 Live from the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Silicon Valley 2016. Brought to you by Morantis. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Lisa Martin. Welcome back, when we here live in Silicon Valley for OpenStack SV, for Silicon Valley OpenStack SV. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Lisa Martin. Our next guest is Andrew Randell, he's the CEO, founding CEO of Tigera. Welcome to theCUBE. Great to be here. So as an entrepreneur, first tell us about your company and then what's going on here at OpenStack for you? Yeah, so Tigera's all about securing cloud networks. So we think there's a real problem with how, as we move to more and more densely packed data centers, how do you secure those workloads? So we actually came up with a project about a couple of years ago called Calico, within a larger company called MetaSwitch. And as this started to gain momentum, we realized we needed to set up a startup to really make the most out of this project. So we launched that in May and we support OpenStack, we support container environments and so being here, where we're starting to see OpenStack moving more towards embracing those container environments is kind of natural meshing of multiple ecosystems that we're involved in. And how big is the company, size-wise, funding? Can you share some particulars? Sure, so we're about 15 people right now, but hiring, bringing a lot of engineers on board, community advocates, product management, all of those things we need to do to scale the company. We raised around a 13 million from new enterprise associates and Wing VC. And so we announced that back when we launched the company in May. Great, yeah, two great VCs, NEA, obviously Legend and Wing VC, XL partners, guys, so they know infrastructure. They know switching, networking, all that stuff. So as that OpenStack world evolves from, we see all the SDN action, certainly NFV being a big popular use case, the Kubernetes Docker madness has changed the game. It's like putting a new fruit in the blender, it changes color, right? It's a whole nother shake-up here. What is the impact of dockerization and this new orchestration on Kubernetes? What does it mean for OpenStack and ultimately customers? Yeah, I mean, I'd rather think of it as the sanity coming into the game rather than the madness, right? So I think we've seen the architectures that have been- Docker sanity, that's a new hashtag. There you go, Docker sanity. Jerry Chen will love that. These new architectures that are being built for containers just make a lot of sense for the new style of applications, right? So certainly the kind of enterprises that we're working with, mostly leading edge kind of enterprises, that's where they're looking to target their new application developments, but they need solid infrastructure as well to build those apps on and to bring the legacy apps into that new world as well. So it's made sense to us for a long time that these two worlds need to coexist and I think that the fact that the community is just starting to really make this happen is really exciting. It shows a level of maturity as well. Do you think it's been a shot in the arm, so to speak, for OpenStack community to have that Docker sanity, as you say, come in? Because that seems to give some freedom to the developers to play, but yet let the build out of OpenStack certainly mature, it's been maturing, but fill in the gaps if you will, the white spaces. Yeah, I think it's addressed in questions that people have had about what is the migration path to the future, right? So they've seen a shining city on the hill, right, of containers and microservice-based applications and there's been a gap between where they are today and where they want to get to and so it's kind of paved that road for them, so I think that's going to open up a whole lot of innovation. It's also, to be honest, plugged some holes that there were with OpenStack. If you talk to anyone that's deployed OpenStack, I was just at a reception last night talking with a large cable company that had deployed an older version of OpenStack, a lot of workloads in production and didn't know how to move it up to a more recent version. That kind of upgrading has been impossible up to now and running it on Kubernetes where you can just kind of terminate services, bring them up again, it provides a much better deployment environment for OpenStack. A little more elegant than the lift and shift, bring in the old, get rid of the old and bring the new. Yeah, I mean, the previous strategy was always burn it down, rebuild. And that works for an early stage project, but if you're really talking about something that should be thought of as mature enterprise technology, you need a more of an elegant underpinning. So one of the things that interests me is wanting to kind of dig into security and one of the things that was talked about today around the OpenStack days here is challenges around security, kind of one of the age-old cloud challenges that customers of all sizes face, but also want to explore what it is that Tiger is doing. What are you doing to mitigate some of those security challenges that customers are facing when you're working with cloud-native applications? Yeah, I think if you look at the data breaches, there've been a lot of very highly publicized data breaches over the years and they keep coming, right? One thing most of them have in common is that people have broken through perimeter security and once they're on one server in the network to jump to the next one, to jump to the next one is actually relatively trivial, right? So one of the things that we're trying to do is to move away from the idea of just virtualizing the old three-tier architecture to really describing at a very fine-grained level who should be allowed to talk to whom under what circumstances, and then detecting when things are happening that shouldn't be happening, right? So locking down every workload, putting, if you like, a microfile wall on every workload's virtual interface, not just kind of around the edge of a network, but literally around every microservice, and that we think is the way to implement network security. There are other aspects of security, of course, that need to be addressed, but for network security, we think that fine-grained policy is the way of the future. And perimeter security, obviously we've been talking about on the queue for many years now, the perimeter is dead. And that is a reality if you're in the cloud and you get services like microservices, certainly. Anything API is just another surface area for an attack. What's the big focus now when the perimeter's gone? Is it securing the workloads around the data? Is it the app? I mean, how do you guys look at that specifically? So I think security to be effective is going to be multi-layered. So, if you look at what CoreOS is talking about with the trusted computing model, I think that's very important, and people are talking about ways to ensure that the workload that's running is actually the one that you think is running. And then at the network layer, that where we're sitting, it's important to be able to describe in a very high-level terms that application developers can actually write down very simply who has to talk to whom, who's allowed to talk to whom, and then you can really lock down those interfaces as tightly as possible. So being that you're a fairly new company, are there any, one of the things that I also was talking about today in the OpenStack community, really evolving and just sharing successes? We talked about some of the challenges that go in with implementing, you mentioned a telecom company, or cable company rather, that was having challenges with older version. It's not, how do we do this massive lift and upgrade? From that perspective, how are you helping? Where do you see the impact for customers that TIGERA can influence in terms of infiltrating that multi-security layer approach? Yeah, so I think if I look at the kind of customers that we're working with and the people that are deploying Calico today, it's, there's a number of different use cases, right? A number of different drivers. One is, people are fed up with the complexity of traditional virtual networking, and they look at what they're trying to do and say, really, I just need to get IP packets from A to B across the network. How hard can that be? Why am I building huge clusters of distributed controllers to make this all happen and wrapping packets in layers? So we simplify the networking, and that's one of the big use cases is just to remove those layers of complexity. Another is people starting to look at hybrid cloud, right? And hybrid in multiple senses, right? One is public and private, and another is open stack and Kubernetes, right? So, or open stack and Docker, right? So being able to network seamlessly between these environments and apply the common set of security policies across those multiple environments. So we're certainly seeing large financials getting behind that. We have some Silicon Valley type large SaaS companies deploying this technology. So those are probably the two key things that we're seeing. And I was going to ask you who your target audience is with respect to Canal. Can you share a little bit with our audience about what Canal is and who are you targeting with that? Yeah, absolutely. So Canal came out of a partnership with CoreOS where, so CoreOS had a networking solution for Kubernetes called Flannel. And we had a networking solution for Kubernetes called Callico. Our strength was very much in simple networking with very strong security policies applied to it. Flannel enabled networking in various cloud environments, and there were a lot of users of that project that wanted to get Callico's security policies. So we said, we can put these together. We can run the security infrastructure over Flannel's transport mechanisms. And that was the genesis of the Canal idea. It was rather than try and reinvent the wheel in both projects, let's just put them together and allow them to be deployed together in Kubernetes environments. And the same target audience that you were mentioning previously or is this allow a little bit of breadth expansion? Yeah, I think anyone who's looking at deploying orchestrated microservice environments, looking at Kubernetes in particular, which is the primary target for Canal, in open stack it's a little bit broader instead of enterprises, I think. So on the DevOps equation, VMs were a big part of expanding the server sprawl which became VM sprawl. Now with Docker containers in Kubernetes, the need for VMs kind of are shifting. How is that impacting that world? Because the DevOps ethos certainly has done well, that's right in your wheelhouse where you guys are coming in kind of as goes mainstream. Do you find customers are looking to throw away the VM architecture and go with Docker containers? Yeah, so I think it's mixed right now. What we're seeing is increasingly a new application development is targeting containers. And people love the orchestration environments that have been built for that world, right? So they love the fact that you just describe the ultimate architecture that you want to get and press a button and everything magic happens and containers are created and they're destroyed if demand goes away and it all just works without you having to think about each container as an entity you care about, right? It takes a human out of being an admin, if you will. Exactly and so they see that and then they also have a lot of workloads that are running in VMs today and are going to run in VMs for many years time but they want to apply those orchestration techniques to the VMs and so I think that's what we're seeing in the VM world being pulled into this container orchestration way of thinking about things. So when you guys did the whole VC kind of tour, 13 million is a good series, eight round, congratulations. Thank you. They don't just write big, bad checks, you have to do some due diligence. What was the core problem that you guys solved that got their attention? I'll see any tier one VC and I'll see Peter Wagner at Wing, specialist, more specialty VC but two good firms. Yeah. What did they hone in on? What was the core problem that you solved? I'm sure they didn't say, oh, we're solving open stack problems, it was probably a different issue. What was the core issue? Yeah, I think the core thing that they really zeroed in on was this idea that the way you secure networks, that's an open field right now, particularly in terms of public cloud and particularly in terms of these new orchestration environments. So it's essentially people were replicating the old perimeter security model in a virtual environment and they realized that the much finer grain approach that we were taking could really redefine how you think about security in the world going forward. Specifically application development and on top of cloud. Application developers and operations folks as well. And I think that was one of the light bulbs as well was we've talked a lot about developers and how they define the application requirements. But when you start to think about operations and we talk about DevOps, but they still are two different mindsets, even if it's the same person wearing two hats. The ability to define policies on a operational level across a data center, as well as have the application developer define the specific way he wants his application to be built and combine those. That's a really important part I think is how what we do brings those worlds together. Some terms of momentum, a new company been around since May you said. You can definitely hear your passion for it as John was mentioning the, as you mentioned as well, the big $13 million check. So clearly you articulated very well just now the problem that you were trying to solve. Talk to us about, I saw on your website not only was this born out of a conversation over beers seeing a pattern here with the Brits. But also in terms of growth and I know that you're hiring, talk to us about how you're leveraging not just the momentum on the technology side, but the momentum to create a culture within Tigera that can drive your growth into the future. Yeah, I think every startup founder, one of the passions that you have building a startup is you want to build a culture that's right for where you are today, but also going to build a company long into the future. And we talk a lot about this internally and particularly when we look at our hiring plans, there's looking year ahead, there's going to be a large proportion of the company who weren't part of that founding team. So how do we create the right culture such that we maintain what we've got to start with and build on that and attract the right talent as well. So it comes out of the passion that we have but that only gets you so far, right? I think trying to build a culture of transparency, particularly in an open source based company, one of the things that attracts people into that kind of environment is they like the open community aspect of it and they expect a company internally to work in a similar way, right? So we communicate very openly with our partners about what we're trying to do. We communicate internally very clearly with all the employees about what the strategy is and how we're thinking about things. So that I think is an important part of it and allowing everyone within the team to shape that and to push the envelope themselves and to grab the community interactions. And one of the things people love is all the meetups and these kinds of events and really getting to be part of a bigger community. And I think as a relatively small company, that's what open source brings. It's what the open stack community and ecosystem has done brilliantly at and the Kubernetes world and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation that's building around that is really being what's driving the leading edge of technology in the industry now and people want to be part of that. Excellent. Andrew, talk about what you guys going to work on this year. What's your goal? So let's wrap up here, the segment of your open stack. Obviously it's cloud, it's open cloud, a lot of cloud action. What's your goal for the company? What's some of the milestones you're going to do? What kind of events do you guys want to go to to get your word out? Yeah, so for us right now, our focus is on adoption and momentum of the open source project. So obviously you don't go get a check from VCs without some idea about being able to commercialize. But one of the things we really liked about NEA as an investor was that they got the open source model and they understood that unless you build a broad based community around a valid open source offering that really works for a broad set of use cases then you're never going to be able to build a commercial company on top of that. So really all of our short and medium term objectives are around building that community. Engineering hires. Engineering hires, community advocates, the partnerships that we're building, having a lot of partnership conversations here and things like the canal project with CoreOS, integration with Tectonic, but integration with the open stack vendors as well. So contributing code is part of the display. Contributing code, absolutely. One of the things that we have is we have goals for a number of users we want to see out there and it's been fantastic seeing a large number of users adding into the community. We have hundreds of end user, large companies now participating in the community, but also contributors. We have folks like Cisco contributing code into the project and being part of what we're doing and that's fantastic and that's one of the things I tell my engineers is even if it takes you more time to work with an external partner to help shepherd a contribution through, the value to that of the community then it would have taken you to build that yourself. The value to the community of building people outside of our company who are experts in the code and who are integrating and meshing it into other things that they're doing is massive and that's a multiplier effect. It's so interesting just to end the segment, share your thoughts on just how different this mindset is just from 10 years ago. I mean, completely different. I didn't mean you would have said, hey, what are you working on now? 20% of your time tops. Get the code shipped. Absolutely and I think 10 years ago people had only just started to think about open source as a business model and there was a kind of open source 1.0 which was a cheaper, more cheerful version of. Second tier citizen. Second tier citizen. Now open source is where the innovation is happening. That is the leading edge of technology is all happening in open source and the best and the brightest engineers want to be in that space. It's also a recruiting opportunity for you guys, right? Absolutely. Your code speaks, it's like your literature. Yes, yeah. Like Martin as a keynote today, the old way was Gartner Magic Quadrant. The new way is code. Yeah, absolutely. And people look to the vibrancy of the community to see whether this is something they want to go deploy. Awesome, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your perspective. We really appreciate it. We'll have some beers later. Thank you for having us here. Yeah, we'll come up with some more great ideas over beer. There you go. All right, we are here inside theCUBE. The hot startup, fresh funding, open source, can making contributions. Thanks so much for coming on any A-funded great company. We'll be right back with more live coverage here in Silicon Valley. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin. We'll be right back with more after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.