September 18, 2026 • 54 mins
Control Plane CEO Doron Grinstein joins me to discuss how they’ve created an AI-native cloud API that virtualizes multi-cloud and hybrid cloud to simplify management and ship faster.
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Creators & Guests
- Cristi Cotovan - Editor
- Bret Fisher - Host
- Beth Fisher - Producer
- Doron Grinstein - Guest
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- (00:00) - A single API for multicloud with Control Plane
- (04:42) - Introduction: Meet Doron Greenstein
- (09:36) - What Is Control Plane?
- (13:31) - The Union of All Clouds
- (15:25) - Adoption and Onboarding
- (18:59) - Eliminating Infrastructure Toil
- (24:01) - AI Agents in DevOps
- (29:19) - Infrastructure as Code in the Agent Era
- (33:04) - Small Teams and Non-Developers
- (37:35) - Compliance and the Data Problem
- (40:50) - Scaling, Secrets, and Audit Trails
- (44:48) - Cost Efficiency and Getting Started
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Bret (2) (00:00):
were you sorta seeing where this all could take us in terms of
(00:03):
agents helping us in infrastructure
Doron (00:05):
we wanted to reduce the cognitive load on engineers not
having to stitch together Kubernetes,Istio, Grafana, Prometheus, Vault,
and all the CNCF, solutions out there.
And we created an API that gives youunified access to any cloud, any service,
and we find that AI, if you just tell it,"Create me the infrastructure," it's gonna
duplicate a lot of resources (00:28):
and it's gonna be expensive, non-deterministic, and
it's gonna be non-secure, non-compliant.
And where is the logging, the metrics,the tracing, the secrets management,
the service discovery, the TLS, the DNS?
And the list goes on and on.
So what AI needs, just like an engineerneeds, is a reduced cognitive load.
(00:50):
Give it a deterministic APIthat says, "Hey, take my
desired state and make it so.
And by the way, make it so on anycloud." It makes AI a lot more effective.
we find AI in a perfect, intersectionbecause we can now make it do
tricks that is otherwise very, veryexpensive or even u- unattainable
Bret (2) (01:16):
Welcome to another episode of DevOps & Docker Talk.
I'm your host, Bret, and in this one,we go deep into the universal control
plane for the cloud and the search forthe singular management system, which
we have been doing my entire 30-yearcareer, been trying to find that perfect
sweet spot of a tool that can manageall of my infrastructure from one API.
(01:40):
And what better person to have onto talk about this than the CEO and
co-founder of Control Plane, the companybuilding this unified API layer for
controlling all your infrastructure.
I'm having Doron Grinstein on the show,and we go deep into what they're building,
And he has a very similar story to me,just trying to use the infrastructure
(02:02):
that we had at the time and the toolingwe had at the time, and I have managed
infrastructure for so long that I haveforgotten about all the tools that we've
tried to use over the years to unifyeverything, and we never quite get there.
We get 60%, maybe if you're reallylucky, 80%, but then there's always
that other thing that doesn't quite fit.
And it's exciting to see a companythat's brave enough to take this
(02:25):
on, because it's no small task.
It's no small achievement to be ableto say you have a universal API control
plane that you can access from thebrowser or from Terraform or from Pulumi
or from your agent harness, and it feelslike that's what they're achieving.
And we walked through a bunch of demos.
In fact, if you're interested in thedemos, go check out the link in the
(02:47):
show notes to go to the live stream,'cause we demoed for about an hour
after the conversation, and, wedidn't put those into this podcast.
So if you wanna check out allthose demos, go check the link.
But we talk about everything fromhow they onboard customers, what are
their customers looking like in termsof their infrastructure, and how are
they managing it once they get there.
Surprise, not a lot's changed.
They still use Terraform or OpenTofu.
(03:10):
All the things that they were usingbefore are compatible with their APIs.
But they also have MCP and CLI toolsto manage this, and once you get into
their interface, you realize that partof what they can do, because they're
agnostic and they want to operationalizeall of this across multi clouds, is
they're setting up the Kubernetesdistributions across the clouds for you.
(03:30):
They're making the decisions around howthe encrypted tunnels are gonna happen
between the different providers, itfeels kind of like what Docker felt at
first, where they had this old sayingat Docker of, "Batteries included, but
swappable" and that is something thatI feel like I could call control plane.
It feels like it's very easy outof the box, but they hide a little
bit of that complexity with theiropinionated defaults, which I like
(03:52):
opinionated defaults, especiallywhen I agree with those opinions.
And we dive into some of their extrafeatures that they're building on top
of this universal control plane, likea, a sandboxing approach that is so
popular right now that we have agentharnesses needing sandboxes, and we're
now talking about the corporate vibecoders, which I call app creators, the
(04:12):
people that are outside of IT that maybeneed a safe space to experiment with
ideas that they can then hand over toeither robots or humans to maybe develop
further and get onto their production.
Those people are coming, and us platformengineers and DevOps engineers, we're
having to deal with that problem, and itfeels like we need some solutions that
(04:32):
help automate that middle layer out of theway with a higher level of abstraction,
and it looks like that's what they built.
So let's get into my conversationwith Doron about Control Plane.
welcome to the show.
I'm glad to have you here.
Doron (04:44):
g-great to be here.
looking forward to it
Bret (2) (04:46):
Give us a little bit of your background, Tell me the origin story,
Doron (04:50):
I ran a company, sold a company, was chief architect at
Dell, chief architect at, SAP, andthen ended up as, chief architect,
for VMware for cloud services.
And, at VMware, I missed myinteractions back at SAP with a guy
named Dan Wilson, who was the bestDevOps/platform engineer I ever met.
And what I wanted at VMwarewas, Dan Wilson as a service.
(05:15):
And, I really saw hundreds of,outside customers and internal teams
struggle with Kubernetes, Istio,Grafana, Prometheus, and having to
reinvent the wheel again and again.
And so had the idea for ControlPlane, left VMware, started
this company, called Dan Wilson.
He was back at SAP and I said, "I want youto join me as my CTO and really deliver to
(05:39):
the world, what you do as a service." AndI thought it's gonna be a hard battle, but
he jumped ship and he said, "Yeah, I'lljoin you." And, that was the origin story.
And then we brought on a few otherbrilliant, engineers that have decades
of, practice on, on, cloud nativearchitectures, and, we built this company
Bret (2) (05:59):
this is pre-AI, right?
So, th- we're gonna get into awhole bunch of details later on,
agent-driven infrastructure, likeMCP and CLI tooling, agent h- harness
first, whatever we wanna call thisthing, th- this new future we're in.
but what did, what was it liketo to be an infrastructure
company and to see AI coming?
Were, were you sorta like seeingwhere this all could take us in
(06:20):
terms of agents helping us ininfrastructure and stuff like that?
Doron (06:23):
100%.
we, I think, got more lucky.
We have more luck than brain, becauseit found us at a very interesting time.
We, we wanted to reduce the cognitiveload on engineers not having to stitch
together Kubernetes, Istio, Grafana,Prometheus, Vault, and the things…
all the CNCF, solutions out there.
(06:44):
And we created an API that gives youunified access to any cloud, any service,
and we find that AI, if you just tellit, "Create me the infrastructure," it's
gonna duplicate a lot of resources (06:56):
a NAT gateway, a load balancer, brain, a
Kubernetes set of nodes, and it's gonnabe expensive, non-deterministic, and
it's gonna be non-secure, non-compliant.
And where is the logging, the metrics,the tracing, the secrets management,
the service discovery, the TLS, the DNS?
And the list goes on and on.
(07:17):
So what AI needs, just like an engineerneeds, is a reduced cognitive load.
In the era of AI is lesstokens, less context window.
Give it a deterministic APIthat says, "Hey, take my
desired state and make it so.
And by the way, make it so onany cloud." It is a boon for AI.
It makes AI a lot more effective.
(07:40):
we find AI in a perfect, intersectionbecause we can now make it do
tricks that is otherwise very, veryexpensive or even u- unattainable
Bret (2) (07:49):
Yeah, I always struggled with, automation, pre-AI, in terms
of, there's a point at which you'retrying to automate things and
automate triggers and intelligencewith a deterministic language.
And I always would get to a point whereI want this to be more automated, but
the level of effort to automate thatsmall thing was way more than it was
worth in terms of the automation.
(08:10):
And, and in DevOps forever, we've beentalking about the toil, and I think
that, I think the first time I heardthat was from Google's SRE paper, was
talking about, the toil of ops, andI always felt like there was a better
way, a more complete way to automatethings, but every time I would try to
take it to the next level, it, it waslike the management had no tolerance
for me spending all of my time tryingto automate these little things.
(08:30):
I'm like, "Yeah, but they're tinypaper cuts and they add up over time,"
and I was trying to, defend the,the case for more automation, but
we would just never quite get there.
And now I feel like theworld is our oyster.
I feel like we're, we're at a place whereyou're only limited by your imagination
and your ability to, manage the harnessand manage that agent inside it.
Doron (08:46):
we, we called it the cloud is your oyster.
We truly allow you to have a singularAPI and leverage BigQuery on Google
and Cosmos DB on Azure and S3 on Amazonand-- or any one of the services.
You can now write code and run it on yourRaspberry Pi or Dell machine or your EC2
instances or EKS, AKS, GKE, whatever.
(09:09):
And you can, not beconfined by any factor.
So think of all the clouds as They havemerged, and now you can run the compute in
a basement or on a cloud or on a secondaryor neo cloud, but leverage any service of
any cloud, and, and let AI do the work.
Like, I need a Postgres, Ineed a Redis, I need a Kafka.
(09:31):
You can conversationally get thosethings up and running deterministically
Bret (2) (09:36):
All right, so if we back up a second, If someone hasn't heard of Control
Plane, how is this different than a cloudor different than a cloud management
tool that we might all be using, likeTerraform or, any of the dozen, different
opportunities I have to manage my cloudwith a CLI or some sort of service?
Doron (09:52):
Sure.
So Terraform allows youto create resources.
We provide the Terraformprovider for control plane.
We provide Pulumi, we provide otherinterfaces Control Plane is a virtual
cloud, allowing you to not have acloud and be cloudless and still
run on Amazon, Google, Azure, Oraclewithout a cloud account and pay by
(10:14):
the millicore and megabyte of compute.
So if you deploy the Bret app,you can run essentially serverless
on any cloud or multiple cloudswithout having a cloud account.
You can bring your own cloud account.
If you're a SaaS and your customerstell you, "Hey, you must run on Azure,"
or, "You must run on Oracle," or,"Must run on Hetzner," you now can.
(10:34):
Your code, without any change,can run anywhere, even on-prem.
We let you have observabilitybuilt in We let you, as I
mentioned, run by the millicore.
We let you, communicate across clouds.
If you have data in a VPC, let's sayRDS, Relational Database Service, and
you want to run the workload on-prem,yet communicate with RDS without
(10:56):
poking holes in the firewall, you can.
You can, run above the cloud.
So today, when you run RDS asan example, you're paying a
high premium to run a database.
You're not paying for the compute.
Control Plane lets you run anyopen source project very easily.
We've certified, lotsand lots of, templates.
You can run Kafka, Postgres, MySQL,Cassandra, Mongo above the cloud.
(11:21):
So if you wanted to move yourpersistent store to Linode or Hetzner
or Oracle or on-prem, you can.
If you need multi-master replication,we support that for many database types.
we provide, sandboxes, so youcan deploy workloads or, or write
code in a isolated environment.
(11:42):
The difference about our, sandboxesis that they allow you to communicate
to your databases and other resourcesin private data centers or VPCs.
And you can traverse the networkboundary, easily connecting Amazon
US East and Azure US West and Oraclein, the Middle East, et cetera.
So you can think of all the cloudshave, having merged and, with a hundred
(12:06):
x simplification on how to consumethem, but without any limitation.
So if you need to use thenative SDK for SQS, SNS,
Dynamo, or any other native service,you can we, we-- think of us as
a virtual cloud, just like whatvirtualization did to servers.
(12:27):
You didn't care if it'sDell or HP, we do to cloud.
We make it so you don't care and theagent doesn't care if you're running
on Azure or any other, cloud provider.
In fact, you can deliver traffic closeto where the customer is, and if there
is a failure, let's say Amazon US East isdown, you automatically get routed to GCP
or to Amazon US West or somewhere else.
(12:48):
So you deliver low latencyand extreme high availability.
We provide a five-nine guarantee,translating to five minutes, fifteen
seconds per year of cumulative downtime.
So the reason customers come to us isfor unbreakable compute, for, extreme
ease of use, for, cost optimization.
Many of our customers save about fiftypercent compared to running natively
(13:12):
on Amazon or Google because They canpay for what they use and not pay for
a cow when you need a glass of milk.
'Cause when you buy a Kubernetescluster, you pay for the brain nodes,
the worker nodes, you pay a hundredpercent of their utilization, even
though they may consume twenty percent.
And on control plane, youpay twenty percent if you're
consuming twenty percent.
Bret (2) (13:31):
so you built this sort of unified API layer over multiple clouds
and, It sounds like you're adding almostlike your own custom services on top
of that like you mentioned the, thesandboxing, and obviously someone can,
design their own little, EC2 instanceor whatever, or they can, they can try
to design their own sandboxing solution.
But it sounds like you're, you'readding these as, specific services
on top of that unified API, Thisis actually a long question.
(13:52):
I'm spitballing here.
But, you could implement somethingin one of those sandboxes or one of
your other, ideas on top of any of theclouds, whether or not that cloud has a
particular offering labeled that, right?
'Cause when I think of unifiedcloud, I think of, reducing it down
to its core elements and then, onlygetting to use those core elements.
But it sounds like you'reenriching on top of that API to
(14:13):
give us higher level services.
Doron (14:14):
yes, people assume because we unify the cloud, we give
you, lowest common denominator.
But in fact, we're the opposite.
We give you the union of all clouds,because now You can write the code
with a native SDK for Google, forCloud Spanner, for Amazon, for, SQS,
for, Azure, for cloud, for, let'ssay, Entra ID or Cosmos DB or whatever
(14:38):
machine learning service that is onAzure, and we allow you to consume
those services without credentials.
Why is it important in the era of AI?
You do not want to leak tothe LLM, the credentials.
So neither in design time, meaning coding,nor at runtime are keys exposed, and
in fact, you don't even have to rotatethe keys because you get ephemeral,
(15:01):
zero trust, least privileged tokens.
and we patented the technologycalled Universal Cloud Identity that
basically gives you the identity, theIAM of all the clouds in a much more,
streamlined manner, and the code isdevoid of credentials completely.
Yet the code can only do theexact, operations on the exact
(15:22):
resources you granted it access to.
Bret (2) (15:25):
what are you seeing with adoption?
as a, as someone who's… I've managedinfrastructure for over 30 years
at this point, and, w- we've beenchasing this dream in ops land of,
the unified control plane, right?
we've had for decades now, ever sincereally the cloud or before, we've
had all these attempts at unifying.
You know, VMware wanted to do it.
Microsoft tried to do it.
we had just all these different pieces,and the best we could do was, like, stick
(15:49):
to one OS and then use their, I thinkthey, system management tools or whatever.
And then I feel like ever since thenI've been chasing this dream, whether
it was Terraform or Chef and Puppetbefore that, and then we got Pulumi, and
we've had all these different attemptsat, one control plane essentially that
controls not necessarily my workloads,but just the infrastructure behind it,
(16:09):
and it's always felt like a compromise.
It always felt like if I'm gonna doTerraform, that's great, but it's gonna
get much harder as I go multi-cloud, andI'm gonna be spending my days in TOML
hell just trying to make sure I don'tbreak things with a, with an update.
So I'm curious of, like, somecustomer stories around, onboarding.
How do people get to controlplane from where they are,
(16:31):
and what does that look like?
Doron (16:32):
Yeah.
So we have, over, eighteen hundred,now over two thousand customers.
Some of them are very large,some of them are tiny, doing
vibe, coding type projects.
And most of the larger customers,the-- none of them are greenfield.
They're all coming from Amazon,from Google, from Heroku, from, uh,
(16:52):
Azure, and they all have a sprawling,degree of Helm charts and, Terraform
or Pulumi or Crossplane, artifacts.
And we have, mechanical translation inthe CLI allowing you to take a Kubernetes
YAML and enrich it to the ControlPlane YAML because Kubernetes doesn't
have the concept of the global virtualcloud, a cloud made up of N clusters.
(17:17):
So in Control Plane, I can take threeclusters or three hundred and turn
them into one global virtual cloudor actually subdivide them into many
global virtual clouds and deploy anapplication to the GVC, which is like
a VPC, but spread across two regions ora hundred in one cloud or many So our
customers typically have a couple daysup to a couple weeks, depending on how
(17:41):
large the customer is, of migration,which is, again, that mechanical
translation of their YAML or Helm chartor other artifacts to Control Plane.
But we integrate very nicelyinto their CI/CD pipelines.
We integrate with Flux or Argo CD.
so it's very natural.
The learning curve is very shallow.
Once you learn Control Plane, youfeel, and what I hear from customers,
(18:04):
we run circles around our peers.
And one customer, I think the bestcompliment I ever got was after
using Control Plane, moving backto not using Control Plane is like
going from iPhone seventeen toNokia from nineteen ninety-seven.
That's-- And, and now, that wasvery rewarding for me to hear, and
I would-- I'm eager to demonstrate.
(18:24):
and my objective is after this,call, y- are you gonna go back to
the old ways or are you gonna adoptControl Plane to deploy your code?
I think it's the latter, because,it's-- we, we truly give you,
Dan Wilson as a service, the oneI, I mentioned, I started with.
He's our CTO, and he really, rather thanyou having to spend or the AI having
(18:45):
to spend millions of tokens reinventingthe wheel, focus on what matters, which
is your rocket shipping system or your,whatever the thing that you're doing
and not be, knee-deep in the toil.
and there is a lot of toil.
It's one thing to have toil,but why should every company
reinvent the same wheel?
(19:06):
Logging, metrics, tracing, secrets,m- mutual TLS between services because
you want a service mesh, audit trail,scaling, scaling strategies, failover
Should every company reinvent that wheel?
Does that make sense?
Should every company have an Exchangeserver engineer babysitting email?
That was the case.
(19:26):
It isn't anymore because itdoesn't make sense when you can,
shift left or whatever, delegatethat, mundane responsibility to
somebody who is excelling at it.
And think about it.
If every company reinvents the sameitems I just mentioned, it represents
technical debt because now you need tomaintain, fix the CVEs, upgrade Kubernetes
every three months, upgrade Istio,upgrade Prometheus, upgrade Grafana.
(19:50):
When do you have time to do theactual work when you're babysitting
an infrastructure that yourpeers are doing the same thing?
We say stop with the babysittingof infrastructure, start
delivering value to customers,
Bret (2) (20:03):
We talked about this last time when we, we had a
r- a call a couple weeks ago.
The, the assumption that I have aboutservices like this, like if I'm looking
at your homepage and I've not talkedto you and I don't know anything about
the company, is that, to me, there'salways a compromise, I feel like.
And so when I think about the complexityof the cloud APIs, just for AWS, the,
"This Week in AWS" podcast with CoreyQuinn, I've been, I've been on his
(20:26):
show, he's been on mine, but I, I alwaysfind his articles about, yet another
AWS service that we don't understandwhat it is, and it's redundant.
And, and so he talks about the hundredsand hundreds of services they have, and
it's, th- there's always a customer forthe things, but it may not be you or me.
And I always find it hilariouslycomplex that I am so behind on how
many of those products I don't knowabout and I've never used, and it just,
(20:50):
Am I even an engineer if Idon't understand half the
things that AWS deploys, right?
Sometimes I question it.
But, I'm curious about, how your APIrelates to their product APIs, and how
you guys have been able to innovatearound covering all the bases to make
sure that we're not left with, thisreduced abstraction that's only the
same core fundamentals across everycloud, but you're allowed to, you're
(21:10):
able to e- enrich it a little bit.
Tell me a little bit about that.
How's that work?
Doron (21:13):
Yeah, that's a great question.
So I mentioned we're not thelowest common denominator, but the
union, and what does that mean?
It means if Amazon came up with aBret service a microsecond from now,
we would support it because we'renot trying to, abstract the API,
the native API to the Bret service.
We integrate at the identityand access management layer.
(21:35):
And so we would mechanically be ableto pull permissions from their IAM IAM
system relating to the new Bret service.
The coder, AI or human, would usethe native SDK if there is one to the
Bret service or the C-- or the API.
We just inject the token necessaryfor the Bret service to do its work,
(21:57):
and we're able to do it whether you--the workload is running on-prem,
on Hetzner, on DigitalOcean, , onGoogle, on Amazon, on Azure.
So because we integrate at the IAM, theidentity and access management layer
Bret (2) (22:11):
Yeah
Doron (22:12):
We are supportive of any new service that Google, Amazon or
anybody else provides instantly.
There is no work that we need to do.
And the likelihood of Amazon or anybodyelse changing their identity and access
management APIs that we exploit arezero, because if they change their APIs,
(22:32):
the cl-- the world would break, right?
Because everybody, millions ofpeople have, utilized their services.
So if they were to change, theywould give you multi-year head start.
but, because again, we integrate at theIAM level, when you consume, let's say,
RDS, but you're on, Azure, the, the, theworkload is running on Azure or on-prem,
(22:54):
we obtain the correct token from theirSTS, their security token service, and
know how to inject it at runtime fromthe SDK to RDS, in our case, And, so in
effect, the workload is liberated andno longer captive to the subject cloud.
You can now move amongst the clouds.
People spent millions of dollarsmoving from Amazon to Google or
(23:16):
Google to Oracle, but on ControlPlane, the cloud is your oyster.
You can move from Amazon to Google,from Google to on-prem, from on-prem
to whatever with a click of a button,and you can leverage all of them.
So we flip the script wherethe clouds want to-- their
objective is to lock you in.
We flip it on its head and, turn themin-into just commoditized utilities.
(23:42):
So when you consume electricity,your TV doesn't care if it's
Edison or somebody else.
It cares about the interface.
With Control Plane, you now have a virtualcloud operating system that utilizes
the power, the whole power of Amazon,the whole power of Google, et cet- et
cetera, but without locking you in.
Bret (2) (24:01):
Yeah.
I wanna change the conversationa little bit to be more specific
on some of the AI, uh, stuff thatwe're all managing right now.
So, this whole year for me has been reallyfocused in understanding other DevOps
teams and, platform engineering teams,like understanding the way that they're
using agent harnesses to do their job.
I think, if we f- if we rewound a yearago, maybe even three or four years
(24:23):
ago when Google Copilot was kinda likethe first IDE to throw AI completion
in, and even in those early days,I think I demoed it when it was in
beta when we were on this channel.
I remember one summer we were, Ithink it was 2022 or something.
It was before ChatGPT came out, and wewere, like, looking at the, the early
GPT model that was embedded in, inGitHub Copilot, and the, VS Code UI.
And we were, we were trying tosee how far we could get with YAML
(24:44):
and TOML by tab completing, right?
Like, we were trying to figure outhow much time can it save me as an,
as a ops engineer, but we were reallyjust talking about file completion,
completion in a YAML statement.
So, it was saving me keystrokes, andit maybe, was saving me potentially
some human error that wouldhopefully be caught by a linter,
but it wasn't a huge gain, right?
(25:05):
And so you fast-forward alittle bit, and then we're all,
we're doing that with ChatGPT.
People are copying and pasting.
And then last year when we got ClaudeCode for the first time and we under- we
started to understand what an agent loopis, it, it started to shift and I started
to notice that my, my production friendswere all dabbling with letting their, the
first thing they would do is let theiragent have, a read access token to some
(25:25):
part of their infrastructure so that itcould maybe run the kubectl commands for
them or run the AWS CLI commands for them.
And I was doing that same thingfor, like, GitHub CLIs for, for CI.
CI.
Like, I cared about GitHub Actionsand, my build status and stuff
like that, so I was, I was managingthat middle portion, and I was
using agents to, keep track of it.
And now it's like these are all inherentfeatures that are really built in.
(25:47):
They, they've got the backgroundworkers, the sub-agents, and things
that are making this really possible.
But I'm curious what you'reseeing with your customers.
how, how are they drivingtheir infrastructure with AI?
Like, I guess maybe if we can getto some, into some nitty-gritty
details around, are they focusedon only using their agent harness?
Are they using, MCP to, to Control Plane?
Are they using, Control Plane CLIs?
(26:09):
Like, how are they actually doingthis work, and what are some
of the stories you're hearing?
Doron (26:12):
Yeah, our customers, pretty much all use our MCP server,
and we always pride ourselves inproviding all the accessibility.
Of course, at the lower end is, is theAPI, but everything you can do in the
API, you can do in the CLI, Terraform,Pulumi, Crossplane, UI, and MCP.
(26:35):
To us, these are symmetric interfaces.
Of course, with MCP, you can now bringthe intelligence to let it discover
what can be done, and now you canhave conversational infrastructure.
You now have the equivalent ofa enterprise architect/platform
engineer/DevOps/SRE bundled into onethat you can have a conversation with.
(26:57):
you can tell me the app you wantto build and the dependencies that
you want to have, and the MCP willgo and negotiate and build those
things that we want to build for us.
And then if we need to troubleshootor need to look at observability, the
MCP is able to look at the traces,the logs, the metrics, a- and add the
intelligence to give you actionable items.
(27:19):
So you feel like you have the best SREsand platform engineers at Google with you
twenty-four seven, and you don't pay them.
So you can vibe code a very complexsystem made up of 20 microservices all
intertwined with databases and queuesand, and caches and say, "Okay, give
it to me codified." And our codifiedversion is always backwards compatible.
(27:42):
So I'm sure Kubernetes deprecatestuff every three months.
You have some deprecations and new APIs.
It's a fairly unstable substrate.
So if you wanted to take YAMLfrom 10 years ago and just run
it, you'll run into issues.
So we made an early choice.
Bret (2) (27:57):
At a minimum warnings, possibly errors, yeah
Doron (27:59):
Right.
And we made a decision.
We, we noticed that six years ago andmade the very, I think, good decision of
always having backwards compatibility.
So if you take YAML from six years ago andapply it today, you'll get the exact same
artifacts on top of any compute substrate,whether it's on-prem, Azure, etcetera.
Bret (2) (28:19):
we-- Are-- When you s- when you say that, are we talking
about your customers can continueto use Terraform or Pulumi?
I'm assuming that that's how they're,they're interacting with you, right?
Like, they're, they're talkingto your API from these particular
management tools, right?
I'm ass- I'm assuming, um,OpenTofu is s- is supported.
What else, what are the other ways?
(28:40):
'Cause, o- one of the things I'vestarted to see with agents is if,
if you're a singular cloud, it mightjust be better if your, if your
agent is the complete interface to h-whatever the description language is.
I've seen some examples of people actuallyswitching away from Terraform back to
the native, cloud formation or whateverof their cloud, because they look at
it as there's this agent abstractionbetween me and the YAML or the JSON.
(29:03):
I don't have to be the expert in everysingle line of that anymore, so I
actually care more about, some of theinherent functionality of a different,
of, of the language tooling itself ratherthan, we always looked at Terraform
as maybe a little bit more to, easierto understand than cloud formation.
A little bit, a little less comprehensive,a little, little less verbose.
But if you've got an agent inthe way, that matters less.
(29:25):
Are you seeing anything like that?
Are, are you seeing people,switch, products now that they're
using agents, as their interface?
Doron (29:32):
Somewhat, yes.
I've seen people that, that usedcertain… I don't want to name names
'cause I don't want to dish on any oneplatform, but there are many equivalents.
Like when-- whether you useCrossplane, Pulumi, CloudFormation,
Terraform, and a few others,they're functionally equivalent.
They're like French, English, Spanish.
You can express the sameideas in these languages.
(29:53):
They do things in slightly differentmanners, like Pulumi is more,
programmatic than, than, declarative,and Terraform is more declarative.
But at the end of the day, theyexpress a desired state, and there is a
translation layer that takes the desiredstate, like with DAG on, on the case
of, Terraform, and applies in the rightorder, calls the APIs that are affecting
(30:16):
the, the actual resources in the cloud.
It's just a translation, right?
So like you said, if I don'thave to write to that language,
why can't I talk in English andlet it make the calls directly?
But here is the thing.
Terraform, as an example, or OpenTofu,invested heavily in doing the DAG and
doing the validation and doing stuff thatthe agent itself will have to reinvent
(30:39):
what they had done to apply things in theright order and give you the rigor that
they have already baked into the platform.
It is better, like in the Excel exampleI've ga-- I've given, to let the
agent leverage a tool like Terraformthan to learn, the underlying, API.
It's, it's possible.
here it's, it's, it'snot an exact science.
(31:00):
Here is subject to, to, judgment.
It can call the, the direct, itcan call the API, it can call
the CLI of the AWS, let's say.
It can call, a CDK, There aremany, again, equivalent, logically
equivalent, options here.
So
Bret (2) (31:16):
So
Doron (31:16):
our
Bret (2) (31:17):
you, I
Doron (31:17):
w- w- we, we just give you the, the one API, and it's your choice.
You tell the AI, " Use the API, useTerraform, use YAML, use JSON, JSON,
use, CRD." We give the choice to thecustomer or the AI, and the AI would
choose the, the least token-consumingmanner that it can operate in
Bret (2) (31:35):
So when someone's migrating to your platform, if they're using
CloudFormation, d- I'm assuming youdon't support CloudFormation because
you're sitting in front of the AWS.
Like, you're, you're
Doron (31:46):
Correct.
Bret (2) (31:46):
different
Doron (31:47):
we, we don't support cloud formation for control plane.
We have customers that use cloudformation to create their S3 buckets
and their RDS and their Dynamo,then, then they tell control plane,
run a workload that connects tothe S3 bucket to RDS to Dynamo.
They're not, in conflict with each other.
They're just not overlapping.
There is no reason for us to introducea cloud formation concept 'cause
(32:10):
it's a proprietary, lingo of AWS.
So we are operating atthe cloud agnostic, layer.
We fly above the cloud.
We don't wanna fly in, in that cloud.
We fly above it
Bret (2) (32:21):
Do you see, do you think that Terraform is still the
primary way your customers aremanaging their infrastructure?
Do you see that as, the majority?
Doron (32:27):
I would call it 60%.
Bret (2) (32:29):
Okay
Doron (32:30):
Just because of inertia, Not because it has a, a, a
specific advantage, like I said.
Whether it's Terraform, Pulumi, orCrossplane, or something else, All they
are, are syntactic sugar on top of theAPI with some DAG, that, that decides
what to create first and what to destroyfirst, and maybe save the state and so on.
So to me, those are fairlycommoditized, languages.
(32:53):
So for, for the audience tounderstand, we don't compete with
Terraform, not even a little bit.
It's like a car doesn'tcompete with, a sandwich.
It's two different animals completely.
Bret (2) (33:04):
yeah.
so we talked about customerbase, and, like, the different
size of customers, right?
And it's hard for, any one cloud toalways, a-adopt all customers, right?
We, we all think of, the digital oceansand, the Vercels of the world, that
they're all like a very niche cloud,that they've got a very specific purpose,
and then you have the three hyperscalersthat are just everything for everyone,
but it's also impossible for anyoneto get on board really easily, right?
(33:26):
Do you, do you see, are small teamsof, with n-no developers or very few
operators or anything like that, dothey-- Is Control Plane being used by
those kinds of small little companies?
'Cause I, I have a scenario whereI'm thinking, I have, companies
that are, they, th-they might haveone or two IT staff, but, they
don't have internal developers.
So usually when it, it's hard to figureout, as a consultant, your heart, it's
(33:49):
hard to figure out, what do I do for them?
Because I either have to put themon a hyperscaler, and then now they
can't do anything without me, right?
I become a bottleneck, which I, I, me asa consultant, I don't ever wanna do that.
I wanna be instantlyreplaceable re-usually.
Or I have to put them on some sort ofniche cloud that, if it's too niche, it
may not be here in five years, or it mightbe somehow limited i-in, in what it can
(34:10):
do, and then I'm li- like a Lovable forAI or whatever, like these, these little
fly-by-night dashboard companies, right?
Do you… W-what's it look like for thereally small teams on, on Control Plane?
Doron (34:19):
The good news, you will always have a substrate to run upon 'cause it can
be, like I said, your on-prem, it can beAzure, Google, Amazon, Oracle, et cetera.
And we have customers that have, non,traditional developers, certainly no
dev… We have DevOps engineers thatuse Control Plane, platform engineers,
but we have people that are just vibecoding and not know anything about…
(34:43):
They don't know the ifstatement, and they still deploy
successfully on Control Plane.
case in point, my youngerson, wanted to build an app.
He never wrote a code, anypiece of code in his life.
He was able to write a full game,which was pretty impressive, and
run it on Control Plane, and hedidn't even ask me how to do it.
So he deployed the whole game witha back end, and, I was shocked.
(35:05):
You know, I, I helped develop theproduct, and I was shocked at,
at, at what he was able to do, andhe's never written a line of code
despite me wanting him to, to learn.
But he was able to do it.
So we have many people withno coding experience that are
able to be very successful.
Bret (2) (35:20):
Yeah.
Do you think that's a-- With AI, I mean,I, I know my answer to this question,
but, it's like a leading question.
Do you think that with these agentsgetting better and better and th-
there's the… Now we got Cowork and,and Claude Code built into people's
Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions forpeople that aren't technical, right?
You don't have to use the TUI anymore.
And so I feel like we're, we're heading toa, pretty quickly to a place where non-IT
(35:42):
staff are getting more and more powerto be able to potentially do things like
vibe code their own app and deploy it onthe internet, and If they don't have the
IT staff to help them manage it,they can, they can at least get
by with some, some simpler stuff.
do you see that happeningon Control Plane too?
It sounds like it is, since your, since
Doron (35:56):
100%.
We are, we are releasing a,more consumer-oriented…
I'll come out and say it.
We are, the, shipping very soon.
We're in the tail end of,Vers- not Vercel, but, Lovable
and Replit, Base44 killer.
And why we're able to do what theydo, but they're not able to do
what we do, is the coding agents.
(36:18):
when you look at Replit, most of theeffort has been put into, Guardrails
and skills that are just, wrappers,assisting agents for, for the LLM.
and, and those are now in the LLMitself most of the, of the time.
The heavy lifting is allowing you torun on any cloud, letting you scale
using a hundred different scalingstrategies, letting you fail over
(36:41):
automatically, leveraging hundredsof diff- the operational stuff.
So we've been hard at work buildingthis operating system for six and a
half years, and it's not somethingyou can vibe code, absolutely not.
And so we built this operating system,and for us to layer the, consumer-facing
app builder is a lot easier thanfor an, an app builder to create an
(37:04):
operating system for running, anywhere.
Replit is I, I playedwith it a little bit.
It's a, it's a good tool.
I don't know that it will letyou scale to Netflix grade.
I, I think what happens is, and I wrotean article that I'm publishing, but many
people, when they start scaling or needsecurity or need compliance, they get
off of that vibe coding platform, whereControl Plane takes you all the way to
(37:27):
Netflix grade cloud native maturity.
You get the compliance, the security, thescalability, the, unbreakable compute.
Bret (2) (37:35):
I would just assume that a lot of those platforms are not
like, SOC 2, PCI, you know, HIPAA,
Doron (37:41):
HIPAA, right
Bret (2) (37:42):
all the things that like a dec- any decent sized company is gonna care
about, and there's probably someone inmarketing vibe coding something on Lovable
that's completely not up to standards.
For me, my experience so far has been oneof the biggest challenges in like the vibe
codings products out there, is they don'treally answer the data problem, right?
Like, 'cause usually m- everyone thatI've talked to so far, like creating
(38:02):
a dashboard is cute, and these are,these are important things for teams.
but th- th- there needs tobe data on that dashboard.
There needs to be data in that app, andit's usually existing cust- company data
locked up somewhere, usually not behindlike a perfectly designed open portal
with a proper API across every surfacewith, with automatic, token delivery
(38:23):
for people that request it to ins- Like,there's just this whole infrastructure
of cloud native that a lot of companies
they haven't matured to yet.
And that's to me, like building these vibecoding platforms for companies, which I
think, yeah, again, like we could probablydo a whole separate podcast on, but
like that world is inherently necessarythat you have a very modern mature
infrastructure before you can do that.
(38:45):
' Cause a lot of it is about, automationand security and encryption and, l-
like you said, auditing and compliance.
That's, that's where I live, and that'swhere the vibe coded app, while it may
not be stable or highly redundant, it hasto… It, it… Those things are almost
like optional, maybe someday things.
But what's not usually optionalis for this thing to be useful, I
(39:05):
need to access that SQL database,and how do I get that, right?
How do I ensure thatthat data doesn't leak?
How do I make sure thatthis is behind the firewall?
Like, there's all those levelsof complexity that I don't see
the Replitz and the Lovables ofthe world ever truly tackling.
So I think you're right that this isprobably… These, these solutions
are probably gonna come more frominfrastructure companies like yourself
rather than a, a startup that's focusingon AI as a, as a sort of, magic button.
(39:31):
So, I'm, I'm interested to get into that.
So I know you brought some demos,and we could talk about this product
forever, but I, I feel like we've,we've covered some of the questions
that I wanted to, to know about.
l- l- what are we gonna, whatare we gonna look at today?
Doron (39:43):
So I want to show you, I, I want to do a tour around the platform, and
I'll give a sneak peek at some of thepower you get right out of the box, and
traverse the network boundaries, allowyou to run an app anywhere, even on-prem,
that consumes any service of any cloud,show you the observability, show you
the audit trail, show you the Terraform,capabilities and, and stuff like that.
(40:05):
So just give you a general tourso people know what exists.
And, most people don't know that theyhave at their fingertips so much power,
and they keep struggling with Amazon.
And, w-where you can get a hundredx the productivity by leveraging,
a, a platform like Control Plane.
and not only that, save a bundlebecause you're not running full EC2
(40:28):
instances, you're running the millicores.
So you can literally run your Bretapp for six-- five and a half cents a
day, a day meaning twenty-four hours,literally less than six cents a day.
and yet people are spending moneyon NAT gateways, load balancers and,
Kubernetes nodes and pay hundredsof dollars per month when they can
be paying, cents on the dollar.
(40:48):
And that's what I want to show.
Boom questions?
Bret (2) (40:51):
no, this is, this is a lot.
That's, I'm trying to think of myworkflows and, like, how my workflows
for creating infrastructure and managinginfrastructure need to adapt to this
model, 'cause it's, it's flexible enough.
you have click ops, right?
but it seems so easy to hop back and forthbetween the click ops, 'cause it feels
like the click ops is backed because youhave that versioning and the audit trail.
(41:14):
you don't, it doesn't, it looks likeyou've removed the risk of the, sort of
the rogue click that now is no longercompatible or, or can- isn't tracked in
a way that you can update your Terraform.
this is the classic problem of, we'regit- we're trying to do GitOps, and
we're putting all of our infrastructurein, in Git, and we're storing changes
there, and we've maybe got someautomation for Terraform plans and
(41:35):
applies, or we've got, we've got somestuff going on there, and that's the
only way we're supposed to do it.
And then we get some person that showsup and in an emergency or because they
didn't know or whatever, they go intothe AWS console and make a change,
and now I'm bifurcated, and I haveno path to success because AWS isn't
gonna really easily export, it's notgonna to export Terraform for me.
(41:58):
And so I have to figure out what theychanged before, I risk blowing their
stuff away with my future Terraform apply.
And so we, we've always had thischallenge in infrastructure of,
sometimes we do need the click ops.
Sometimes we ne- do need to be able to gointo a GUI really quick, troub- especially
when you're, like, troubleshooting orjust trying to recover from outage.
You don't wanna stare at a bunchof l- code in TOML forever.
(42:19):
So you're, you're usually in the, inthe dis- in this GUI app trying to
figure things out, but you also knowthat y- it's, you can't touch it.
It has to be read-only because youneed to make your changes somewhere
else, and you're so nervous.
So it feels like you've kindathought about that a little bit.
Doron (42:33):
Yeah, and everything, like I said, everything you
can get as, YAML or, or JSON.
But here is our app running, andso we give you a more consumer-y
interface to this thing.
but the bottom line, it's really backedby the control plane API, and the control
plane API lets you run anywhere, and with,with determinism, and, and it's the same.
(42:54):
You c-- Again, you can run it onyour Raspberry Pi or Dell machine.
And the cloud wormhole, which Ihaven't demonstrated, allows you to
very, very easily connect to an RDSinstance in a VPC or connect from
a, the seven different locationshere to my own Redis on my machine.
And we have a service catalogwhere you can run above the cloud.
(43:14):
If you want to run CockroachDB orCassandra or really any open source
project, we certify these s-services.
Like let's say I want to run HermesAgent or Langfuse or Keycloak or, you
name it, Postgres, Mongo You can runthem at the cost of the infrastructure
instead of paying a premium to RDS.
(43:36):
You pay double what the computeis, but Control Plane lets you
do backups, lets you do leaderselection, lets you do multi-master
replication with different add-ons.
You can run Ollama, you canrun whatever you want to run.
and you can conversationally say, "Hey,get me an N8n, run me a Hermes agent,
run me, know, OpenBaO or run me whatever,Postgres very, very easily." you,
(44:00):
you can do all of, all of that stuff.
And again, you can run anywhere.
Bret (2) (44:04):
Yeah
Doron (44:04):
w-we're not going to do an exhaustive demonstration.
one of the things that, that peoplecare about is security, and you
can set very granular policies ofwho is allowed to do exactly what.
You can say, this agent is allowed onlyto push image but not delete an image.
This Lisa can only, read acertain value but not write.
Secrets are only available to X and Y.
(44:26):
So everything is very, very granular.
and th-there is a lot, a lot more.
You can set custom domains.
we have customers with twentythousand different domains, and
they run perfectly on Control Plane.
It gives you the confidence to operateabove the clouds without being bogged down
by the complexity of any particular cloud.
(44:46):
And the thing I wanted to show,because we have this thing called
Capacity AI That is by default on.
If you look at the spend, you're spendingtwenty-five millicores 'cause the system
learned over time that Bret video gameonly needs twenty-five one-thousandth
of a CPU and thirty-two megs of RAM.
If you go to the control plane pricingand plug in-- And you can bring your
(45:08):
own compute, or you can use controlplane compute, or you can do both.
So twenty-five millicores andthirty-two megs of RAM cost you a
dollar seventy-eight per month, period.
You don't pay for load balancers,you don't pay for nodes,
you don't pay for anything.
That's all you pay.
We charge you by the second.
let's say a full hour would costyou, No, sorry, a full day would
cost you less than six cents.
(45:30):
So if you ran the Bret app for afull twenty-four hours in a location,
it would cost you six cents.
That's why I'm saying sometimes runningit in more locations is even cheaper
than running it in a single location,'cause if you were to stand up a EKS
cluster, you would pay hundreds ofdollars in a month to heat up the planet
Earth or to make Jeff Bezos richer.
(45:50):
We let you pay for what you eat,not for heating up the planet Earth.
So extremely cost-effective
Bret (2) (45:57):
In that, in the, the workflows you were showing
as you would, as you were doing thisstuff, I w- guess one of my questions is
Deployment configurations and design canoften be, hard for teams, especially when
they start to adopt Kubernetes, right?
Because then they have to pick Fluxor Argo, and they have to decide on a
particular way to deploy that, and thenthey have to configure it all correctly,
(46:17):
and then when they have b- a bunch ofdifferent apps, yeah, so my premise was,
like one of the, one of the challengesthat I, I train people on and is a lar-
a d- decent amount of my consultingover the last six years has been once
teams adopt Kubernetes, there becomesthis deployment complexity because it's
not enough to just have Kubernetes.
Then, then you need, your code's storedin a place, GitHub, GitLab, whatever, and
(46:38):
then you gotta connect all that together.
And, in the old days before containers,a- and even when we first, first
started using containers, it was verymuch "I'm gonna write a CI job that
runs kubectl apply," or, "I'm gonnarun a Docker run, and, and it's gonna
connect to the server from my CI."
And then we grew up, and werealized we maybe need a more
deterministic methodology, and thenwe started adopting Argo and Flux.
(46:59):
And, and so for the longest time,I've been f- I've been advocating
and teaching those technologies.
We call it GitOps, but it doesn'tnecessarily have to be labeled that.
and I'm curious how you, howyour platform works with that.
Does that m- It, it… You've got alot of, glue there that feels like
it makes a lot of these rough edgesstreamlined and it's almost like you're
applying opinionated defaults, which Ilove because I'm a, I'm a very much a,
(47:21):
an opinionated defaults kind of guy.
when it comes to like the code inthe repos, and is it as easy as
someone on your platform pointingto repos, and then it figures out
how to get it into Kubernetes?
do they need to even worryabout Argo at this point?
'Cause you've been saying things likedeploy this app, and it's doing it.
I don't know how it's doing it.
I know it's, I know it'srunning on Kubernetes.
(47:42):
But what's that, that deploymentlook like for Control Plane?
Is it automating it?
Is it, is it doing Argo for you?
Doron (47:47):
So it c-- you can use Argo.
So we have, a CRD, a control planeCRD, so you can have a cluster and,
use Argo or Flux very naturally.
the way it works, so you said, "I'm notsure how it works," so let me explain.
you get the YAML.
Let me share real quick.
and again, YAML is just one of many.
(48:07):
So if… let's take thisguy for-- as an example.
I can export, this YAML.
So you can see the kind is workload.
It's a new kind that doesn't exist onKubernetes, and it has the different,
like what's the memory, what's thescaling strategy, what GVC does it go on?
And you j-just say CPLN applyand give it, minus F and give
(48:28):
it the YAML, and it deploys it.
Like I said, we have other waysto deploy, but at the end of
the day, we have a data service.
We have an-- we have the controlplane API, and you make a call to
the plane itself is, is runningon Amazon, Google, and Azure, and
the-- our data is distributed.
It calls a component we call the whichis a control plane, Go-based application.
(48:51):
It runs on the edge, wecall them edge clusters.
So you can have one cluster, or inour case, we have one, two, three,
four, five, six, seven clusters.
These are different clusters.
They can have hundreds of nodes.
we provide clusters that are, cloudless,meaning we provide clusters, or you can
bring your own, you can bring your owncluster like I did in the Ron office.
(49:13):
I created the Kubernetes brain in thecloud, but I could have run OpenShift or
EKS or whatever, in the local environmentThe-- what you need is a Kubernetes
cluster with the actuator and a few othercomponents like the, the log, collector,
the metrics collector, and so on.
But we control planify a cluster,and then it becomes part of
that global virtual cloud.
(49:33):
We use NATs under the covers to haveour, control plane, if you will,
communicate the desired state to all theclusters, and they all take the desired
state and actuate it in the cluster.
So under the cover, you have, statefulsets or, deployments or, pods and
all the Kubernetes goodness that ishappening, but it has been abstracted.
(49:55):
And if you want to see the Kubernetesresources and, and it's a bring your
own Kubernetes like I have here, youcan get the kubeconfig and go edit
or use the dashboard and go edit.
But we… You noticed we didn'thave to issue kubectl apply commands
and all that because there is anactuator component in this cluster
that went and did the actuationof the desired state Makes sense.
(50:18):
And also, if we are down, the, the clusteroperates autonomously and serves traffic.
Maybe you can't upgrade the versionof the workload, but A, we're very
highly, redundant and highly available.
so we're very, very unlikely to go down.
But if we were to go down, we are thecontrol plane, not the data plane.
The data plane is where the data,flows, and you mentioned that earlier.
(50:41):
so hopefully that gives you kind
Bret (2) (50:43):
the goal, right?
Is like the control plane never,never takes down the data plane
when it's, when it's unavailable.
Yeah.
Doron (50:49):
Exactly.
A, we're extremely… Yeah,and we test everything, like,
like I can't even tell you.
From day one, we created what we callthe Observer Project, and it does
twenty-four seven millions of testssimulating node failure, multi-node
failure, cluster failure, AZ failure,region failure, whole cloud failure.
And we do, fuzzing.
(51:10):
We do random failure, introduction offailure modes with a core objective
of making sure you never go down.
So one of the things you get withControl Plane is mainframe-grade
availability over commodity infrastructure
Bret (2) (51:23):
All right Yeah, the fractional CPU, stuff is, is
pretty flexible and pretty awesome.
When you're running small stuff andyou're a small company and every single
workload you add has, this minimumcost to it, and Even when you try to
run, small instances in an EC2 cluster,you're limited on how small you can go,
and then you're inherently bottleneckedthere if you ever get any decent traffic
(51:46):
because it, it doesn't know how to…
You, you have to build a lot ofintelligence in in order for it to
auto-scale up and correctly changethe node size, if you need more memory
because, a classic example is, a legacyapp with a PDF export and someone
decides to PDF export a report that isn'tbatched properly, so then it consumes
all the memory on the server for onereport, and then the, and then your tiny
(52:06):
little app crashes the whole thing allbecause you wanted to print a report.
So there's always, there's always, sizingchallenges because you just want things,
especially when, when it's, a smallbusiness kind of situation where, they,
you tell them, $500 a month for somethingthat they consider not worth all that is a
hard sell when you're like, "Well, that'swhat it takes to be minimum redundant
(52:27):
across regions in this particular cloud."
And the idea that I can say, "Well,you're, you're only using this
app internally, so we don't evenneed a single CPU. We need a half
of one. We need a third of one,"
Doron (52:37):
Yeah, we need a fif-fiftieth of one or, one, one-twentieth of one.
Yeah, and that's… And you can nowgive people redundant availability for
three dollars, five dollars a month.
you can run an app for fivedollars a month that is-- has the
availability of a real enterprise.
Bret (2) (52:53):
how do people get started?
They go to Control Plane.comand sign up for an account?
Doron (52:57):
Yeah.
Yeah, it's very easy.
so they go to Control Plane, theyclick sign up, they follow the prompts.
we ask for a credit card, and Ifind some people get intimidated.
we're happy to give you,especially to your listeners,
shoot me an email directly, Doron,D-O-R-O-N, @ Control Plane.com.
I'll give you, basically a, afree month to experiment with.
(53:19):
Of course, don't do crypto mining anddon't do crazy stuff, but happy to
let you experiment on the platform.
Even if we were to charge you, you canrun so cost effectively that unless you
reach five dollars in spend, which is alot on Control Plane, we don't charge you.
So if you're under five dollars amonth, we don't even charge you 'cause
it's not worth it to send to Stripe.
So many people can run real projects onControl Plane for less than five bucks.
(53:43):
There is no platform fee, there's noper seat fee, there's just usage fee,
and it's very, very cost effective.
Bret (2) (53:49):
That's what I used to use Heroku for, so now m-
now maybe you're my new Heroku
Doron (53:52):
Think of us as a non-toy Heroku.
Bret (2) (53:54):
Yeah
Doron (53:54):
the non-toy, replace your, Heroku with, the, the, the cloud du jour.
But, we give you all the powerof all the clouds, but, with the
ease of use of Heroku or better,
Bret (2) (54:05):
thank you so much for being here, Doron.
Doron (54:06):
thank you.
Really enjoyed, the conversation.
You asked great questions.
super happy we connected
Bret (2) (54:12):
And we'll see you guys next time.
Ciao.
were you sorta seeing where this all could take us in terms of
(00:03):
agents helping us in infrastructure
Doron (00:05):
we wanted to reduce the cognitive load on engineers not
having to stitch together Kubernetes,Istio, Grafana, Prometheus, Vault,
and all the CNCF, solutions out there.
And we created an API that gives youunified access to any cloud, any service,
and we find that AI, if you just tell it,"Create me the infrastructure," it's gonna
duplicate a lot of resources (00:28):
and it's gonna be expensive, non-deterministic, and
it's gonna be non-secure, non-compliant.
And where is the logging, the metrics,the tracing, the secrets management,
the service discovery, the TLS, the DNS?
And the list goes on and on.
So what AI needs, just like an engineerneeds, is a reduced cognitive load.
(00:50):
Give it a deterministic APIthat says, "Hey, take my
desired state and make it so.
And by the way, make it so on anycloud." It makes AI a lot more effective.
we find AI in a perfect, intersectionbecause we can now make it do
tricks that is otherwise very, veryexpensive or even u- unattainable
Bret (2) (01:16):
Welcome to another episode of DevOps & Docker Talk.
I'm your host, Bret, and in this one,we go deep into the universal control
plane for the cloud and the search forthe singular management system, which
we have been doing my entire 30-yearcareer, been trying to find that perfect
sweet spot of a tool that can manageall of my infrastructure from one API.
(01:40):
And what better person to have onto talk about this than the CEO and
co-founder of Control Plane, the companybuilding this unified API layer for
controlling all your infrastructure.
I'm having Doron Grinstein on the show,and we go deep into what they're building,
And he has a very similar story to me,just trying to use the infrastructure
(02:02):
that we had at the time and the toolingwe had at the time, and I have managed
infrastructure for so long that I haveforgotten about all the tools that we've
tried to use over the years to unifyeverything, and we never quite get there.
We get 60%, maybe if you're reallylucky, 80%, but then there's always
that other thing that doesn't quite fit.
And it's exciting to see a companythat's brave enough to take this
(02:25):
on, because it's no small task.
It's no small achievement to be ableto say you have a universal API control
plane that you can access from thebrowser or from Terraform or from Pulumi
or from your agent harness, and it feelslike that's what they're achieving.
And we walked through a bunch of demos.
In fact, if you're interested in thedemos, go check out the link in the
(02:47):
show notes to go to the live stream,'cause we demoed for about an hour
after the conversation, and, wedidn't put those into this podcast.
So if you wanna check out allthose demos, go check the link.
But we talk about everything fromhow they onboard customers, what are
their customers looking like in termsof their infrastructure, and how are
they managing it once they get there.
Surprise, not a lot's changed.
They still use Terraform or OpenTofu.
(03:10):
All the things that they were usingbefore are compatible with their APIs.
But they also have MCP and CLI toolsto manage this, and once you get into
their interface, you realize that partof what they can do, because they're
agnostic and they want to operationalizeall of this across multi clouds, is
they're setting up the Kubernetesdistributions across the clouds for you.
(03:30):
They're making the decisions around howthe encrypted tunnels are gonna happen
between the different providers, itfeels kind of like what Docker felt at
first, where they had this old sayingat Docker of, "Batteries included, but
swappable" and that is something thatI feel like I could call control plane.
It feels like it's very easy outof the box, but they hide a little
bit of that complexity with theiropinionated defaults, which I like
(03:52):
opinionated defaults, especiallywhen I agree with those opinions.
And we dive into some of their extrafeatures that they're building on top
of this universal control plane, likea, a sandboxing approach that is so
popular right now that we have agentharnesses needing sandboxes, and we're
now talking about the corporate vibecoders, which I call app creators, the
(04:12):
people that are outside of IT that maybeneed a safe space to experiment with
ideas that they can then hand over toeither robots or humans to maybe develop
further and get onto their production.
Those people are coming, and us platformengineers and DevOps engineers, we're
having to deal with that problem, and itfeels like we need some solutions that
(04:32):
help automate that middle layer out of theway with a higher level of abstraction,
and it looks like that's what they built.
So let's get into my conversationwith Doron about Control Plane.
welcome to the show.
I'm glad to have you here.
Doron (04:44):
g-great to be here.
looking forward to it
Bret (2) (04:46):
Give us a little bit of your background, Tell me the origin story,
Doron (04:50):
I ran a company, sold a company, was chief architect at
Dell, chief architect at, SAP, andthen ended up as, chief architect,
for VMware for cloud services.
And, at VMware, I missed myinteractions back at SAP with a guy
named Dan Wilson, who was the bestDevOps/platform engineer I ever met.
And what I wanted at VMwarewas, Dan Wilson as a service.
(05:15):
And, I really saw hundreds of,outside customers and internal teams
struggle with Kubernetes, Istio,Grafana, Prometheus, and having to
reinvent the wheel again and again.
And so had the idea for ControlPlane, left VMware, started
this company, called Dan Wilson.
He was back at SAP and I said, "I want youto join me as my CTO and really deliver to
(05:39):
the world, what you do as a service." AndI thought it's gonna be a hard battle, but
he jumped ship and he said, "Yeah, I'lljoin you." And, that was the origin story.
And then we brought on a few otherbrilliant, engineers that have decades
of, practice on, on, cloud nativearchitectures, and, we built this company
Bret (2) (05:59):
this is pre-AI, right?
So, th- we're gonna get into awhole bunch of details later on,
agent-driven infrastructure, likeMCP and CLI tooling, agent h- harness
first, whatever we wanna call thisthing, th- this new future we're in.
but what did, what was it liketo to be an infrastructure
company and to see AI coming?
Were, were you sorta like seeingwhere this all could take us in
(06:20):
terms of agents helping us ininfrastructure and stuff like that?
Doron (06:23):
100%.
we, I think, got more lucky.
We have more luck than brain, becauseit found us at a very interesting time.
We, we wanted to reduce the cognitiveload on engineers not having to stitch
together Kubernetes, Istio, Grafana,Prometheus, Vault, and the things…
all the CNCF, solutions out there.
(06:44):
And we created an API that gives youunified access to any cloud, any service,
and we find that AI, if you just tellit, "Create me the infrastructure," it's
gonna duplicate a lot of resources (06:56):
a NAT gateway, a load balancer, brain, a
Kubernetes set of nodes, and it's gonnabe expensive, non-deterministic, and
it's gonna be non-secure, non-compliant.
And where is the logging, the metrics,the tracing, the secrets management,
the service discovery, the TLS, the DNS?
And the list goes on and on.
(07:17):
So what AI needs, just like an engineerneeds, is a reduced cognitive load.
In the era of AI is lesstokens, less context window.
Give it a deterministic APIthat says, "Hey, take my
desired state and make it so.
And by the way, make it so onany cloud." It is a boon for AI.
It makes AI a lot more effective.
(07:40):
we find AI in a perfect, intersectionbecause we can now make it do
tricks that is otherwise very, veryexpensive or even u- unattainable
Bret (2) (07:49):
Yeah, I always struggled with, automation, pre-AI, in terms
of, there's a point at which you'retrying to automate things and
automate triggers and intelligencewith a deterministic language.
And I always would get to a point whereI want this to be more automated, but
the level of effort to automate thatsmall thing was way more than it was
worth in terms of the automation.
(08:10):
And, and in DevOps forever, we've beentalking about the toil, and I think
that, I think the first time I heardthat was from Google's SRE paper, was
talking about, the toil of ops, andI always felt like there was a better
way, a more complete way to automatethings, but every time I would try to
take it to the next level, it, it waslike the management had no tolerance
for me spending all of my time tryingto automate these little things.
(08:30):
I'm like, "Yeah, but they're tinypaper cuts and they add up over time,"
and I was trying to, defend the,the case for more automation, but
we would just never quite get there.
And now I feel like theworld is our oyster.
I feel like we're, we're at a place whereyou're only limited by your imagination
and your ability to, manage the harnessand manage that agent inside it.
Doron (08:46):
we, we called it the cloud is your oyster.
We truly allow you to have a singularAPI and leverage BigQuery on Google
and Cosmos DB on Azure and S3 on Amazonand-- or any one of the services.
You can now write code and run it on yourRaspberry Pi or Dell machine or your EC2
instances or EKS, AKS, GKE, whatever.
(09:09):
And you can, not beconfined by any factor.
So think of all the clouds as They havemerged, and now you can run the compute in
a basement or on a cloud or on a secondaryor neo cloud, but leverage any service of
any cloud, and, and let AI do the work.
Like, I need a Postgres, Ineed a Redis, I need a Kafka.
(09:31):
You can conversationally get thosethings up and running deterministically
Bret (2) (09:36):
All right, so if we back up a second, If someone hasn't heard of Control
Plane, how is this different than a cloudor different than a cloud management
tool that we might all be using, likeTerraform or, any of the dozen, different
opportunities I have to manage my cloudwith a CLI or some sort of service?
Doron (09:52):
Sure.
So Terraform allows youto create resources.
We provide the Terraformprovider for control plane.
We provide Pulumi, we provide otherinterfaces Control Plane is a virtual
cloud, allowing you to not have acloud and be cloudless and still
run on Amazon, Google, Azure, Oraclewithout a cloud account and pay by
(10:14):
the millicore and megabyte of compute.
So if you deploy the Bret app,you can run essentially serverless
on any cloud or multiple cloudswithout having a cloud account.
You can bring your own cloud account.
If you're a SaaS and your customerstell you, "Hey, you must run on Azure,"
or, "You must run on Oracle," or,"Must run on Hetzner," you now can.
(10:34):
Your code, without any change,can run anywhere, even on-prem.
We let you have observabilitybuilt in We let you, as I
mentioned, run by the millicore.
We let you, communicate across clouds.
If you have data in a VPC, let's sayRDS, Relational Database Service, and
you want to run the workload on-prem,yet communicate with RDS without
(10:56):
poking holes in the firewall, you can.
You can, run above the cloud.
So today, when you run RDS asan example, you're paying a
high premium to run a database.
You're not paying for the compute.
Control Plane lets you run anyopen source project very easily.
We've certified, lotsand lots of, templates.
You can run Kafka, Postgres, MySQL,Cassandra, Mongo above the cloud.
(11:21):
So if you wanted to move yourpersistent store to Linode or Hetzner
or Oracle or on-prem, you can.
If you need multi-master replication,we support that for many database types.
we provide, sandboxes, so youcan deploy workloads or, or write
code in a isolated environment.
(11:42):
The difference about our, sandboxesis that they allow you to communicate
to your databases and other resourcesin private data centers or VPCs.
And you can traverse the networkboundary, easily connecting Amazon
US East and Azure US West and Oraclein, the Middle East, et cetera.
So you can think of all the cloudshave, having merged and, with a hundred
(12:06):
x simplification on how to consumethem, but without any limitation.
So if you need to use thenative SDK for SQS, SNS,
Dynamo, or any other native service,you can we, we-- think of us as
a virtual cloud, just like whatvirtualization did to servers.
(12:27):
You didn't care if it'sDell or HP, we do to cloud.
We make it so you don't care and theagent doesn't care if you're running
on Azure or any other, cloud provider.
In fact, you can deliver traffic closeto where the customer is, and if there
is a failure, let's say Amazon US East isdown, you automatically get routed to GCP
or to Amazon US West or somewhere else.
(12:48):
So you deliver low latencyand extreme high availability.
We provide a five-nine guarantee,translating to five minutes, fifteen
seconds per year of cumulative downtime.
So the reason customers come to us isfor unbreakable compute, for, extreme
ease of use, for, cost optimization.
Many of our customers save about fiftypercent compared to running natively
(13:12):
on Amazon or Google because They canpay for what they use and not pay for
a cow when you need a glass of milk.
'Cause when you buy a Kubernetescluster, you pay for the brain nodes,
the worker nodes, you pay a hundredpercent of their utilization, even
though they may consume twenty percent.
And on control plane, youpay twenty percent if you're
consuming twenty percent.
Bret (2) (13:31):
so you built this sort of unified API layer over multiple clouds
and, It sounds like you're adding almostlike your own custom services on top
of that like you mentioned the, thesandboxing, and obviously someone can,
design their own little, EC2 instanceor whatever, or they can, they can try
to design their own sandboxing solution.
But it sounds like you're, you'readding these as, specific services
on top of that unified API, Thisis actually a long question.
(13:52):
I'm spitballing here.
But, you could implement somethingin one of those sandboxes or one of
your other, ideas on top of any of theclouds, whether or not that cloud has a
particular offering labeled that, right?
'Cause when I think of unifiedcloud, I think of, reducing it down
to its core elements and then, onlygetting to use those core elements.
But it sounds like you'reenriching on top of that API to
(14:13):
give us higher level services.
Doron (14:14):
yes, people assume because we unify the cloud, we give
you, lowest common denominator.
But in fact, we're the opposite.
We give you the union of all clouds,because now You can write the code
with a native SDK for Google, forCloud Spanner, for Amazon, for, SQS,
for, Azure, for cloud, for, let'ssay, Entra ID or Cosmos DB or whatever
(14:38):
machine learning service that is onAzure, and we allow you to consume
those services without credentials.
Why is it important in the era of AI?
You do not want to leak tothe LLM, the credentials.
So neither in design time, meaning coding,nor at runtime are keys exposed, and
in fact, you don't even have to rotatethe keys because you get ephemeral,
(15:01):
zero trust, least privileged tokens.
and we patented the technologycalled Universal Cloud Identity that
basically gives you the identity, theIAM of all the clouds in a much more,
streamlined manner, and the code isdevoid of credentials completely.
Yet the code can only do theexact, operations on the exact
(15:22):
resources you granted it access to.
Bret (2) (15:25):
what are you seeing with adoption?
as a, as someone who's… I've managedinfrastructure for over 30 years
at this point, and, w- we've beenchasing this dream in ops land of,
the unified control plane, right?
we've had for decades now, ever sincereally the cloud or before, we've
had all these attempts at unifying.
You know, VMware wanted to do it.
Microsoft tried to do it.
we had just all these different pieces,and the best we could do was, like, stick
(15:49):
to one OS and then use their, I thinkthey, system management tools or whatever.
And then I feel like ever since thenI've been chasing this dream, whether
it was Terraform or Chef and Puppetbefore that, and then we got Pulumi, and
we've had all these different attemptsat, one control plane essentially that
controls not necessarily my workloads,but just the infrastructure behind it,
(16:09):
and it's always felt like a compromise.
It always felt like if I'm gonna doTerraform, that's great, but it's gonna
get much harder as I go multi-cloud, andI'm gonna be spending my days in TOML
hell just trying to make sure I don'tbreak things with a, with an update.
So I'm curious of, like, somecustomer stories around, onboarding.
How do people get to controlplane from where they are,
(16:31):
and what does that look like?
Doron (16:32):
Yeah.
So we have, over, eighteen hundred,now over two thousand customers.
Some of them are very large,some of them are tiny, doing
vibe, coding type projects.
And most of the larger customers,the-- none of them are greenfield.
They're all coming from Amazon,from Google, from Heroku, from, uh,
(16:52):
Azure, and they all have a sprawling,degree of Helm charts and, Terraform
or Pulumi or Crossplane, artifacts.
And we have, mechanical translation inthe CLI allowing you to take a Kubernetes
YAML and enrich it to the ControlPlane YAML because Kubernetes doesn't
have the concept of the global virtualcloud, a cloud made up of N clusters.
(17:17):
So in Control Plane, I can take threeclusters or three hundred and turn
them into one global virtual cloudor actually subdivide them into many
global virtual clouds and deploy anapplication to the GVC, which is like
a VPC, but spread across two regions ora hundred in one cloud or many So our
customers typically have a couple daysup to a couple weeks, depending on how
(17:41):
large the customer is, of migration,which is, again, that mechanical
translation of their YAML or Helm chartor other artifacts to Control Plane.
But we integrate very nicelyinto their CI/CD pipelines.
We integrate with Flux or Argo CD.
so it's very natural.
The learning curve is very shallow.
Once you learn Control Plane, youfeel, and what I hear from customers,
(18:04):
we run circles around our peers.
And one customer, I think the bestcompliment I ever got was after
using Control Plane, moving backto not using Control Plane is like
going from iPhone seventeen toNokia from nineteen ninety-seven.
That's-- And, and now, that wasvery rewarding for me to hear, and
I would-- I'm eager to demonstrate.
(18:24):
and my objective is after this,call, y- are you gonna go back to
the old ways or are you gonna adoptControl Plane to deploy your code?
I think it's the latter, because,it's-- we, we truly give you,
Dan Wilson as a service, the oneI, I mentioned, I started with.
He's our CTO, and he really, rather thanyou having to spend or the AI having
(18:45):
to spend millions of tokens reinventingthe wheel, focus on what matters, which
is your rocket shipping system or your,whatever the thing that you're doing
and not be, knee-deep in the toil.
and there is a lot of toil.
It's one thing to have toil,but why should every company
reinvent the same wheel?
(19:06):
Logging, metrics, tracing, secrets,m- mutual TLS between services because
you want a service mesh, audit trail,scaling, scaling strategies, failover
Should every company reinvent that wheel?
Does that make sense?
Should every company have an Exchangeserver engineer babysitting email?
That was the case.
(19:26):
It isn't anymore because itdoesn't make sense when you can,
shift left or whatever, delegatethat, mundane responsibility to
somebody who is excelling at it.
And think about it.
If every company reinvents the sameitems I just mentioned, it represents
technical debt because now you need tomaintain, fix the CVEs, upgrade Kubernetes
every three months, upgrade Istio,upgrade Prometheus, upgrade Grafana.
(19:50):
When do you have time to do theactual work when you're babysitting
an infrastructure that yourpeers are doing the same thing?
We say stop with the babysittingof infrastructure, start
delivering value to customers,
Bret (2) (20:03):
We talked about this last time when we, we had a
r- a call a couple weeks ago.
The, the assumption that I have aboutservices like this, like if I'm looking
at your homepage and I've not talkedto you and I don't know anything about
the company, is that, to me, there'salways a compromise, I feel like.
And so when I think about the complexityof the cloud APIs, just for AWS, the,
"This Week in AWS" podcast with CoreyQuinn, I've been, I've been on his
(20:26):
show, he's been on mine, but I, I alwaysfind his articles about, yet another
AWS service that we don't understandwhat it is, and it's redundant.
And, and so he talks about the hundredsand hundreds of services they have, and
it's, th- there's always a customer forthe things, but it may not be you or me.
And I always find it hilariouslycomplex that I am so behind on how
many of those products I don't knowabout and I've never used, and it just,
(20:50):
Am I even an engineer if Idon't understand half the
things that AWS deploys, right?
Sometimes I question it.
But, I'm curious about, how your APIrelates to their product APIs, and how
you guys have been able to innovatearound covering all the bases to make
sure that we're not left with, thisreduced abstraction that's only the
same core fundamentals across everycloud, but you're allowed to, you're
(21:10):
able to e- enrich it a little bit.
Tell me a little bit about that.
How's that work?
Doron (21:13):
Yeah, that's a great question.
So I mentioned we're not thelowest common denominator, but the
union, and what does that mean?
It means if Amazon came up with aBret service a microsecond from now,
we would support it because we'renot trying to, abstract the API,
the native API to the Bret service.
We integrate at the identityand access management layer.
(21:35):
And so we would mechanically be ableto pull permissions from their IAM IAM
system relating to the new Bret service.
The coder, AI or human, would usethe native SDK if there is one to the
Bret service or the C-- or the API.
We just inject the token necessaryfor the Bret service to do its work,
(21:57):
and we're able to do it whether you--the workload is running on-prem,
on Hetzner, on DigitalOcean, , onGoogle, on Amazon, on Azure.
So because we integrate at the IAM, theidentity and access management layer
Bret (2) (22:11):
Yeah
Doron (22:12):
We are supportive of any new service that Google, Amazon or
anybody else provides instantly.
There is no work that we need to do.
And the likelihood of Amazon or anybodyelse changing their identity and access
management APIs that we exploit arezero, because if they change their APIs,
(22:32):
the cl-- the world would break, right?
Because everybody, millions ofpeople have, utilized their services.
So if they were to change, theywould give you multi-year head start.
but, because again, we integrate at theIAM level, when you consume, let's say,
RDS, but you're on, Azure, the, the, theworkload is running on Azure or on-prem,
(22:54):
we obtain the correct token from theirSTS, their security token service, and
know how to inject it at runtime fromthe SDK to RDS, in our case, And, so in
effect, the workload is liberated andno longer captive to the subject cloud.
You can now move amongst the clouds.
People spent millions of dollarsmoving from Amazon to Google or
(23:16):
Google to Oracle, but on ControlPlane, the cloud is your oyster.
You can move from Amazon to Google,from Google to on-prem, from on-prem
to whatever with a click of a button,and you can leverage all of them.
So we flip the script wherethe clouds want to-- their
objective is to lock you in.
We flip it on its head and, turn themin-into just commoditized utilities.
(23:42):
So when you consume electricity,your TV doesn't care if it's
Edison or somebody else.
It cares about the interface.
With Control Plane, you now have a virtualcloud operating system that utilizes
the power, the whole power of Amazon,the whole power of Google, et cet- et
cetera, but without locking you in.
Bret (2) (24:01):
Yeah.
I wanna change the conversationa little bit to be more specific
on some of the AI, uh, stuff thatwe're all managing right now.
So, this whole year for me has been reallyfocused in understanding other DevOps
teams and, platform engineering teams,like understanding the way that they're
using agent harnesses to do their job.
I think, if we f- if we rewound a yearago, maybe even three or four years
(24:23):
ago when Google Copilot was kinda likethe first IDE to throw AI completion
in, and even in those early days,I think I demoed it when it was in
beta when we were on this channel.
I remember one summer we were, Ithink it was 2022 or something.
It was before ChatGPT came out, and wewere, like, looking at the, the early
GPT model that was embedded in, inGitHub Copilot, and the, VS Code UI.
And we were, we were trying tosee how far we could get with YAML
(24:44):
and TOML by tab completing, right?
Like, we were trying to figure outhow much time can it save me as an,
as a ops engineer, but we were reallyjust talking about file completion,
completion in a YAML statement.
So, it was saving me keystrokes, andit maybe, was saving me potentially
some human error that wouldhopefully be caught by a linter,
but it wasn't a huge gain, right?
(25:05):
And so you fast-forward alittle bit, and then we're all,
we're doing that with ChatGPT.
People are copying and pasting.
And then last year when we got ClaudeCode for the first time and we under- we
started to understand what an agent loopis, it, it started to shift and I started
to notice that my, my production friendswere all dabbling with letting their, the
first thing they would do is let theiragent have, a read access token to some
(25:25):
part of their infrastructure so that itcould maybe run the kubectl commands for
them or run the AWS CLI commands for them.
And I was doing that same thingfor, like, GitHub CLIs for, for CI.
CI.
Like, I cared about GitHub Actionsand, my build status and stuff
like that, so I was, I was managingthat middle portion, and I was
using agents to, keep track of it.
And now it's like these are all inherentfeatures that are really built in.
(25:47):
They, they've got the backgroundworkers, the sub-agents, and things
that are making this really possible.
But I'm curious what you'reseeing with your customers.
how, how are they drivingtheir infrastructure with AI?
Like, I guess maybe if we can getto some, into some nitty-gritty
details around, are they focusedon only using their agent harness?
Are they using, MCP to, to Control Plane?
Are they using, Control Plane CLIs?
(26:09):
Like, how are they actually doingthis work, and what are some
of the stories you're hearing?
Doron (26:12):
Yeah, our customers, pretty much all use our MCP server,
and we always pride ourselves inproviding all the accessibility.
Of course, at the lower end is, is theAPI, but everything you can do in the
API, you can do in the CLI, Terraform,Pulumi, Crossplane, UI, and MCP.
(26:35):
To us, these are symmetric interfaces.
Of course, with MCP, you can now bringthe intelligence to let it discover
what can be done, and now you canhave conversational infrastructure.
You now have the equivalent ofa enterprise architect/platform
engineer/DevOps/SRE bundled into onethat you can have a conversation with.
(26:57):
you can tell me the app you wantto build and the dependencies that
you want to have, and the MCP willgo and negotiate and build those
things that we want to build for us.
And then if we need to troubleshootor need to look at observability, the
MCP is able to look at the traces,the logs, the metrics, a- and add the
intelligence to give you actionable items.
(27:19):
So you feel like you have the best SREsand platform engineers at Google with you
twenty-four seven, and you don't pay them.
So you can vibe code a very complexsystem made up of 20 microservices all
intertwined with databases and queuesand, and caches and say, "Okay, give
it to me codified." And our codifiedversion is always backwards compatible.
(27:42):
So I'm sure Kubernetes deprecatestuff every three months.
You have some deprecations and new APIs.
It's a fairly unstable substrate.
So if you wanted to take YAMLfrom 10 years ago and just run
it, you'll run into issues.
So we made an early choice.
Bret (2) (27:57):
At a minimum warnings, possibly errors, yeah
Doron (27:59):
Right.
And we made a decision.
We, we noticed that six years ago andmade the very, I think, good decision of
always having backwards compatibility.
So if you take YAML from six years ago andapply it today, you'll get the exact same
artifacts on top of any compute substrate,whether it's on-prem, Azure, etcetera.
Bret (2) (28:19):
we-- Are-- When you s- when you say that, are we talking
about your customers can continueto use Terraform or Pulumi?
I'm assuming that that's how they're,they're interacting with you, right?
Like, they're, they're talkingto your API from these particular
management tools, right?
I'm ass- I'm assuming, um,OpenTofu is s- is supported.
What else, what are the other ways?
(28:40):
'Cause, o- one of the things I'vestarted to see with agents is if,
if you're a singular cloud, it mightjust be better if your, if your
agent is the complete interface to h-whatever the description language is.
I've seen some examples of people actuallyswitching away from Terraform back to
the native, cloud formation or whateverof their cloud, because they look at
it as there's this agent abstractionbetween me and the YAML or the JSON.
(29:03):
I don't have to be the expert in everysingle line of that anymore, so I
actually care more about, some of theinherent functionality of a different,
of, of the language tooling itself ratherthan, we always looked at Terraform
as maybe a little bit more to, easierto understand than cloud formation.
A little bit, a little less comprehensive,a little, little less verbose.
But if you've got an agent inthe way, that matters less.
(29:25):
Are you seeing anything like that?
Are, are you seeing people,switch, products now that they're
using agents, as their interface?
Doron (29:32):
Somewhat, yes.
I've seen people that, that usedcertain… I don't want to name names
'cause I don't want to dish on any oneplatform, but there are many equivalents.
Like when-- whether you useCrossplane, Pulumi, CloudFormation,
Terraform, and a few others,they're functionally equivalent.
They're like French, English, Spanish.
You can express the sameideas in these languages.
(29:53):
They do things in slightly differentmanners, like Pulumi is more,
programmatic than, than, declarative,and Terraform is more declarative.
But at the end of the day, theyexpress a desired state, and there is a
translation layer that takes the desiredstate, like with DAG on, on the case
of, Terraform, and applies in the rightorder, calls the APIs that are affecting
(30:16):
the, the actual resources in the cloud.
It's just a translation, right?
So like you said, if I don'thave to write to that language,
why can't I talk in English andlet it make the calls directly?
But here is the thing.
Terraform, as an example, or OpenTofu,invested heavily in doing the DAG and
doing the validation and doing stuff thatthe agent itself will have to reinvent
(30:39):
what they had done to apply things in theright order and give you the rigor that
they have already baked into the platform.
It is better, like in the Excel exampleI've ga-- I've given, to let the
agent leverage a tool like Terraformthan to learn, the underlying, API.
It's, it's possible.
here it's, it's, it'snot an exact science.
(31:00):
Here is subject to, to, judgment.
It can call the, the direct, itcan call the API, it can call
the CLI of the AWS, let's say.
It can call, a CDK, There aremany, again, equivalent, logically
equivalent, options here.
So
Bret (2) (31:16):
So
Doron (31:16):
our
Bret (2) (31:17):
you, I
Doron (31:17):
w- w- we, we just give you the, the one API, and it's your choice.
You tell the AI, " Use the API, useTerraform, use YAML, use JSON, JSON,
use, CRD." We give the choice to thecustomer or the AI, and the AI would
choose the, the least token-consumingmanner that it can operate in
Bret (2) (31:35):
So when someone's migrating to your platform, if they're using
CloudFormation, d- I'm assuming youdon't support CloudFormation because
you're sitting in front of the AWS.
Like, you're, you're
Doron (31:46):
Correct.
Bret (2) (31:46):
different
Doron (31:47):
we, we don't support cloud formation for control plane.
We have customers that use cloudformation to create their S3 buckets
and their RDS and their Dynamo,then, then they tell control plane,
run a workload that connects tothe S3 bucket to RDS to Dynamo.
They're not, in conflict with each other.
They're just not overlapping.
There is no reason for us to introducea cloud formation concept 'cause
(32:10):
it's a proprietary, lingo of AWS.
So we are operating atthe cloud agnostic, layer.
We fly above the cloud.
We don't wanna fly in, in that cloud.
We fly above it
Bret (2) (32:21):
Do you see, do you think that Terraform is still the
primary way your customers aremanaging their infrastructure?
Do you see that as, the majority?
Doron (32:27):
I would call it 60%.
Bret (2) (32:29):
Okay
Doron (32:30):
Just because of inertia, Not because it has a, a, a
specific advantage, like I said.
Whether it's Terraform, Pulumi, orCrossplane, or something else, All they
are, are syntactic sugar on top of theAPI with some DAG, that, that decides
what to create first and what to destroyfirst, and maybe save the state and so on.
So to me, those are fairlycommoditized, languages.
(32:53):
So for, for the audience tounderstand, we don't compete with
Terraform, not even a little bit.
It's like a car doesn'tcompete with, a sandwich.
It's two different animals completely.
Bret (2) (33:04):
yeah.
so we talked about customerbase, and, like, the different
size of customers, right?
And it's hard for, any one cloud toalways, a-adopt all customers, right?
We, we all think of, the digital oceansand, the Vercels of the world, that
they're all like a very niche cloud,that they've got a very specific purpose,
and then you have the three hyperscalersthat are just everything for everyone,
but it's also impossible for anyoneto get on board really easily, right?
(33:26):
Do you, do you see, are small teamsof, with n-no developers or very few
operators or anything like that, dothey-- Is Control Plane being used by
those kinds of small little companies?
'Cause I, I have a scenario whereI'm thinking, I have, companies
that are, they, th-they might haveone or two IT staff, but, they
don't have internal developers.
So usually when it, it's hard to figureout, as a consultant, your heart, it's
(33:49):
hard to figure out, what do I do for them?
Because I either have to put themon a hyperscaler, and then now they
can't do anything without me, right?
I become a bottleneck, which I, I, me asa consultant, I don't ever wanna do that.
I wanna be instantlyreplaceable re-usually.
Or I have to put them on some sort ofniche cloud that, if it's too niche, it
may not be here in five years, or it mightbe somehow limited i-in, in what it can
(34:10):
do, and then I'm li- like a Lovable forAI or whatever, like these, these little
fly-by-night dashboard companies, right?
Do you… W-what's it look like for thereally small teams on, on Control Plane?
Doron (34:19):
The good news, you will always have a substrate to run upon 'cause it can
be, like I said, your on-prem, it can beAzure, Google, Amazon, Oracle, et cetera.
And we have customers that have, non,traditional developers, certainly no
dev… We have DevOps engineers thatuse Control Plane, platform engineers,
but we have people that are just vibecoding and not know anything about…
(34:43):
They don't know the ifstatement, and they still deploy
successfully on Control Plane.
case in point, my youngerson, wanted to build an app.
He never wrote a code, anypiece of code in his life.
He was able to write a full game,which was pretty impressive, and
run it on Control Plane, and hedidn't even ask me how to do it.
So he deployed the whole game witha back end, and, I was shocked.
(35:05):
You know, I, I helped develop theproduct, and I was shocked at,
at, at what he was able to do, andhe's never written a line of code
despite me wanting him to, to learn.
But he was able to do it.
So we have many people withno coding experience that are
able to be very successful.
Bret (2) (35:20):
Yeah.
Do you think that's a-- With AI, I mean,I, I know my answer to this question,
but, it's like a leading question.
Do you think that with these agentsgetting better and better and th-
there's the… Now we got Cowork and,and Claude Code built into people's
Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions forpeople that aren't technical, right?
You don't have to use the TUI anymore.
And so I feel like we're, we're heading toa, pretty quickly to a place where non-IT
(35:42):
staff are getting more and more powerto be able to potentially do things like
vibe code their own app and deploy it onthe internet, and If they don't have the
IT staff to help them manage it,they can, they can at least get
by with some, some simpler stuff.
do you see that happeningon Control Plane too?
It sounds like it is, since your, since
Doron (35:56):
100%.
We are, we are releasing a,more consumer-oriented…
I'll come out and say it.
We are, the, shipping very soon.
We're in the tail end of,Vers- not Vercel, but, Lovable
and Replit, Base44 killer.
And why we're able to do what theydo, but they're not able to do
what we do, is the coding agents.
(36:18):
when you look at Replit, most of theeffort has been put into, Guardrails
and skills that are just, wrappers,assisting agents for, for the LLM.
and, and those are now in the LLMitself most of the, of the time.
The heavy lifting is allowing you torun on any cloud, letting you scale
using a hundred different scalingstrategies, letting you fail over
(36:41):
automatically, leveraging hundredsof diff- the operational stuff.
So we've been hard at work buildingthis operating system for six and a
half years, and it's not somethingyou can vibe code, absolutely not.
And so we built this operating system,and for us to layer the, consumer-facing
app builder is a lot easier thanfor an, an app builder to create an
(37:04):
operating system for running, anywhere.
Replit is I, I playedwith it a little bit.
It's a, it's a good tool.
I don't know that it will letyou scale to Netflix grade.
I, I think what happens is, and I wrotean article that I'm publishing, but many
people, when they start scaling or needsecurity or need compliance, they get
off of that vibe coding platform, whereControl Plane takes you all the way to
(37:27):
Netflix grade cloud native maturity.
You get the compliance, the security, thescalability, the, unbreakable compute.
Bret (2) (37:35):
I would just assume that a lot of those platforms are not
like, SOC 2, PCI, you know, HIPAA,
Doron (37:41):
HIPAA, right
Bret (2) (37:42):
all the things that like a dec- any decent sized company is gonna care
about, and there's probably someone inmarketing vibe coding something on Lovable
that's completely not up to standards.
For me, my experience so far has been oneof the biggest challenges in like the vibe
codings products out there, is they don'treally answer the data problem, right?
Like, 'cause usually m- everyone thatI've talked to so far, like creating
(38:02):
a dashboard is cute, and these are,these are important things for teams.
but th- th- there needs tobe data on that dashboard.
There needs to be data in that app, andit's usually existing cust- company data
locked up somewhere, usually not behindlike a perfectly designed open portal
with a proper API across every surfacewith, with automatic, token delivery
(38:23):
for people that request it to ins- Like,there's just this whole infrastructure
of cloud native that a lot of companies
they haven't matured to yet.
And that's to me, like building these vibecoding platforms for companies, which I
think, yeah, again, like we could probablydo a whole separate podcast on, but
like that world is inherently necessarythat you have a very modern mature
infrastructure before you can do that.
(38:45):
' Cause a lot of it is about, automationand security and encryption and, l-
like you said, auditing and compliance.
That's, that's where I live, and that'swhere the vibe coded app, while it may
not be stable or highly redundant, it hasto… It, it… Those things are almost
like optional, maybe someday things.
But what's not usually optionalis for this thing to be useful, I
(39:05):
need to access that SQL database,and how do I get that, right?
How do I ensure thatthat data doesn't leak?
How do I make sure thatthis is behind the firewall?
Like, there's all those levelsof complexity that I don't see
the Replitz and the Lovables ofthe world ever truly tackling.
So I think you're right that this isprobably… These, these solutions
are probably gonna come more frominfrastructure companies like yourself
rather than a, a startup that's focusingon AI as a, as a sort of, magic button.
(39:31):
So, I'm, I'm interested to get into that.
So I know you brought some demos,and we could talk about this product
forever, but I, I feel like we've,we've covered some of the questions
that I wanted to, to know about.
l- l- what are we gonna, whatare we gonna look at today?
Doron (39:43):
So I want to show you, I, I want to do a tour around the platform, and
I'll give a sneak peek at some of thepower you get right out of the box, and
traverse the network boundaries, allowyou to run an app anywhere, even on-prem,
that consumes any service of any cloud,show you the observability, show you
the audit trail, show you the Terraform,capabilities and, and stuff like that.
(40:05):
So just give you a general tourso people know what exists.
And, most people don't know that theyhave at their fingertips so much power,
and they keep struggling with Amazon.
And, w-where you can get a hundredx the productivity by leveraging,
a, a platform like Control Plane.
and not only that, save a bundlebecause you're not running full EC2
(40:28):
instances, you're running the millicores.
So you can literally run your Bretapp for six-- five and a half cents a
day, a day meaning twenty-four hours,literally less than six cents a day.
and yet people are spending moneyon NAT gateways, load balancers and,
Kubernetes nodes and pay hundredsof dollars per month when they can
be paying, cents on the dollar.
(40:48):
And that's what I want to show.
Boom questions?
Bret (2) (40:51):
no, this is, this is a lot.
That's, I'm trying to think of myworkflows and, like, how my workflows
for creating infrastructure and managinginfrastructure need to adapt to this
model, 'cause it's, it's flexible enough.
you have click ops, right?
but it seems so easy to hop back and forthbetween the click ops, 'cause it feels
like the click ops is backed because youhave that versioning and the audit trail.
(41:14):
you don't, it doesn't, it looks likeyou've removed the risk of the, sort of
the rogue click that now is no longercompatible or, or can- isn't tracked in
a way that you can update your Terraform.
this is the classic problem of, we'regit- we're trying to do GitOps, and
we're putting all of our infrastructurein, in Git, and we're storing changes
there, and we've maybe got someautomation for Terraform plans and
(41:35):
applies, or we've got, we've got somestuff going on there, and that's the
only way we're supposed to do it.
And then we get some person that showsup and in an emergency or because they
didn't know or whatever, they go intothe AWS console and make a change,
and now I'm bifurcated, and I haveno path to success because AWS isn't
gonna really easily export, it's notgonna to export Terraform for me.
(41:58):
And so I have to figure out what theychanged before, I risk blowing their
stuff away with my future Terraform apply.
And so we, we've always had thischallenge in infrastructure of,
sometimes we do need the click ops.
Sometimes we ne- do need to be able to gointo a GUI really quick, troub- especially
when you're, like, troubleshooting orjust trying to recover from outage.
You don't wanna stare at a bunchof l- code in TOML forever.
(42:19):
So you're, you're usually in the, inthe dis- in this GUI app trying to
figure things out, but you also knowthat y- it's, you can't touch it.
It has to be read-only because youneed to make your changes somewhere
else, and you're so nervous.
So it feels like you've kindathought about that a little bit.
Doron (42:33):
Yeah, and everything, like I said, everything you
can get as, YAML or, or JSON.
But here is our app running, andso we give you a more consumer-y
interface to this thing.
but the bottom line, it's really backedby the control plane API, and the control
plane API lets you run anywhere, and with,with determinism, and, and it's the same.
(42:54):
You c-- Again, you can run it onyour Raspberry Pi or Dell machine.
And the cloud wormhole, which Ihaven't demonstrated, allows you to
very, very easily connect to an RDSinstance in a VPC or connect from
a, the seven different locationshere to my own Redis on my machine.
And we have a service catalogwhere you can run above the cloud.
(43:14):
If you want to run CockroachDB orCassandra or really any open source
project, we certify these s-services.
Like let's say I want to run HermesAgent or Langfuse or Keycloak or, you
name it, Postgres, Mongo You can runthem at the cost of the infrastructure
instead of paying a premium to RDS.
(43:36):
You pay double what the computeis, but Control Plane lets you
do backups, lets you do leaderselection, lets you do multi-master
replication with different add-ons.
You can run Ollama, you canrun whatever you want to run.
and you can conversationally say, "Hey,get me an N8n, run me a Hermes agent,
run me, know, OpenBaO or run me whatever,Postgres very, very easily." you,
(44:00):
you can do all of, all of that stuff.
And again, you can run anywhere.
Bret (2) (44:04):
Yeah
Doron (44:04):
w-we're not going to do an exhaustive demonstration.
one of the things that, that peoplecare about is security, and you
can set very granular policies ofwho is allowed to do exactly what.
You can say, this agent is allowed onlyto push image but not delete an image.
This Lisa can only, read acertain value but not write.
Secrets are only available to X and Y.
(44:26):
So everything is very, very granular.
and th-there is a lot, a lot more.
You can set custom domains.
we have customers with twentythousand different domains, and
they run perfectly on Control Plane.
It gives you the confidence to operateabove the clouds without being bogged down
by the complexity of any particular cloud.
(44:46):
And the thing I wanted to show,because we have this thing called
Capacity AI That is by default on.
If you look at the spend, you're spendingtwenty-five millicores 'cause the system
learned over time that Bret video gameonly needs twenty-five one-thousandth
of a CPU and thirty-two megs of RAM.
If you go to the control plane pricingand plug in-- And you can bring your
(45:08):
own compute, or you can use controlplane compute, or you can do both.
So twenty-five millicores andthirty-two megs of RAM cost you a
dollar seventy-eight per month, period.
You don't pay for load balancers,you don't pay for nodes,
you don't pay for anything.
That's all you pay.
We charge you by the second.
let's say a full hour would costyou, No, sorry, a full day would
cost you less than six cents.
(45:30):
So if you ran the Bret app for afull twenty-four hours in a location,
it would cost you six cents.
That's why I'm saying sometimes runningit in more locations is even cheaper
than running it in a single location,'cause if you were to stand up a EKS
cluster, you would pay hundreds ofdollars in a month to heat up the planet
Earth or to make Jeff Bezos richer.
(45:50):
We let you pay for what you eat,not for heating up the planet Earth.
So extremely cost-effective
Bret (2) (45:57):
In that, in the, the workflows you were showing
as you would, as you were doing thisstuff, I w- guess one of my questions is
Deployment configurations and design canoften be, hard for teams, especially when
they start to adopt Kubernetes, right?
Because then they have to pick Fluxor Argo, and they have to decide on a
particular way to deploy that, and thenthey have to configure it all correctly,
(46:17):
and then when they have b- a bunch ofdifferent apps, yeah, so my premise was,
like one of the, one of the challengesthat I, I train people on and is a lar-
a d- decent amount of my consultingover the last six years has been once
teams adopt Kubernetes, there becomesthis deployment complexity because it's
not enough to just have Kubernetes.
Then, then you need, your code's storedin a place, GitHub, GitLab, whatever, and
(46:38):
then you gotta connect all that together.
And, in the old days before containers,a- and even when we first, first
started using containers, it was verymuch "I'm gonna write a CI job that
runs kubectl apply," or, "I'm gonnarun a Docker run, and, and it's gonna
connect to the server from my CI."
And then we grew up, and werealized we maybe need a more
deterministic methodology, and thenwe started adopting Argo and Flux.
(46:59):
And, and so for the longest time,I've been f- I've been advocating
and teaching those technologies.
We call it GitOps, but it doesn'tnecessarily have to be labeled that.
and I'm curious how you, howyour platform works with that.
Does that m- It, it… You've got alot of, glue there that feels like
it makes a lot of these rough edgesstreamlined and it's almost like you're
applying opinionated defaults, which Ilove because I'm a, I'm a very much a,
(47:21):
an opinionated defaults kind of guy.
when it comes to like the code inthe repos, and is it as easy as
someone on your platform pointingto repos, and then it figures out
how to get it into Kubernetes?
do they need to even worryabout Argo at this point?
'Cause you've been saying things likedeploy this app, and it's doing it.
I don't know how it's doing it.
I know it's, I know it'srunning on Kubernetes.
(47:42):
But what's that, that deploymentlook like for Control Plane?
Is it automating it?
Is it, is it doing Argo for you?
Doron (47:47):
So it c-- you can use Argo.
So we have, a CRD, a control planeCRD, so you can have a cluster and,
use Argo or Flux very naturally.
the way it works, so you said, "I'm notsure how it works," so let me explain.
you get the YAML.
Let me share real quick.
and again, YAML is just one of many.
(48:07):
So if… let's take thisguy for-- as an example.
I can export, this YAML.
So you can see the kind is workload.
It's a new kind that doesn't exist onKubernetes, and it has the different,
like what's the memory, what's thescaling strategy, what GVC does it go on?
And you j-just say CPLN applyand give it, minus F and give
(48:28):
it the YAML, and it deploys it.
Like I said, we have other waysto deploy, but at the end of
the day, we have a data service.
We have an-- we have the controlplane API, and you make a call to
the plane itself is, is runningon Amazon, Google, and Azure, and
the-- our data is distributed.
It calls a component we call the whichis a control plane, Go-based application.
(48:51):
It runs on the edge, wecall them edge clusters.
So you can have one cluster, or inour case, we have one, two, three,
four, five, six, seven clusters.
These are different clusters.
They can have hundreds of nodes.
we provide clusters that are, cloudless,meaning we provide clusters, or you can
bring your own, you can bring your owncluster like I did in the Ron office.
(49:13):
I created the Kubernetes brain in thecloud, but I could have run OpenShift or
EKS or whatever, in the local environmentThe-- what you need is a Kubernetes
cluster with the actuator and a few othercomponents like the, the log, collector,
the metrics collector, and so on.
But we control planify a cluster,and then it becomes part of
that global virtual cloud.
(49:33):
We use NATs under the covers to haveour, control plane, if you will,
communicate the desired state to all theclusters, and they all take the desired
state and actuate it in the cluster.
So under the cover, you have, statefulsets or, deployments or, pods and
all the Kubernetes goodness that ishappening, but it has been abstracted.
(49:55):
And if you want to see the Kubernetesresources and, and it's a bring your
own Kubernetes like I have here, youcan get the kubeconfig and go edit
or use the dashboard and go edit.
But we… You noticed we didn'thave to issue kubectl apply commands
and all that because there is anactuator component in this cluster
that went and did the actuationof the desired state Makes sense.
(50:18):
And also, if we are down, the, the clusteroperates autonomously and serves traffic.
Maybe you can't upgrade the versionof the workload, but A, we're very
highly, redundant and highly available.
so we're very, very unlikely to go down.
But if we were to go down, we are thecontrol plane, not the data plane.
The data plane is where the data,flows, and you mentioned that earlier.
(50:41):
so hopefully that gives you kind
Bret (2) (50:43):
the goal, right?
Is like the control plane never,never takes down the data plane
when it's, when it's unavailable.
Yeah.
Doron (50:49):
Exactly.
A, we're extremely… Yeah,and we test everything, like,
like I can't even tell you.
From day one, we created what we callthe Observer Project, and it does
twenty-four seven millions of testssimulating node failure, multi-node
failure, cluster failure, AZ failure,region failure, whole cloud failure.
And we do, fuzzing.
(51:10):
We do random failure, introduction offailure modes with a core objective
of making sure you never go down.
So one of the things you get withControl Plane is mainframe-grade
availability over commodity infrastructure
Bret (2) (51:23):
All right Yeah, the fractional CPU, stuff is, is
pretty flexible and pretty awesome.
When you're running small stuff andyou're a small company and every single
workload you add has, this minimumcost to it, and Even when you try to
run, small instances in an EC2 cluster,you're limited on how small you can go,
and then you're inherently bottleneckedthere if you ever get any decent traffic
(51:46):
because it, it doesn't know how to…
You, you have to build a lot ofintelligence in in order for it to
auto-scale up and correctly changethe node size, if you need more memory
because, a classic example is, a legacyapp with a PDF export and someone
decides to PDF export a report that isn'tbatched properly, so then it consumes
all the memory on the server for onereport, and then the, and then your tiny
(52:06):
little app crashes the whole thing allbecause you wanted to print a report.
So there's always, there's always, sizingchallenges because you just want things,
especially when, when it's, a smallbusiness kind of situation where, they,
you tell them, $500 a month for somethingthat they consider not worth all that is a
hard sell when you're like, "Well, that'swhat it takes to be minimum redundant
(52:27):
across regions in this particular cloud."
And the idea that I can say, "Well,you're, you're only using this
app internally, so we don't evenneed a single CPU. We need a half
of one. We need a third of one,"
Doron (52:37):
Yeah, we need a fif-fiftieth of one or, one, one-twentieth of one.
Yeah, and that's… And you can nowgive people redundant availability for
three dollars, five dollars a month.
you can run an app for fivedollars a month that is-- has the
availability of a real enterprise.
Bret (2) (52:53):
how do people get started?
They go to Control Plane.comand sign up for an account?
Doron (52:57):
Yeah.
Yeah, it's very easy.
so they go to Control Plane, theyclick sign up, they follow the prompts.
we ask for a credit card, and Ifind some people get intimidated.
we're happy to give you,especially to your listeners,
shoot me an email directly, Doron,D-O-R-O-N, @ Control Plane.com.
I'll give you, basically a, afree month to experiment with.
(53:19):
Of course, don't do crypto mining anddon't do crazy stuff, but happy to
let you experiment on the platform.
Even if we were to charge you, you canrun so cost effectively that unless you
reach five dollars in spend, which is alot on Control Plane, we don't charge you.
So if you're under five dollars amonth, we don't even charge you 'cause
it's not worth it to send to Stripe.
So many people can run real projects onControl Plane for less than five bucks.
(53:43):
There is no platform fee, there's noper seat fee, there's just usage fee,
and it's very, very cost effective.
Bret (2) (53:49):
That's what I used to use Heroku for, so now m-
now maybe you're my new Heroku
Doron (53:52):
Think of us as a non-toy Heroku.
Bret (2) (53:54):
Yeah
Doron (53:54):
the non-toy, replace your, Heroku with, the, the, the cloud du jour.
But, we give you all the powerof all the clouds, but, with the
ease of use of Heroku or better,
Bret (2) (54:05):
thank you so much for being here, Doron.
Doron (54:06):
thank you.
Really enjoyed, the conversation.
You asked great questions.
super happy we connected
Bret (2) (54:12):
And we'll see you guys next time.
Ciao.
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