 Hey everyone, welcome to Detroit, Michigan. TheCubus live at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon North America 2022. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, this event, the keynote that we got out of a little while ago is standing here only. The solution's all is packed. There's so much buzz. The community is continuing to mature. They're continuing to contribute. One of the big topics is CloudNative scale. Yeah, I mean, this is a revolution happening. The developers are coming on board. They will be running companies. Developers structurally will be transforming companies with digital heads. They got to get powered somewhere. And I think the CloudNative at scale speaks to getting everything under the covers, scaling up to support developers. In this next segment, we have two Cube alumni who are going to talk about CloudNative at scale. Some of the things that need to be there in a unified architecture should be great. All right, it's going to be fantastic. Let's go under the covers here. As John mentioned, two alumni with us, Madera Miskasky joins us. Co-founder of Platform 9. Sareesh Raghuram, also co-founder of Platform 9. Join us. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to have you guys here at KubeCon on the floor in Detroit. Thank you for having us. Excited to be here. So talk to us. You guys have some news. Madera, give us the sneak peek. What's going on? Definitely, we are very excited. So we have, John, just not too long ago, we spoke about our very new open-source project called Arwan. And we were talking about the launch of Arwan in terms of its first release and et cetera. And just fresh part of the press, we, Platform 9 had its 5.6 release, which is its most recent release of our product. And there's a number of key interesting announcements that I would like to share as part of that. I think the prominent one is Platform 9 added support for ECIS, Kubernetes Cluster Management. And so this is part of our vision of being able to add value no matter where you run your Kubernetes clusters because Kubernetes or cluster management is increasingly becoming commodity. And so I think the companies that succeed are going to add value on top and are going to add value in a way that helps end users, developers, devops, solve problems that they encounter as they start running these environments with a lot of scale and a lot of diversity. So towards that, key features in the 5.6 release first is the very first package release of the product Arwan, which is the open-source project that we've kicked off to do cluster and application, entire cluster management at scale. And then there's few other very interesting capabilities coming out of that. I want to just highlight something and then get your thoughts on this release 5.6. First of all, 5.6, it's been around for a while, five reps. But now more than ever, you mentioned the application in ops. You're seeing web assembly trends, you're seeing developers getting more and more advanced capability. It's going to accelerate their ability to write code and compose applications. So you're seeing an application tsunami coming. So the pressure is, okay, they're going to need infrastructure to run all that stuff. So you're seeing more clusters being spun up, more intelligence being trying to automate. So you've got the automation, so you've got the dynamic, the power dynamic of developers and then under the covers. What does 5.6 do to push the mission forward for developers? How would you guys summarize that for people watching? What's in it for them right now? So it's, you know, I think going back to what you just said, right? Like the breadth of applications that people are developing on top of something like Kubernetes and Cloud Native is always growing. So it's not just the number of clusters, but also the fact that different applications and different development groups need these clusters to be composed differently. So a certain version of the application may require some set of build components, add-ons and operators and extensions, whereas a different application may require something entirely different. And now you take this in an enterprise context, right? Like we had a major media company that work with us. They have more than 10,000 pods being used by thousands of developers. And you now think about the breadth of applications, there are hundreds of different applications being built. How do you consistently build and compose and manage a large number of Kubernetes clusters with a large variety of extensions that these companies are trying to manage? That's really what I think 5.6 is bringing to the table. Scott Johnson just was on here early as the CEO of Docker. He said there's more applications being pushed now and then the history of application development combined. There's more and more apps coming, more and more pressure on the system. And that's where, you know, if you go, there's this famous landscape chart of the CNC of ecosystem technologies. And the problem that people here have is, how do they put it all together? How do they make sense of it? And what 5.6 and Arlon and what Platform 9 is doing is, it's helping you declaratively capture blueprints of these clusters using templates and be able to manage a small number of blueprints that helps you make order out of the chaos of these hundreds of different projects that are all very interesting and powerful. So, Project Arlon really helping developers reduce the configuration and the deployment complexities of Kubernetes at scale. That's exactly right. Talk about the impact on the business side. Ease of use, what's the benefits for 5.6? What does it turn into a benefit standpoint? Yeah, I think the biggest benefit, right, is being able to do cloud native at scale faster and while still keeping a very lean ops team that is able to spend, let's say, 70 plus percent of their time caring for your actual business, bread and butter applications and not for the infrastructure that serves it, right? If you take the analogy of a restaurant, you don't want to spend 70 percent of your time in building the appliances or setting up your stuffs, et cetera. You want to spend 90 plus percent of your time cooking your own meal because that is your core key ingredient. But what happens today in most enterprises is because of the level of automation, the level of hands-on available tooling being there or not being there, majority of the ops time, I would say 50, 70 percent plus gets spent in making that kitchen set up and ready, right? And that is exactly what we are looking to solve. What would a customer look like, or prospect environment look like that would be really ready for platform nine? Well, is it more apps being pushed, big push on application development, or is it the toil of really inefficient infrastructure or gaps in skills of people? What does an environment look like? So if someone needs to look at their advice, say, okay, maybe I should call platform nine. What's it look like? So we generally see customers fall into two ends of the barbell, I would say. One is the advanced communities users that are running, I would say, typically 30 or more clusters already, okay? These are the people that already know containers. They know how to, they've contained their savvy teams, a lot of them are out here. And for them, the problem is, how do I manage the complexity at scale? Because now the problem is, how do I scale us? So that's one end of the barbell. The other end of the barbell is, how do we help make Kubernetes accessible to companies, what I would call the mainstream enterprise? We're in Detroit in Motown, right? And it's outside of the echo chamber of the Silicon Valley. Here's the biggest truth, right? For all the progress that we made as a community, less than 20% of applications in the enterprise today are running on Kubernetes. So what does it take? I would say it's probably less than 10%, okay? And what does it take to grow that in order of magnitude? That's the other kind of customer that we really serve is because we have technologies like Cube Word, which helps them take their existing applications and start adopting Kubernetes as a directional roadmap, but while using the existing applications that they have, without refactoring it. So I would say those are the two ends of the barbell. The early adopters that are looking for an easier way to adopt Kubernetes as an architectural pattern, and the advanced savvy users for whom the problem is, how do they operationally solve the complexity of managing at scale? And what is your differentiation message to both of those different user groups as you talked about in terms of the number of users of Kubernetes so far? The community groundswell is tremendous, but there's a lot of opportunity there. You talked about some of the barriers. What's your differentiation? What do you come in saying, this is why Platform 9 is the right one for you in both of these groups? And it's actually a very simple message. We are the simplest and easiest way for a new user that is adopting Kubernetes as an architectural pattern to get started with existing applications that they have on the infrastructure that they have, number one. And for the savvy teams, our technology helps you operate with greater scale, with constrained operations teams, especially with the economy being the way it is. People are not going to get a lot more budget to go hire a lot more people. So all of them are being asked to do more with less. And our team, our technology and our teams help you do more with less. I was talking with Phil Estes last night from AWS. He's here. He's one of their engineer, open source advocates is always on the ground, topping up AWS. They've had great success, Amazon Web Services with their EKS. A lot of people adopting clusters on the cloud and on premises, but Amazon is doing well. You guys have, I think, a relationship with AWS. What's that, if I'm an Amazon customer, how do I get involved with Platform 9? What's the hook? Where's the value? What's the product look like? Yeah, so it kind of goes back towards the point we spoke about, which is Kubernetes is going to increasingly get commoditized. So customers are going to find the right home, whether it's hyperscalers, EKS, EKS, GKE, or their on-prem infrastructure to run Kubernetes. And so where we want to be at is we, with a project like R1, should we spoke about the barbell strategy? On one end, there's these advanced Kubernetes users. Majority of them are running Kubernetes on EKS, because that was the easiest platform that they found to get started with. So now they have a challenge of running these 50 to 100 clusters across various regions of Amazon, across their dev tests, their staging, their production. And that results in a level of chaos that these DevOps or platform operators- So you come in and solve that. That is where we come in and we solve that. And Amazon or EKS doesn't give you a tooling to solve that, right? It makes it very easy for you to create those number of clusters. Well, even in one hyperscale, let's say AWS, you've got regions and locations. That's kind of a super cloud problem we're seeing. Opportunity, problem and opportunity is that on Amazon, availability zones is one thing, but now also you've got regions. That is absolutely right, your on point, John. And the way we solve it is by using infrastructure as a code, by using GitOps principles, right? Where you define it once, you define it in a YAML file, you define exactly how for your dev test environment you want your entire infrastructure to look like, including EKS, and then you stamp it out. So let me, here's an analogy I'll throw out this. You guys are like, someone learns how to drive a car, Kubernetes clusters, they've got a couple clusters. Then once they know how to drive a car, you give them the sports car. You allow them the thing on Amazon and all of a sudden go completely distributed. Edge, global. I would say that a lot of people that we meet, we feel like they're figuring out how to build a car with the kit tools that they have. And we give them a car that's ready to go and doesn't require them to be trying to, they can focus on driving the car rather than trying to build a car. I want people to stop. Once they get the progressions, they hit that level up on Kubernetes, you guys give them the ability to go much bigger and stronger to accelerate that application. Building a car gets old for people at a certain point in time and they really want to focus on is driving it and enjoying it. We've got four right behind us, so we'll get them involved. But you're not reinventing the wheel. We're not at all, because what we're building is two very, very differentiated solutions, right? One is, we're the simplest and easiest way to build and run cloud-native private clouds. And this is where the operational complexity of trying to do it yourself, you really have to be a car builder to be able to do this without platform line. This is what we do uniquely that nobody else does well. And the other end is we help you operate at scale in the hyperscalers, right? Those are the two problems that I feel, whether you're on-prem or in the cloud, these are the two problems people face. How do you run a private cloud more easily, more efficiently, and how do you govern at scale, especially in the public clouds? I want to get to two more points before we run out of time. Arlon and Argo CD as a service, we previously mentioned them coming into KubeCon, but here, you guys couldn't be more relevant, because Intuit was on stage on the keynote getting an award for their work, you know. Argo, it comes from Intuit, that ArgoCon was in Mountain View, you guys were involved in that. You guys are at the center of all this super cloud action, if you will, or open source. How does Arlon fit into the Argo extension? What is Argo CD as a service? Who's going to take that one? I want to get that out there, because Arlon has been talked about a lot. What's the update? I can talk about it. So, you know, one of the things that Arlon uses behind the scenes is it uses Argo CD, open source Argo CD as a service, as its key component to do the continuous deployment portion of its entire, you know, the infrastructure management story, right? So we have been very strongly partnering with Argo CD. We really know and respect the Intuit team a lot. We, you know, as part of this effort, in the 5.6 release, we've also put out Argo CD as a service in its GA version, right? Because, you know, the power of running Arlon along with Argo CD as a service in our mind is enabling you to run on one end your infrastructure as a scale through GitOps and infrastructure as a core practices, and on the other end, your entire application fleet at scale, right? And just marrying the two really gives you the ability to perform that automation that we spoke about. But to avoid the problem of sprawl when you have distributed teams, you have now things being bolted on, more apps coming out. So this really solves that problem, mainly. That is exactly right. And if you think of it the way those problems are solved today is kind of in disconnected fashion, which is on one end you have your CS CD tools like Argo CD is an excellent one. There is some other choices which are managed by a separate team to automate your application delivery. But that team is disconnected from the team that does the infrastructure management. And the infrastructure management is typically done through a bunch of Terraform scripts or a bunch of ad hoc homegrown scripts which are very difficult to manage. So Arlon teams is sure as they teams the complexity and also the sprawl. But that's also how companies can die. They're growing fast. They're adding more capability. That's where trouble starts, right? I think in two ways, right? One is, as Madhura said, I think one of the common longstanding problems we've had is how do infrastructure and application teams communicate and work together, right? And you've seen Argo really get adopted by the application teams, but it's now something that we're making accessible for the infrastructure teams to also bring the best practices of how application teams are managing applications. You can now use that to manage infrastructure, right? And what that's going to do is help you ultimately reduce waste, reduce inefficiency and improve the developer experience because that's what it's all about, ultimately. And I know that you just released 5.6 today. Congratulations on that. Any customer feedback yet? Any customers that you've been able to talk to or have early access? Yeah, one of our large customers is a large SaaS retail company that is B2C SaaS. And their feedback has been that this basically helps them bring exactly what I said in terms of bring some of the best practices that they wanted to adopt in the application space down to the infrastructure management teams, right? And we're also hearing a lot of customers that I would say large scale public cloud users saying they're really struggling with the complexity of how to tame the complexity of navigating that landscape and making it consumable for organizations that have thousands of developers or more. And that that's been the feedback is that this is the first open source standard mechanism that allows them to kind of reuse something, as opposed to everybody feels like they've had to build ad hoc solutions to solve this problem so far. Having a unified infrastructure is great. My final question for me, before I ended up the lease or the last question is, if you had to explain platform nine, why you're relevant and cool today, what would you say? If I take that, I would say that the reason why platform nine, the reason why we exist is putting together a cloud, a hybrid cloud strategy for an enterprise today historically has required a lot of DIY, a lot of building your own car. Before you can drive a car or you can enjoy the car, you'll really learn to build and operate the car. And that's great for maybe 100 tech companies of the world, but for the next 10,000 or 50,000 enterprises, they want to be able to consume a car. And that's why platform nine exists, is we are the only company that makes this delightfully simple and easy for companies that have a hybrid cloud strategy. Why are you cool and relevant? How would you say it? Yeah, I think as Kubernetes becomes mainstream, as containers have become mainstream, I think automation at scale with ease is going to be the key and that's exactly what we help solve. Automation at scale and with ease. With ease and that differentiation. Guys, thank you so much for joining me. Last question, I guess, Madera, for you, is where can devs go to learn more about 5.6 and get their hands on it? Absolutely, go to platformline.com. There is info about 5.6 release, there's a press release, there's a link to it, right on the website. And if they want to learn about online, it's an open source GitHub project, go to GitHub and find out more about it. Excellent, guys. Thanks again for sharing what you're doing to really deliver CloudNative at scale in a differentiated way that adds ostensible value to your customers. John and I appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you so much. Our pleasure. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Detroit, Michigan at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2022. Stick around, John and I. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute.