[MUSIC PLAYING]
MAX SALTONSTALL: Today we're here with Cristina,
CEO and founder of Pandium.
And we're really excited to explore more
about what Pandium does.
Before we jump into it, Cristina,
can you tell us, at its core, what is Pandium doing?
CRISTINA FLASCHEN: Absolutely.
So Pandium is an integration platform
that makes it easier for every B2B software company
to have their own in-app marketplace
and also to be present in the marketplaces of their larger
partners.
So application integration is not what it used to be,
and integration is really about distribution
and reaching your customers wherever they are,
whether that's within your own application
or in the marketplace of your larger partners.
Pandium is an infrastructure platform
that makes it easier for software companies
to build and support those marketplaces.
MAX SALTONSTALL: So it sounds like Pandium
is helping businesses reach other businesses pretty
broadly.
Can you tell us a little bit about some
of those specific companies and how you've helped them?
CRISTINA FLASCHEN: Yeah, absolutely.
We work across all different verticals,
but one of our customers is in the sports management space.
Their customers are interested in moving information
about their rosters, their invoices, their registrations
into all of the other tools that they use day to day,
whether that's an accounting software, a CRM, email
marketing, or sports endemic tools that
are specific to their industry.
We power their integration marketplace
so that their customers can go and connect to all of the tools
that they use directly from within that application.
MAX SALTONSTALL: Pandium's helping
reduce some of the complexity for them and their developers.
How are you able to make the developers' lives easier
as they're looking to do all these third-party integrations?
CRISTINA FLASCHEN: Absolutely.
So we are a SaaS platform, and we help our engineering users
build integration scripts in languages
that make sense to them without having
to deal with a lot of the operational overhead
of the marketplace itself, system authentication, logging,
enabling their customer support team
to help those customers if they have issues.
We've productized everything around that exercise
so that the engineers at our customers
can focus on building out the business logic
and not focus on all that infrastructure.
MAX SALTONSTALL: That's awesome.
And it sounds like you're going to make them happier
because they're doing less of the overhead
and more of the actual feature design.
CRISTINA FLASCHEN: That's the goal, yes.
MAX SALTONSTALL: That's great.
So can you tell me about some of the Google technologies
that enabled you to build Pandium
and how you put it all together under the hood?
CRISTINA FLASCHEN: We are an infrastructure product
at our core with some cool features
and skins on top of it.
And we face a lot of the same problems
that any developer platform would face around
authentication, security, and storage.
We have also the added complexity
of running third-party code.
So our engineering users at our customer sites
actually push code to our platform.
So it was really important to us to have
an architecture that allowed us to do this safely
and securely at scale.
It was an obvious choice for us when
we learned about Kubernetes to go down
the path of microservices.
It really allows us to partition our users and our accounts
in a safe way so that if code is doing something
that we don't need it to, we don't
have an issue like a monolithic design
where it could take down our entire system.
And GCP includes a lot of the kind of universal tools
that we need to support Kubernetes at massive scale.
We use Google's key management service
to manage our authentication into our accounts.
And we also use GKE, the managed Kubernetes engine,
to take care of a lot of the operational and DevOps overhead
so we can focus on building the platform.
MAX SALTONSTALL: So you've got a lot of customers each
with their own Kubernetes clusters and instances.
How do you handle the operational load
of that growth?
CRISTINA FLASCHEN: Another great part
of using GKE and GCP is that we have a great team OF SREs
behind us that can help us.
It's very, very uncommon that we have
an issue with our production account
and have to make a ticket with support.
But if we do, we know that we're going
to get great support, better support than we've
gotten when we've used other providers in the past.
And we have just a massive team behind us making sure
that all of our clusters are running well.
That is a resource that is so valuable to us,
especially being a growing team.
In addition to that, your docs are amazing.
We really appreciate that the language in the documentation
is not buzz-wordy.
It makes it a lot easier for us to talk not only
internally, but also with our developer users and our product
users about our technology when there
is common nomenclature that makes sense for everyone
and isn't specific to one company.
MAX SALTONSTALL: I'm guessing you have a lot of repeated work
each time you're taking on a new client.
Are there ways that you've found efficiencies
so that you can spin up new instances of your services
as a new client comes on?
CRISTINA FLASCHEN: Yes.
So Terraform has been great for us.
And the fact that Google has templates for Terraform
specifically has made our deployment process so much more
straightforward.
And again, we're not reinventing this wheel.
We set this up one time.
We want to focus on what we do best
and let the folks that do these things great
continue to do those things great while we can take
advantage of that technology.
MAX SALTONSTALL: Looking back on all the things
that you have done, are there any changes you would make
or big lessons learned that you want to share?
CRISTINA FLASCHEN: Yes.
So in the very beginning, we rolled our own Kubernetes
cluster, did all the management and maintenance ourselves.
I think it was a great learning experience because we really
got deep into the guts of Kubernetes.
But when we learned that GKE was a thing,
it was a very obvious choice for us
to migrate from another cloud provider to Google.
And again, it's been a great experience
not having to worry about a lot of the operational and DevOps
overhead and just relying on the excellent support
that we get from Google.
In addition to that, we would probably
have gone all in on Stackdriver a little bit earlier.
So we were using GCP and GKE but tried
to use other monitoring tools and found
them very cumbersome to set up.
And they weren't really giving us the deep insights
into the kind of nuts and bolts of what was happening
in all of our clusters.
We decided to give Stackdriver a try.
And being a Google product, it was super easy to implement
and is very closely tied with GKE.
So we were able to really get those insights right out
of the box.
MAX SALTONSTALL: That was really cool.
Thank you very much for that story.
It was great to hear about how you built Pandium.
And I appreciate your collaboration
and your partnership today.
CRISTINA FLASCHEN: Thank you for having us.
MAX SALTONSTALL: If you'd like to learn more about Pandium,
visit pandium.com.
Thanks for watching, and stay tuned for more episodes
of Stack Chat."