August 15, 2023
Season 1, Episode 21
In this episode, Jon dives deep into the intricacies of cloud-native challenges and the developer experience with Haseeb Budhani from Rafay Systems.
Guest Introduction:
Haseeb Budhani is the CEO of Rafay Systems, a company that operates in the management space. With a rich background in the tech industry, Haseeb brings a wealth of knowledge about the challenges and opportunities in the cloud-native landscape. Throughout the episode, he sheds light on the evolution of Kubernetes, the importance of understanding infrastructure, and the need for businesses to adapt to changing technological landscapes.
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
Themes Covered in the Podcast:
Quick Takeaways:
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[00:00:00] Jon: Hello, welcome to Cloud and plot today. I have Zib from Rafa Systems and we’ll be talking about cloud native challenges and the developer experience and maybe the developer experience gap potentially and where the challenges lie for organizations. But before we dig in, I I suppose you wanna introduce yourself.
[00:00:21] Haseeb: Yeah, happy to firstly, thank you for having me, Gareth. Looking forward to this conversation. My name is I’m the CEO of Rafa. We’re in the management space looking forward to talking about in the enterprise.
[00:00:32] Jon: Cool, that’s good. And so to get straight in a bit, obviously, you’ve got your own company, which is Rafa Systems, which is like you said, mentions managing Cuban eighties in general and operations. I don’t suppose you want to talk a little bit about why you’re trying to solve that problem and who you’re trying to solve it for. And then we can kind of dig there.
[00:00:52] Haseeb: Happy to talk about that. So before Rafi came about, there were maybe 100 companies who have come and gone in this space already. I mean, I know a bunch, I only know so many people. So it stands to reason that if I know, then there’s probably more companies out there and I will posit that many of those companies made two fundamental mistakes and not because they know what they were doing. It’s because that was the data available at the time. But we’ve been going to shows like coupon for a long time. I don’t know how many years, five years, six years, seven years. I, I don’t believe the enterprise market was actually using that. I think that when this market started as is the case with most industries, you know, a set of developers saw the opportunity to enable their enterprise, their their employer to move significantly faster and they adopted these technologies and they were solving a singular purpose which was uh fabric of my applications to small pieces. You know, I just only change that one piece at a time. You know what that is right, standardization, micro services, these are concepts, but there’s a class of problems that look frankly, developers don’t care about that become real problems. When the enterprise starts thinking of this new technology as an enterprise wide technology. When any technology is is adopted, you know, sort of enterprise wide, it becomes an I T function. Now, we may call I T different things now, right? We may call it platform engineering, et cetera. These are obviously, you know, evolutions of classic I T but it’s, you know, fundamentally we are in an I T function. I see myself as an in an I T function and I T has expectations I T S expectations are, well, there’s the audit, simple silly example, but how do I know John can do that? But not that other thing. I’m not gonna let John get an US account. That’s not how things are done in the enterprise. You need something you can ask for. OK. What does that process look like? And on and on and nobody has a single cluster, right? We know the story, right? I mean, you know, standardization of PLU configuration, there’s so many of these issues that have nothing to do with the basic problem that the generation one company solved, which was let me help you build a cluster. The reality is it doesn’t matter. I can build one too. It’s not that hard
[00:03:02] Jon: when you were saying you don’t think them by the enterprise, do you think then because Cubans is quite inherently complex? I mean, the fact that you’ve got to sit exams about it probably tells you that there’s a lot to cover. Obviously, if it was really simple, the exam will be like two minutes or something, right? Because it wouldn’t be very much to cover. So just the breadth of Cuban eights in general, do you think then it was mostly adopted by like high engineering based businesses who?
[00:03:27] Haseeb: Yeah, I mean, it certainly has been, I mean, even in like financial services companies, there are some very well produced large companies who have built these large teams who have software COTIS and look, my experience has been that the first team that picks Cotis and this is not a dig against anybody. It’s just, this is how things work out. You know, the first team in an enterprise who picks Cotis, they happen to be incredibly sophisticated engineers and frankly, they can do anything, they could have done anything and they decide I’m going to solve this problem and they do. And the next team shows up and the next team shows up and the next team shows up and, and there’s a decay curve to the expertise as you go inviting my team. And eventually somebody in leadership says, why do I have to all these different DeVos people in all the different views doesn’t make any sense. We should do this centrally, which does actually makes sense. And you see the thing is, you know, sometimes you are, I guess if you have enough white Harry run with these things that most of these enterprises are V M ware customers, they have been running data centers with V MS for a very long time and they’ve had a certain, they manage V M infrastructure and VCENTER being, you know, a key uh sort of management system that has been used by many, many, many, many enterprises to manage the data centers. In fact, from a thesis perspective, the real question we were asking ourselves was OK. So what does this vcenter thing look like in the new world. I got, I got multiple environments. There’s no longer a single orchestrator. It used to be E S X. I was the orchestrator. There’s only one uh open never really, you know, took over. OK. But now I have a, and I got, and I got a gas and I got, and I don’t know. Somebody wants open chef and so what is my visa are gonna look like? Right. And you start thinking about that, right? What are all the things that we started it? Well, yeah, it’s solved for V MS. But then it’s so for management without access management. How can you provide a coupon solution if people can’t coup cuddle? You can’t say oh yeah. Go get this other thing for access. Yeah. No, sorry. No, that’s not gonna work. No enterprise will buy from you. Oh yeah. So network policies. Yeah. Go buy this other thing. Oh, you want Cotis policy? You want gatekeeper? Buy this other thing you want cost management. Buy that other thing you want storage on premises? Oh, yeah. Buy that other thing. How many things did I buy? Who’s gonna manage all this stuff? Who’s gonna bring all this together? Well, it turns out that in the center, all these things were in a single platform. Well, what’s the equivalent of that? Right. So that was the clarity. You gotta build that now. And in my opinion, you know the mistake, I said there were two mistakes and one mistake was that, yeah, people thought that this was a developer purchase so they didn’t think about all these stuff. They figured, well, these are very smart for buyers and they’re gonna figure it out. The reality is eventually people want to go back to the job that they’re paid for, which is their job paid to write applications. Infrastructure is not their job. Uh very recently. In the last week, I spent time with a very, very senior person at a very very large bank who was talking about the percentage wastage in bandwidth of his development organization as it relates to infrastructure. And he was estimating that somewhere between 15 to 20% of the bandwidth for each of his developers is wasted because they’re trying to figure out infrastructure stuff. They have 5000 developers. What if 20% of 5000 developers is 1000 people? So he’s paying 1000 salaries where people are not writing applications, they’re working on infrastructure. That is ridiculous. That should be somebody else’s job and that’s the opportunity and that’s the opportunity that I think a lot of the companies, the space they were just focused on, see how fast my group cluster comes up. Yeah, my friend, nobody cares. Right. I mean, yeah, I care in a lab but in practice, I’m not going to build a cluster every day when we talk about upgrades are such important things. Yes, absolutely. We upgrades. Very nice, very cool. But I don’t upgrade my clusters every day. Most enterprises do this like once a year. The reason why they moved to the next one is because there’s an E O L situation of the last version. That’s why people upgrade. But it is, it, the market is the market, it is what it is. The second mistake people made. This was not it. I think the second mistake people made was perhaps more egregious, which was they assumed that the public clouds will never ship a good enough mantis. So betting against the public cloud, that’s a serious risk, right? So if you’re telling the word, yeah, Amazon Gas has these five things missing. This is like 23 years ago, there are companies who used to have blogs on their website talking about the problem DC. And of course they removed those blogs from the website. And the thing about the internet is that it doesn’t forget anything. So you can still find these blogs talking about how e is bad? Is it good or is it bad? It’s not important. The reality is your customers are essentially going to be in a hybrid situation. They may have something on prem but they will have a cloud it blue or Azure or GCP or more than one or maybe all three. I don’t know. And they will use the managed coup these clouds. So if you would have a customer who’s running something on prem maybe open or I don’t know upstream, then they’re gonna have E K S in the US and then they’re gonna have a K S in Azure. The substrate is different. So your management system needs to adopt to support all these substrates. And if you don’t do that, well, I have is not a good answer. By the way, that’s a bad answer. Here’s Kay bad answer. I can explain a lot. Um, you’re not going to be a real company. You’re not gonna make any money frankly, right? And these are the things that we better, we bet that A people will not understand these things and B you get them right? And
[00:08:32] Jon: we have, what do you think stops because I guess there’s a lot of kind of, I agree with what you’re saying around. You know, people are mostly focused on day zero style, day one style stuff at the very beginning. So it’s just about enablement like devs have got some containers, we can go and spin something up, let’s quickly go and spin up A Q and A s and that’s kind of where it begins for a lot of people that are maybe not, they don’t know what they don’t know at the very beginning, I suppose. And then later find themselves in a place where they’re starting to feel the pain because of the complexity of all the operational requirements that the business has on them after they’ve delivered something but at the same time, there’s still, I think in our domain when you’re talking about the point solution things, you know, like a security tool and a cost management tool and all these types of things, there is definitely in the platform, devops mindset on lots of different tools, you know, and you kind of stitch them together yourself and that kind of like build over by out of mentality. Do you think that’s still prevalent now where people do want to stitch it all together themselves?
[00:09:33] Haseeb: I would say that that type of thinking is changing pretty fast because if you are relying on a set of people and I’m gonna look, these are things I’m going to say that perhaps are, you know, unfair in some respects. But this is the reality of our industry right now and many companies because they were focused on attracting talent, they would let their engineers do a lot of things that they failed. Well, this would power them and they’re going to stay. So if I let them build a platform home, they will stay, but people eventually take off, right? So your IP just left with that guy who got a better job in another company, right? Because it’s in his head, right? He was the guy who retire from him and now you’re, he’s gone. Now you’re gonna start all over again. How many times have you heard this story? Right. So this has happened enough times now industry where leadership in multiple enterprises and you know, the locals of companies who are our customers is on our website. They have all come to the conclusion because they must right that I don’t want to do this in house counterintuitively all of our customers, most of our customers, large majority at least had already built something before they engaged with us. So if you already built something while you’re telling me, because the cost of maintaining these platforms is so high. If you build it in house that eventually even the ones who built it, they say my God, I would rather do something else. And this is the issue initially, it just seems very easy and it’s not about people don’t understanding or like you said, right? You only know what, you don’t know what you don’t know. So, you know, eventually people get experience in the space and the good news is they’re all very, very smart people. If you built a platform in house, you are not, you know, a mediocre engineer, you must have the, you know, like incredible talent and people who are at that level, kind of talented, you know, they make logical decisions. Right? Thursday, I talked to the cio for a large sort of financial service company in the US and incredibly technical gentleman. He could probably just built it himself like he was that technical and sometimes you meet these incredibly sharp people and the entire conversation was about what have you built and why? And when would you decide to not use it anymore? So the instant I find something that does all the things that we do, why would I continue? The real question is the cost of, because my people are really, really sophisticated, I’d rather put them on things and make money. And this is not a thing that makes you money. This is a thing that was a means to an end because without it, I couldn’t deliver my applications, of course. So this was the right thing to build at the time three or four years ago. But now if I could find something and he actually said something that I hear a lot that we periodically do essentially a market check. Is there something out there that can take this burden from us? And if there is great, if there’s no problem, you keep going, we’ll come again in six months or a year and do one of them, right? This is the right mentality. And these are the smart people who are building some inter internal platforms and they’re not caught up with ego, they’re caught up with solving the problem doing the right thing. And in many, many cases, the right thing is actually to not build it, right? Your applications, the infrastructure will come from elsewhere. Otherwise they would have gone to Amazon, right? They would have built their own data centers for us. They saw the commoditization of that layer. And they said, why would we do this? Let’s go to the cloud. Similar thing is happening here. This is commoditized. Now what we do you do is a commodity. It doesn’t mean it’s free, it doesn’t mean it’s easy. It means everybody else is doing the same thing. So where is the competitive advantage commodity? So, if it’s a commodity, you should spend the least amount of money solving it because there’s no competitive advantage. And in all cases, the least amount of money is to buy benefits are more expensive. Yeah,
[00:12:53] Jon: you’re gonna get economies of scale elsewhere which they won’t get, right, I suppose because there’s no, you don’t, you don’t get the economy of scale internally because you can’t it back on. So it’s a total. Well,
[00:13:04] Haseeb: you have one customer, right? I mean, you’re bringing literally for one customer, right? I mean, but we have enough customers and I, I say this all the time when you work with us, it’s as if you hire a guy named Rafi, but Ray is my son’s name. So it’s a boy’s name. Yeah, you hire a guy named Rafi. You have enough people on the team. It’s one other person and you pay him a salary. But in the process, this engineer name, Rafi brings 200 people because you got an army guy in ra that’s why we can support all of these different customers. Um And that’s what I really think about it. It’s a commodity. I need to solve it. That’s not a discussion. I need to solve it in the, in the sort of enterprise way with all the right controls. That is not a discussion either. OK. Now what is the path of Easter assistance? If I can find a platform that does these things, then I should openshift as an example, the entire platform openshift, not 00 C P. I guess it’s a beautiful platform. They’ve done an incredibly good job solving for all these things. By the way, they do all the things that we talked about on this call. Yeah, but then they only do it for open shift the distribution or O K D and they do it, you know, in a very specific environment and it’s, you know, it’s got, in my opinion, some things that they should address over time, but they have sort of missed and that was mistake number two that in my opinion, red made was they never took E K s and A K s and G K seriously to their detriment had so, but they didn’t get the sort of mistake number one was not made that they got that right. The problem number two they made, that was a mistake. Anybody who makes one of these mistakes, there’s an opportunity. In addition, if you don’t make other mistakes, you can move it around. I think
[00:14:28] Jon: the clouds are funny though because even A K s and G Q are from a point solution perspective, they kind of make sense and they advertise themselves, you know, the phenomenal businesses and the business model is great and they provide obviously a huge amount of value, but they’re all in the point solution marketing. But obviously as a business, you are thinking about scale, which is like the same solution many times over. But they don’t necessarily form those patterns. They have like frameworks and they’ll be like, hey, you know, there’s a well architected framework and you know, you should have blast radius reduced and you should do these things. But then the point solutions are still point solutions because you’re like, OK, well, how do I manage 30 clusters or how am I gonna manage, you know, 30 teams consuming 30 clusters, maybe non production and production, etcetera. So I think even though they’re quite good at solving some aspects to execute well as a business around those to some kind of repetition so that you can manage things well, internally, I don’t think they are really trying to address that. They’re like here’s the tool kit, you can obviously go and make it all yourself. So then it’s the responsibility model then back on the customer too. So you might have been sold the dream of all right, I managed service. I’m done. This is it, you know, you don’t need to bother, but actually how you design for consumption of that across the business is still your responsibility and you kind of back to square one online. Ok. Well, how do I then solve that again?
[00:15:49] Haseeb: The easy answer for enterprises is, you know, give everybody, you need a B R A account for subscription, I guess they call it. And yeah, they can spin up an E cluster or E, it’s not that hard now. You got your own now, you know, but if you are a big enterprise, you can have 1000 of these now and then it would be really hard to manage. Infrastructure providers will provide infrastructure, right? Is an infrastructure, how you consume. It is not an infrastructure issue. That’s more of a pass issue. And I will bet you in at least one of these clouds cases. I know for a fact and Google already has on those. Yeah, so they understand, you know what it takes. I think they all not, I think I know they all understand the problem but the reality is those businesses E K s and A K are growing really, really fast. It’s actually shocking how fast they’re growing, how many consumers they have. It’s actually mind boggling the number of different accounts that are using ecs for example. Yeah, man. Look, I mean, if you have customers, you’re gonna service your customers, right? They’re also finding tickets, right? So you gotta go work on that. They have clarity that they have to get here. The question is when is it going to happen in the next year or two years, three years, four years, I think it’s gonna take time because they’re so successful right now. A G as an example, they’ve add things like backup glu and what not. It’s already in the system. You can specify G G E is actually very elegant, right? They have all these pieces built in, but then if I have 10 of these or 100 of these, then that’s where they have challenges today. I will bet you that all of these cloud providers will start adding backup capabilities, you know, like centralized upgrades, et cetera. Yeah, at some point in the next 12 to 18 months, it’s coming. So if we build companies that are essentially focused on that, if we understand that the problem is bigger and you have to stay ahead of them so that they see value in your platform. If you’re like a year ahead of them, they’re not going to support you. What is the point they’re going to come soon if you’re 3/4 years out of them and the assumption that customers actually have this need, they will help you. And so far knock on wood. You know, our friends at B have helped us a lot, right? I mean, there’s enough videos we’ve done with the, if you just Google Rafa and E K S, you’re gonna find like 1000 different things that have been done. Yeah. Can you support us in accounts because I mean, for them, the problem is very simple or the question is very simple. Are you going to make my customer’s life easy? And is there data that shows that you have? Yes and yes. OK. Then it will support you at some point if I don’t need you to do that anymore. All right, then yes, you just have to maintain, you know, sort of that distance. Right. And that’s the art of a startup. You gotta stay ahead of whatever else, right? You don’t just focus on competition. Competition is not interesting to focus on this market is very big, right? So you don’t need to worry about your competition. There’s enough customers, that’s not the issue. You think about these tertiary competitors. I mean, competitors is the wrong word, right? I mean, you know, partners are day competitors tomorrow, basically, right? At some point, everybody will come because this is a real opportunity. Look every single enterprise in the world, 50 60,000 of them globally are going to address this problem somehow and well, you have a choice, right? Yeah, you build something that’s interesting to them. You’re gonna build a public company if you build something that is, you know, not solving the real problem and you’re focused on, look how fast my cluster comes up or E K S is bad, whatever, right? Silly things like that or we help you upgrade. OK. All right. Very nice. But then this problem will get solved. You just really think to step back and think about what is a real problem in that, right? Like drift management, you got 100 clusters. How do you know there’s no drift or you’re example? Large companies use data do. Yeah. When you install data do on every cluster, the API key on every cluster is different. Yeah. How did you do that? If you expect your customer to go cluster by cluster by cluster by cluster now get the API key, you do not have a good solution, that product will not work out long term because it doesn’t solve the real problems. And that’s the issue. People don’t seem to understand the real problems in an enterprise. It’s got nothing to do with the nugget, the co that people understand it’s all these other things. And if you solve for that, you will build a real company for. Do you
[00:19:29] Jon: think though that because it’s obviously the developers because there’s the operational complexity because each time you’re kind of a business is trying to address something. I think if you were like a couple of teams, you’re probably fine, right? So you could make it work and you probably wouldn’t need to invest much in anything external because it’s like you could have a person managing those clusters because there isn’t that many of them. But every time you hit an element of scale, every time scale comes into the equations, the problem magnifies you know, it’s like exponentially grows. So all the challenge that you might have on just a person to two, you then scale 2, 2000 and then you realize that, you know, whatever percentage of time they were spending on two, obviously, they’ve got to times that by 2000, then that’s kind of the scale of the problem. That kind of goes with the technology on the other side though, you kind of have devs who don’t really care, right. Let’s be honest, they’re like, don’t really care like Cuban eighties is probably forced on me. I’m all about containers, not necessarily Cuban eighties per se. So on one hand, you’ve got a bunch of people that just want to kind of innovate on development innovation for the business, not necessarily operational innovation because that’s just a means to an end, not really something they’re passionate about, but those two worlds see still a little bit disjointed, you know, you kind of have operational changes going on one hand and they impede innovation somewhere else. On the other hand, and they’re not necessarily well connected. And I still think kind of ironically, I think you, you were right about open shift. They did quite a good job trying to bridge the two, you know, to try and make Q and eight more developer centric over being operational centric, which I think made a lot of sense but still quite opinionated. Do you see that gap closing down now with like as in more of a focus on developer experience or business enablement or innovation
[00:21:12] Haseeb: enablement. So what do developers actually want? Right. So they want to write their code, they want to check in their code, maybe they want to test their code. So when it comes to testing their code, they need a sandbox, the sandbox should align with their needs and that’s it. Whereas the cos in that. So the reason why developers end up exposed to Cobert is because some decisions have been made in large enterprises where look, no, because our automation at the platform level, at the central level is only going to allow for us to build an entire cluster. And I’m gonna just give you a OK. Here’s a coupon fig. OK? All right. So now I gotta learn something. Yeah, I mean, you know, how do I get my path? Right? Am I gonna take my coupon thing even? No, actually I’m gonna go there. I’m gonna bring a new user. I don’t wanna call it, get up action thing, but get up actions. I’m gonna to authenticate that. So I need decks and ok. Well, now I got decks. I need to try to I DC and OK. Well, that’s one thing. Oh my God. Right. I mean, this is what happens and then slowly the developers say, wow, look guys, you’re the center team, please. If you could step back and think about all the kind of the base functionality that I probably need. Anyway, everybody needs it, you want it and then sort of, you know, the bathroom team starts kind of taking on more things. OK? We’ll give you a cluster but then we’ll add the, you know, the right monitoring and blah, blah, blah. And we’re gonna point it to the right places. And you know, that’s why platform teams are sort of born in enterprises. But even so if a developer says I need a sandbox, because I think that’s the right level of abstraction, we should be talking, I need a sandbox. OK. What does that mean? Uh Well, I’m a spring book. Uh but this other guy is a data scientist. So because of my identity in this enterprise, I need different things and I need a data space probably in a DEV cluster. But then I need an R D essence, maybe somebody should set up a notebook for me or whatever, right? And my personality is going to determine the sandbox that I need. It should all be automated when I do a GIT pro request rather and say give me a sandbox and my sandbox should have ABC. It should just happened. That’s the right level of distraction for a developer cotis I want to do Cotti in that, give me a dashboard where I can go and see like I’m getting this alert that my pod is like restarting all the time. So I want to debug it over there. OK. So give me a path in so that I can look at my events coming out of that specific pot. This is it. So for that you have no business, don’t expose developers to things that they don’t care about. They will if, if they have to. But that’s not a platform then, right, you punted the problem with the developer and you’re not gonna make the money you should make because you said earlier right before you asked this question, you know, there’s one engineer, I’m paraphrasing and they have a few clusters in the company and they can manage them if you think about it. You just said that this company, this fictional company, their cost of putting these operations is one salary. All right. Very based John. I did not ask you this question before. Which country are you in today? Ok. In the UK. So that’s two £100,000 fully loaded benefits, et cetera, et cetera. So essentially what you just said was to manage a few clusters. The fictional company you came up with is spending £200,000. Is that cheap to run? It’s not cheap. It’s not cheap at all, right. So what you’re saying is look today, 200,000 is not that much money, but when it gets to, I don’t know, making up a number a million pounds, then you would take it seriously. Actually. No, you should take it seriously today. You should really think about it right. Straight to our car. Would you rather just £200,000 to somebody else and take this clearly sharp engineer and have them work on more products. That makes a pretty good deal. Right. That’s how people are thinking about this. Now. I think that particularly because of the economy, given where it is more and more people will look to augment their staff, right? Because head count is harder at this point in time, right? You can’t go to your CFO and say give me five more headcount to manage coup. I know it’s not gonna happen, it’s done now, right? At least for the next few years and then you forget again and the market would be crazy. But till that time, well, this is the opportunity, right? We’re telling our customers you are probably as well. There’s an opportunity to save money, right? You take these smart people and put them on more important things and the reality is nobody runs an entire community’s practice with one engineer never happens. It’s always multiple. So how much does that cost? And that’s the real cost and people, you know, developers are highly optimistic people, right? So they kind of feel like, oh, this is so easy, I can do this on the weekend. Well, maybe, but you’re wasting a lot of your own time, right? And that time could be invested in something else. We always minimize the problem in our heads till we start working on it and this is a, in my opinion, over the years I’ve, I’ve seen now, like, the smartest people make this mistake. Right. They trivialize the problem in their heads because in their minds, right, because they’re smart people, they can really think about all these different things and they go, ok, well, I’ll do this, I’ll do this, I’ll do this. Ok. All right. That’s about, I don’t know, 20 hours of works. I got this. But then you get into it and then you find out all these other degrees and this is the issue of is it is truly a glacier. It seems pretty easy and it’s not the number of people I meet. They go, that’s pretty easy. I don’t hear anything. And then 345 months later they go, oh my God, this is, uh you know, the team is growing and you know, it’s all these other issues and then my center of excellence wants this and the security guys want that and, oh my God, this is really hard and the backlog is not this big. Ok? This is why companies exist to solve this problem for you have this kind of run or whatever, right? And get going. You would have done it anyway. You would have hired some guy out anyway.
[00:26:19] Jon: But do you think in the example because say like the one person that was mentioning, I don’t think they necessarily like Cubin eight is a specific technology term. But I think when you go to the cloud, there’s obviously three or 400 services depending on which right. So there’s like 300 services there not just Cubin eights in the equation. So that person that’s brokering the developer need won’t just be responsible for Q and A. It’s going to be responsible probably for more than just that. And the illusion is that the services from the cloud are enablement for the business to function because that’s why the businesses decide to go to the cloud. And that’s true because it is like there’s no argument there, but I don’t think people necessarily anticipate the cost of responsibility on some of the technologies back to them. So some technologies like S3, you know, very little, very little on the business, much more sash driven. So I’m not sure people, you know, in the example I was given, I’m not sure people make the decision knowing what outcome they’re causing when they choose it. I don’t think there’s a lot of people that will just be like, hey, and eight is great. I’m going to use that. Apparently it’s the tool for orchestrating containers. Let’s go with it without knowing all the ins and outs of what it actually means to run it and operate it in line with the gaps that the car vendor maybe hasn’t solved. They’re so maybe 50% and they could be odd and it will get to 60% but there’s still a bunch in there that’s not resolved. And,
[00:27:43] Haseeb: yeah, we have two choices as vendors. Right. We can sort of read for our customers to learn these lessons themselves. And in many cases they just will anyway, in the other case, we can at least, I mean, at a minimum or perhaps at best we can sort of share with them all the things that probably will come up and at least have those open conversations. You know, it is a reality of the situation, all the things that need to be done and the intent is not to scare people away from cotis. The intend is, look, it’s ok, it’s fine. It can be to solve the problem. And when it is all done, then Cotti is a thing of beauty. But until you get there, you know, there will be a lot of toil and that conversation we just have to have in a very sort of nurturing and educational way, right? The intent is not to kind of force you to platform down their throats. They will buy when they’re ready. It is what it is. Right? And maybe they’re not hurting today. I don’t know. Right. So what we’re gonna talk about all the things that they need to think about and going to essentially remind them to think about ABC. And at some point they’re going to say, OK, I see it, I need it or not. And that’s ok. We’re going to go to the next vendor who might or other customer who might care. The really, really good news is, you know, going back to the meta picture, everybody’s got this issue just a matter of time, right? Because everybody’s going to Kubernetes, pretty much everybody I meet is doing something in Kubernetes and you know, this market is going to standardize on some platforms. I’m convinced that there will be three or four vendors in this space. It won’t be one, it’s never one and then the enterprise, it should be three or four and it will be 30 be three or four. And it’s not clear who they are right now. I don’t know, like if I had to pick a number four, I don’t know who the all, all the four are. I’m pretty confident that one of us is awesome. I mean, we, you know, we, we seem to be doing ok, but I don’t know what the other three are frankly just yet. I mean, it’s not a rancher, for example. Right. I know that that’s probably open shift, right. Openshift is going to be around forever in my opinion because Openshift has something thing called E C M which is gonna, they already kind of supporting, you know, E K and it’s today, maybe it’s not that great, but it’ll get better function of time. Right? And there’ll be probably another, another couple of vendors. So, yeah, maybe more. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong and maybe it’s 10, but there’s enough money to be made here. And it’s not a function of that. This is not a, I’m not speaking from a position of greed. What I’m saying is the opportunity, size is large enough that if you have the platform, people will adopt it because it’s going to make their life better. Right? And that’s the part to understand, right. This is not about selling them something. this is about giving them the clarity that yeah, indeed their life could be better. And when, when they get there, of course, they will want to spend money with you. Why would they not they should run now if you’re going to make their life better?
[00:30:06] Jon: No, it’s really cool. And what about the people that are starting in the space? So you know, people that are kind of moving to be more cloud native or people that are even just moving to cloud for the first time, I guess, would you see them adopting Cuban eighties or would you see them adopting different technology like serverless technologies rather than maybe Cuban eighties technologies or I don’t
[00:30:26] Haseeb: even know what it means anymore. I thought this was lambed out as an example. Now people say E C is also serve, I actually don’t know what it means anymore. But with the assumption that we’re really talking about event driven architecture. So this this is my limit experience with writing applications over the years, I don’t know if every application can be written as an event driven system. You are, you can force feed anything into anything, right? Or rather, you know, shove a square peg in a round hole. You can, I don’t know, maybe you should, maybe you should. I think that the modern application is a combination of services like R DS or whatever you are and then some is infrastructure and then some lambda slash, you know, service, you know, functions classically functions. I think it’s a combination. I think the successful companies in this space over time are going to mature to address all three. It won’t be one but you have to start somewhere and you know, you can survive, make money thrive on COTIS. But long term, if you want to build a real business, you guys all along can be just one. So it’s not to say the other two things are not real. No, they’re absolutely real. You know, I can only put out so many fires at a time right now. Focus on Cotti but no indeed. So we announced a platform called Environment manager last week, which essentially is a template like a temporizing capability, a service where you can create an environment, environment and the environment could be anything. Yeah, sure. But all these other things are on and it’s a good step in the right direction. I in my opinion, for the company because uh we can now help our sort of customers who are solving a problem, which is a cloud problem. So, yeah, we, we’re there now. I mean, we launched the, uh, we’ll be doing demos of that at coupon in few weeks, three minutes, coupon. Three weeks, three weeks or sooner. Oh, my God. Sooner. So, we’ll be doing demos of that and then, you know, people can come and get the tires and try. But we did that step. We knew the step would come five years ago, but we just couldn’t get here two years ago. Didn’t make any sense. We had to at least get our implementation to a point of sort of maturity where customers could truly use it in a big environment. And the answer to that is yes, they can. Now, let’s focus on
[00:32:21] Jon: this other part that makes a lot of sense. And if people wanted to find you, where would they find you either personally or the company, how would someone get in touch if they wanted to get
[00:32:29] Haseeb: in touch? So the website is rough. A R A fa Y rafa, I was with a shirt dot C O couldn’t get the somebody else already had it, but C O I’m on Twitter has I’m on linkedin. Uh My is on linkedin actually. So if somebody wants to set a time and have a conversation about these crazy ideas, uh have you do it? This is a complex problem, as John said, right? Sometimes people don’t know what they don’t know, there’s no book for this, like dummies does not cover any of these things. By the way, there is a book called, it doesn’t cover these things and we have to kind of get to that point of clarity by talking to each other. So I spend a lot of time doing that just talking to, you know, people in large enterprise, like just talking about what we built and is there a different path? It’s not about selling anything. It’s just about, you know, getting all of us to that next level as an enterprise and as a community. I’m looking forward to that. So please do find me on linkedin on Twitter again with the website for the company is Ray R A F P Y dot C O. Perfect.
[00:33:22] Jon: Thanks a lot and thanks for your time as well. And then obviously people have just heard how to get in touch. That was great, great having you on and to talk about these problems.
[00:33:31] Haseeb: Thanks. Thank you John for having me. I really appreciate it.
[00:33:33] Jon: Thank you. Cheers.
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