 Live from Manhattan, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit New York City 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. And we are live here in the Javits Center, continuing on theCUBE, our coverage of AWS Summit 2017, here in Midtown, starting to wind down, tail end of the day, but still a lot of excitement out here on the show for behind us as there has been all day long. Joining us now along with Stu Miniman on John Walls is Josh Stella, who is the CEO and co-founder of Fugue, Washington DC and Frederick Maryland based company. Josh, thanks for being with us. Gentlemen, thanks for having me on theCUBE. You bet, absolutely, first time, I think, right? No, second time. No, I'm sorry, second time. Yeah. All right, so theCUBE bet. theCUBE bet, there you go. All right, so for our folks, viewers at home, who might not be too familiar with Fugue. Sure. Tell us a little bit about what you do, and I'm always curious about the origin of the name, where it came from. Sure thing, sure. So what Fugue is an infrastructure automation system for the cloud. So it builds everything you need on the cloud, it constantly monitors and operates it, it corrects it if anything goes wrong, and it gives you a full view of everything in your infrastructure. So we like to say you go fast, that's why you're going to cloud, is to be able to go fast. You need to be able to see everything and get it right. Fugue gives you all of those capabilities at a different level than anything else out there. The name actually comes from music from a form of musical composition called a Fugue. And there might be some folks in the audience who remember Hofstetter's book, Gertel Escherbach. That was actually where the idea came from. That and there aren't many English words left that are real words, and I didn't want to make something up. Well, I know for... You could get the website for it, so it was good to go. Yeah, we used Fugue.co, that was part of it, sure. It worked out for you then. It worked out, yeah. Well, for a guy who was big into astronomy, I guess a cloud would be, that seems to make sense, right? That you'd be tied into that. Just in general, cloud migration now, with what we're seeing this mass of this paradigm shift, that's occurring right now. What's in your mind the biggest driver of that? Why are people now seriously on the upper? Sure, so when I was at AWS, most of the growth that we saw was sort of bottom up. We would go into a new customer and they'd say, we didn't think we were on cloud, and then we looked and there were 130 cloud accounts on AWS Scattered throughout the organization. That was kind of the first motion of cloud adoption. We're really now in the second wave, and this wave is strategic. It's where CIOs, CEOs, and CTOs are saying, this is the right way to go. They do security well, it's more cost effective, more than anything, it allows us to move fast, iterate, be disruptive ourselves, instead of letting the other guys who are moving fast on cloud disrupt us. So these are the big drivers. What Fugue does is it allows your cloud desk in almost any of these organizations that are in this sort of phase two motion. It's not all bottom up. They're starting to say, how do we really want to get our hands around this? And so what Fugue allows you to do is let your developers go even faster than they could without it, but where things like policy as code and infrastructure as code are just baked in from the front. So your developers can go really quickly, iterate, and the system will actually tell them when they're doing something that isn't allowed by, for example, a regulatory regime or a compliance requirement. And once you've built those things, Fugue makes sure they're always running properly. So it's a really powerful technology for migration. Josh, I'm wondering if you could take us in that dynamic you just talked about because the stuff where the developers were just playing with it, we definitely saw it. My joke when I went to an audience was like there's two types of customers out there, those that know they're using AWS and those that don't realize that they are using AWS. But when you switch to the top down, it's how do you get buy-in? How do you get that developer and the operator all on the same page? And even you say today, most companies say I have a cloud strategy, but everybody's strategy's different and there's still kind of the inks drying. And as most people say, strategy means it's good for today, maybe not two years from now. What are you seeing in the customer base is some of those organizational dynamics, strategy dynamics? Sure, so what we're seeing, people are confused I think still about where this whole thing's going. There's a lot of clarity about where it's been, what it can do for you now, that's coming into a clear focus, but we're in this moment of, not just moment, decade of huge change in computing. And we're still probably less than halfway through the sea change. So I would say the strategy, what we advise people is the strategy has to be really thinking more about the future that is unknown as much as the present that's known. And that's a difficult thing to do. So our approach to that has been, and then how do you unify the kind of intentions of the executives and the developers? Well, with developers you have to give them great tools. You have to give them things they want to use. You can't impose these kind of old enterprise-y systems on them, they will find ways around it. So with Fugue we wrote this very elegant functional programming language where the developers have far more power to do infrastructure as code than with anything else. It's a very beautiful, elegant language. Lots of developer tooling around that. We're just coming out within the next couple of weeks here and open beta on a visualization system. So as you're writing your infrastructure as code, you automatically can see a diagram of everything that will be deployed. So developers really like those aspects of Fugue. We speak their language. I'm the CEO, I've been a developer for 30 years. From the other side of the equation though, the executive level, the leadership of the organization, they need assurance that what's being built is going to be correct, is going to be within the bounds of what's allowed by the organization, and can adapt to change as it comes down the pike. So, and this gets back to strategy. So we had the kind of everything being built with virtual machines and attached disks. And now containers are really a huge trend, a really great trend, but it's not the end. You have things like Lambda, you have things like machine learning as services, and the application boundaries around all of those things, the ones that are there now, and where it's going in the future. And so Fugue is very much architected to grow with that. Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious what you're seeing from customers. It used to be, I think back to virtualization, it was, IT was a cost center. And how do we squeeze money out? Then it was, how can IT respond to the business? And now, the leading edge customers is, how's IT driving business? And I think about machine learning, IOT, a lot of the customers we've talked to that are using serverless, it's, I can be more profitable from day one, I can react much faster. What are the dynamics you're seeing, kind of the role in IT, and the business and driving forward? Thanks, that's a great question. So, you know, software is eating the world. And the cloud is software, if you do it right. The use of the cloud is software. And so, we're definitely seeing that, where it used to be IT was this big, fixed cost center, and you were trying to just get more efficiency out of it, you know, maybe extend your recap cycles if you could get away with it, kind of. Now it's really a disruptive, offensive capability. How am I going to build the next thing that expands my market share, that goes after other people are trying to be disrupted. So you have to be able to go really, really fast in order to do that, yeah. So, one of the announcements today was the AWS migration hub, and it sounds great. I've got all of these migrations out there, and it's going to help them put together. But it reminds me of kind of, we have the manager of managers, because there's so many services out there. You know, public cloud used to be like, oh, cloud's going to simplify everything. It's like, no, cloud is not simplifying anything. We always have kind of the complexity. How do you help with that? How are customers grappling with the speed of change and the complexity that is now the environment today? Through automation and code. And that's the whole way through the stack. You know, people used to think about software just being the application, then in more recent, I'd say in the last 18 months, people have really figured out that actually know the configuration of the system, the infrastructure, if you will, even that's a bit anachronistic, has to be code. So does security. Everything needs to be turned into code so that the build process is minutes, not days or hours. So we have a customer in financial services, for example, that uses Fugue to build their entire CI CD pipeline, and then integrate itself with it so that all of their infrastructure and security policies are completely automated whenever a developer does a pull request. So if they do a pull request, out comes an infrastructure. If that infrastructure did not meet policy, it's a build fail. So the way you adapt to all this complexity is through automation. And it's going to get worse, not better as these services proliferate and as the application boundaries are drawn around wider and wider classes of services. Yeah, and that's what I guess to ask about is that if I come in to the cloud and I have X workloads, you know, and all of a sudden, you know, here comes this and here comes that. Now I can do this and I have new capabilities and it's growing and growing. And my managing becomes a whole different animal now. Right? Yes. How do I control that? How do I keep a handle on that and not get overwhelmed by the ability to do more and then people within my own company wanting to do more? Yeah, so what you're getting at there I think is that people go into this thinking the day one problem is the hard one. It's not. Mine's going to be when it becomes exponentially larger. Yeah, and the day two on problem is the hard one. Now I've built this thing, is it right anymore? Right. Is it doing what it's supposed to do? Who owns it? Right, so all these things are what Fugue were built to address. We don't just build stuff on cloud. We monitor it every 30 seconds and if anything gets out of specification, we fix it. So the effect of this is as you're building and building and building, if Fugue is happy, your infrastructure is correct. So you no longer have to worry about what's out there. It is operating as intended at the infrastructure layer. So I think that you're exactly right. You get to these large scales and you realize, wow, I have to automate everything. Typically inside of enterprises, they're kind of hand-rolling a bunch of point solutions and bags of Python and BashScript to try to do it. It's a really hard problem. All right, so Josh, it's been a year since you came out of stealth. You know, what's been exciting? What's been challenging? And what do you expect to see by the time we catch up with you a year from now? Yeah, sure. So what's been exciting is the amount of real traction and interest we're getting out of like financial services, government and healthcare, those kinds of markets. I'd say it's also been exciting to get the kind of feedback we have from our early customers, which is they really become evangelists for us. And that feels great. When you give people a technology that they don't just use, but they love, that's very exciting. A year from now, you're going to see a lot from us over the next six to nine months in terms of product releases. We're going to be putting something out at re-invent. I can't get too much into it. That really changes some of the dynamics around things like being able to adopt cloud. So a lot of exciting stuff coming. It sounds like you've got a pretty interesting runway ahead of you and you certainly have your hands full, but I think you got a pretty good hand on it. So congratulations on a very good year. Thank you. And we wish you all the best success down the road as well. Great, thanks for your time. You bet, Josh, thank you. Josh Stella from Fugue joining us here on theCUBE. Back with more from the Jaffet Center we're in Midtown Manhattan at AWS Summit 2017.