it's real time updating, right? And that makes perfect sense. That's basically the same architecture that we are bringing to the web at very large scale. But of course the problem is that now that gatekeeper's there, right? That people you have to ask for permission to publish and so on and there are other attempts to say, hey, we need a performant web and there's a very big players out there that say, let's come over and just, you know do we even need to call it the internet? Can we just call it our company? Website, I'm not gonna name any names here, right? But leading down is what we call wall gardens that are great for absolutely no one except for the company, right? And what we believe is that if you have a web that is secure and is scalable and is performing enough to justify at least the architecture maintaining, right? And not having to run into any wall gardens and still say, no, you don't need to use a handful of commercial platforms if you wanna be heard rather than have your own web properties and your own custom domains, right? I think that's the part of the open independent Bible web that we're fighting for, right? Basically one that adopts and keeps adopting an architecture that is something that levels the playing field. And then I would also say for Netlify, I mean, a few years before we started like try configuring your own CDN, right? And like that was reserved for the very, very large tech players, now you can come in, you can literally click a button on Netlify and get custom domain and ACTS and a post-process site that's globally distributed and automatically integrated into Git, right? And that's on the premium point, you know? And so as a startup, you can level set together with everyone else and be available widely across the world without performance issues immediately. And so in that way, I'm also seeing that's a democratization of performance, right? That means that that's great. And for places where you see developing economies where you often have brownouts, where you often can't depend on having rival service in this locally and so on, right? This idea of having decoupled that and having something that's just automatically, you know what, don't even worry about it because it's already ready to go in all these pockets all around the world. That's a huge game changer. That's actually, we see a lot of adoption of the Jamstack and Netlify in those places as well, right? Because that's just such a promise to the architecture. So I hear what you're saying and I'm also very concerned about a fragmented web for political reasons as well, right? Across the globe, right? And from our angle, the way we fight for it is to make sure that it retains using an architecture that makes it accessible for you. Yeah, I heard many years ago a friend of mine said, if you're a technologist, it means that in general you are a technology optimist, which I definitely try to be. So I love Chris how you've just brought in some of the potential and opportunity. Matt, I want to give you just people out there, they hear like, oh, 5G is coming. It's going to completely change the world. Anything that you're seeing on your side as to real opportunities that we will see, just a step function in what your companies using Jamstack that partnering with Netlify and your ecosystem. What are some of the early things that you see that are exciting you down the line for this? Part of it is simply like the whole ecosystem around the Jamstack growing up and the tooling, the APIs, the frameworks available around it and the level of innovation that's triggered and especially how it's triggering like, especially how we are seeing the potential for small distributed teams to work together and build things with a global impact in a short time. I remember a couple of years ago, we did a hackathon with Together Free Code Camp and of course like since it was with Free Code Camp it was mostly like teams were mostly fairly new to programming and so on, right? And it was pretty amazing to see what over a weekend like with this architecture and with this tooling, right? With the vendors that were present there and helping out and so on, what these small teams could actually get done in a weekend, right? Like I remember the winning team had an app where the whole room would like see an image on the main stage screen and then on their phone try to place that image on the map and you would real time see like how people ranked, how close they got and get a winner and so on, right? And that was all just from combining like APIs and tooling like Hasura, like Netlify, like HonorDB, like Google Maps and so on, right? And I think in some way we shouldn't forget like just how much this kind of ecosystem of readily available APIs and services around this running stack is allowing people to build things that like years ago would have taken like a very big team like probably like a year to build, right? Like and suddenly you can have a relatively small group of relatively new programmers build something really impressive, right? So I think that's a trend we'll see continue accelerating, right? And Chris, personally involved in advising and helping out a lot of like these new startups in the space that are trying to bring new tooling to the world that makes more and more of these things possible and accessible. Well, Chris and Matt, I really appreciate you both joining such an exciting space. Talk about the cloud agility and innovation, such a robust ecosystem. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having us. And I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for joining and look forward to hearing more about your Cube Insight.