 Well, thank you for joining us here as we continue our Q conversations on the AWS startup showcase with Marco Paladino, who is the CTO of Khan and Marco, also co-founder, by the way. Marco, thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. It's good to have you with us. Thank you, John, for having me. You bet, absolutely. First off, to our visitors and our viewers who might not be too familiar with Khan, tell us a little bit about what you're up to and your core competencies, which I know are mad. Khan is a cloud connectivity company. We provide the technology software that developers and enterprise organizations all over the world can use to connect securely their software and their microservices and their APIs together. So we're really executing here on being the Cisco of L4 and L7. Great analogy, really good analogy. So when you are talking about microservices, obviously this is a pretty new space. We're certainly a growing space in terms of deployments and different technologies. How come? Where does this come from? Basically the whole microservice notion and concept. Yeah, it's a very interesting concept. In 2013 and 2014, there was a market transition in the landscape. Docker was released in 2013. Kubernetes was released in 2014. And Docker and Kubernetes together really have unleashed a new era of microservices across pretty much every organization in the world. We know that if we are trying to grow a business, we must iterate fast, ship new products faster. We must be reliable. We must be distributed, the couple. And to do that monolithic applications, which is the previous way of building modern software, monolithic applications doesn't really scale that well in a distributed world. And so with microservices running on top of Kubernetes, containerized with Docker, we can now decouple our software and run it in a faster, better, more reliable way across pretty much any cloud vendor in the world. And as a result of that, we can enter new markets faster. We can make our users happier by shipping fixes and features faster. And therefore we can grow the business. That's why microservices really have been adopted across the board. So let's dive into that a little deeper here in terms of the value proposition because just because you could do something, obviously it isn't the reason why you should do it. There is value at the end of the day that you're delivering a new value. So summarize that a little bit for, again, a prospective customer who might be watching right now, somebody that you want to talk to about these new services, these new values that they can enjoy. Why should they be thinking about home? Why should they be thinking about microservices? Yeah, you see, you know, every organization in the world is becoming digital. And we've discovered that a few years ago with digital transformation 1.0, as I call it. And in that digital transformation, we have realized that in order for us to build a successful software, in order for us to grow our business, we really must being able to innovate quicker. We must be able to create and ship new products faster. We must be able to duplicate our workloads across multiple regions and cloud vendors so that we can target our users with low latency and with the quickest performance we can possibly get. Now, in order to do that, the monolithic applications we used to build, they don't do that well. Monolithic applications as they grow, they become huge, hard to move, hard to scale, hard to deploy, hard to innovate. And we as an industry have learned that if we can decouple those large monolithic applications into smaller components like microservices, we can then ship and innovate faster. Now, of course, on one end, we ship and deploy faster. On the other end, we are introducing something that our monolithic applications never really had at this scale. And that is this massive connectivity across all the services that make up the final application. Being decoupled and being distributed really means that we are connecting them over the network with service connectivity. And if that service connectivity is not working, well, then the application is not working. So digital transformation 2.0 really is all about taking our digital business and transforming it by decoupling it and distributing it in order for us to build a stronger business. So you talk about the monolithic application and there's some simplicity to that though, isn't there? Because now we're introducing multiple layers and a lot of complexity in some respects, which allows us to do a lot of things really well, but it also introduces challenges. So if you were talking to, again, a prospective customer and they said, hey, this all sounds well and good, but what if? There are a lot of what ifs out there. How do you address the different challenges or the questions that might be raised in terms of trouble that you're inviting by introducing this new complexity into the marketplace? Yeah, the key here is to abstract away all the things that we don't need to build for our business, right? The key is to focus on what drives our business. And that's our users, our customers, the applications that we're building. Everything else that's not part of the core business should be delegated as part of the underlying infrastructure. Likewise today, when we want to enter a new market, we just leverage a cloud vendor. We don't go and build a physical data center from scratch. Likewise, when we build new modern applications, we don't want to build the orchestration platforms by ourselves. We don't want to build the connectivity stack by ourselves, but we want to abstract that away so that our teams can focus on what matters for the business. And that's the users, the customers, the application. It's not building the underlying infrastructure which can be given as a service to the application teams as opposed to asking the teams to build it from scratch. And there's going to be challenges, of course, but there's going to be benefits. And as long as the benefits are bigger than the challenges, then it's worth while transitioning to microservices if that can help us scale faster and grow faster. And if anything, with COVID last year, we have learned how important it is for every organization to think about digitalizing in a faster way in order to keep being in business as a matter of fact, to keep winning against their competitors and your organizations that can acquire good knowledge of the underlying tooling to allow them to transform this way, those are the organizations that are going to be succeeding moving forward. What do you think is the biggest shift in this paradigm in terms of this legacy system that we had in place? Worked pretty well. To now we have a much more specialized, instead of much more distributed approach that is providing these new values and certainly great benefits. But in your mind, what's the biggest shift there, I think in terms of mindset and in terms of actual deployment? Well, transitioning to microservices really involves three different transformations and that's why sometimes it can be challenging. It requires transforming our software to microservices. By doing so, it requires us to rethink the operations of how we deploy, run and test our software. And the third aspect, the third component that it transforms, it's the cultural component. Now we can build smaller teams that can work in a de-coupled asynchronous way. And as long as they expose an API, those teams are going to be very well integrated with the rest of the organization. Look at what companies like Amazon, Netflix or Google have done. And that's a big cultural shift. Like any large transformation, there is not one secret ingredient. It's an entire mindset that has to change. Now, thankfully for us, this transition is also being driven by bottom-up adoption and transformation that's being driven by open source software. So unlike the previous transformations, this one, if you wish, it's a self-service transformation. Open source ecosystem provides us with a self-service ecosystem of landscape of tools and platform technologies that the application teams and the infrastructure teams can go ahead and use in order to figure out what's the best formula for them to achieve their success. When you have the solutions, say you've got your operation in place and you have these multiple communications going on amongst microservices, whatever, it's all well and good. Now you want to introduce yet another. And so are there not concerns, are there challenges there in bringing kind of a newcomer into that environment in terms of testing, in terms of deployment, because of the factors, the variables that come into play here. And how one piece works with another piece won't be the same as how it works with another piece. So how do you handle testing? How do you handle new deployments in this kind of environment? Okay, this is perhaps the most critical cultural change in transformation that microservices bring. With the monolithic application, if the monolith was up and running, the business was up and running. If the monolith was down, the business was down. Simple, easy, it was clear, it's one-to-one clear to understand. With microservices who are effectively making ourselves comfortable of always running in a partially degraded system, because there is so much more, so many more moving parts running at the same time, they cannot possibly be all up and running at any given point in time. Some of them will be running, some of them will be slow, some of them will be not executing. And guess what? Our infrastructure is built in such a way that even when that happens, the customer and the users will never experience any downtime. This is a chance for us to transition to microservices. It's a chance for us to accelerate the innovation in the organization, but also to accelerate the reliability of our applications and also accelerate the security of our applications. And this may sound counterintuitive. Many technology leaders are like, wait, what do you mean by that? How can you transition to microservices and improve the security if you have so many moving parts in your systems running as opposed to a monolith? But that's an opportunity for us to improve the security because now, I like the monolith where everything you can consume and access everything else. With microservices, we can set up tighter security rules in place to determine what services can consume, what other services and in what capacity. In a monolithic world, as long as the code base is accessible, anybody can do anything that the monolith can do. With microservices, it's an opportunity for us to lock that down. And even the past year, we've seen how important that is. The reputational and entire organization can be destroyed by a high profile breach or attack. And so it's very important for us to catch this opportunity so that we can implement zero trust security. We can implement a consistent, non fragmented layer of security across all of our applications, not just the Kubernetes ones or the containerized ones, but even the virtual machine-based ones. And all the connections that we're generating, that's the backbone of every modern architecture. That's the bread and butter of every microservice oriented application. And that connectivity has to be managed and secure and observed and exposed to our partners, developers and customers. If that connectivity fails, then our business fails. And so today, we cannot ask the application teams to build that connectivity for us. That's like asking them to go build an application and as they're doing that, walk into the data center and physically connect the switches and the routers to the server racks to build the underlying physical connectivity. We cannot ask them to do that. The connectivity as well has to be abstracted the same way we are abstracting the data center with platforms like Kubernetes. So just back against security, obviously you pointed out, we've had some pretty high profile cases here of late, well, actually it's probably that's four or five years, but certainly late state actors taking actions. So that security mindset that you're in right now, it does some counterintuitive to me that you have multiple doors, right? You have like, in the monolithic environment, you have, you got one big one, right? You can say if you crack the code, you're in. But in this case, you've got a lot of different entry points but you're saying that you're actually, you can bat down that hatch, if you will. You can provide the protective barrier around all these microservices in an effective way. It's an opportunity for us. I'm a big fan of when John Chambers, the ex CEO of Cisco said, whatever there is a threat, how can we think of that as an opportunity? And really microservices give us the opportunity to implement a new generation security model for all of our applications that's tight, that cannot be break, break into. And so that zero trust security, OPA, OPA across the entire organization for both North, South and East West traffic, for both the gateways and the service meshes, that is for us the opportunity to secure our applications in a way that could not be secured before in a monolithic world. Microservices not only create a business advantage, but they gave us also many, many different chances for us to improve all the other aspects of security and productivity within your organization. And securing it, that's one of the opportunities that we cannot miss. Well, Marco, thank you for the time. Fascinating work, it really is revolutionary in many respects, and I wish you continued success at COM. And thank you for joining us here on the startup showcase. Thank you so much. Great, John was here talking to Marco Paladino who is the CTO and co-founder of COM. We're talking about the service mesh, that landscape, it is new, it is evolving, and it is certainly a fascinating wrinkle to our world. Thanks for joining us here on the CUBE Conversation, I'm John Walls, we'll see you next time.