 Hello, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California, beginning in 2022, kicking off the new year with a great conversation. We're with folks from Down Under, two co-founders of Instacluster. Pete Lilly, CEO, Ben Brumhead, the CTO, Instacluster Success. He's been on theCUBE before 2018 at Amazon Reinvent. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for piping in from Down Under into Palo Alto. Thanks John, it's really good to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. So I love the name of Instacluster. It conjures up cloud, cloud scale, modern applications, serverless, it just gives me a feel of like things coming together, spinning me up a cluster of these kinds of feelings. The cloud is here, open source has grown. That's what you guys are in the middle of. Take a minute to explain what you guys do real quick. And this open source cloud intersection that's just going supernova right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Instacluster is on a mission to really enable the world's ambitions to use open source technology. And we do that specifically at the data layer. And we primarily do that through what we call our platform offering. And think of it as the way to make it super easy, super scalable, super reliable, way to adopt open source technologies at the data layer to build cutting edge applications in the cloud. Today, used by customers all over the world, we started the business in Australia, but very quickly become a global business. But we are the business that sits behind some of the most successful brands that are building massively scalable cloud-based applications. And you're dead right. We sit at a real intersection of kind of four things. One is open source adoption, which is incredibly powerful journey and a wave that's kind of driving the future direction of IT. You've got managed services or managed operations and moving those onto a platform like Instacluster. You've got the adoption of cloud and cloud is a wave that like open source is a wave. And then you've got the growth of data. Everything is so data-driven these days that and data is just except the business and our customers. In a lot of cases, when we work with our customers on Instacluster today, it's the application and the data, the data is the business. Ben, I want to get your thoughts as a CTO because open source and technology in cloud has been a real game changer. If you go back prior to cloud, open source was very awesome, still great, freedom. We've got code. It's just the scale of open source and then cloud came along, changed the game. So open source and then new business models became. So commercial open source software is now an industry. It's not just open source, hey, free software and then maybe a red hats out there or someone like a red hat will have some premium support. There's been innovation on the business model side. So matching technology, innovation with the business model has been a big change in the past many, many years. And this past year in particular, that's been key and open source, open core. These are the things that people are talking about and license changes. This is a big discussion because you could be on the wrong side of history if you make the wrong decision here. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it's also worth, I guess, taking a step back and understanding a little bit about why have people gravitated towards open source and the cloud beyond kind of the hippie freedoms of, oh, I can see the code and I have ownership and everything's free and great. And I think the reason why it's really taken off in a commercial setting, in an enterprise setting is velocity, right? How much easier is it to go reach and grab a open source tool that you can download, you can grab, you can compile yourself, you can make it work the way you want it to do to solve a problem here and now versus the old school way of doing it, which is with, I have to go download a trial version. I'll know some of the features a lot. I've got to go talk to a procurement or a salesperson to kind of go and solve the problem that I have and then I've got to get that approved by my own purchasing department and do we have budget and all of a sudden it's like way, way, way harder to solve the problem in front of you as an engineer. Whereas with open source, I just go grab it and I move on, right? I've achieved something for the day, right? Yeah, based on all that friction that comes in, you got a problem, oh, open source, just get a hammer and hammer that nail. Wait a, whoa, whoa. I got to stand in line, I got to jump over hoops, I got to do all these things. This is the hassle and friction. Exactly, and this is why it's often called, you know, one of the most impressive things about that. And I think on the cloud side, it's the same thing, but for hardware and capability and compute and memory, right? You know, previously if you wanted compute, right, oh, you got to lodge a ticket, you got to ask someone to rack a server in a data center, you know, you got to deal with three different departments. Oh my goodness, you know, how painful is that just to get a server up to go run and do something, right? That's just pulling your hair out. Whereas with the cloud, that's an API call, right? Or clicking a few buttons on a console, right? And off you go, you now combine those two things. And I would say that software engineers are probably the most productive they've ever been, you know, in the last 20 years, right? You know, I know sometimes it doesn't look like that, but their ability to solve problems in front of them, you know, especially using external, you know, stuff is way, way, way better. Right. I think you're under, I think you're under understanding that right there. I mean, the fact of the matter is they are productive. They're putting security into the code right in the CICD pipeline. So, I mean, this is highly agile right now. So, you know, coders are highly productive and efficient and changing the way people are rolling out applications. So, you know, game is over. Open source is won, open core is winning. And this is where the people are confused. This is why I got you guys here. What's the difference between open source and open core? What's the big deal? Why is this so important? Yeah, yeah. No, great, great question. So really like the difference between open source and open core, it comes down to, I guess really it's a business model, right? So open core contains open source software, right? That's 100% true, right? So usually what will happen is a company will take a project that is open source that has an existing community around it or they've built it or they've contributed it or however that's kind of that genesis has happened. And then what they'll do is they'll look at all the edges around that open source project. And I think one of some enterprise features that don't exist in the open source project that we can build ourselves and then sprinkle those around the edges and sell that as a proprietary offering, right? So what you get is you get the core functionality is powered by an open source project and quite often the code is identical, right? But there's all these kind of little features around the outside that might make it a little bit easier to use in an enterprise environment, right? Or might make it a bit easier to do some operations side of things and they'll charge you a license for that, right? So you end up in a situation where you might have adopted the open source project but then now if you want feature X, Y or Z you then need to go and fork over some money and go into that whole licensing kind of contract, right? So that's the core difference between open core and open source, right? Open core has got all these little proprietary bits kind of sprinkled around the outside. So how would you describe your platform for your customers? So you guys are succeeding, your growth is great, we're going to get in that second but as you guys have been steadily expanding the platform of open source data technologies what is the main solution that you guys are offering customers? Managing open source technologies, what's the main value that you guys are offering to the customer? Yeah, definitely. So really the main value that we bring to the customer is we allow them to I guess successfully adopt open source databases or database technologies, right? Without having to go down that open core path, right? You know, open core can be quite attractive but what it does mean is you end up with all these kind of like mini oracles, right? Or still having to pay the toll in terms of license fees, right? What we do however is we take those open source projects and we deliver that as a database as a service on our managed platform, right? So we take care of all the operations the pain, the care, the feeding, patch management, backups everything that you need to do, right? Whether you're running it yourself or getting someone else to run it we'll take care of that for you, right? But we do it with the pure upstream open source version, right? So that means you get full flexibility, full portability and more importantly you're not paying those expensive license fees, right? Plus it's easy, it just works, right? You get that full cloud native experience and you get your database right now when you need it. And basically you guys saw the problem of one, I got this legacy or existing license technology I got to pay for and it may not be enabling modern applications and they don't have a team to go do all the work, right? Or some companies have like a whole army of people just embedded in open source, that's very rare. So it sounds like you guys can go over they get that right, is that right? You have to do that one? Yeah, so definitely, so we definitely enable it if you don't have that capability yourself, right? You know, we're the outsourced option to that, right? It's obviously a lot more than that but it's one of those pressures that companies nowadays face, right? And if we take it back to that concept of developer velocity, right? You know, you really want them working on your core business problems you don't want them having to fight database infrastructure, right? So you've also got the opportunity cost of having your existing engineers working on running this stuff themselves or running a proprietary or an open call solution themselves when really you should be outsourcing, you know preferably to Instacluster, but hey, let's be honest you know, you should be outsourcing it to anyone so that your engineers can be focusing on your core business problems, right? And really letting them work on the things that make you money, right? It's very smart, you guys have a great business model because one of the things we've been reporting on theCUBE on SiliconANGLE as well is that the database market is becoming so diverse for the right reasons. You know, databases are everywhere now and code is, you know, becoming horizontally scalable for the cloud, but it vertically specialized with machine learning. So you're seeing applications and new, new database no one database rules the world anymore and it's not about Oracle anymore or anything else. So open source fits nicely into this kind of platform view. How do you guys decide which technologies go in to the platform that you support? Yeah, great, great question. So we certainly live in a world of, you know, I call it polyglot persistence, but you know, a simple way of referring that to that is the right tool for the right job, right? And so, you know, we really live in this world where engineers will reach for a database that solves a specific problem and solves it well, right? As you mentioned, you know, companies they're no longer Oracle shops or they're no longer MySQL shops, right? You know, you'll quite often see services or applications of teams using two or three different databases to solve different challenges, right? And so what we do at Instacluster is we really look at what are the technologies that our existing customers are using and using side by side with say some of the existing Instacluster offerings. We take great lead from that. We also look at what are the different projects out there that are solving use cases that we don't address at the moment, right? So it's very use case driven, right? Whether it's, hey, we need something that's better at say time series or we need something that's a little bit better at translitical workloads, right? Or something that's a bit of a better fit for a case, right? And we work with those. And I think importantly, we also have this view that in a world of polyglot persistence, right? You've also got data and integration challenges, right? So how do you keep data sync between these two different database types, right? So we're also looking at how do we integrate those better and support our users on that particular journey, right? So it really comes down to one, listening to your customers, saying what's out there and what's the right use case for a given technology and then we look to adopt that. That's great. Been machine learning completely on fire right now. People love it, they want more of it. AI, everything, everyone's putting AI on every label. If it does any automation, it's magic, it's AI. So really we know what that's happening. It's just really database work and machine learning under the covers. The business model here has completely changed too because now with open source as a platform, you have more scale, you have differentiation opportunities. I'm sure business is doing great. Give us an update on the business side of Instacluster. What's clicking for you guys? What's working? What's the success trajectory look like? Yeah, I mean, it's been an amazing journey for us. I mean, when you think about it, we found it in 2013. So we're eight years into our journey. When we started the business, we were focused entirely on Cassandra, but as Ben talked about, we've gone and diversified those technologies onto the platform, that common experience that we offer customers. So you can adopt any one of the number of open source technologies in a highly integrated way and really grow off the back of that. It's driving some phenomenal growth in our business and we've really enjoyed growth rates that have been sort of 70, 80, 100% year on year since we've started the business. And that's led to an enormous scale and opportunities for us to invest further in the platform, invest further in additional technologies in a really highly opinionated way. I think Ben talked about that, new integrations and that becomes incredibly complex as you have many, many kind of offerings on the platform. So Instacluster is much more targeted in terms of how we want to take our business forward and the growth opportunity before us. I mean, we think about being deeply expert and deeply capable in a smaller subset of technologies that those which actually integrate and interoperate for customers, they can build solutions in, for their applications, but do that on Instacluster using its platform with that common experience. And so we've grown to sort of 270 people now around the world. We started in Australia, we've got a strong presence in the US. We recently acquired a business called Creditive in Europe, which was a Postgres specialist organization. And that was because, as Ben said, before talking about those technologies, we bring onto a platform, Postgres, huge market, disrupting Oracle, exactly the right place that we want to be as Instacluster with pure open source offerings. We bought then into the Instacluster family much this year. And we did that to accelerate it onto our platform. And so we think about that, we think about future technologies on that platform, what we can do and introduce to even provide an even greater and richer experience, cadence is new to our platform. Super exciting for us because not only is it kind of something that provides workflow as code as an open source experience, but as a glue technology to build kind of complex kind of business logic for applications. It actually drives workloads across Cassandra, Postgres and Kafka, which are kind of core technologies on a platform. Super exciting for us and big market. Interesting kind of a group of adopters. You've got Uber kind of leading the charge there with that and us partnering with them now. We see that as a massive growth opportunity for our business. And as we introduce analytics capabilities, exploration, visibility features into the platform all built on open source. So you can build a complete kind of top to bottom kind of data services layer using open source technology for your platform. I think that's an incredibly exciting part of the business and great opportunity for us. Opportunities to raise money, more acquisitions on the horizon. Well, I think acquisitions where it makes sense. I mean, you know, I talked about credit where we looked at credit and we knew the Postgres was a mature market and we were coming to that market reasonably late. So, you know, the way we thought about that from a strategy perspective was we wanted to accelerate the richness of the capability on our platform that we introduced and became GA last year. So we think about when we're selecting that kind of technology, you know, that's the perfect opportunity to consider an acquisition for us. So as we look at what we're going to introduce in the platform over the next sort of two, three, four years that's that sort of decision that we'll or that sort of thinking or frames our thinking on what we would do from an acquisition perspective. I think the other way we think about acquisitions is new markets, you know so thinking about globally, you know, entry into the Japanese market, does that make sense because of, you know, kind of in language requirements to be able to support customers? Because one of the things that's really, really important to us is, you know, the platform is fantastic for scaling, growing, deploying, running, operating this very powerful open source technology. But so too is the importance of having deep operational open source expertise kind of backing and being there to call on if a customer is having an application issue. And that kind of drives the need for us to have in-country kind of market support. And so when we think about those sort of opportunities, I think we think about acquisition there as like another string to the bow in terms of getting presence in a particular or an emerging market that we're interested in. Awesome. Ben, final question to you is on the technology front, what do you see this year emerging a lot of changes in 2021? We got another year of pandemic situation going on. Hopefully it goes by fast. Hopefully it won't be three years, but again, who knows? But you're seeing the cloud open source actually taking as a tailwind from the pandemic. New opportunities, companies are refreshing. They have to, they're forced. There's going to be a lot more changes. What do you see as a, from a tech perspective in open source, open core and in general for large companies as open source continues to power the innovation? Yeah. So definitely, you know, the pandemic as a tailwind, you know, particularly for those companies adopting the cloud, right? You know, I think it's forced a lot of their hands as well. You know, their five year plans have certainly become two or three year plans around moving to the cloud. And certainly, you know, that contest for talent means that, you know, you really want to be keeping your engineers focused on core things. So definitely, I think we're going to see a continuation of that. We're going to see the continuation of open source, you know, dominating when it comes to database and the database market the same with cloud. You know, I think we're going to see the, you know the gradual march towards different adoption models within the cloud. So, you know, serverless, right? You know, I think we're going to see that kind of slowly mature. I think it's still a little bit early in the hype cycle there but we're going to start to see that mature. On the ML AI side of things as well, you know people have been talking about it for the last three or four years. I'm sure to people in the industry, they're like, oh, you know, we're over that. But I think on the broader industry, we're still quite early in that particular cycle as people figure out how do they use the data that they've got, right? How do they use that? How do they train models on that? How do they serve inference on that, right? And how do they unlock other things with lower down on their data stack as well when it comes to, you know, ML and AI, right? You know, we're seeing great research papers come out from AI-powered indexes, right? So the AI is actually speeding up queries, let alone actually solving business problems, right? So I think we're going to see more and more of that kind of come out. I think we're going to see more and more process capabilities and organizational responses to this explosion of data. Super excited to see people talking about concepts and organizational concepts like data mesh, right? I think that's going to be fundamental as we move forward and have to manage the complexities of dealing with this, right? So it's, you know, it's an old industry data, you know, when you think about it, you know, as soon as you had computers, you had data and it's an old industry from that perspective. But I feel like we're only just getting started and it's just hating up. So super excited to see what 2022 holds for us. Every company will be an open source, AI company has to be no matter what. Well, thanks for sharing the data, Pete and Ben, the co-founders of Instacluster. We'll get our CUBE AI working on this data we got today from you guys. Thanks for sharing. Great stuff. Thanks for sharing the open core perspective. Really appreciate it. And congratulations on your success. Companies do need more Instaclusters out there. You guys doing a great job. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks, John. Cheers, Matt. It's a CUBE conversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.