 Okay, we're back with Mark Hill, who's the Director of IT Operations at Digital River. Mark, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Oh, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. Hey, tell us a little bit more about Digital River. People know you as a payment platform, you've got marketing expertise. How do you differentiate from other e-commerce platforms? Well, I don't think people realize it, but Digital River responded about 27 years ago, primarily as a one-stop shop for e-commerce, right? And so we offered site development, hosting, order management, fraud, expert controls, tax, physical and digital fulfillment, as well as multi-lingual customer service, advanced reporting and email marketing campaigns, right? So it was really just kind of a broad base for e-commerce. People could just go there, didn't have to worry about anything. What we found over time as e-commerce has matured, we've really pivoted to a more focused API offering, specializing in just our global seller services. And to us, that means payment, fraud, tax and compliance management. So our global footprint allows companies to outsource that risk management and expand their markets internationally very quickly and with low cost of entry. Yeah, it's an awesome business and to your point, you were founded way before there was such a thing as the modern cloud, and yet you're a cloud native business. Which I think talks to the fact that incumbents can evolve, they can reinvent themselves from a technology perspective. I wonder if you could first paint a picture of how you use the cloud, you use AWS, I'm sure you got S3 in there, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, exactly. So when I think of a cloud native business, you kind of go back to the history, well, 27 years ago there wasn't a cloud, right? There wasn't any public infrastructure. It was, we basically stood our own data center up in a warehouse. And so over our history, we've managed our own infrastructure and co-located data centers over time through acquisitions and just how things worked. There was over 10 data centers globally. For us, it was expensive, both from a software hardware perspective, as well as getting the operational teams and expertise up to speed too. So, and it was really difficult to maintain and ultimately not core to our business, right? Nowhere in our mission statement doesn't say that our goal is to manage data centers. So about five years ago, we started the journey from our hosted into AWS. It was 100% lifted and shift plan and we were able to complete that migration a little over two years, right? Amazon really just fit for us. It was a natural place for us to land and they made it really easy here for us too. Not to say it wasn't difficult, but. But once in the public cloud, we really adopted a cloud-first vision, meaning that we'll not only consume their infrastructures to service, but we'll also purposely evaluate and migrate to software as a service. So I come from a database background. So an example would be migrating from self-deployed and managed relational databases over to AWS RDS Relational Database Service. You're able to utilize the backups, the standby and the patching tools automatically with a click of the button and that's pretty cool. And so we moved away from the time-consuming operational tasks and really put our resources into revenue-generating products, like pivoting to an API offering. I always like to say that we stopped being busy and started being productive. I love that. That's really what the cloud has done for us. Is that what you mean by cloud native? I mean, being able to take advantage of those primitives and native APIs. What does that mean for your business? Yeah, exactly. I think, well, the first step for us was just to consume the infrastructure, right? But now we're looking at targeted services that they have in there too. So, you know, we have our data stream of services. So log analytics, for example, we used to put it locally on the machine. Now we're just dumping it into an S3 bucket and then we're using Kinesis to consume that data, put it in Elastic and go from there. And none of the services are managed by DigiRiver. We're just utilizing the capabilities that AWS has there too. So. And as an e-commerce player, retail company, were you ever concerned about moving to AWS as a possible competitor or did you look at other clouds? Well, can you tell us about that? Yeah, and so I think e-commerce is really mature, right? And so we got squeezed out by the Amazon's of the world. It's just not something that we're doing, but we had really a good area of expertise with our global seller services. But so we evaluated Microsoft, we value the AWS as well as Google. And, you know, back when we did that, Microsoft was Windows based. Google was just coming into the picture really didn't fit for what we're doing, but Amazon was just a natural fit. So we made a business decision, right? It was financially really the best decision for us. And so we didn't really put our feelings into it, right? We just had to move forward and it's better than where we're at. And we've been delighted actually. Yeah, makes sense, best cloud, best tech. Yeah. Yeah, I want to talk about Chaos Search. A lot of people describe it as a data lake for log analytics. Do you agree with that? You know, what does that even mean? Yeah, well, from our perspective, because our self-managed solutions were costly and difficult to maintain. You know, we had older versions of self-deployed using Splunk, other things like that too. So over time, we made a conscious decision to limit our data retention in generally seven days. But in a lot of cases, it was zero. We just couldn't consume that log data because of the cost in maintaining it. So because of this limit, you know, we've lost important data points used for incident triage, problem management, trending and other things too. So Chaos Search has offered us a manageable and cost-effective opportunity to store months or even years of data that we can use for operations as well as trending automation. And really the big thing that we're pushing into is an adventure of an architecture so that we can proactively manage our services. Yeah, you mentioned Elastic. So I know, I've talked to people who use the Elk Stack, they say there's these exponential growth in the amount of data, so you have to cut it off at whatever, I think you said seven days or less. Yeah. You're saying you're not finding that with Chaos Search? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that was one of the huge benefits here too. So, you know, we were losing out if there was a lower priority incident, for example, and people didn't get to it till eight, nine days later, well, all the breadcrumbs are gone. So it was really just kind of the best guess or the incident really wasn't resolved, we didn't find a real cause. Yeah, like my video camera down at my, you know, my other house when somebody breaks in, I don't find out for two weeks and the video's gone. So it's the kind of same thing. So how do you, can you give us some more detail on how you use your data lake and Chaos Search specifically? Yeah, yeah, so there's many different areas, but what we found is we were able to easily consolidate data for multiple regions into a single pane of glass to our customers, so internal and externally. And it really does serve that operational support for the data extract transformation low process, right? It offered us also a seamless transition for the users who were familiar with Elasticsearch, right? It wasn't difficult to move over. And so these are a lot of selling points, benefits. And so now that we have all of this data that we're able to capture and utilize, it gives us an opportunity to use machine learning, predictive analysis, and like I said, you know, driving to an event driven architecture. So that's really what it's offered and it's been a huge benefit. So you're saying you can speak the language of Elastic, you don't have to move the data out of an S3 bucket and you can scale more easily, is that right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so for us, just because we're running in multiple regions to drive more high availability, having that data available from multiple regions in a single pane of glass or a single way to utilize it is a huge benefit as well, just not to mention actually having the data. What was the initial catalyst to sort of rethink what you were doing with log analytics? Was it cost? Was it flexibility scale? There was, I think all of those went into it. One of the main drivers, so last year we had a huge project. So we have our Elk stack and it's probably from a decade ago, right? And version point or two or something, anyways, it's very old. And we went through a whole project to get that upgraded and migrated over and it was just, we found it impossible internally to do, right? And so this was a method for us to get out of that business to get rid of the security risks, the support risk and have a way for people to easily migrate over. And it was just a nightmare here, consolidating the data across regions. And so that was a huge thing. But yeah, it was also then the cost, right? It was, we're finding it cheaper to use Chaos Search and have more data available versus what we're doing currently in AWS. Got it. I wonder if you could share maybe any stories that you have or examples that underscore the impact that this approach to analytics is having in your business, maybe your team's everyday activities, any metrics you can provide or even just anecdotal information? Yeah, yeah. And I think one, coming from an Oracle background here, so did your ever historically has been an Oracle shop, right? And we've been developing or reporting an analytics environment on Oracle and that's complicated and expensive, right? We had to use advanced features in Oracle like partitioning materialized views and bring in other supporting software like Informatica, Hyperion S-Base, right? And all of these required a large team with a wide set of expertise into these separate focus areas, right? And the amount of data that we were pushing into Chaos Search would simply have overwhelmed this legacy method for data analysis and a relational database, right? And not to mention the human toll of the stress of supporting that Oracle environment into 24 by 7 by 365 environment, which requires literal or no downtime. So just that alone is a huge thing. So it's allowed us to break away from Oracle. It's allowed us to use new technologies that make sense to solve business solutions. You know, Chaos Search is really interesting company to me. I'm sure, like me, you see a lot of startups. I'm sure they're knocking on your door every day. And I always like to say, okay, where are they going after? Are they going after a big market? How are they getting product market fit? And it seems like Chaos Search has really looked at hard at log analytics and kind of maybe disrupting the Elk stack. But I see, you know, other potentially use cases, you know, beyond analyzing logs. I wonder if you agree. Are there other use cases that you see in your future? Yeah, exactly. So I think there's one area would be Splunk, for example. We have that here too. So we use Splunk versus, you know, flat file analysis or other ways to capture that data just because from a PCI perspective it needs to be secured for our compliance and certification, right? So Chaos Search allows us to do that. There's different types of authentication, really a hodgepodge of authentication that we used in our old environment, but Chaos Search has a more easily usable one, one that we can set up, one that can really segregate the data and allows to satisfy our PCI requirements too. So, but Splunk, but I think really, you know, deprecating all of our elastic search environments are homegrown ones, but then also taking a hard look at what we're doing with relational databases, right? 27 years ago, there was only relational databases, Oracle and SQL Server. So we've been logging into those types of databases and that's not cost effective, it's not supportable. And so really getting away from that and putting the data where it belongs and it's easily accessible in a secure environment and allowing us to push our business forward. And when you say where the data belongs, it sounds like you're putting it in the BitBucket S3, leaving it there, is it's the most cost effective way to do it and then sort of adding value on top of it. That's what's interesting about Chaos Search to me. Yeah, exactly. Yep, yep, versus the high price storage, you know, that you have to use for a relational database, you know, and not to mention the standby is the backup. So, you know, you're duplicating, duplicating all this data here too in an expensive manner. So, yeah. Yeah, copycrate, you're moving data around, it gets expensive. It's funny what you say about databases, it's true. Database used to be such a boring market, now it's exploded, then you had the whole no SQL movement and SQL became the killer app, you know, it's like a full circle, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, anyway, good stuff Mark, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing your perspectives. Would love to have you back in the future. Oh yeah, yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. Okay, so that's a wrap. You know, we're seeing a new era in data and analytics. For example, we're moving from a world where data lives in a cloud object store and needs to be extracted, moved into a new data store, transformed, cleanse, structured into a schema and then analyzed. This cumbersome and expensive process is being revolutionized by companies like Chaos Search that leave the data in place and then interact with it in a multilingual fashion with tooling that's familiar to analytic pros. You know, I see a lot of potential for this technology beyond just log analytics use cases, but that's a good place to start. You know, really, if I project out into the future, we see a trend of the global data mesh really taking hold where a data warehouse or a data hub or a data lake or an S3 bucket is just a discoverable node on that mesh and that's governed by automated computational processes. And I do see Chaos Search as an enabler of this vision. You know, but for now, if you're struggling to scale with existing tools or you're forced to limit your attention because data is exploding at too rapid a pace, you might want to check these guys out. You can schedule a demo just by clicking the button on the site to do that or stop by the Chaos Search booth at AWS re-invent, theCUBE is going to also be there. We'll have two sets, a hundred guests. I'm Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE, your leader in high tech coverage.