Techstrong TV: Expanding Kubernetes Operations

Rafay systems continues to grow, raising a $25 million series B as it builds the industry’s first platform for Kubernetes operations. Video is below followed by a transcript of the conversation Alan Shimel.

Recorded Voice:         This is Digital Anarchist.

 

Alan Shimel:               Hey everyone, welcome to another TechStrong TV segment. We have got the folks from Rafay here today. Let me introduce you to us, Haseeb Budhani and Sean Wilcox. Gentleman, welcome to TechStrong TV.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Alan, thanks right for having us

 

Sean Wilcox:               Great to be here. Thanks.

 

Alan Shimel:               Thanks for you guys being on. We couldn’t do this without people coming on us guests, so it’s all good. Guys, Haseeb, as you mentioned off camera, you and I have spoken before, but I’m gonna assume not everyone in our audience is familiar with Rafay. And so why don’t we start – And I don’t even know, am I pronouncing it right by saying Rafay? Is that [crosstalk].

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Rafay.

 

Alan Shimel:               Rafay.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        I say that the Gadra and then Faye Dunaway, so Ra-fay.

 

Alan Shimel:               I like that. That’s an easy one to remember, but as I said, not everyone in the audience is familiar. So why don’t we start with that? Maybe a little company background. And Sean and Haseeb, let’s hear a little bit about your backgrounds as well.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Sure. Let’s start with the Rafay. So the company is three and a half years old. We are in the Kubernetes space, kind of the Kubernetes as you know a busy space at this time with so many enterprises modernizing their applications. The gap that we saw that we are addressing is that every enterprise that modernizes and chooses Kubernetes, they face an operations challenge. How do I run all this stuff?

I gotta cluster up. Okay, now what? How do I control access? How do I do governance? How do I deploy applications easily? Et cetera, et cetera. And there’s a number of services that these customers need for their DevOps teams to be able to successfully deploy applications and run them, et cetera.

So we sell what we call a Kubernetes operations platform. It’s a SaaS first platform, which means you can consume it as service, you can run clusters in the cloud, AWS, GK, whatever. You can run clusters on premises, but then holistically look at all of your infrastructure across the board, edge, and manage everything from a very easy to use SaaS platform, which goes well beyond where the market is right now.

So right now, the market is focused on cluster management, so how do I bring up a cluster? We’re now seeing that large enterprises are moving beyond that. You’re thinking about policy management, access management, get off base application deployment, governance, et cetera. And this is where Rafay shines, above and beyond what – Once you have clusters, now what?

 

Alan Shimel:               Agreed. Agreed. Sure. Haseeb, why don’t we talk a little bit about your background too?

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Yeah, sure. So the very first time you and I met was, I’m assuming in Vegas, ’cause that’s where it seems to happen all the time. At some tech Sean show in 2014, when I was at a community called Soha Systems, which was in hindsight, the first software defined perimeter company in the market.

So I was part of another start up before this, that company was acquired by Akamai. I spent some time at Akamai, left to start this one. But I feel like I’ve been doing startup forever now, which is, I don’t know if that’s good or bad,

 

Alan Shimel:               Yeah, you do both

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Oh my God man. _____. But now it’s always fun to find a new, crazy problem. And when you start working on it, people go, “This is not a problem. This is not real,” or, “This is solved already.” And then you actually show them a different way to think about it. There’s nothing better than that. So that’s what –

And I’ll be lucky enough to do a few times. Hopefully this time we do something similar even here at Rafay, seems like two years ago when I used to tell people, “Hey, here’s the gaps I’m seeing and here’s where we’re gonna go.” But people would be like, “But this is done already. What the hell are you doing? You’re three years late already?”

“No, no, no, no, no. Here’s a real problem that you don’t understand that we do,” because that’s a skillset that this team’s acquired over the years, being able to see gaps. Finding those threads, pulling on them and then building very easy to use platforms that enterprises can consume and appreciate.

 

Alan Shimel:               Excellent. Sean, how about you? You’ve been quiet.

 

Sean Wilcox:               Yeah. I have been doing startups forever, so 20 plus years now. So started at what used to be a small company called Verisign, then a company Proofpoint, and then Clearwell Systems. So I’m sort of used to joining new spaces and creating new spaces and having people tell me that we’re crazy for doing so. So Rafay is sort of that next evolution here and looks like things are going really well for us.

 

Alan Shimel:               And what’s your role at Rafay?

 

Sean Wilcox:               I head marketing.

 

Alan Shimel:               Okay. And Haseeb, I didn’t ask you, I-

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Oh, I –

 

Alan Shimel:               – don’t know, but tell the audience. Yeah.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        I’m the CEO, but more often I’m the guy doing the demos with the customers. Actually, the best part of my job is talking to customers. In fact, right before this call, we got an email on our support. Alias, some guy sent an email saying, “Hey sir, do you guys support window servers?” So there was a phone number in his his signature. I call him and I talked to him for 30 minutes. It was a lot of fun, actually. The problem –

 

Alan Shimel:               I know. Look, I’ve done this

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Probably that was my best meeting of the day. I don’t know this, maybe the second best meeting of the day.

 

Alan Shimel:               Well, no, I’m gonna tell you something, talking to real life people about their problems and what they’re looking for, I love – Even doing what I do here at MediaOps, I still – Look, the vendors are great. I talk to guys like you all day, but talking to practitioner is about kinda what’s driving them wild, what they’re having fits about, what works, what doesn’t work.

I find it by far the most fascinating, informative, ’cause you gotta keep it real. And sometimes we forget that. Anyway, so guys sounds like big things going on. Of course, everything in cloud native Kubernetes today is kind of just blowing up. But you recently announced some news around funding, around product. Let’s dive into that if you don’t mind.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Yeah, absolutely. So we and announced series B round of funding which closed a few weeks ago. We announced that earlier this week. $25 million raised from a very well-known fund called FirstPoint Capital. Really, really enjoying working with them. I think that they seem to really understand the problem.

I think before the funding, we had set certain goals in our minds, if we’re gonna hit certain number of customers, certain number of AI, et cetera. And we seem to be moving faster than at least I planned. And how do you know you’re moving faster than planned. You are understaffed on everything. That’s how you know. It’s like, “Oh my God, I think –” Because we didn’t expect to be here.

We don’t have enough salespeople.We don’t have enough SCs. We don’t have enough SAs. We don’t have enough engineers. We don’t have enough of everything. And thankfully, the Force 1 team kinda stepped up and well, before we were even ready to raise, we were not even ready. Alan, I didn’t even have a deck to present in the first meeting I had with these guys. We were not ready.

But I think they had a lot of clarity on where the market is going. Finding investors who a priori, have a thesis on the problem you’re solving. So at that point, you’re not trying to convince them, they’re trying to convince you. You know what I mean?

 

Alan Shimel:               Right.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        That happens. It’s magic. It’s very fast. And that’s what happened with the Force 1 for us this time around. So with the 25 million, look, we’re gonna go expand. I think we, as a team, have a lot of clarity on the operation problems that our customers are seeing. So we have some pretty large companies on the platform, there’s a bunch of nice logos on our website, like Card Health and MoneyGram and Verizon and HP and so on.

So these are some large companies who have really, I think forced us to think differently about the problem. And we’ve been very open to it. So anytime we have a gap, we just jump in and say, “Okay, well, we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Mr. Customer. Let’s take a half a day and just kind of talk through it now.”

And you know what? We’re gonna take this back to our team and we’re gonna build it for you. We come back with the prototype and they say, “This sucks. This is not what I thought.” And we fix it, but that’s actually made our product very elegant. You could go to our product, our SaaS product. You can go sign up, you can have clusters up and running with applications deployed, single sign on working, audits working within an hour.

It’s rock solid. But it happened because a lot of very large customers beat us up for the last year. But because of that, I mean, the pain, it’s not, it’s not masochistic. It’s actually by design. You deal with these large customers upfront and they beat you up and you actually end up with a much better product.

In all front, I gotta say, I mean, it’s going well because of all the really good decisions the team made early on in terms of what customers to deal with, how to deal with them, the support model we built here. A lot of things are new, but they’re working

 

Alan Shimel:               Excellent. It’s a funny world we find ourselves those. Look, I’ve been in the startup game 25 plus years myself. And I still have a lot of friends who are in venture back startups. So here at MediaOps, I got off of that hamster wheel. We were bootstrap from seven years ago, eight years ago when I started and I don’t have a VC board to worry about.

But it’s amazing to me, the amount – It’s almost like a buyer’s market where you can sit and choose. Okay, there’s a lot of people throwing their hat in the ring. Who do I wanna partner up with? It sounds like a cliche, but who’s gonna give more than just money to me here to really help us with our business.

And I mean, congratulations. And we talk here, guys, you just raised money. I’ve raised money in the past. A lot of our folks out here still look at raising money as sort of a bridge too far, or a mountain too high. The first time you do it, it’s hard. And then after that, it gets, I think a little easier though. It’s never really easy for someone to write you a check for millions and millions of dollars. So, congratulations on that.

Now for a good percentage of our audience though, they’d say, “Well, what does that mean to them?” Not just more sales engineers or more salespeople, are we going to get product faster? Are we going to get more feature sets? Are we gonna solve the problems, use cases that I’m dealing with?

And connecting the dots between getting money to solving someone’s use case is sometimes, they don’t see behind the black garden. They don’t know how that relates. In this case, though, what I like is you also have a product announcement.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Yes, sir. So going back to the operations kind story that I described earlier today, one goal we had was – This is gonna sound cliche for sure. Alan, you heard this a hundred times I’m sure.Just today we’re building a platform. Everybody says that, right?

 

Alan Shimel:               Mm-hmm.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        But we’re building a platform, but that the product platforms is, yeah, nobody buys a platform. They buy this one thing that they need and over time, they end up using a platform. Nobody buys a platform. So you have to design a platform in a very unique way. Most companies, what they do is they take a bunch of products and then they kind of say they have a platform.

Building a platform upfront is hard. I think we had the benefit of a strong team that a lot of clarity on what the market’s gonna need over the next five years. So, three years ago, they knew that five years from then we’re gonna have n number of capabilities on our platform. And if n number of these capability will exist, then what is the right underlying platform that must exist to deliver these things?

If we are gonna have a SaaS product that is fronting tens of thousands of clusters across hundreds of customers, single cluster, by the way, not cluster, single controller, it’s a multi-tenant kind of microservices based system that runs across multiple regions in Amazon. Wow. So how do we think about scaling, et cetera?

So we made a lot of good decisions upfront that are helping us now. So now, with the new money, one of the things we’re doing kind of very clearly, and we’ve told all of our larger customers this already, that you need more than we have right now. There are four or five capabilities that we don’t have today that we’re gonna build over the next couple of years.

But already, right now today, this platform sells, provides six services that every operations teams needs. So, when we announced two days ago, we added a couple more capabilities. So one key capability we added was a policy management engine.

Every large enterprise we talked to, the biggest challenge that they’re running into is, “Well, so these clusters are popping up everywhere, how do I know they’re not talking to some row container registry on the internet? How do I know my engineers are not deploying produce containers, and then there’s a bad thing that happens at the container in my – I get hacked,” et cetera.

So being able to centrally set policies across all of your infrastructure at the Kubernetes level is a hard problem to solve. So we delivered that as a service on our platform a couple of days ago. In addition, how do you even know how many cluster Gemini company? How do you know that Sean is not accessing that one cluster, which is a production cluster? Where did you get that visibility?

So we also announced a whole suite of dashboards built into the platform that give you organizational level, team level, cluster level, developer level dashboards, so that you have a lot of visibility. So that your mean time to resolution is now shrinking. Because when bad things happen, app is down, where do you go?

Our customers now go to our platform and they look at what the most recent alert was and they can do correlation. So these are two key things that we are building. And if you think about those features, one is kind of policy management and the other one being visibility, these are governance related concepts.

The fact that we can help you build clusters, yeah, that we solved a long time ago. The fact that we can help you deploy applications, yeah, that we saw the like a year ago. Now that you have all this infrastructure, you have all these applications, how do you manage all this stuff? How do you have visibility? Because, see, Kubernetes used to be a toy. People doing things in the corner. Now this is an enterprise grid platform. I’m running my production –

 

Alan Shimel:               [Crosstalk]

 

Haseeb Budhani:        – stuff here, right?

 

Alan Shimel:               Mm-hmm

 

Haseeb Budhani:        The requirements are different. Security cares.

 

Alan Shimel:               Absolutely.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Enterprise architecture cares. That’s where the VIN is. So now slowly start helping our customers truly think of this as an enterprise care platform, which is why we released the policy management and the dashboarding capabilities that we just did very recently.

 

Alan Shimel:               Agreed. Agreed. So this available now?

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Yes, sir. Yep. Just go to website, rafay.co there’s a signup button, click signup, start playing with that. And that’s the best experience. You don’t need to deploy anything to deploy your clusters. It just works, and you’re gonna have a really good experience. It’s rock solid.

 

Alan Shimel:               So when things just work, that’s where we’re aiming for, right?

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This –

 

Alan Shimel:               To just work.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        We talked about back in the day, at least the school I went to as a kid, they used to say, actually, it should be, see, not heard. Yeah, that’s what Kubernetes should be. If you have to hire people just to do Kubernetes, you’re doing it wrong, actually. This is infrastructure. This should be hidden, focused on the app.

 

Alan Shimel:               It’s always been – I remember going to my first DockerCon and I saw an early demo of Kubernete. This is before 101 Preview, whatever they called the beta. And I said to myself, “This is hard. I don’t know how it’s gonna catch on. It’s really hard at this point.” So, hearing, “Make it just work and make it simpler,” that shows you where it’s come.

Guys, we’re about outta time though. I want to thank you for coming on and sharing the great news with Rafay, with the audience. Keep up the great work. Congratulations on the money raise. Go check out Rafay, R-A-F-A-Y.co. And you can find out more about the solution, the new product, and what’s going on. Haseeb, Sean, thanks for being here. We will see you soon, hopefully back here on TechStrong TV.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Thanks, Alan.

 

Sean Wilcox:               Sounds great.

 

Haseeb Budhani:        Thank you for having us here.

 

Alan Shimel:               All right, guys. This is Alan Shimel. We’re gonna take a break. We’ll be right back.

 

[End of Audio]

Alan Shimel

As Editor-in-chief of DevOps.com and Container Journal, Alan Shimel is attuned to the world of technology. Alan has founded and helped several technology ventures, including StillSecure, where he guided the company in bringing innovative and effective networking and security solutions to the marketplace. Shimel is an often-cited personality in the security and technology community and is a sought-after speaker at industry and government conferences and events. In addition to his writing on DevOps.com and Network World, his commentary about the state of technology is followed closely by many industry insiders via his blog and podcast, "Ashimmy, After All These Years" (www.ashimmy.com). Alan has helped build several successful technology companies by combining a strong business background with a deep knowledge of technology. His legal background, long experience in the field, and New York street smarts combine to form a unique personality.

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