 Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner ecosystem. So what can Fubue do for you? Well, I'm going to guess that they can take your agency to the cloud. You're correct, John. That's exactly what I'm looking at over here, the Fubue booth here on the show for AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, welcome inside live on theCUBE, John Walter, John Furrier and Josh Stella, who is the founder and CEO of Fubue. Did I get it right, by the way? You did get it right. Taking the agency to the cloud, correct? Taking the agencies to the cloud, taking companies to the cloud too, but of course this is worldwide public sector, so we're focused on the agencies today. Yeah, we were just talking before the segment started, there's just a little historical background here. You were with Amazon back in 2012 when this show started and you told me that your commission with your colleagues was to get 600 attendees. Yeah, we wanted to get 600. I think we got 750, which is classic Amazon style, right? We go over, but yeah, over, you were saying 10,000 registered this year, it's amazing. Which shows you this explosive growth in this area, in terms of the public sector. So let's talk about Fubue a little bit before we dive a little bit. Share with our viewers the core competencies, you know, what your primary mission is. So Fubue is an automation system. Fubue is a way to completely automate the cloud API surface. It's true infrastructure as code, so unlike a deployment tool that just builds something on cloud, Fubue builds it, monitors it, self heals it, modifies it over time, alerts if anything, drifts. And we've added a layer to that for policy as code. So you can actually express the rules of your organization. So if you're a government agency, those might be NIST or FSMA rules. If you're a startup, those might be, we don't open SSH to the world. Those can be just expressed as code. So Fubue fully automates the stack. It doesn't just do deployment. And we just released the team conductor that will manage dozens of AWS accounts for you. So many of our customers in financial services and other enterprises have many, many AWS accounts. Fubue allows you to kind of centralize all of that control without slowing down your developers, without getting in the way of going fast. And why is that big news? It's big news because in the past, the whole core value prop of cloud is to go fast, is to innovate, iterate, be disruptive, and move quickly. What happens though, is as you do that, at the beginning when you're starting small, it looks pretty easy, you can go fast, but you learn pretty quickly over time that things get very messy and complex. So Fubue accelerates that going fast part, but keeps everything kind of within the bounds of knowing who's running things, knowing what resources you're actually using, who built what, who has permissions to do what. So it's really this foundational layer for organizations to build and control cloud environments. Josh, one of the things we were talking about in the opening was the government's glacial pace of innovation over the years, but the pressure is on to innovate. So a lot of emphasis on innovation. In an environment that's constrained by regulations, governance, policies, so they have kind of an Achilles heel there, but cloud gives them an opportunity at a scale point to do something different. I want to dip into that, I'll set this question up by quoting a CIO I chatted with who's in the government sector. He's like, look, a cloud's like jumping out of a plane with a parachute I don't even know it's going to open up. So that's kind of a mindset, and I'm not saying he was over-generalizing, but again, to the point is trust, scale, execution, risk, it's a huge thing. How do you guys solve that problem for the agencies that want to go to the cloud? Because certainly they want to go there, I think it's a new normal as Werner said, what do you guys do to make that go away? How do you make it go faster? Sure, so Amazon and other cloud vendors have done a great job of building a very highly trusted low level infrastructure that you can put together into systems. That's really the core offering. But there's still in government agencies, as you point out, this need to follow rules and regulations and policies and check those. So one of the things Fugue does is allows you to actually turn those rules into executable compiled code. So instead of finding out you're breaking a rule a month later in some meeting somewhere that's going to loop back, it'll tell you in 10 milliseconds, and how to fix it. So we allow you to go just as fast as anyone can on cloud, but meeting all those extra constraints and so on. So you codify policies and governance type stuff, right? That's part of what we do, but we also automate the entire infrastructure. Okay, so this is what I want to kind of jump to that next point. Sure. That's cool. But it would make sense that machine learning would probably be like an interesting takeaway because everyone talks about training data models and it sounds like what you're doing. If you codify the policies, you probably set up well for growing and scaling in that world. Is that something that's on your radar? How do you guys look at that role? Okay, I got machine learning coming down the pike. Everyone wants to get their hands on some libraries and they want to get to unsupervised at some point. Yes. What are you doing? It's a great question. So Fugue is really a bridge to that future where the entire infrastructure layer is automated and dynamic. And that's what you're talking about, where you have machine learning that are helping you make decisions about how to do computing. A lot of folks aren't ready for that yet. They're still thinking about the cloud as kind of remote data center. In our view, it's actually just a big distributed computer. And so when you think about things like whether it's machine learning or just algorithms to run over time to modify these environments and make them more efficient, Fugue is definitely built to get you there, but we start where you're comfortable now, which is just enforcing what you have. Yeah, of course. It's still early, toes in the water, we have all kinds of data issues and so you can see the growth there. So the question is, what is the low hanging fruit for you? What are the use cases? Where are you guys winning? And what's new with your codifying the policies that you're releasing here? Sure. What's the use cases and what are you guys releasing? Yeah, so a common use case for us is integration with CI CD and DevOps for the entire infrastructure chain. So you'll have organizations that want to go to a fully automated deployment management of infrastructure. And what they've learned in the past is without Fugue, they might get some of the deployment automated with a traditional CM tool or something like this, but because they're not doing the self healing, the constant maintenance on the environment, the updating of the environment, the alerting on it, there's a big missing link in terms of that automation. So we're getting a lot of resonance in the financial services sector in folks who are sophisticated on cloud and are doing large scale cloud operations. So if you think about a Netflix can build full automation for themselves because they're Netflix, but not everyone fits in that boat. So Fugue is sort of the sorts of capabilities that Netflix built in a very specific way for themselves. We don't use their tools. We're a general purpose solution to that same class of problems. So really where we're winning is in automation of, again, deployments and operations of those deployments, but also in things like policy. And we're seeing that not just in government but in the private sector as well. So what are the big bottlenecks? What is the roadblocks for the industry? The roadblocks for the industry certainly are bringing sort of legacy patterns to cloud. Imagining it's a remote data center, thinking of it as virtual machines and storage instead of just infinite compute and infinite resources to put together. So the mindset's the bottlenecks, absolutely. It's cultural, yeah, yeah. And skill set because in the DevOps cloud world, everything should be code. And therefore everyone has to be a developer. And so that's a little new. Is scale a big issue for you guys with your customers? Is that something that they're looking for? What's the kind of scope of some of your customers in your use cases in the government cloud? Yeah, sure, absolutely. I mean, a lot of us came from AWS, so we know how to build things at scale. But yeah, a lot of folks start small with Fugue, but they go to very large very quickly has been our experience. So scale across dozens or hundreds of AWS. That's where the automation, if they're not set up properly, it bites them in the butt pretty much. Absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, we get a lot of that too, going back in and helping people put their system back together the right way for cloud because they went there from the distance. All right, so what's the magnified learnings from this? From your experience with your company, multiple rounds of financing, you guys are well financed. One of the best venture capital firms, NEA, GreatBack, are you guys doing well? Over the years, what have you learned? What's the magnification of the learnings and how do you apply it to today's marketplace? We are in a massive transition. We're just beginning to see the effects of this transition. So from 1947 until the cloud, you just had faster, smaller, von Neumann machines in a box. You had any acts that got down to the size of your wristwatch. The cloud is intrinsically different. And so there is an opportunity now, that's a challenge, but it's a massive opportunity to get this new generation of computing right. So I'd say the learnings for me as a technologist coming into a CEO role are how to relate these deeply technical concepts to the world in ways that are approachable and that can show people a path that they want to get involved with. But I think the learnings that I've had at AWS and at Fugue are this is the beginning of this ride. It's not going to end at containers. It's not going to end at Lambda. It's going to continue to evolve. And the cloud in 10 years is going to look massively different than it does now. So when you said to get it right, yes, computer, I mean, such as or in what way, I mean, we have paths, right? You have routes you can take. So you're saying that there are a lot of options that will be hitfalls and the others that will be great opportunities. Well, that's absolutely right. So for example, betting on the wrong technologies too soon in terms of where the cloud is going to finally land is a box canyon, right? That's an architectural dead end. If you cannot compose systems across all these disparate cloud services, the application boundary, the system boundary is now drawn across services. You used to be able to open an IDE and see your application. Well, now that might be spread across virtual machines, containers, Lambda, virtual disks, block storage, machine learning services, human language recognition services. That's your application boundary. So if you can't understand all of that in context, you're in real trouble because the change is accelerating. If you look at the rate of new services year-over-year in the cloud, it's going up, not down. So the future's tougher. So if I'm a government service though, and I think that John just talked about this, I'm just now getting confidence, right? And I'm really feeling a little bit better because I've got somebody to hold my hand. And then I hear on the other hand say, we have to make sure we get this right. So now I'm backing off the edge again. I'm not so sure. So how do you get your public sector client base to take those risks or take those daring steps, if you will? You know, we've had a lot of really great conversations and have a lot of great relationships in public sector. What we're seeing there is like in the commercial world. I mean, public sector wasn't that far behind commercial and cloud. When I was at Amazon five years ago, I worked mostly with public sector customers and they were trying hard there. They were champions already moving there. So one of the things that Fugue does very effectively is because we have this ability to deterministically, programmatically follow rules. It takes it off of the humans having to go and check. And that's always the slow and expensive part. So we can give a lot of assurance to these government agencies that, for example, if one of their development teams chooses to deploy something to cloud in the past, they'd have to go look for that. Well, with Fugue, they literally cannot deploy it unless it's correct. And that's what I mean by get it right, is the developer who's sitting there, and I've been a developer for decades, they want to do things by the rules. They want to do things correctly, but they don't always want to read the stack of books like this and check their boxes. So with Fugue, you just get a compiler error and you keep going. Josh, I want to ask you about a new category we see emerging. It's not really not mainstream yet, but Wikibon Research and SiliconANGLE Cube. We get to see things a little bit early. Plus we have a data science team to squint through the predictive analytics. But one thing that's clear is SaaS businesses are merging. Whether so, SaaS is growing at an astounding rate, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service. I mean, JASA doesn't think see it that way. I don't think you do either. It's infrastructure and SaaS pretty much. So pretty much everyone's going to, at some point, be a cloud service provider. And there'll be a long tail distribution, we believe, on niche to completely huge. And the big ones are going to be the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Googles, but then there's going to be service providers that are just going to emerge. They're going to be on clouds with governments. So we believe that to be true. If you believe that to be true, then the question is, how do I scale it? So now I'm a solution architect in an enterprise. And like you said, it's intrinsically different in the cloud than it was, say on-premise or even the traditional enterprise computing. I got to now completely change my architectural view. If you think it's a big computer, then you got to be an operating systems guy. You got to say, okay, I was a linker, there's a loader, there's a compiler, I got subsystems, I got IO. You got to start thinking that way. How do you talk to your friends and colleagues and customers around how to be a new solutions architect? Yeah, so I think it's a balancing act because we are at this transition stage, right? The modern cloud is still a Prius and the future cloud is the Tesla in terms of how customers use it. We're in this transition phase in technologies. So you have to have one foot in both camps. Immutable infrastructure patterns are incredibly important to any kind of new development. And if you go to the fugue.co site or O'Reilly, we wrote a little book with them on immutable infrastructure patterns. So the notion there is you don't maintain anything, you just replace it. So you stand up a compute instance, Werner likes to talk about these are cattle, not pets, or paper cup computing, that's right. You never touch it, you never do configuration management, you crumple it up and throw it away and make a new one. That's the right new pattern. But a lot of the older systems that people still rely upon don't work that way. So you have to have a foot in each camp as a solutions architect in cloud or as a CEO of a cloud company. You have to understand both of those and understand how to bridge between them. And their roles within the architecture as well. They coexist, this coexistence. Absolutely. You know, it's interesting you said everything's going to be, everyone's going to become a service provider. I'd put that a little differently. The only surface that matters in the future is APIs. Everything is APIs. And how you express your APIs is a business question. But fundamentally that's where we are. So whether you're Salesforce or the SaaS, I really don't like the infrastructure and SaaS delineation because I think the line's very blurred. It's just APIs that you compose into. Well that's a tough one, this is a good debate we could have, certainly if we could do it live on theCUBE and arm wrestle ourselves here and talk about it. But one of the things about the cloud that's amazing is the horizontal scalability of it. So you have great scalability horizontally, but also you need to have specialism at the app layer. So you can't pick one or the other. They're not mutually exclusive. That's right. You say, okay, what's the stack look like? So if everything's an API, where the hell's the stack? Yeah, well that's why we write Fugue. Because Fugue does unify all that. You can design one composition in Fugue, one description of that stack, and then run the whole thing as a process like you would run Apache. So you're such a wrapping system, a system around pre-exec... You like almost what Docker containers is for microservices you are for imputing. And including the containers managers. So that's just one more service to us. That's exactly right. And you asked me earlier, how does this affect agency? So one thing we're really excited about today is we just announced today, we're live on GovCloud. So we support GovCloud now. You can run in the commercial regions, you can run in GovCloud. And one of the cool things you can do with Fugue because of that system wrapping capability is build systems in public regions and deploy them on GovCloud and they'll just work instead of having to figure out the differences. That's the other thing about the cloud. Standing up something is a verb now. I haven't stand this up. That used to be cloud language, now that's basically app language. I think what you're getting at here is something near to my heart, which is all there are any more are applications. Talking about infrastructure is kind of like calling a chair an assembly of wood. What we're really talking about are these abstractions and the application is the first class. I want to be comfortable and sit down and take a load off. That's right. That's what a chair does. You don't want to stand up, you want to sit down. And there's different, there's a Tesla of the chairs and then there's the wooden hard chair for your lower back, the back problem. Exactly, exactly. The Tesla really is a good use case because that points to the, what I call the fine jewelry of a product, right? And they really artistically built amazing product where the value is not so much just the car, maybe there's some innovations with the car, I've got that with electric, but it's the data. The data powering the car then brings back to the question of the apps and the data. Again, I want to spend all my time thinking about how to create a sustainable, competitive advantage and serve my customers rather than figure out how to architect solutions that require configuration management and tons of labor. This is where the shift is. This is where the shift is going from non-differentiated loperations to high value added capabilities. It's not like jobs are going on. Yeah, some jobs are going to go away, I believe that, but it's like saying bank tellers we're going to kill the banking industry and more branches opened up as a result. Oh yeah, this is the democratization of computing as a service and that's only going to grow computing as a whole. Getting back to the kind of fine jewelry, you talked about data as part of that. I believe another part of that is the human experience of using something. And I think that is often missing in enterprise software. So, you'll see in the current release of Fugue we just put into beta a very, we've spent about two years on it, a graphic user interface that shows you everything about the system in an easily digestible way. And so, I think that the effect of the iPhone on computing in the enterprise is important to understand too. The person that's sitting there at an enterprise environment during their day job gets in their Tesla because they also love beautiful things. There's a lot of other places for you guys to do that democratization and liberation, if you will, and to the government cloud and public sector is the public sector they need. Right now, they've been on antiquated systems for, yeah, I'm not only just antiquated, siloed, you know, cobalt systems, mainframe, we've got a lot of legacy stuff. There is, there's a lot of legacy stuff and there are a lot of inefficiencies in the process model and how things get done. And so, we love that AWS has come in and when we were there, we helped do that part and now with Fugue, we want to take these customers to kind of the next level of being able to move forward quickly. Well, if you want to take your agency to the cloud, Fugue is your vehicle to do that. Josh Stella, founder, CEO, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. Thanks much. We appreciate it. We'll continue live from Washington D.C., nation's capital here at AWS Public Sector Summit 2017 on theCUBE. All right, great job.