 From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Escape 19. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the first inaugural multi-cloud conference in New York City. It's called Escape 2019. I'm here at Brendan O'Leary, Senior Solutions Architects with GitLab. Is that right, Senior Solutions Architects? Close enough, manager, you know. Manager, architect. You work GitLab, you're technical, so we have a good chat here. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thanks for having me. First multi-cloud conference, really, we'd love to go to the inaugural anything. Just in case it's not around next year. What would you say we're here? But it looks like it's got some legs, some interesting conversations. I see you in the hallways. You know, you guys are a big part of this revolution. GitLab, your company, providing open source repositories free to get people get started as well. You got paid stuff as well. Hot area, GitHub was acquired by Microsoft. Some say Microsoft's not going to meddle with that. We'll see. But still, a super important part of the community that you guys are involved in. It's true, we're seeing this multi-cloud revolution, if you want to call it that, with a lot of our customers. Right, it's no longer that you pick one cloud and that's where everything's going to run. You're going to have acquisitions. You're going to have the desire to negotiate and have a negotiating position with your vendors. You're going to want to use functionality that's maybe only in one of the clouds. And so we're really seeing this multi-cloud become more of the norm. And that's why we think it's critical to have a DevOps platform that's independent from that so that you can deploy everywhere. So what's the lock-in spec? I mean, basically the thesis is if you want negotiating leverage, you want to have multi-cloud. I get the whole, there's multiple clouds because you upgrade to Office 365, you got Azure basically. So multi-vendor, multi-cloud, totally buy it. But what's the lock-in spec that's getting people agitated or thinking about multi-cloud? Yeah, I think it's interesting because there's both, of course, the technical side. Like I said, you might have functionality that you want to run that's only available in one cloud, but the finance folks and everyone else gets concerned about, hey, are we going to get locked into some vendor where we don't have any ability to negotiate? And so I think that is part of it. And I read as part of prepping for my talk here, a 2019 state of cloud report that said 84% of enterprises today are using more than one cloud. So I think that's indicative of that desire to not, you may have a primary cloud where you deploy things, but you're going to use more than one cloud. I think that's a fair reality. I mean, probably more, I mean, if you count all these, how they're bundling apps in there. What's your talk going to be about, is it today or tomorrow? So I'm talking tomorrow and I'm talking about a framework for making decisions about multi-cloud. Because again, I think that a lot of the times we can get bogged down in the technology and picking features over what we're really looking for, which is the business value of being able to have kind of a single view, a single application, a single kind of platform for your developers to be able to deploy, kind of no matter where it's going to end up in the end, right? We don't want the developer having to think about that necessarily when they're building the application. We want to deliver value to our customers, right? And so we want them to be doing that differentiated work. Me and Armand were talking earlier, Hashing Corp, CTO of Hashing Corp, and he was talking about workflows. And I was talking about, okay, workloads. So if you just take those two concepts, workflows and workloads, and just strip out any of the technical conversation, what's the framework? Because these are real issues. Those are the, that's the continuity issue for the business, not the tech. So fill in the blanks around that. How does that, how do I get multi-cloud out of making sure my workloads aren't disrupted and my workloads are kicking ass and doing a job? I would say that that's a great question. And we love Hashing Corp and what they've done for our space and for multi-cloud in general. They're a great partner for us. But I think the key is the workflow, you generally wanna be the same no matter where you're deploying, right? You wanna have confidence that the code you're building is secure, it's gonna work, it's been tested. And no matter where it deploys in the end, you wanna have that same kind of workflow for your developers. But you also wanna have workload portability, right? And so when you're talking about the ability to have a negotiating position or the ability to run in multiple clouds, the same application, you know, have disaster recovery, have not just this kind of monocloud environment, you have to have workflow portability as well. Well, Brendan, I'm not sure if they're taping your interview, I hope they are, if they are, that we'll get those copies in our video on cloud, but you got a framework for multi-cloud. And with the reality that everyone wants or has either inherited or has or will want a multi-vendor environment, what is that framework for negotiating? Or setting up the foundation, because the theme here of my interviews here and the hallway conversation is two things. One is foundational discussions around multi-cloud. So still, I mean, early thought leaders laying out, here's some lines to think about, and then two data. So two interesting common threads here. Foundational thinking and data. I think that foundational thinking is important because I think that's really what my framework gets to is, hey, we want to look at not just the technology and not, you know, those answers, we want to look at what are the business metrics that we're driving towards, right? Because in the end, again, that's what we want to be driving in software, is our businesses. And so what are the business metrics that we're going to use and how can we make it efficient? How can we make it governed? And how can we make it visible across those clouds? I think those are the three things to be focused on. And is there certain weights or is it more, you know, it's situational based upon the environment because maybe there's weights of certain variables over others? I think so. I think depending on your environment, right, you may be in a more highly regulated environment where governance is the number one, it's the king. But I think everyone has those governance concerns, right? None of us want to wake up to a security call that we should have known about, right? So we all have this. How's this going on in your world? Get lab, you guys are doing great. Good to see you guys. Got a big round of funding recently. Get up to self a billions of dollars. That's a nice comp. Yeah, no, I say it's nice when someone sells a house in your neighborhood for a lot of money, right? But yeah, now what we see from that is, you know, the industry moving towards this single tool for your DevOps life cycle, for your DevOps tool chain and your DevOps life cycle, we want to be able to have one way that developers deploy code and we're seeing that kind of consolidation in the market and we've had great success with that so far. Our desire, stated public desire is to go public next year and we're on track for that right now and so we're looking forward to it. What's interesting I love is a subtext to all this plot which is there's a human equation in all this, right? The human capital, human resource, the people side of the equation, the cultural shifts in these companies, your customers now. What's any observational commentary that you can share around how DevOps has kind of gone mainstream, any cultural shifts around people and their behaviors and their affinity towards certain things? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I saw an article yesterday about a CIO who was being promoted to CEO as the current CEO stepped down and how that was kind of a novel thing but the article was actually talking about how we're going to see more of that, right? Businesses, you know, eight years ago, Mark Andreessen said that software is eating the world. Well, I think software has eaten the world and we're seeing that in our businesses as every company becomes a software company. And open source, JJ would argue at OSS Capital that this new business model is emerging as well and new opportunities as well for everyone involved. Open source software, cloud computing, multi-cloud, it's a great wave. It is a big wave and get labs based on an open source project, right? And so we were founded only back in 2014 as a company but we've come to find a business model that works, open core, and we think there's a lot of opportunity in the market for folks to follow and open source to have an even bigger impact than it's already had in the market. Final question for you, Brandon. What do you think about this conference, some of the hallway conversations? What's the vibe for the folks that aren't here? What's it like? Oh, I mean, I think it's great. I think there's been a lot of great discussions, again, about very foundational things, about, hey, how do we look at this as a business leaders? But then I've also had great discussions about the technology, you know, about Kubernetes, about those kinds of things that really enable us to have those kinds of conversations. So it's a good relationship to being developed here. People know each other too. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, people I haven't seen in a long time or people that I work with that I haven't seen just where we're all about. It's great to see it in New York too. Yeah, I love it in New York. So I'm from DC, so it's a quick train ride up. But I love coming up. Like us in California, big plane ride. Thank you so much for coming on the queue, appreciate it. Yeah, great, thank you very much for having me. I'm John Furrier here at the first inaugural conference, Escape 19, back more after this short break.