 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Welcome back to AWS re-invent. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. We are live here in Las Vegas. Day two of our three days of coverage of this event, seventh time we've been here. And as we've been saying all along, this show is getting bigger and better than ever, about 40,000 attendees this year. Joined now by Abbas Haiderli, or Haiderali, excuse me, CTO of X-Matters and Chris Krakow, who is the lead solutions architect at Biasat. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having us on. All right, tell us a little bit about your respective endeavors and then why the two of you are here together, and Abbas will let you lead off. Sure, so I'm CTO of X-Matters, as you described, and our company is basically a digital service availability platform, which, outside of the marketing speed, and from a technical perspective, means when bad things happen with technology, and all technology is great, but inevitably, things go wrong, things bad things happen, and we're in the business of helping companies get those things fixed as quickly as possible, ideally, before they become business impacting. And basically I asked Chris here to join me, because he is, you know, you can have technology, we need someone to put it into practice, and Chris has done a great job bringing it into real world at Biasat. Yeah, it's a good transition. Thanks Abbas. So my role at Biasat, Biasat's a satellite-based technology and communications company, and my role is to help administer and deploy some of our automations for orchestration, monitoring, performance, and incident management. A lot of that has to do, as it relates to X-Matters, with notifying people when they eventually have to go hands-on keyboard, and minimizing the amount of administrative burden that they have so that they can just focus on fixing a problem. You mentioned before that everyone who was traveling here on an airplane, if they were using the Wi-Fi, they were probably running over your service. Right, yeah, so one of our... I am astounded that that even works at all, speaking of technology breaking all the time. So maybe explain to us a little bit about how X-Matters helps you keep that thing actually functioning. Yeah, that's a great question. One of the things that we monitor very, very tightly is our customer experience, both on aircraft and residential broadband. And so when we're starting to see things where those planes are passing through beams and maybe not handing off the internet connectivity well, if we're seeing people trying to get on the internet and they're either having a slow time or just not getting on at all. One of the things that we want to do is get that to the right people quickly. So one of the things that we do is we have our customer care elements of commercial mobility in X-Matters so that they can report that to the engineering level for that same area of business. When they do that, it's opening up a Salesforce case, it's notifying a hip chat room, it's getting ahold of the on-call resource and it's also administrating all of that stuff back to the originator of the problem so that they can keep them informed of this is what the engineer found, this is how long it's going to take to get fixed, this is what you need to tell the customers. So it's enabling a lot of communication while reducing a lot of some of the traditional operational elements that go along with incident management. Yeah, and something that we've been hearing quite a bit this week here at AWS is the importance of that operation side of things. It feels like the whole industry has moved from this being a new technology that we should start doing brand new things with and it's matured a little bit where we're actually relying on this stuff to run real multi-billion dollar businesses and operation starts to become really, really important. So as you said, when things break, we want to fix them as fast as possible so that customers can keep using our services. Right, and kind of in the path when you look at all the companies that are here, they're building fantastic new products, builders are a big part of this event. It's all about building the services and you hear a lot about automation and tool chains and the CI CD pipeline. Well, the CI CD pipeline really ends at delivery and that's kind of where our product picks up. So it's in the operations and support realm of it is once it's out there, things inevitably will go wrong. And a lot of the companies you see here are all about detecting that very, very quickly. You'll hear conversations about one second resolution to detect issues and those things have to be handled. And really one of the things that we're seeing a big trend in is going through and saying, how do we remove the manual process and administrative overhead and the toil in actually operating these services when inevitably something goes wrong? And it starts off small and can grow very quickly. So a lot of people use our product to essentially tie those alerting systems directly into X-Matters. It goes out, gathers a lot of the information that people would typically do by hand, kind of the manual effort, delivers it to the right on-call person and arms them with the action that moved them through. And really that cycle of steps, when you think of it as every individual team in service has a series of flows that they go through when things go wrong. It's about taking those steps and putting them all together in the right order and swapping them out as you need to as your service matures and grows and as your innovation is successful and as you grow in scope. Those steps may change, but the flows across the teams remain remarkably the same. Yeah, is there a particular, you talk about flows and different avenues, different opportunities for problems. Is there one that tends to stand out amongst the crowd as, you know, that's our biggest headache and whether it's if we're a Christmas business or for just in general, for any of your clients. Is there one that just leaves your head scratching your head? So, you know, if we go around and interview all the various enterprises who are consumers and builders of the service and we ask them saying, hey, what's the single biggest thing that's kind of a pain when things go wrong? One of the biggest problems that we see is that a lot of these organizations have built kind of a distributed operation model. And one of the biggest problems we see is think of it as like you've got a whole series of things, it's kind of a bunch of a series of points on kind of a kind of spokes. And one thing goes wrong, other people are consumers of it and other people are impacted and all get engaged, say my thing is also sending me a signal saying my work has gone sideways, but it's very difficult to figure out where the actual responsibility lies and how do you engage just the people who can actually fix the issue and then let everyone else who is impacted by it be informed but told to stand down. So they don't waste their cycles on resolving that. And that's a very complicated problem that there is no magical solution for. So if anyone's listening and looking for, okay, that's what I got, give me an answer. I don't have a solution for you, but I can tell you that a lot of these sorts of operational tasks we're putting in place are designed to minimize the effort of kind of figuring out what that is and really speeding up that information cycle so you waste as little time as possible. That's South America, Chris. Very familiar, yeah. So Visats Company motto is always a better way. And so one of the things that we do with X-Matters and the other tools in our incident response chain is take what we learn when we do have an incident, when we do have a problem and find a better way of approaching that. So it allows us to refine our integrations into X-Matters. It allows us to communicate more effectively to the right people. And it allows us to really kind of harness our DevOps model and that company credo to our advantage and constantly perform better for our customers. Yeah, we were talking before we went live here. This is dealing with issues at the scale of space. So these sort of problems, and it's a theme that we've been hearing over the last couple of days that the amount of complexity on these kinds of systems and something at the scale of a space-based platform, this is something which isn't really tractable for the human mind to deal with unaided. So we really do need tools like X-Matters to actually cope with this. But what is putting in something like X-Matters done for the business of Viacet? So what does that actually change that you're now able to do that you weren't able to do before? Well, again, X-Matters enables a lot of opportunity for our DevOps teams to constantly improve. One of the things that I personally like about X-Matters a lot is it's not a centralized tool. A lot of tools in this space are intended for you to be constantly looking at a dashboard or to have an incident captain that's always, you know, their life is that tool. A single glass of paint. Right, but all of these teams have their own single pane of glass that they consume. So we can plug in X-Matters where it's appropriate and allow those tool chains and those automation flows to include X-Matters but not have it be the end-all, be-all of their process. So it helps them improve on all of the other parts of incident management and monitoring. And X-Matters is just there to facilitate those transactions and those workflows. So a lot of value there, a lot of learning opportunities and a lot of enablement for all of our DevOps teams. So you can improve the way that you're doing things without having to rip out everything else and replace it with one new tool. Exactly, you know, one of the things that you don't want to do in any organization is throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. You know, there are tools that can be refined and we see a lot of this in the trend towards microservices, right? Instead of having vendor lock and this huge, you know, one-stop shop for everything, you can pull and replace all of the smaller pieces in that chain without affecting your availability or your ability to respond to an event. Right. Yeah, and one kind of really interesting thing is about these distributed models is you still have places where information needs to wind up. So if I'm working on a particular part of my application and I've got a customer service team that uses Salesforce as their system of choice, I have to get information to Salesforce so they can consume it. It's not okay for me to hoard information. I actually want to make sure that I'm minimizing the friction and moving information along to where it needs to wind up along that process. If I'm a developer, my kind of worldview of my tasks are JIRA, I want to make sure the information winds up there. If I'm in a service management team and I use something like ServiceNow, kind of tracking information there, I have to make information wind up there. If we collaborate in Slack, I have to make sure that it's available within that world as well. So the key thing that we really focused about is every team picks their own flows, they pick their own tools, but the steps along the way are very similar. Something goes wrong, you pull another information, you need help, you need the collaboration step, and you need to basically get the information delivery stage to put information back in the right places because after it's done, to Chris's point, if you just solve the problem very effectively and learn nothing, you've done a bad job, right? Like we kind of have to be clear about that, right? Like learning and improvement is a key part of a successful DevOps transition. And when you're running things at the scale we're talking about at Reinvent, you have to learn. And a key part of that is making sure information winds up in the right places so you're able to do that. Get in them halfway happy, won't cut it, right? Right, I would fully expect that Chris and other customers in Biosat positions would be like, yeah, that's great. We did it great this time, but when it happens again we would have learned nothing. What we do next, exactly. Gentlemen, thank you for the time. We appreciate you sharing your story and wish you success the rest of this week. Enjoy the show. Yeah, thank you very much. Off to a great start, that's for sure. Thank you. Back with more from AWS Reinvent with Justin Moore and I'm John Wall. So you're watching the Q.