 Live from Santa Clara, California, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Nextwork 2015. Brought to you by Juniper Networks. Now your host, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. You are watching theCUBE, a special presentation for our flagship event where we go out to the events to extract the sizzling noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, Joe Meiko, Stu Miniman, analyst at wikibond.com on infrastructure routing networks. Our next guest is Luca Salvatore with DigitalOcean, Network Engineering Manager. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, it's good to be here. Love your company. You guys have been doing great stuff. It's certainly on DevOps, enabling the kind of scale that people want at a great price point. So congratulations. Thanks very much. You have a great company. You're founders in the past. So I got to ask you, Juniper really has been around for a long time. Obviously powering a lot of the networks. They're the big whale in networking. But it's changing, right? So as a customer, you're here at the customer summit. Do you like what you're hearing? I mean, Juniper has to enable you to go faster. I do. Stronger, more agile, more security. Definitely. Talk about that. What are you hearing? Yeah, it's great. The whole announcements around Contrail and the new switching platforms I'm really interested in. The QFX 5200 is something that we've been a heavy user of the QFX 5100. And the 5200 seems like a pretty good step in the right direction. So I'm sure we'll evaluate that fairly heavily. And the whole concept of this is how software is starting to drive networking and becoming more and more prevalent in the network engineer's life. So it's an exciting time to be doing this type of stuff. We heard Jennifer Blatnick earlier talking about kind of the guiding thesis of Juniper's strategy and all about automation orchestration. That's cloud, right? That's the future. You guys live that every day. We do. What has to get done to make it go better? What are the things that you're working on? So we have just done a whole automated deployment sort of revamp of the way we deploy our data centers. So being a company that's grown so quickly, we need a way to quickly deploy racks and whole data centers. So we've come up with a whole system using Juniper Zero Touch provisioning, which now allows us to basically plug a switch in and it just builds itself. So it means that the network team doesn't need to console onto a switch, copy and paste a configuration onto it. Our data center team just plugs it in and it pretty much builds itself. So the guys are playing cards now? Yeah, pretty much. Basically, yeah. I mean, what are they doing now? I mean, that's why they're playing cards. I mean, the data center team still has a tough job of racking and stacking, but once they tell us it's ready, we just sit back and watch it build. So what used to take us two days can be done now in minutes, five, 10 minutes really. It's really amazing. It's great stuff. Look, can you kind of sketch out for us a little bit about your network, how big it is, how many people you have and what is that growth portfolio? How often are you adding switches? How often are you adding data centers? How does that look like? So in terms of data centers, we've got 11 now. Our most recent one was in Toronto, which we opened about a month ago. It's the second one we've opened this year. Frankfurt was before that. Previous year we've opened, I think we opened three data centers. So typically we're opening three to four. We've got three planned for next year. So our data center footprint is getting bigger. In terms of customers, we've got hundreds of thousands of customers. We started in 2012 with just a few thousand, hosting a few thousand droplets and now we're hosting hundreds of thousands of droplets. If you look at our growth pattern on NetCraft, it's a company that tracks this type of stuff and you can just see it just sort of start really slowly and then pretty much just hockey stick straight up. So we're actually going by NetCraft's rankings with the second biggest hosting provider in the world and we've done that in three years. So it's been amazing. So Luca, storage and networks are the two things that have typically in the past held us back because I got to bring gear in, I either need capacity or I need ports. Message Juniper's been, obviously, you need another box. Somebody's got to bring that in and plug it in. But other than that, we should be able to take things that took weeks or month and boil that down to seconds or minutes. What's your experience been and what solutions are you using from Juniper and how does that speed up your activities? So from Juniper, we typically purchase a whole bunch of switches at once. When we build a new data center, we have an idea of what we need before we start. So we typically build out, say, 12 racks. We're using QFX switches at the top of rack. We build a pretty simple spine and leaf topology using all Juniper gear. We have AXs in the core and MXs up at the edge. And with that initial build out of 12 racks, we can support a few hundred thousand VMs in that. So we track the numbers fairly carefully and when we see we're getting to around 50% capacity, we sort of have a shopping list of stuff we need and we just go off to our Juniper reps and say, just send us all this stuff again and we'll start again. So it's a pretty seamless process for us these days. Are you using the contrail solution also? The contrail is a thing that we have evaluated heavily. We do have a SDN project, which is kicking off right now really. Contrail is very interesting, so it's something that we are definitely looking at. Okay, so I guess what's moving you towards SDN? What are some of the key things that you're looking at? What's it gonna transform for your business? So for us, the key driver for SDN is just the features it provides. So because we've grown so quickly, some of the features that are needed are sort of almost lacking from our cloud. We've just released floating IP, which is a great new feature and it's actually hugely popular already. But SDN solution will also enable us to sort of redesign our network. So typically we've had a pretty big layer two network, which most people know is not a great way of doing things. Something like contrail will allow us to do layer three down to the top of rack and let the hypervisor pretty much take care of everything else by building an overlay across the physical network, which will manage. So it's really exciting. Okay, and is security part of the discussion for making a change when you go to SDN? Security is definitely a topic of interest, so we want to start being able to do things like virtual private clouds for customers, which is obviously a hindrance to people who need a, well, it's a hindrance to not have that product for customers who need that type of security. So yeah, we're always looking at all the things we can improve on. Look, I want to get your take on some of the messaging that you never saw in the switch, it's certainly the 5200, they're talking about an instant evolution, which is cool, I like the marketing, it's got a good ring to it. But you're an interesting situation with DigitalOcean, you're growing really fast, congratulations. But you're also building out, same time you're re-architecting and positioning for that next level of inflection that's going to go straight up or however the hockey stick will shape whatever the trajectory is. What do you guys look for? Do you think it's an instant evolution and what do you need right now? Because to continue that growth, it's challenging, right? You got to do a lot of, you're building out in real time. So what is the thing about the 5200 that gets your attention? Is it the density? Is it the latency? The thing that drove us to the whole QFX range to start with and the 5100 was 40 gig port. So we're building 40 gig down to the hypervisor now. And the 5100 was a 24 port, 40 gig switch, expandable to 32 ports with some expansion modules. It's great to see that the 5200 is now just a fixed form, 32 gig, 40, 32 port, 40 gig switch, it's a tongue twister. It's a tongue twister. And then even getting more 40 gig ports, I think 64 port is what it goes to as well now. So that basically just means that you can cram more servers into a rack, you can have more spines, more leaf switches. And it means basically you need less hardware to do the same job that you did with previous models. What about analytics? Obviously you don't have things, you're in, you're in the engine room, baby network is the engine room of future. So what are you guys doing with that analytics? You need to get some data out of there. Yes, analytics is something that we are very, very interested in because we don't have a lot of it right now. We pull most of our data from the hypervisor. And that's something where Contrail is really good with analytics as well. So we're really excited to be able to start seeing more about what's going on in our network because actually right now it is lacking a little bit. So any new features that enable that to be easier and more easily found is great and we'll definitely get into that in the next few months. This is hard when you're scaling so quickly. Some of these are nice to have features sort of just have to wait until you have the time. You've got to wait until you grow into it, right? Definitely, definitely. But it's a good headroom for you guys. Yes, and now that we've got, our company has grown significantly in terms of staff members, we've got people now that have time to look at this type of stuff. So you'll definitely see. Nobody's playing cards at Digital Ocean, you wish. We actually had a poker night a few weeks ago but that was more of a reward. That was outside of business hours, yeah. So, Luca, you guys work with a lot of developers as your customers, can you talk a little bit about kind of the developer culture? How it is working with Juniper? See things like, you guys are mentioned at DockerCon, I know you said you sent some people there. How much are your customers pushing you? How much are you pushing Juniper? And what do you see changing in the networking space? So, I mean, we're the cloud built by developers for developers, that's our, I think it's from the front page of our website. We're big in the developer industry because people like the $5 droplet, it's cheap, it's fast performing and it's a really good product. We have a great team of software engineers who are really involved in the community. We have a community team who's really involved in all the different events. We host events at our office. So, yeah, the developer community is something that is very important to Digital Ocean and something that we will continue to grow and keep going with. In terms of, from a networking perspective, DevOps or NetDev is something that is becoming more and more important for network engineers. So, I know in the network engineering team, almost all of us can write some type of code, be it Python or whatever else. We've got network developers who actually work in the networking team now who are building internal tools for the network team and helping us with our automation. And I think as we get more and more into our SDN strategy, we're going to start pushing things like Contrail or whatever it might be to cater for our needs more and more. One of the more interesting things in the keynote is Juniper talked about how they have a strong software heritage, but they don't yet run a software business. And if you think traditionally on budgets, it's like, all right, well, I mean, you might not have yearly, but kind of regularly, okay, here's my network budget. This is what I have to spend. What's your mindset internally about purchasing more? I mean, the cloud model is usually more on demand. Can you guys see that shift of moving from buying boxes to disaggregating hardware, software? Where's your thoughts internally about that? That's an interesting question. I honestly hadn't thought about it too much. And before I got here, we're always going to need hardware. It's just the nature of being an infrastructure as a service company. If we can buy hardware that we can start to maybe run our own software on, then I can see the benefits of that as well. White box switching is becoming more and more popular over the past few months, I guess. There's a lot of companies who are doing this type of stuff now and it's great to see Juniper sort of taking that leap into the whole DevOps thing. So it's hard to say. I see it becoming more and more prevalent. What it means for the networking team at DO, I'm not really sure yet. We're just focused on making sure we're getting to where our customers need to be and keeping everything stable right now. Yeah, so with your services, one of the biggest challenges must be kind of controlling costs and understanding this. Can you talk a little bit about how networking fits into the cost? How does Juniper help you? Why haven't you guys just gone kind of white box and done some of those solutions? Yeah, we evaluated some white box stuff a while ago. The reason that we liked Juniper is because, in my mind, Junos is by far the best network operating system around the command line is so much better than anything else on the market. The white box stuff, basically it's a whole another skill set that we had to learn and the whole team was good at Juniper. We all liked Juniper. Didn't really see a reason to change. We have a great team of Juniper, account reps and SMEs and we buy a lot of stuff from them so we get some good deals. They're really on the point with getting us trial gear, we're evaluating about the QFX 10K. So we have a really good relationship with Juniper and didn't really want to change things. It's just easy. Look, I got to ask you about DevOps because that's been coming out for a long time. Early days of cloud, go back to 2009, really cloud was starting to really, that DevOps culture started to really grow. Now it's mainstream, right? So what is DevOps to you guys and your customers? Because you see Docker being very successful containers. You start to see them out on new development model where infrastructure as code is really important to the developers. They want to program the infrastructure. They don't want to get in the weeds on configuration management, all the provisioning stuff that goes on that quite frankly you're enabling. So talk about the dynamic right now. Give us a snapshot of what's happening in DevOps. To me, it's just everyone being able to write some form of code, whether it's a script to make a config change on a switch or it's actually developing some type of application. And you're seeing that the more people that are able to write code and come up with their own software, it just makes the world, makes the IT world at least a better place to work in because there's all these new ideas, all these new applications, that just make life easier for everyone. So it's interesting from a networking perspective because network engineers typically haven't been people who have written code or who have developed stuff and that's shifting now. So I think in the next year, you'll start to see more people talking about, well from a networking perspective, people talking about NetDev or network developers. And they're closer to the action too. I mean, go back a decade or so ago, network guys would do their job and they'd be playing cards and having beers out at the pubs. But now they're so close to the action and they're actually can see the enablement. What's the coolest thing that you've seen at DigitalOcean that's happened above you that you guys have enabled that you go, wow, that blew me away, mind blowing. The launch of our floating IP address product, which was I think two weeks ago, was probably some of the coolest stuff that we've done as a company. It's enabled customers to now have an IP address that floats between two or more droplets and it's high availability features which were lacking from our cloud. So that was a big effort by our software engineering team and they had to rewrite a whole bunch of code and do a whole bunch of stuff that I don't understand. But it was really exciting. We had a big launch party and it was great. Luca, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insight and some of that data. You are pretty much the poster child at DigitalOcean of what customers are probably going to go through as they get into this new transformation with the modern era of infrastructure. So congratulations on your success. Fastest growing cloud, second biggest hosting provider, growing like a rocket ship, hockey stick growth. We've got more here. The Juniper customer event next work, we write back after this short break.