 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm coming from the Boston area studio. We were supposed to have a CUBECon Europe in Amsterdam. First in the spring, they pushed it off to the summer and of course the decision due to the global pandemic is it's making it virtual. But happy to welcome to the program two guests that I was planning to have on in person, but couldn't wait for our virtual coverage for the event. So happy to welcome the co-founders of TriggerMesh. Sitting in the middle is Mark Hinkel, who is the CEO of the company and to the other side, Sebastian Golezgen, who is also the co-founder and the chief product officer, gentlemen. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us Stu. Thanks Stu. All right, so, you know, it's interesting. We've been covering the cloud native space for a number of years and especially at CUBECon. There's always some of those discussions of, you know, does cloud kill on premises? Does this new thing kill that old thing? And in some of the early days of CUBECon, it was like, well, you know, containers were really interesting and there was, you know, all the buzz for years about Docker. But, you know, hey, the next thing's going to be serverless. In serverless, we don't need to think about any of that stuff. It's the nirvana of what developers wanted. So therefore, let's not worry about containers, but you sit in that space really helping to connect between, you know, some of the various pieces. So, I guess, Sebastian, maybe if I could start with you, because you've built some of these various projects, you know, when you go through and look at your background, you know, you've been involved in the Kubernetes space, CUBEless, and now, of course, TriggerMesh, but, you know, give us some of that background as to how, from a technological underpinnings, the community's been thinking about how these worlds fit together. Yeah, sure. And, you know, it's very interesting because first, you know, the container rejuvenation started with Docker, obviously, and then Kubernetes, you know, appeared and the entire community started building this. And this was really an evolution from, you know, the virtual machine orchestration, right? People needing a better way to package application, deploy them. And they said, you know, hey, you know what? Virtual machines are not, you know, that great for this. And we have a better vehicle to do this. And that's where, you know, really containers to cover. And it made total sense. And so we saw this switch from, you know, craziness about OpenStack and even CloudStack that Mark and I worked on, and, you know, putting all the focus on containers. And then comes AWS always innovating, always in the lead, and AWS saying, hey, you know what? Actually, we need to go serverless. We need to forget about the infrastructure. What people want is really, you know, deploy applications without worrying about the infrastructure. They want things that are going to autoscale. They want to pay very little, you know, even pay per function call and not pay, you know, when your VM is up. So AWS really pushed this mindset of serverless. But then what was the meaning in that, in that realm of containers? And that's where I started Cubeless. And I said, you know what? If you would need to build function as a service, you should build it on Kubernetes. You can use Kubernetes as a platform. And from there, we started seeing this fight a little bit between people saying, hey, you know, forget containers, go serverless. So in a trigger match, we're not really taking that stance. We really see on-premises has, you know, it's always been to be here, you know, we have workloads on-premises. We have our own data centers, but definitely there is more and more cloud usage. And when you start using the cloud, you don't want to care about the infrastructure in the cloud, right? So you want as much serverless as possible in the cloud, but you know, you have to deal with your own premises, you know, databases and some workloads and so on. So you have to be a pragmatic and you have to take the best of both worlds and keep moving to, you know, modernize your stack and your IT in general. Excellent. All right. So Mark, you know, at the CNCF, I had seen the K-native project come out and it was talking about, you know, how we can, how can we connect containers and serverless? And one of the questions I'd been asking is, I said, well, you know, look, there are a lot of open source projects for serverless. But when I talk to the community, when I talk to users, you say serverless, I think AWS, Sebastian was just talking about. So, you know, I was sitting at the KubeCon shows and talking to the vendors and a lot of really big vendors working on K-native, you know, Oracle, IBM, Red Hat and others. And I said, if this doesn't connect with, you know, AWS first and, you know, Azure second, you know, I don't understand what we're doing. Yes, there's probably a place for on-premises, but that was when, you know, I think you and I had a conversation. We've been looking at this space. So how did the ideas that Sebastian talked about turn into, you know, an initiative and a company of TriggerMesh? Well, early on, we latched on to the K-native announcement that Google made. Google had given Sebastian some insight into where they were going with serverless and the K-native project before it launched. And then they actually quoted him in their release, which started interest in our company, which was only a company in name at that point. But we really didn't know where K-native and Kubernetes together were going and the serverless movement. But we thought at first that there would need to be management capabilities to do life cycle management around serverless functions. But what we realized, or Sebastian realized early on was that it's not so much the management of serverless because that's the whole idea of serverless is to abstract away all the servers and architecture so that all you're really dealing with is the runtime. And so the problem that we saw early on was not managing but actually integrating applications across serverless from. So the name TriggerMesh came from the idea that you trigger serverless functions and that you would mesh architectures, whether they be legacy applications or they be cloud services or other serverless clouds across the fabric of the internet. So that's TriggerMesh and that's really where we're going and we see that there's a couple of proof points in our industry for that already. People having a desire to do that. All right, excellent. So that integration that you're talking about that helps Sebastian explain there some news, I believe is the EveryBridge cloud native integration platform that's just announced. Help us understand what that is and if he can give a little, what should we be kind of comparing it to other solutions in the industry today? Yeah, so we're very happy about the EveryBridge announcements and it's really, we're getting beta, we are doing a beta release of EveryBridge available in our SaaS cloud that TriggerMesh.io. And really to first piggyback on what Mark was saying is that I think a lot of people still believe serverless is just functions, right? And for us, serverless is much more than this. Serverless is about building event-driven applications. We see it with AWS, with things like they're doing with EventBridge, for example, but we really believe in this mindset. What we're trying to do is to help people build applications, build cloud native applications that fundamentally are event-driven and they are linking cloud services in the public cloud providers and also on-premises workload, right? So EveryBridge allows people to do this, to build those cloud native apps as basic event flows that connect event sources, wherever they are, could be events that are on-prem from an e-commerce application, ERP application, could be events that are circulating through a Kafka infrastructure on-prem. And people can connect those event sources with what we call targets. So those targets could be on-premises, they would be OpenShift workloads, for example, or they could be in the cloud AWS Lambda functions, Google Cloud Run, or even dedicated SaaS, like Twilio, SunGrid and so on. So that's what we saw really over the last 18 to almost two years now, is that serverless is more of an integration problem, more like traditional iPads that we've seen, right? So basically we're building a new iPad solution at the frontier of serverless offerings from the public clouds. Traditional messaging system, like Kafka, RabbitMQ as well, plus the, I would say the old iPad solution, and we're doing all of this backed by Kubernetes and K-Mative. Excellent, so Mark, I heard Sebastian talking about, he mentioned OpenShift, talked about Google. Speak a little bit to really the ecosystems and marketplaces that TriggerMesh fits into, what are the use cases that you're seeing customers using? Yeah, I think a couple of the, to dive into the on-prem triggers, we'll have the capability to trigger for Oracle database changes that could actually kick off cloud-based ETL transactions. We're seeing that users are going through digital transformation, and really to be more specific, given the global climate right now is remote work, and the idea of lifting and shifting all of your infrastructure into the cloud is pretty daunting and long task, but if you can front-end those systems with new cloud-native architecture, and you have a way to create those event flows to tie in your existing systems to new portals for your employees to get their work done, automate workflows to provision new systems, like Zoom for its ample and other conferencing systems, you can use the serverless front-ends and workflows that actually integrate with all of your existing infrastructure and give you a way to extend your life of your applications and modernize them. Yeah, the long pole in the tenant modernization always is that application. Sebastian, maybe come to you on this, is I think about iPads, when you look at that space, they talk about all the integration that they need to work on, usually there's certifications involved. You mentioned Oracle databases, these are things that we need to go in there with an engineering effort and make sure that it's tested and certified by the ISV out there. Does containerization, Kubernetes and serverless, does it change it at all? Does it make it easier to move along these environments? I guess the question is for the enterprise, normally this change is rather slow. Mark was just alluding to the fact, we need to do some of these things a little faster to try to react from what's happening in the world. Yeah, I think that's the entire premise of containers. It's spitting up the software lifecycle and the speed at which we can deliver new features for all our applications and so on. So a big part of the job when Docker started and then Kubernetes has been, if you adopt that type of infrastructure and that type of artifact containers, you're going to speed up your software management and software delivery. So now what happens is that you have slow-moving pieces, maybe pieces that you've had in your data center for 10, 20 years, for quite a while. And then you have this extremely fast-moving environment which is containerized and running Kubernetes plus the cloud that's even faster-moving. And that's definitely the challenge and that's where we see the value and that's where we see the struggle is that you have all those big companies that have those slow-moving pieces, Oracle, DB, IBM, MQ, and so on. And they need to make those pieces relevant in a fast-moving containerized world and in a cloud-native world. So how do you bridge that gap? So that's what we do. We provide bridges. We provide integration bridges with every bridge. There you go. So we connect the event sources from Oracle, DB, and MQ and we bring that to a more fast-moving cloud-native environment, whether it's managed Kubernetes on Google GKE or whether it's still on-prem in an open ship. Yeah, Mark, I want to get your viewpoint just being a startup in today's global environment. Obviously, your company, you look at the cloud-native space, many of the companies are distributed. We're talking to Sebastian from over in Europe, you're down in North Carolina, but give us your viewpoint as a startup. How is the current economic environment impacting you, impacting your partners, impacting your customers? So our partners and customers are probably moving more slowly than we do as a startup because they had physical brick-and-mortar offices and now they're coming into our world. We're 100% virtual or in three continents across over 12 times in. So that kind of work versus where they're at, I think everybody is cautiously moving ahead. The one thing that I will say is that their interest in being more like the startups that are virtual don't have brick-and-mortar, are really good at online collaboration. They look at us for sort of inspiration on how they're gonna do business going forward or at least for the foreseeable future. So overall, I think that not only are we teaching them about cloud-native technologies, but we're just teaching them about distributed workforces in a quarantine world. Absolutely, and I think those are some of the key learnings that you'd look at, the diverse ecosystem in the cloud-native space. What I want to give you both a final word. And Stu, if I just add something, I mean, Mark and I have been working from home for quite a while, eight to 10 years. And definitely right now, this is not the normal working from home, right? We all have, most of us have kids at home 24 seven. The cognitive load in the news is huge. This is not the normal environment. So, we are extremely careful. We help each other definitely internally in the team, India, Vietnam, Germany, Spain and US. We have to be extremely careful that everybody is not falling down and pulling too much on the nerves and their spirits, right? So, yeah, not a normal environment. And even though we know how to do it, we have to be careful. Yeah, no, Sebastian, I'm so glad you brought that up because this is not just a, hey, how do we move to a distributed system? There is the rest of the impact on that. All right, so, yeah, let's give you both final word. Hopefully, we absolutely will be gathering together, even if we are remote for the KubeCon event for Europe, other events later this year. But, Sebastian, let's start with you, final takeaways. Yeah, so we're excited to be able to start up. It's fast moving, it's an exciting industry and releasing the beta release of every bridge for us. We're trying to bring the future of event-driven application to everybody, event sources to targets for everyone, not just on AWS and, you know, taking all the strength of Kubernetes with us. It's going to be a familiar system for all Kubernetes lovers. Great, Mark. Well, as we talked about today, we're very excited about the every bridge announcement. And if you're interested in cloud-native server lists, digital transformation, we think we have great tools for you. But on a more personal and global note, I think Sebastian hit something that's really important that, you know, even though we're not all together, it's really important to check in. Even these virtual sessions have been, it's nice to interact with your colleagues and your friends in the industry, but be kind to each other and just take it for granted that everything's going on the other end of the wire. So reach out to each other and we'll all get through this together. Well, Mark and Sebastian, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely, you know, the personal pieces, as well as, you know, TriggerMesh, you're helping to pull some of those, you know, technology communities together. So congratulations on the progress and definitely look forward to, you know, tracking where you go from here. Thanks to you. We appreciate it. All right, be sure to check out the kube.net. We will be covering kube.con and cloud-native.con Europe as it goes virtual as well as lots of others in the cloud developer space. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the kube.