 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE on the ground, covering KubeCon 2016, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hi, I'm John Furrier. We are here on the ground in Seattle for KubeCon Container Con here, a cloud native con here in Seattle. It's theCUBE on the ground coverage, and we're here with a hot startup CTO, co-founder, Jeff Hughes, we had great chat earlier, either co-founder of a hot startup, aggressive disruption plan, great technology, but this is not your first rodeo. I mean, you've had some very good success at Isilon Systems, which became the darling in the storage business doing big data before it was big data, but that was classic early days of web scale-out. Talk about your background at Isilon and how that relates to the startup that you're working on right now. Yeah, sure, so I spent about eight years at Isilon, and that was from the pre-IPO days when we were selling into very small deals on the order of a million dollars and hundreds of gigabytes at that point in time, up to the point where we were selling many petabyte deals and that sort of stuff, and so what that looked like, and what I got to see at that, was where is this huge growth of data? If you look at, we see all these numbers of, hey, there's exabytes being generated, but it's really hard to picture what do petabytes of data look like and who's actually using that data, and so I got a really good inside view of where is that data being generated, and why, and what are the real pain points around it? You know, last time I saw Andy Jassy at his house about some of the stuff Amazon's working on, we were kind of reflecting on the historic nature of the world we're living in. You know, I mean, open source is so mainstream, tier one. You saw the early days of scale-up, folks like Facebook of the world had their own software and using hardware in a whole new way, and now you got the cloud going crazy and trying so much value and really changing the game, but you know, specifically back to your experience with Iceland to the Facebooks of the world, the Apples, all buying massive amounts of systems because at that time, the data was on-premise, there was a lot of challenges. Certainly the cloud is going to help a lot of people reconfigure their systems to be more efficient and create more inventions, but there's a lot of pain in the infrastructure business. I mean, I'm a plumber by trade, technically speaking about being in tech, but the plumbers are going away, they're turning into machinists. I mean, that's the big joke in Silicon Valley where the infrastructure layer via DevOps is being automated away to provide orchestration, hence we're here at KubernetesCon and CloudNative, so a new abstraction layer of values being created, but you still got to run hardware whether that's on the cloud or on-premise. What's the pain point for the people inside the enterprise right now who want to go to the cloud, who obviously get it, they got to figure it out, certainly do the architecture, but they still got to run their business today. Yeah, you know, if you look at the growth of the cloud and where it came from, it was from, you know, they call these hyperscale guys and whatnot, and what they faced was they were very smart engineers, but they had a problem which is they had to scale beyond where anybody had been before. You know, if at enterprise you had thousands of servers, they were looking at millions and saying, what happens there? Oh, I have failures like I've never seen before, I got to build software to handle those because if I don't, I've got people going and doing that. And so they developed a whole new kind of software out there at a scale that was just not seen before. And the problem is that if you go back to the enterprises, they're starting to face that same problem. You know, everybody needs data to run their business and they're having to grow the same scale inside. And so they're facing many of those same problems of, hey, what does this mean to manage tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of systems and they need software to go do that. And that's part of what we're doing is we're building that software that goes into those customers. And you had that experience, but this is not a bad thing, the fact that they have the right software, but that's the world we live in right now. I mean, that was an indicator of kind of this whole developer focus right now is that writing software is not a bad thing, but if you guys can help out, you got open source out there as well as you guys, how is that changing the job of the folks out there and how do they scale up and get more hardware in there and get more solutions than you guys have a solution? But the pain of that person in IT or in the business. You know, there's a great quote of one of our early customers. And he said, you know, Jeff, this is a great architecture of what you guys have built. And it's very much like, you know, I could probably have a team go build that in a couple of months. The real innovation of what you guys have brought is operationalizing it. Having all the runbooks to handle the hardware failures, to handle the issues that come up and having that automated is something that I would have to take 18 months building. So really the value is an infrastructure guy like myself and a developer is that we can go back and say like, we solve that operational problem for you is that I heard it over and over again of, folks are just building more and more scale and they were doing more things by hand as opposed to having the software that would go automate that process. And so really I think that the pain that they see is really how do I manage hundreds of thousands of systems at once? Because that's just the new reality. So when you started IGNIS, I mean this is interesting conversation because that seems to be an issue that keeps on happening. It's like Groundhog's Day, the movie that the problems keep on happening where you have a problem, you guys now can start software to solve the problem, but yet another one just kicks in. That's just the world we live in. That is cloud. So that seems to be the pattern and the problem with the enterprises, they don't have the staff to build because time is the big issue. Is that an accurate assessment of it? You know, I think so. In some ways, this is just the disruptive, the reason we have the disruptive cycle right now is because these turns have started to go even tighter, right? You know, the time it took from going to mainframes to the client server era to so on and so forth has been tens of years or five to 10 years. Now we're talking about, hey, it was only 10 years ago that we had the start of AWS. And now billions of dollars have been put into exactly that architecture. And so the turn of cycles is going much faster and enterprises have to be there as well for them to be competitive. Final question for the folks that buy your solution, what's the impact of their job? What changes in their world overnight with you guys? What's different? The key thing we look to do for our customers is free them up from the monotonous tasks of break fix and making sure things are running and start looking forward and saying, hey, how can I be more of a business analyst and choose how we're gonna go spend money or improve infrastructure, but for our business as opposed to just the things that I'm trying to keep running. And as all these clouds start growing, you got Microsoft, you got Amazon, you got Google, and you got Oracle and all this stuff going on VM where it's gotta deal with Amazon. How do you guys fit in that growth for your customer? Do you rise up with that tide or how does that work? And because obviously containers are big and Kubernetes, we're here at KubernetesCon. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I'd say that we're very much complimentary to kind of the public cloud model. In our view, we're cloud just like the public cloud. We happen to be able to do it in a distributed fashion in thousands of data centers around the world as opposed to a handful of 10 or 20 that these folks have. It's a different model, it's different software, it's different automation, but it's the same problem. But you guys don't change the customer's goal to get to the cloud. No, we're one of those destinations as well. All right, Jeff Hughes, CTO of a hot start at Ignis. Thanks for sharing your background. And again, disruption in the startup world, Ignis Systems, thanks for stopping by. We're on the ground here in Seattle, KubeCon and container company John Furrier. Thanks for watching theCUBE on the ground.