>> Live, from San Francisco, it's theCube
covering DockerCon 18, brought to you by Docker,
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back to theCube, we are live at DockerCon 2018,
in San Francisco, on a beautiful day.
Lisa Martin with John Troyer.
We're very pleased to welcome back to theCube
distinguished alumni Avinash Lakshman,
the CEO and founder of Hedvig.
Welcome back.
>> Thank you, great to be here.
>> So, talk to us about Hedvig, what's new,
what are you guys doing, what's exciting?
>> Oh, a lot of things, I mean, since the last time
we spoke here, I think, some of the improvements
have been made in the platform as been pretty significant,
in fact we are executing on the vision
we had from day one, which is to be
the infrastructure for both primary and secondary storage,
and I think we are delivering on that promise.
And doing so pretty efficiently.
>> Talk to us about the case for consolidating
primary and secondary workloads on one platform.
>> So, everybody understands how capics can be reduced,
right, but I think the key to understanding how one
can reduce their operation overhead,
is going to become very important,
and the key to that is to, if you look
at how enterprises have evolved,
there's always been a vendor they talk to
for their SAM needs, a different kind of vendor
for their NAS, they're all trying to figure out
what their object strategy ought to be,
and now there's a lot of disruption happening
in the secondary market, we always felt like,
what if you go to one platform, on which you can consolidate
block, file, and object, and also be the backup target in
most of the secondary use cases.
Then, all you got to do is to train your folks,
on one platform, and just use it for different workloads
by changing either policy or adverse queue.
Makes your operational overhead
very streamlined and very efficient.
>> Avinash, sometimes the infrastructure people
joke about containers, and they say,
well, you know the developers here,
they just go, well the storage just exists, doesn't it,
I just call, I do a mount point,
and it just works, in the cloud, right?
And so, but Hedvig is here at DockerCon.
Can you talk a little bit about
some of the relationship there,
and some of the how you work with folks,
these folks here at DockerCon, working in containers?
>> See, anytime anything is simple to use,
they always joke about it,
but there's a lot of work
that goes behind driving that simplicity.
Like they say, you wanna keep things simple,
because any fool can complicate things, you know?
So, but I think you, people are looking
to bring that cloud-like mentality
into On Prem data centers, and I think,
we are also delivering on that promise.
>> To clarify, I was kind of making a joke.
The infrastructure people always kind of,
they roll their eyes, they say we do all this work,
and the developers think it's so easy one it gets to them.
>> No, I know, because all hard work is done for them.
>> I mean, there's also a joke
among the infrastructural community
that, eh, it's just an app, that's how
they flippantly brush off applications, so,
it goes both ways, I suppose.
>> Indeed.
>> So, I always look at messaging on websites
of guests and companies, and I liked what I saw.
Finally, a cloud agnostic storage solution.
What does that mean from Hedvig's perspective,
and how does that give you
that differentiation that you want?
>> Good question, because, for that one needs
to define what multi-cloud is.
Everyone has their own definition for multi-cloud.
Just the way of, a few years ago,
everybody had their own definition of distributed systems,
right, I mean, there was a large populace
that believed that if a program runs on multiple computers,
it's a distributed system.
Not the way, we, I, would define it.
It has to be multiple machines working together
to make believe that there's only one machine
behind the scenes, right?
And similarly, one may want to set the stage
for what multi-cloud is all about.
Again, running, there is a popular school of thought,
if I can run on Cloud A, and then run on Cloud B,
I am multi-cloud, that's not my definition.
The way I would like to define it is
one fabric that can span multiple clouds,
and give you the illusion that
that's where there's a whole location
transparency thing comes in.
You believe everything is local,
but it could be anywhere, you know,
and that's where infrastructure becomes kind of invisible,
and it's a single fabric that spans
multiple cloud environments.
>> So, that transparency, is that something
that really kind of helps Hedvig define
some of your key differentiation?
>> In the cloud environment, definitely, yes, and here's why:
When people typically build applications,
if you program to services that are available
in one particular cloud environment,
tomorrow, you wanna run it on a different cloud environment,
there is no API compatibility between different clouds.
So you will have to rebuild your applications
to a total different set of services,
that another cloud vendor provides.
At least, what we bring to the table is
from a data management infrastructure layer,
you could have one fabric, you can run your,
you can now move your applications willy-nilly,
because you will be programming
against an API that we provide,
and you don't have to worry
about where you are running them.
And that's what we enable.
And that's done seamlessly today.
>> Can you talk about how some
of your customers are using Hedvig,
and some of the customer use cases, in production?
>> Yeah, I mean, there's quite a a few use cases,
I think the popular ones are, for those
who are in the primary kind of workload space,
which are typically used when you to run,
when you need fault tolerance across multiple sites.
One of the more interesting use cases
that we are now deploying in the UK
is across multiple clouds and on premise,
so it's kind of hybrid and multi-cloud
built inside one fabric.
And the reason they do it, is basically,
not only consolidate their existing On Prem data centers,
but also to get, to satisfy data governance laws
for certain applications.
This leads to a tone that I'm trying to drive
and make popular, which is a declarative data sovereignty,
which basic means, if you look at things in Europe,
for different applications, there are different laws,
and that's now becoming kind of common place.
We live in a global economy,
but the data governance laws are all local.
So, people want certain applications and its data
not to span certain geographic regions, right?
How do you make that happen in a declarative way?
And, you should be able to do that by just saying
for this app, this volume, and there are some policies
you assign to it, and that policy basically dictates
what regions that data will live in,
and we make it as simple as it possibly can get.
>> Nice. So, the policies then drives where the data lives,
and on Hedvig, if it needs to stay in Germany,
that volume will stay there,
and will never be anywhere else.
>> Exactly, exactly, and you can even control that
across different cloud windows,
if you're running, say, for example, this particular
customer, I'm not sure if I can mention the name,
but so I'm going to err on the side of caution,
they run across AWS, Azure, and On Premise.
And for certain apps, they want the data
to be spread across AWS and Azure,
and for certain apps, they wanted data
to be stored across On Prem and AWS.
You wanna make it as simple as possible,
make it declarative, and for those who are
more systems savvy, if you look at how computer science
has evolved over time, if you look at the late 90s,
transactions were a big deal, everyone were trying
to figure out how to program transactions into their system.
But, over time, people designed run-times,
where you can declaratively annotate
section of your modules, to say whether it should be
part of a transaction or not.
And they made it that simple, and the run-time
kind of takes care of that delivering those
annotations that you declare.
We wanna bring the same simplicity for data sovereignty.
>> So we're at the fifth DockerCon,
and this morning, Steve Sing said it was around 5,000,
we've heard upwards of 6,000 attendees here,
and I think you said at the first DockerCon,
there was only about 300 people.
I noticed when I walked out of the general session
this morning, and I turned back around the room,
it was packed, it was standing room only.
I'm curious what your thoughts are about
some of the things that Docker has announced,
you know, they really talked about what they're enabling
with enhancements to enterprise edition,
with federated application management,
what they're doing with Docker desktop,
as really enabling three things:
and I heard you kind of talk about one of them for sure,
which was agility, choice, and security.
From a security perspective, what are some of the things
that Hedvig can enable your customers to achieve,
because we hear that security is a huge issue.
>> Security typically manifests itself in two ways:
one is in today's systems, you have data
spreading all over the place, so when the data's
on the wire, you need to encrypt things
on the wire so that nobody can sniff and steal data.
There is also an aspect of security
where data, which goes onto the sides on any media,
needs to be secured, meaning it needs to be encrypted.
Now, there's a whole school of people
who believe that they've solved that problem
by sticking in what is called self-encrypting drives,
but that solves only part of the problem,
and it's a hacky solution because we live in a world
where, you know, BYOD was a big thing,
and it's kind of BYOK, right?
Bring your own keys, so we can encrypt
using the keys that you bring to the table
and get out of the way, right?
So, if you want to achieve that,
then you cannot just SCD's, you have to drive
the encryption onto the media on which
the data is going to reside, but that's part of the problem.
The other part of the problem is:
what happens to data when it's on the wire?
So you want to be able to encrypt data on the wire,
and at rest, so that takes care of one part of security.
The other big issue is ransomware, right,
and there are also application developers
when they want to shown through their features,
and they want to build fast and develop features very fast,
they could end up corrupting data underneath.
How do you protect against, you want to have a feature
that even let's you protect your data from yourself,
and those are all capabilities
that one needs to think through.
The way you typically would do that is have
the capability of providing managed snapshots,
where you can periodically keep taking snapshots
of your data, so you can revert to any,
it's kinda like Github for data, that's how we look at it.
You know, when you look at Github,
you put your source code in there,
but nobody is working on the same source tree,
you create different trees, and then you merge them in
when you think the time is right.
So, you wanna have different copies of your data,
without having copies, and then be able to revert back
to any pristine version you deem fit,
if you make any mistakes at the application level,
or if there are ransomware kind of issues.
So, it's a multi-fold problem.
So, you've got to look at things holistically
and make sure that everything is kind of
delivered natively through
any infrastructure platform one is building.
>> So, Avinash, you are, frankly, you've had a big impact,
on cloud computing, you were one of the co-inventors
of DynamoDB, at Amazon.
>> Dynamo.
>> Dynamo, and you were then at Facebook Cassandra,
and you actually said the 10th anniversary of Cassandra.
>> This is, I didn't even realize,
I think it's either this month or next month.
>> Nice, nice. Huge impact, right?
Whole ecosystems have been built up.
So, you have a sense of where the problems are.
Now, Hedvig, a few years old now,
you know, what are trying to do now with Hedvig,
and where would you like to take it?
You're in the middle of a very hot market,
the data services market, this kind of
secondary storage market, is super hot.
So, I would just love to hear what your dreams are,
where you're trying to take Hedvig,
and how did you see that this was a hot place,
and where are you going with it?
>> Dreams are a difficult question to answer,
but at least we know one thing:
what we do know, is that we are onto something big,
and this a problem that needs solving,
and it needs solving from the ground up,
and it needs solving in a very different way.
I always believed that true innovation
comes from people from the outside.
I'm not a storage guy, I never was.
But, I believe that makes me better suited
to go after this problem because I don't have any
of the baggage that people typically tend to have.
You can't disrupt yourself, right?
We believe we are onto something big,
and so we are just heads down trying to deliver on that.
I don't know where it could go, I'll leave it to destiny,
but I think we're onto something big,
and hopefully we will reap the benefits
of what we are doing.
>> Well, Avinash, thanks so much for coming by theCube
again and sharing with us what's going on at Hedvig.
It sounds like some exciting times ahead,
and we wish you the best of luck.
>> Thank you, really appreciate it.
>> We want to thank you for watching theCube.
For John Troyer, I'm Lisa Martin,
and we are live from DockerCon 2018 in San Francisco.
Thanks for watching, guys.
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