July 26, 2023 • 36 mins
Join Eveline Oehrlich, Michael Wagner, and Ian Evans to discuss cloud repatriation, company culture and much more.
Michael Wagner is the Co-Founder and CEO of Metify, a software startup based in Madison, Wisconsin. He worked in several senior management positions at IBM in Boston and San Diego before joining Red Hat in 2010. He was one of the creators of Red Hat’s Apex Partner Program for SI’s implementing OpenShift / Kubernetes solutions in his final role before launching Metify.
Ian Evans is the Co-Founder and CTO of Metify, a software startup based in Madison, Wisconsin. Ian’s broad expertise in cutting-edge infrastructure technology led him to multiple Sr. Architect positions with some of the world's top technology companies including AWS, Verizon, Lockheed Martin, and Red Hat.
The Humans of DevOps Podcast is incredibly grateful to be voted one of the Best 25 DevOps Podcasts by Feedspot.
Learn more about getting DevOps certified at devopsinstitute.com
Michael Wagner is the Co-Founder and CEO of Metify, a software startup based in Madison, Wisconsin. He worked in several senior management positions at IBM in Boston and San Diego before joining Red Hat in 2010. He was one of the creators of Red Hat’s Apex Partner Program for SI’s implementing OpenShift / Kubernetes solutions in his final role before launching Metify.
Ian Evans is the Co-Founder and CTO of Metify, a software startup based in Madison, Wisconsin. Ian’s broad expertise in cutting-edge infrastructure technology led him to multiple Sr. Architect positions with some of the world's top technology companies including AWS, Verizon, Lockheed Martin, and Red Hat.
The Humans of DevOps Podcast is incredibly grateful to be voted one of the Best 25 DevOps Podcasts by Feedspot.
Learn more about getting DevOps certified at devopsinstitute.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Narrator (00:02):
You're listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a
podcast focused on advancing thehumans of DevOps through skills,
knowledge, ideas, and learning,or the skil framework.
Ian Evans (00:16):
I think the other element that's important from a
business perspective, as weknow, most businesses want to
run hybrid workloads. Thefrustrating part for most of the
businesses is they didn't feelthere was a really good standard
to essentially control all thesedevices in the data centers.
Eveline Oehrlich (00:33):
Welcome to the humans of DevOps Podcast. I'm
Evelyn Erlich, Chief ResearchOfficer at DevOps Institute.
Some of you might remember whata SIS admin does, and others
might not. I do and I rememberthe hard work when I was in that
role. I was part of a giant datacenter consolidation many years
ago, and I was a sysadmin in theyear y2k Or year 2000. Okay, I
(00:57):
know that dates me, but I don'treally care. However, when I
hear people saying that the datacenter is dead, I have a very
strong reaction because it's nottrue. That is why I've invited
two thought leaders and founderswho have architects and design
the solution, which focuses onthe work in the data center. And
today, as I said, we have twoleaders which have created a
(01:19):
very interesting solution calledmattify, or a company called
mattify. We'll talk about thesolution in a little bit. Let me
introduce the two gentlemen. Sofirst one, Michael Wagner, is a
co founder and CEO of mattify.He began his career in 1995 as a
network engineer, when he joinedIBM while still attending the
(01:41):
University of Wisconsin Madison.He worked in several senior
management positions at IBM inBoston and San Diego. Before
joining Red Hat in 2010. Michaelwas head of Channel Sales and
alliances for North America atRed Hat. He was one of the
creators of Red Hat hats, epicspartner program for system
integrators, implementingOpenShift Kubernetes solutions
(02:04):
in his final role beforelaunching mattify. The second
person is Ian Evans. He is cofounder and CTO of mattify. He
began his career in 1999. As thedirector of IT for Quintus
resorts. He got his first tasteof working in software startup
when he next joined was Zabisystems. As Director of Product
(02:27):
Management at wasabi, Ian wasdeeply involved in all aspects
of product development andstrategy. In Sprott expertise in
cutting edge infrastructuretechnology led him to multiple
senior architect positions withsome of the top technology
companies on the planetincluding AWS, Verizon, Lockheed
Martin, and Red Hat. Ian's finalrole before launching mattify
(02:49):
was principal architect for theglobal open solutions practice
of WW Ts, and welcome to OurPodcast management. My wonderful
gentleman. Thank you. I callthis podcast a glimpse into two
co founders journey for the datacenter a sounds a little bit
(03:11):
like Star Trek. I am a Star Trekfan. So hopefully don't you
don't mind. It is great to haveyou to with us today. And I'm
excited for our audience tolisten in. So we before we talk
about mattify Ian, can you sharewith me how you two have decided
to become co founders and createmattify? Where if you met give
(03:32):
us the story?
Ian Evans (03:34):
Sure. Yeah. So we, I've known Mike for about a
little over four years. And theidea of what we generally
started working on a bunch ofdifferent technologies around
the data center. And you know,in our respective roles, we
really saw a lot of limitationsaround getting the product out
(03:56):
to market and doing it in a waythat was kind of free of
obstacles. So of course thatstarted the the discussion
around starting our own company,and starting to figure out how
we start to tackle the issues inthe data center, but build the
product to basically facilitatewhat we feel need to be done as
(04:19):
quickly as possible. So we gotour start working on all those
different technologies. Youbrought it all into a single
product plan. And then westarted to make some
determinations on what areas ofthat data center we're going to
tackle first. And that reallyled to the creation of mattify.
And the wonderful product thatwe have called Mojo.
Eveline Oehrlich (04:40):
So medified name and does it stand for
something? It does.
Mike Wagner (04:48):
Yeah, so mattify it's a portmanteau combination
of two words so metal andsimplified. So we put the first
couple letters of metal lastcouple of letters that simplify,
and you get
Eveline Oehrlich (05:02):
mattify. Great love that. I bet that was a
variety of cycles of thinking,which ideation around the name.
That's fantastic. So, Michael,what does mattify do? What is
and what is so unique aboutmattify?
Mike Wagner (05:18):
Yeah, so we went against the grain, we saw a need
in private cloud and data centerspace, in particular. And as the
sort of definition of what adata center is, was quickly
evolving, you know, the needs ofsystem administrators, the needs
of folks that are ininfrastructure and operations,
(05:40):
don't go away. And as that greatlittle meme that was floating
around and still is, you know,what is the cloud, it's just
somebody else's computer. Andthat's, that's the reality of
it, you know. So for us, werecognize that the hyper scalars
have done a great job ofautomating their infrastructure.
(06:01):
And they did such a great jobthat, you know, companies all
around the world decided, well,let's just get rid of this
problem, when we're startingoff. While the data centers in
most of the Fortune 1000,companies really didn't change
all that much. If you look athistorical spend, data center,
data centers have grown, as faras server spend, and as well as
(06:23):
total megawatts, even in theprivate data centers have grown
consistently, every year. Andthat hasn't changed. Now, cloud
and hyper scalars have grownmuch faster. But the fact that
the data centers are still outthere is a testament to the fact
that you know, fortune 1000companies, companies that reach
a certain size, the economies ofhaving their own hardware makes
(06:44):
sense. So it's that kind ofquestion about do I rent? Or do
I buy? And at some point, itcertainly makes sense to buy. So
yeah, so what we did was wewanted to make that incredibly
simple. We wanted to create itso that you know, the hard work
that say Googles and Amazonshave done to make public cloud,
(07:05):
incredibly consumable, supereasy to spin up a server, and
get the exact hardware profilethat you want. We wanted to make
that as easy as possible forprivate organizations to do
behind their firewall. And also,you know, there was a big switch
going on, that really was theimpetus for launching things in
where we got our first use casewas right on the edge. So of
(07:28):
course, the development of 5gand the need to move, compute
and storage closer to thecustomer themselves, really led
to us, you know, creating acouple of different use cases
for our product. And I thinkthat's helped to drive growth
overall. So bottom line is wejust wanted to make accessing
the hardware, discovering it,provisioning it, and maintaining
(07:51):
it, as simple as possible treatit as a first class citizen, if
you will, all the investment hadreally gone AppStack, you know,
into applications andapplication frameworks and
DevOps, you know, and ingeneral, like OpenShift, and
Kubernetes, and Docker. That'swhere all the interest was. But
the fact that, you know,everyone was still toiling down
at the server level, and at thechip level, to get these things
(08:13):
to talk and get them organizedthat way they need to with the
right access, and governance,compliance, all those things
still existed. It's justsomebody else's computer and
call it a cloud. But at the endof the day, it's a bunch of
servers.
Eveline Oehrlich (08:27):
Yep, I understand when you said that
you went exactly the opposite towhere everybody else's has been
going. And particularly duringthe pandemic, people were
thinking, Oh, we got to move tothe cloud. And they took those
two years or whatever how manymonths it has, and they did it.
But there's still a whole bunchof and I wish we could quantify
it. How much is still out there.I'm sure Gartner has some data,
(08:50):
in terms of how many datacenters are still out there.
Alright, great. So where are yougoing with the vision for
mattify? What is what's theshort term? And are whatever
short term means short term tome mean sometimes a day? But I
don't mean tomorrow, but youknow, in six months from now, in
a year from now, what's yourvision forward?
Mike Wagner (09:13):
Yeah, so we have an established channel program. So
that's a big part of what we do.We've got incredible business
partners that we work with. Butfrom a vision perspective, it's
really taking the product to abroader audience. We currently
our installation process issomething that we're working on
right now, because we want tomake it push button, you know,
immediately deployable from oursite. So that's a big step for
(09:37):
us. But overall, it's just amatter of, you know, continuing
to do what we're doing and makemore customers aware of it. The
footprint that we have right nowreally covers most sectors. So
we've had a great opportunity towork with folks in financial
services as well as media andentertainment, banking,
(09:57):
insurance, you name it, we'vekind of had Uh, we're working
with those customers. So that'sa, that's a great thing. So you
know, from an executionperspective, we want to make
sure that we're doing the thingsthat we want it to do really
well, which is the discovery,provisioning and maintaining of
servers themselves. And thenexpanding that out as we grow
(10:20):
into really all of the edge usecases and IoT sensors. And the
best part about where we'reheaded is, it's defined already,
for us, essentially, we leverageopen standards. And so the open
source communities, and the openstandards, communities that made
our product possible, are reallydefining directionally where we
(10:42):
go. And from a r&d perspective,that's something I learned from
Red Hat, there's really nobeating the open source research
and development model, there'sno beating the open source
software development model,because your r&d is essentially
handled for you by thecommunity, you know, and as the
community demands something, itgets rolled into the open
(11:04):
standard. And then we make italmost instantly accessible
inside of our product after wetest it and make sure that it
works across different hardwareprofiles. So that's, that's one
of the great benefits of havinga redhead background is that
it's, it showed me the power ofopen source, and the power of
open communities overall, toreally help drive product change
(11:26):
and making sure that you're notheading down technical rabbit
holes that aren't gonna leadanything, you know, these are
all community driven. And sowhenever you're taking your
marching orders from peopledemanding features, you know
that there's going to be anaudience for it.
Eveline Oehrlich (11:42):
They're a different culture than it was
when I started out in it, whichwas 90, in the 90s. I'm glad
we're here. And that's verybeautiful. I keep telling my
daughters, hey, you should gointo it. But maybe I had too
many ITIL books on mynightstand, and they didn't want
to do that. So there aredifferent topics today, but so
very successful young ladies. Soculture is everything. It says
(12:08):
on your whiteboard, Michael, inyour office, little word was
telling me that. What, how doesthat translate in your day to
day because for us, the DevOpsInstitute, you know, it's just
human angle. We forget, there'sa lot of talk about tech, and
all these different things. Butthe culture and how we work and
(12:31):
how people come together isessential. Otherwise, we'll
basically are machines. So tellme a little bit about how this
culture is everything translatesat your day to day mattify? With
your coat with your customers,your clients and everything
else?
Mike Wagner (12:48):
Yeah, so that's great. Yeah. So from a culture
perspective, we really lead withthree core elements, if you
will. And I think, you know,culture evolves over time in an
organization. But as a softwarestartup we came from large is
large enterprises in the past,and we saw a few things that we
(13:11):
thought, okay, if we launchedour own, we know exactly what
we'd want. So that was anothervery cool thing of doing a
startup is you get to kind ofbuild it to your dream, right?
And eat and I, our culturalwants, in terms of what a
company should be, we're justperfectly aligned. So
essentially, it's number one iskindness. So no egos no
(13:33):
pretense, no bad attitudes,right. If you're not having fun,
I always have the saying, ifyou're not enjoying it, you're
probably in the wrong job. And,you know, you should consider
other options, right? We enjoy agreatly coding and we love what
we're doing, we, you know, thehardware in general. And that
intersection of where hardwareand software meet is just a
(13:55):
really cool space to be. Sokindness is number one,
transparency is number two, andtransparency, because that
enables trust, right, andwithout trust, you don't have
much, especially in a smallorganization. And you can boil
that down to individual teams ifyou're in a larger organization.
(14:15):
But for us the transparency, youknow, we've got a small group of
folks here trying to make thisdream happen. And that have made
the product an award winningproduct now, and you know, some
some amazing customers. So itreally has to be there, from the
very beginning. And throughoutthe build process. So you know,
essentially being able to seewhat they've done, you know,
(14:37):
let's take a look at your codefor today. Right? How did things
go? Always checking in Sotransparency is number two, and
number three would beconsistency. And that's really,
you can view that as essentiallya self discipline, right, and
the will to collectively workhard towards a common goal. And,
(14:58):
you know, the excitement aroundIn our product Mojo platform,
and you know, the fact that wehave some really cool customers,
and that we're working withsome, some, some of the largest
global players in theirrespective spaces right now is
really exciting. So I think it'smuch easier to kind of create
(15:19):
the collective vision now thatthe product is built, and
everyone sees the potentialaround it. And so it's, those
are the three main ones, thoughkindness, transparency, and
consistency. And as long as youhave those things in place, you
know, you can kind of take onthe world.
Eveline Oehrlich (15:35):
Yeah, I'm sure you get to read that culture is
everything when you visitMicrosoft Office, anything you
want to add to that,
Ian Evans (15:41):
I think might hit all the the major ones for us. I
mean, I agree with them. YouHumility is a big one for me.
You know, I think that that goesa very long ways. And I think if
you get the right people inplace, and they enjoy their
jobs, like he'd said, they'redoing great work, you know, the,
the, the ability to managebecomes a lot easier, you know,
(16:02):
you don't have to engage in alot of micromanagement and stuff
like that. So it's all about,you know, just the attitude,
this the selection of the personin the role and allowing them to
kind of spread their wings, youknow, I'm allowing them to take
all the cumulative skills thatthey've gathered over the years
and feel that strong spirit ofinnovation, and push it forward
(16:23):
into in the product. And I thinkwhen you do that, you get the
best elements of everything,from a company perspective, a
product perspective, marketreadiness, all of all of those
things come together into agreat package. So yeah, I
definitely agree with everythinghe mentioned with maybe those
those, those couple extra thingsfrom from a company management
(16:45):
and cultural perspective and allthose things.
Narrator (16:48):
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Eveline Oehrlich (17:22):
Great. That makes me think of one of my
former colleagues at Forresterused to say actually two of them
to steal some research,excellent research, they're at
Forrester Research. He used tosay, happy employees, happy
customers. And that goes for allkinds of products, right? So if
we have happiness and enjoyment,then that translates into happy
(17:47):
customers, because we enjoy whatwe're doing. And this is in your
case, and in anybody else'scase, even flying, or driving or
ordering or anything like that.So great. Okay. Yeah. And
Ian Evans (18:00):
I want to add one quick thing, and that is, you
mentioned happy customers peace.And that, that that is one of
the biggest things for us isthat we, we felt that the
products being introduced to themarket were way too complex. And
you know, and that obviouslyleads into positive customer
experience, you know, we want itto be as seamless and easy to
use as possible. And that to ustranslates to happy customers.
Eveline Oehrlich (18:24):
Yep. Ah, that makes me think of something
else. I wanted to ask youcommunity outreach, you guys
have done something around,making sure that there is basic
access to internet and things inrural areas called something
called photon Connect. Is thatcorrect? Can one of you
elaborate on what that is?Because I think that is
(18:47):
beautiful when I heard aboutthat.
Mike Wagner (18:50):
Yeah. So a few years ago, when COVID hit, Ian
lives in the, in the foothillsof the Blue Ridge Mountains. And
that might be one of the mostchallenging places to get
broadband signals into that I'veever seen personally, I'm in
Madison, Wisconsin, andcomparatively, you know, it's
(19:11):
farm pastures out here. It'spretty simple. But we still have
a lot of rural broadbandchallenges as well. It's
surprising when you discoveredjust how, how widespread the
problem is across North Americastill. But when COVID hit there
was some teachers in particularthat were having trouble
connecting and being able tohave their classes you know,
(19:34):
delivered in a way that wasactually usable for the kids. So
we identified a few of thoseteachers and reached out to the
school board and we're able toget them hooked up at no charge
to an Ian actually developed anamazing product that we've gone
on to work with commercially andhave some some really cool
(19:58):
customers that we're workingwith on the come martial side
now, commercial enterprise side.And yeah, it's a it's called
photon router. And it's a it's ahighly tuned customer premise
piece of equipment that takescare of all of the streaming
difficulties that you woulddiscover it most people face
with much even higher bandwidthcoming into the home. So yeah,
(20:22):
that was that was the key, weestablished our own ISP, and
essentially got these teachersonline, so they could teach the
classes with some degree ofperformance and actually be able
to interact with the kids anduse the the Zoom classes, and
the features that that the theschool board was using. The
(20:43):
district was using to try andenable the remote learning that
was in place during COVID.
Eveline Oehrlich (20:48):
Beautiful, very noble, great, great idea.
All right, cloud repatriation,we've seen it we're hearing it
to to, you know, some fin ops orcost observability organizations
are repatriating out of thecloud. Not all not everything.
But we've, we've seen it inDevOps Institute and talked to
(21:12):
all ambassadors and they see itas well. So in what are some use
cases, you've seen what Cloudrepatriation makes sense? And,
and I like you, too, I know youare. I'm gonna call you a nerd.
But I mean it as a compliment,not as derogative at
Ian Evans (21:28):
all. That's okay. I get called that a lot.
Eveline Oehrlich (21:33):
Yeah, Miko calls you on the road all the
time. Okay. But instead oflooking at it from the technical
perspective, I'd like to likeyou to focus a little bit on the
business value perspective, interms of cloud repatriation,
what are some use cases you'veseen?
Ian Evans (21:48):
So I think the dynamics have changed a bit. You
know, one of the things thatI've noticed immediately is,
you're starting to seeminiaturization in terms of
hardware footprint, right? Sothings that when notoriously
kind of take, you know, threerows, or more, you know, for
large workloads, as an example,those are things that you're
consolidating down into one ortwo racks, or even less now,
(22:10):
because of the core counts andthe efficiencies that are
brought forth with new servertechnologies. So, you know, when
it comes to a real estateperspective, looking at it from
a spanned, it becomes a mucheasier scenario for a lot of
companies, because they can lookat that as footprint reduction,
less building size, less coolinginfrastructure, so forth, all
these translate into lowercosts. So what was a major
(22:33):
obstacle before in that regardis is now been, you know,
largely fixed with theefficiencies and the
consolidation of hardware. Sothat's one major driver there.
And it makes it possible forpeople to put very powerful
workloads into smaller spaces,so they don't need huge data
centers to do that. I think theother element that's important
(22:55):
from a business perspective iswe know most businesses want to
run hybrid workloads. Thefrustrating part for most of the
businesses is they didn't feelthere was really a really good
standard to essentially controlall these devices in the data
center. So the MTF redfishstandard is a great example of
an improvement in that area, andthat it basically creates a set
(23:17):
of extensible schemas andpurposes, it reaches into
servers and storage and otherelements in the data center. And
really, the overall goal is tobring things into a standard
unified API that's easy tounderstand, easy to consume. And
above all else, is accessiblethrough a multitude of different
OEMs. So customer puts in acommand to power on a server,
(23:40):
that would be the same commandacross a Dell HP super micro
platform, and so forth. That'sthe overall goal. So with those
pieces coming in, from abusiness perspective, the
elements of automation are moreachievable, as long as you have
a toolset that accommodatesthat. And that's really where
Mojo came in is we wanted tobuild that platform to use that
(24:00):
standard. So people canorchestrate automate hardware in
an in a very agnostic way. Sothat those those drivers really
help out quite a bit. And Ithink also there's kind of the
shock with Cloud spend as well,and it's relatively hard to
control. And you know, a lot ofcustomers, they put workloads in
there and they have certainexpectations and some of those
(24:22):
costs been out of control. Andnext thing, you know, you're
locked into specifictechnologies, maybe this public
cloud provider has and thespends very high so customers
are looking at ways with thethings I mentioned earlier,
using those things, bringing itall together and bringing
workloads back into you know,kind of like a smaller on prem
type of footprint.
Eveline Oehrlich (24:44):
Yep, makes sense. scuze me, I am doing some
research or we at the DevOpsInstitute have done five years
of research now on it upskillingor we call it upskilling at
2023. We just have a reportpublic session we share a lot of
the findings there the top twodomain skills or capabilities,
(25:06):
which are must have a processskills, you know, be it ITIL it
for it DevOps, agile scrum, youknow, name them, and technical
skills. Those are the two topmost important skill domains.
When we think about this topicof moving workloads, and or data
back to on premise on the skillsin a data center, that's one
(25:27):
thing, I think that's onechallenge, I can see already.
When we everybody wants to haveclouds skills, and has cloud
skills and container skills andall of that wonderful stuff. The
second one politicalconsiderations if I'm the CTO,
and I decided two years ago,five years ago, we're gonna go
all cloud. And I'm still around.And now I have to say, I'm
(25:51):
sorry, but I think we need tomove certain things back. That
could be carried over. Maybe.Those are just two aspects of
cloud repatriation conversationsI've had with clients and and
others, Michael, to you. Haveyou had conversations with your
clients on Cloud repatriation,and hearing other things? And if
(26:14):
not other, maybe comment onskills versus cost and political
savviness?
Mike Wagner (26:21):
Yeah, okay. So, couple good threads there. So
I'll start with the discussionaround skills. And that was
really one of the core reasonswhy we developed the product.
You know, we saw Ian saw a need,and we've both had the
opportunity to go to datacenters of some of the top
companies globally, and you seethe way they're running things.
(26:45):
And you recognize that there's afew people that really hold the
keys to the castle. And they'refrom a hardware perspective,
which is, that's an exposure.And then being able to knowledge
transfer, how things are doneinternally is also a very
difficult thing. So we wanted tocreate really a first class
citizen, if you will, a firstclass application that makes
(27:06):
that intersection of people andhardware as simple as possible.
And that's where Mojo platformreally came in. And Ian has a
navy background he worked inwith some Navy contractors and
the KISS principle that keep itsimple, stupid principle around,
alright, what can we do to builda tool that's just very easy to
(27:28):
use very intuitive, and handlesall of this sort of manually
heavy, and very error proneactivity that's often left to
individuals. And in particular,we're talking BIOS upgrades,
firmware upgrades, remoteprovisioning of operating
systems, remote booting ofoperating systems wiping of hard
(27:51):
drives. So you know, this, thislow level, ability to do what
you need to do from a servermaintenance perspective, just
was a glaring problem and havinglived through it, you know, he
just wanted to create sort ofthe dream tool, if you will. So
handling that skills gap, andbeing able to allow companies to
(28:13):
take those resources andrepurpose them into more
valuable roles, is, was animportant consideration for us.
And one of the core reasons webuilt motion platform. So you
know, we want to make it so thatanybody can come in with minimal
training on that tool, and beable to build private clouds
build, you know, the the poolsthat are necessary, provide the
(28:35):
infrastructure controls, thegovernance, the are back, all
the things that are required tohave a well maintained
infrastructure that provideswhat your developers need, at
with just a few clicks. Andthat, that we've managed to do.
So we're excited about havingsort of that phase one of the
project if you will, phase oneof our, our software proven and,
(28:57):
and really loved by ourcustomers. And the next piece of
it, the use cases, or the usecases really came to us again,
because you know, openstandards. We have Major League
Baseball is a big customer ofours. And as an example, you
know, they're a hybrid company.They have stadiums all over
North America, and data centers,you know, the overall definition
(29:21):
of even what a data center is,is just stretching and changing
as we speak. And that's, youknow, as we get closer to the
edge and as the demands of whatcompute and storage need to do,
because the optimization of thearchitecture itself requires it.
We just wherever the workloadneeds to be, we're fine with it.
(29:42):
So Cloud repatriation, yes. It'shappening also from just a
application perspective, orthey're like, well, we we did a
lift and shift because we wantedto get rid of the optics of
having a data center and thepeople right, and then they
recognize holy moly, there is orI should say the cap
expenditure. And there's anincredible operating expenditure
(30:03):
in the cloud. And there'sdefinitely a break even point of
when you recognize that, withthe miniaturization and advances
in technology and advances inchip power and the shrinking of
storage, you can do all thosethings in house for a lot
cheaper. And there's, you know,myriad cases where you can look
(30:24):
those up online and just see allof the money that's being saved
across the board. And weourselves, have done some really
cool work in that regard aswell. So the stuff that Major
League Baseball is doing is ahybrid cloud, we partnered with
Google on it. And it's justincredible to see all that's
enabled at the edge sitting ontop of Mojo's provisioned
servers, and then it bursts upinto GCP 7.2 terabytes of data
(30:49):
per game. And they've just gotan amazing amount of really cool
data that's pulled in there forall of their fans to interact
with. And see in real time, youknow, how far Aaron judges home
run went when he hit his 62nd.One, you know, so it's just
amazing all the things they cantrack even the speed of the ball
as it spins off the pitchershand and, you know, more data
(31:12):
than you can imagine, getsloaded up and, and used by fans
every game. So yeah, it's theit's the use cases themselves
that have really brought thissometimes cloud repatriation,
sometimes just natural, newbuild, you know, Greenfield
space where we have to changethe way the solution is
(31:33):
architected, to really get theoption, the optimal footprint to
deliver the best experiencepossible to our customers.
Ian Evans (31:41):
Yeah, wait, I was gonna add in quick thing on
that, you know, we alsounderstand that, in order to
have a successful product thatworks well in, in a hybrid
setting, or, you know, in aprivate data center type of
setting to automate differenthardware, you really need to
make sure that people that arecoming from the public cloud,
(32:03):
find the tool relativelyfamiliar, you know, so from a
DevOps perspective, you know, wewanted to make sure that we
weren't introducing somethingthat seemed foreign or you know,
monolithic, it's kind of thatlike, fine balance, you know, we
want to make sure that we keepit very simple. We also want to
make sure that it's alsofamiliar, and, you know, if, if
a DevOps person is working onour system, and they prefer to
(32:27):
use Ansible, they can useAnsible, they want to use
TerraForm, they can certainlyuse TerraForm. So we want to
keep it very open in thatrespect, as well, you know,
bring your own tools, bring yourown servers, you know, flexible
platform, you know, very muchcommon in terms of things that
they would see, within thepublic cloud, a lot of the terms
are the same. So we reallyworked hard to make sure that
(32:48):
the tool is recognizable topeople that are coming from
those environments, but also,you know, very, very much usable
when they're using both of thoseenvironments at the same time.
Eveline Oehrlich (32:58):
Great points. Excellent learning. Super. All
right. Last question. And thishas nothing to do with any of
what we've talked about. Well,maybe I'll leave it up to you,
gentlemen. What do you guys dofor fun?
Mike Wagner (33:13):
Oh, boy. So I guess I'll go first. I love music. I
mean, I jokingly, Ian and Ialways joke around that this is
all just a front for us to beable to put our album out once
our company goes public. So butwe'll see. Right. So I've been
(33:35):
playing bass for many years. Andso that's that's something a big
hobby of mine, for sure. I alsoplay chess. And I have five
kids. So that Oh, really busy.Yeah.
Eveline Oehrlich (33:49):
Yes. Excellent. And you Ian.
Ian Evans (33:52):
Yeah. So we might have some similarities in terms
of things we like to do for fun.I mean, music is a big thing for
me. I've done it for a long timeI play bass, I play guitar. So I
enjoy that. I also just reallyenjoy working within the
community. So a lot of my timemy free time is spent on you
know, things we talked likephoton connects Community
(34:14):
Improvement Project, I want tosee how I can improve outcomes
for people in the community. AndI'm always looking for
challenges, you know, thingsthat have been challenges for a
very long period of time.Nobody's addressed those. I love
those types of things. So when Isee them, I tried to address
them. And if my background inwhat I've done in my background
can help push those thingsforward within the community.
(34:38):
That's one thing I spend a lotof time for on and then the
other ones are animal welfare.I'm very much involved in the
community when it comes towildlife and sustaining that and
ensuring that you know, there'ssome involvement in the
communities involved insustaining the natural wildlife
ecosystem here as well.
Eveline Oehrlich (34:57):
Excellent. Gentlemen, this has been
Fantastic. You guys haveenriched my life significantly
today. And I hope you've enjoyedthis conversation as well. Thank
you again, for all of thelearning and the sharing. And
your last part they are on whatyou do for fun.
Ian Evans (35:15):
It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.
Eveline Oehrlich (35:18):
We've been talking to Michael Wagner, co
founder and CEO of benify. AndIan Evans, co founder and CTO of
mattify. Gentlemen, again, thankyou very much for your time
joining me today on humans ofDevOps podcast and have a great
mattify journey, I'll say.
Mike Wagner (35:35):
Thanks very much.
Eveline Oehrlich (35:37):
Yes, humans of DevOps podcast is produced by
DevOps Institute. Our audioproduction team includes Julia
pape, Daniel Newman, Schultz andBrandon Lee. Shout out to those
colleagues of mine do awonderful job also at their day,
and recording and making surethings are well. I'm humans of
DevOps podcast executiveproducer Evelyn earlyish. If you
(35:59):
would like to join us on thepodcast, please contact us at
humans of DevOps podcast atDevOps institute.com. I'm
abolutely. Talk to you soon.
Narrator (36:12):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the humans of
DevOps podcast. Don't forget tojoin our global community to get
access to even more greatresources like this. Until next
time, remember, you are part ofsomething bigger than yourself.
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You're listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a
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Ian Evans (00:16):
I think the other element that's important from a
business perspective, as weknow, most businesses want to
run hybrid workloads. Thefrustrating part for most of the
businesses is they didn't feelthere was a really good standard
to essentially control all thesedevices in the data centers.
Eveline Oehrlich (00:33):
Welcome to the humans of DevOps Podcast. I'm
Evelyn Erlich, Chief ResearchOfficer at DevOps Institute.
Some of you might remember whata SIS admin does, and others
might not. I do and I rememberthe hard work when I was in that
role. I was part of a giant datacenter consolidation many years
ago, and I was a sysadmin in theyear y2k Or year 2000. Okay, I
(00:57):
know that dates me, but I don'treally care. However, when I
hear people saying that the datacenter is dead, I have a very
strong reaction because it's nottrue. That is why I've invited
two thought leaders and founderswho have architects and design
the solution, which focuses onthe work in the data center. And
today, as I said, we have twoleaders which have created a
(01:19):
very interesting solution calledmattify, or a company called
mattify. We'll talk about thesolution in a little bit. Let me
introduce the two gentlemen. Sofirst one, Michael Wagner, is a
co founder and CEO of mattify.He began his career in 1995 as a
network engineer, when he joinedIBM while still attending the
(01:41):
University of Wisconsin Madison.He worked in several senior
management positions at IBM inBoston and San Diego. Before
joining Red Hat in 2010. Michaelwas head of Channel Sales and
alliances for North America atRed Hat. He was one of the
creators of Red Hat hats, epicspartner program for system
integrators, implementingOpenShift Kubernetes solutions
(02:04):
in his final role beforelaunching mattify. The second
person is Ian Evans. He is cofounder and CTO of mattify. He
began his career in 1999. As thedirector of IT for Quintus
resorts. He got his first tasteof working in software startup
when he next joined was Zabisystems. As Director of Product
(02:27):
Management at wasabi, Ian wasdeeply involved in all aspects
of product development andstrategy. In Sprott expertise in
cutting edge infrastructuretechnology led him to multiple
senior architect positions withsome of the top technology
companies on the planetincluding AWS, Verizon, Lockheed
Martin, and Red Hat. Ian's finalrole before launching mattify
(02:49):
was principal architect for theglobal open solutions practice
of WW Ts, and welcome to OurPodcast management. My wonderful
gentleman. Thank you. I callthis podcast a glimpse into two
co founders journey for the datacenter a sounds a little bit
(03:11):
like Star Trek. I am a Star Trekfan. So hopefully don't you
don't mind. It is great to haveyou to with us today. And I'm
excited for our audience tolisten in. So we before we talk
about mattify Ian, can you sharewith me how you two have decided
to become co founders and createmattify? Where if you met give
(03:32):
us the story?
Ian Evans (03:34):
Sure. Yeah. So we, I've known Mike for about a
little over four years. And theidea of what we generally
started working on a bunch ofdifferent technologies around
the data center. And you know,in our respective roles, we
really saw a lot of limitationsaround getting the product out
(03:56):
to market and doing it in a waythat was kind of free of
obstacles. So of course thatstarted the the discussion
around starting our own company,and starting to figure out how
we start to tackle the issues inthe data center, but build the
product to basically facilitatewhat we feel need to be done as
(04:19):
quickly as possible. So we gotour start working on all those
different technologies. Youbrought it all into a single
product plan. And then westarted to make some
determinations on what areas ofthat data center we're going to
tackle first. And that reallyled to the creation of mattify.
And the wonderful product thatwe have called Mojo.
Eveline Oehrlich (04:40):
So medified name and does it stand for
something? It does.
Mike Wagner (04:48):
Yeah, so mattify it's a portmanteau combination
of two words so metal andsimplified. So we put the first
couple letters of metal lastcouple of letters that simplify,
and you get
Eveline Oehrlich (05:02):
mattify. Great love that. I bet that was a
variety of cycles of thinking,which ideation around the name.
That's fantastic. So, Michael,what does mattify do? What is
and what is so unique aboutmattify?
Mike Wagner (05:18):
Yeah, so we went against the grain, we saw a need
in private cloud and data centerspace, in particular. And as the
sort of definition of what adata center is, was quickly
evolving, you know, the needs ofsystem administrators, the needs
of folks that are ininfrastructure and operations,
(05:40):
don't go away. And as that greatlittle meme that was floating
around and still is, you know,what is the cloud, it's just
somebody else's computer. Andthat's, that's the reality of
it, you know. So for us, werecognize that the hyper scalars
have done a great job ofautomating their infrastructure.
(06:01):
And they did such a great jobthat, you know, companies all
around the world decided, well,let's just get rid of this
problem, when we're startingoff. While the data centers in
most of the Fortune 1000,companies really didn't change
all that much. If you look athistorical spend, data center,
data centers have grown, as faras server spend, and as well as
(06:23):
total megawatts, even in theprivate data centers have grown
consistently, every year. Andthat hasn't changed. Now, cloud
and hyper scalars have grownmuch faster. But the fact that
the data centers are still outthere is a testament to the fact
that you know, fortune 1000companies, companies that reach
a certain size, the economies ofhaving their own hardware makes
(06:44):
sense. So it's that kind ofquestion about do I rent? Or do
I buy? And at some point, itcertainly makes sense to buy. So
yeah, so what we did was wewanted to make that incredibly
simple. We wanted to create itso that you know, the hard work
that say Googles and Amazonshave done to make public cloud,
(07:05):
incredibly consumable, supereasy to spin up a server, and
get the exact hardware profilethat you want. We wanted to make
that as easy as possible forprivate organizations to do
behind their firewall. And also,you know, there was a big switch
going on, that really was theimpetus for launching things in
where we got our first use casewas right on the edge. So of
(07:28):
course, the development of 5gand the need to move, compute
and storage closer to thecustomer themselves, really led
to us, you know, creating acouple of different use cases
for our product. And I thinkthat's helped to drive growth
overall. So bottom line is wejust wanted to make accessing
the hardware, discovering it,provisioning it, and maintaining
(07:51):
it, as simple as possible treatit as a first class citizen, if
you will, all the investment hadreally gone AppStack, you know,
into applications andapplication frameworks and
DevOps, you know, and ingeneral, like OpenShift, and
Kubernetes, and Docker. That'swhere all the interest was. But
the fact that, you know,everyone was still toiling down
at the server level, and at thechip level, to get these things
(08:13):
to talk and get them organizedthat way they need to with the
right access, and governance,compliance, all those things
still existed. It's justsomebody else's computer and
call it a cloud. But at the endof the day, it's a bunch of
servers.
Eveline Oehrlich (08:27):
Yep, I understand when you said that
you went exactly the opposite towhere everybody else's has been
going. And particularly duringthe pandemic, people were
thinking, Oh, we got to move tothe cloud. And they took those
two years or whatever how manymonths it has, and they did it.
But there's still a whole bunchof and I wish we could quantify
it. How much is still out there.I'm sure Gartner has some data,
(08:50):
in terms of how many datacenters are still out there.
Alright, great. So where are yougoing with the vision for
mattify? What is what's theshort term? And are whatever
short term means short term tome mean sometimes a day? But I
don't mean tomorrow, but youknow, in six months from now, in
a year from now, what's yourvision forward?
Mike Wagner (09:13):
Yeah, so we have an established channel program. So
that's a big part of what we do.We've got incredible business
partners that we work with. Butfrom a vision perspective, it's
really taking the product to abroader audience. We currently
our installation process issomething that we're working on
right now, because we want tomake it push button, you know,
immediately deployable from oursite. So that's a big step for
(09:37):
us. But overall, it's just amatter of, you know, continuing
to do what we're doing and makemore customers aware of it. The
footprint that we have right nowreally covers most sectors. So
we've had a great opportunity towork with folks in financial
services as well as media andentertainment, banking,
(09:57):
insurance, you name it, we'vekind of had Uh, we're working
with those customers. So that'sa, that's a great thing. So you
know, from an executionperspective, we want to make
sure that we're doing the thingsthat we want it to do really
well, which is the discovery,provisioning and maintaining of
servers themselves. And thenexpanding that out as we grow
(10:20):
into really all of the edge usecases and IoT sensors. And the
best part about where we'reheaded is, it's defined already,
for us, essentially, we leverageopen standards. And so the open
source communities, and the openstandards, communities that made
our product possible, are reallydefining directionally where we
(10:42):
go. And from a r&d perspective,that's something I learned from
Red Hat, there's really nobeating the open source research
and development model, there'sno beating the open source
software development model,because your r&d is essentially
handled for you by thecommunity, you know, and as the
community demands something, itgets rolled into the open
(11:04):
standard. And then we make italmost instantly accessible
inside of our product after wetest it and make sure that it
works across different hardwareprofiles. So that's, that's one
of the great benefits of havinga redhead background is that
it's, it showed me the power ofopen source, and the power of
open communities overall, toreally help drive product change
(11:26):
and making sure that you're notheading down technical rabbit
holes that aren't gonna leadanything, you know, these are
all community driven. And sowhenever you're taking your
marching orders from peopledemanding features, you know
that there's going to be anaudience for it.
Eveline Oehrlich (11:42):
They're a different culture than it was
when I started out in it, whichwas 90, in the 90s. I'm glad
we're here. And that's verybeautiful. I keep telling my
daughters, hey, you should gointo it. But maybe I had too
many ITIL books on mynightstand, and they didn't want
to do that. So there aredifferent topics today, but so
very successful young ladies. Soculture is everything. It says
(12:08):
on your whiteboard, Michael, inyour office, little word was
telling me that. What, how doesthat translate in your day to
day because for us, the DevOpsInstitute, you know, it's just
human angle. We forget, there'sa lot of talk about tech, and
all these different things. Butthe culture and how we work and
(12:31):
how people come together isessential. Otherwise, we'll
basically are machines. So tellme a little bit about how this
culture is everything translatesat your day to day mattify? With
your coat with your customers,your clients and everything
else?
Mike Wagner (12:48):
Yeah, so that's great. Yeah. So from a culture
perspective, we really lead withthree core elements, if you
will. And I think, you know,culture evolves over time in an
organization. But as a softwarestartup we came from large is
large enterprises in the past,and we saw a few things that we
(13:11):
thought, okay, if we launchedour own, we know exactly what
we'd want. So that was anothervery cool thing of doing a
startup is you get to kind ofbuild it to your dream, right?
And eat and I, our culturalwants, in terms of what a
company should be, we're justperfectly aligned. So
essentially, it's number one iskindness. So no egos no
(13:33):
pretense, no bad attitudes,right. If you're not having fun,
I always have the saying, ifyou're not enjoying it, you're
probably in the wrong job. And,you know, you should consider
other options, right? We enjoy agreatly coding and we love what
we're doing, we, you know, thehardware in general. And that
intersection of where hardwareand software meet is just a
(13:55):
really cool space to be. Sokindness is number one,
transparency is number two, andtransparency, because that
enables trust, right, andwithout trust, you don't have
much, especially in a smallorganization. And you can boil
that down to individual teams ifyou're in a larger organization.
(14:15):
But for us the transparency, youknow, we've got a small group of
folks here trying to make thisdream happen. And that have made
the product an award winningproduct now, and you know, some
some amazing customers. So itreally has to be there, from the
very beginning. And throughoutthe build process. So you know,
essentially being able to seewhat they've done, you know,
(14:37):
let's take a look at your codefor today. Right? How did things
go? Always checking in Sotransparency is number two, and
number three would beconsistency. And that's really,
you can view that as essentiallya self discipline, right, and
the will to collectively workhard towards a common goal. And,
(14:58):
you know, the excitement aroundIn our product Mojo platform,
and you know, the fact that wehave some really cool customers,
and that we're working withsome, some, some of the largest
global players in theirrespective spaces right now is
really exciting. So I think it'smuch easier to kind of create
(15:19):
the collective vision now thatthe product is built, and
everyone sees the potentialaround it. And so it's, those
are the three main ones, thoughkindness, transparency, and
consistency. And as long as youhave those things in place, you
know, you can kind of take onthe world.
Eveline Oehrlich (15:35):
Yeah, I'm sure you get to read that culture is
everything when you visitMicrosoft Office, anything you
want to add to that,
Ian Evans (15:41):
I think might hit all the the major ones for us. I
mean, I agree with them. YouHumility is a big one for me.
You know, I think that that goesa very long ways. And I think if
you get the right people inplace, and they enjoy their
jobs, like he'd said, they'redoing great work, you know, the,
the, the ability to managebecomes a lot easier, you know,
(16:02):
you don't have to engage in alot of micromanagement and stuff
like that. So it's all about,you know, just the attitude,
this the selection of the personin the role and allowing them to
kind of spread their wings, youknow, I'm allowing them to take
all the cumulative skills thatthey've gathered over the years
and feel that strong spirit ofinnovation, and push it forward
(16:23):
into in the product. And I thinkwhen you do that, you get the
best elements of everything,from a company perspective, a
product perspective, marketreadiness, all of all of those
things come together into agreat package. So yeah, I
definitely agree with everythinghe mentioned with maybe those
those, those couple extra thingsfrom from a company management
(16:45):
and cultural perspective and allthose things.
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(17:08):
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Eveline Oehrlich (17:22):
Great. That makes me think of one of my
former colleagues at Forresterused to say actually two of them
to steal some research,excellent research, they're at
Forrester Research. He used tosay, happy employees, happy
customers. And that goes for allkinds of products, right? So if
we have happiness and enjoyment,then that translates into happy
(17:47):
customers, because we enjoy whatwe're doing. And this is in your
case, and in anybody else'scase, even flying, or driving or
ordering or anything like that.So great. Okay. Yeah. And
Ian Evans (18:00):
I want to add one quick thing, and that is, you
mentioned happy customers peace.And that, that that is one of
the biggest things for us isthat we, we felt that the
products being introduced to themarket were way too complex. And
you know, and that obviouslyleads into positive customer
experience, you know, we want itto be as seamless and easy to
use as possible. And that to ustranslates to happy customers.
Eveline Oehrlich (18:24):
Yep. Ah, that makes me think of something
else. I wanted to ask youcommunity outreach, you guys
have done something around,making sure that there is basic
access to internet and things inrural areas called something
called photon Connect. Is thatcorrect? Can one of you
elaborate on what that is?Because I think that is
(18:47):
beautiful when I heard aboutthat.
Mike Wagner (18:50):
Yeah. So a few years ago, when COVID hit, Ian
lives in the, in the foothillsof the Blue Ridge Mountains. And
that might be one of the mostchallenging places to get
broadband signals into that I'veever seen personally, I'm in
Madison, Wisconsin, andcomparatively, you know, it's
(19:11):
farm pastures out here. It'spretty simple. But we still have
a lot of rural broadbandchallenges as well. It's
surprising when you discoveredjust how, how widespread the
problem is across North Americastill. But when COVID hit there
was some teachers in particularthat were having trouble
connecting and being able tohave their classes you know,
(19:34):
delivered in a way that wasactually usable for the kids. So
we identified a few of thoseteachers and reached out to the
school board and we're able toget them hooked up at no charge
to an Ian actually developed anamazing product that we've gone
on to work with commercially andhave some some really cool
(19:58):
customers that we're workingwith on the come martial side
now, commercial enterprise side.And yeah, it's a it's called
photon router. And it's a it's ahighly tuned customer premise
piece of equipment that takescare of all of the streaming
difficulties that you woulddiscover it most people face
with much even higher bandwidthcoming into the home. So yeah,
(20:22):
that was that was the key, weestablished our own ISP, and
essentially got these teachersonline, so they could teach the
classes with some degree ofperformance and actually be able
to interact with the kids anduse the the Zoom classes, and
the features that that the theschool board was using. The
(20:43):
district was using to try andenable the remote learning that
was in place during COVID.
Eveline Oehrlich (20:48):
Beautiful, very noble, great, great idea.
All right, cloud repatriation,we've seen it we're hearing it
to to, you know, some fin ops orcost observability organizations
are repatriating out of thecloud. Not all not everything.
But we've, we've seen it inDevOps Institute and talked to
(21:12):
all ambassadors and they see itas well. So in what are some use
cases, you've seen what Cloudrepatriation makes sense? And,
and I like you, too, I know youare. I'm gonna call you a nerd.
But I mean it as a compliment,not as derogative at
Ian Evans (21:28):
all. That's okay. I get called that a lot.
Eveline Oehrlich (21:33):
Yeah, Miko calls you on the road all the
time. Okay. But instead oflooking at it from the technical
perspective, I'd like to likeyou to focus a little bit on the
business value perspective, interms of cloud repatriation,
what are some use cases you'veseen?
Ian Evans (21:48):
So I think the dynamics have changed a bit. You
know, one of the things thatI've noticed immediately is,
you're starting to seeminiaturization in terms of
hardware footprint, right? Sothings that when notoriously
kind of take, you know, threerows, or more, you know, for
large workloads, as an example,those are things that you're
consolidating down into one ortwo racks, or even less now,
(22:10):
because of the core counts andthe efficiencies that are
brought forth with new servertechnologies. So, you know, when
it comes to a real estateperspective, looking at it from
a spanned, it becomes a mucheasier scenario for a lot of
companies, because they can lookat that as footprint reduction,
less building size, less coolinginfrastructure, so forth, all
these translate into lowercosts. So what was a major
(22:33):
obstacle before in that regardis is now been, you know,
largely fixed with theefficiencies and the
consolidation of hardware. Sothat's one major driver there.
And it makes it possible forpeople to put very powerful
workloads into smaller spaces,so they don't need huge data
centers to do that. I think theother element that's important
(22:55):
from a business perspective iswe know most businesses want to
run hybrid workloads. Thefrustrating part for most of the
businesses is they didn't feelthere was really a really good
standard to essentially controlall these devices in the data
center. So the MTF redfishstandard is a great example of
an improvement in that area, andthat it basically creates a set
(23:17):
of extensible schemas andpurposes, it reaches into
servers and storage and otherelements in the data center. And
really, the overall goal is tobring things into a standard
unified API that's easy tounderstand, easy to consume. And
above all else, is accessiblethrough a multitude of different
OEMs. So customer puts in acommand to power on a server,
(23:40):
that would be the same commandacross a Dell HP super micro
platform, and so forth. That'sthe overall goal. So with those
pieces coming in, from abusiness perspective, the
elements of automation are moreachievable, as long as you have
a toolset that accommodatesthat. And that's really where
Mojo came in is we wanted tobuild that platform to use that
(24:00):
standard. So people canorchestrate automate hardware in
an in a very agnostic way. Sothat those those drivers really
help out quite a bit. And Ithink also there's kind of the
shock with Cloud spend as well,and it's relatively hard to
control. And you know, a lot ofcustomers, they put workloads in
there and they have certainexpectations and some of those
(24:22):
costs been out of control. Andnext thing, you know, you're
locked into specifictechnologies, maybe this public
cloud provider has and thespends very high so customers
are looking at ways with thethings I mentioned earlier,
using those things, bringing itall together and bringing
workloads back into you know,kind of like a smaller on prem
type of footprint.
Eveline Oehrlich (24:44):
Yep, makes sense. scuze me, I am doing some
research or we at the DevOpsInstitute have done five years
of research now on it upskillingor we call it upskilling at
2023. We just have a reportpublic session we share a lot of
the findings there the top twodomain skills or capabilities,
(25:06):
which are must have a processskills, you know, be it ITIL it
for it DevOps, agile scrum, youknow, name them, and technical
skills. Those are the two topmost important skill domains.
When we think about this topicof moving workloads, and or data
back to on premise on the skillsin a data center, that's one
(25:27):
thing, I think that's onechallenge, I can see already.
When we everybody wants to haveclouds skills, and has cloud
skills and container skills andall of that wonderful stuff. The
second one politicalconsiderations if I'm the CTO,
and I decided two years ago,five years ago, we're gonna go
all cloud. And I'm still around.And now I have to say, I'm
(25:51):
sorry, but I think we need tomove certain things back. That
could be carried over. Maybe.Those are just two aspects of
cloud repatriation conversationsI've had with clients and and
others, Michael, to you. Haveyou had conversations with your
clients on Cloud repatriation,and hearing other things? And if
(26:14):
not other, maybe comment onskills versus cost and political
savviness?
Mike Wagner (26:21):
Yeah, okay. So, couple good threads there. So
I'll start with the discussionaround skills. And that was
really one of the core reasonswhy we developed the product.
You know, we saw Ian saw a need,and we've both had the
opportunity to go to datacenters of some of the top
companies globally, and you seethe way they're running things.
(26:45):
And you recognize that there's afew people that really hold the
keys to the castle. And they'refrom a hardware perspective,
which is, that's an exposure.And then being able to knowledge
transfer, how things are doneinternally is also a very
difficult thing. So we wanted tocreate really a first class
citizen, if you will, a firstclass application that makes
(27:06):
that intersection of people andhardware as simple as possible.
And that's where Mojo platformreally came in. And Ian has a
navy background he worked inwith some Navy contractors and
the KISS principle that keep itsimple, stupid principle around,
alright, what can we do to builda tool that's just very easy to
(27:28):
use very intuitive, and handlesall of this sort of manually
heavy, and very error proneactivity that's often left to
individuals. And in particular,we're talking BIOS upgrades,
firmware upgrades, remoteprovisioning of operating
systems, remote booting ofoperating systems wiping of hard
(27:51):
drives. So you know, this, thislow level, ability to do what
you need to do from a servermaintenance perspective, just
was a glaring problem and havinglived through it, you know, he
just wanted to create sort ofthe dream tool, if you will. So
handling that skills gap, andbeing able to allow companies to
(28:13):
take those resources andrepurpose them into more
valuable roles, is, was animportant consideration for us.
And one of the core reasons webuilt motion platform. So you
know, we want to make it so thatanybody can come in with minimal
training on that tool, and beable to build private clouds
build, you know, the the poolsthat are necessary, provide the
(28:35):
infrastructure controls, thegovernance, the are back, all
the things that are required tohave a well maintained
infrastructure that provideswhat your developers need, at
with just a few clicks. Andthat, that we've managed to do.
So we're excited about havingsort of that phase one of the
project if you will, phase oneof our, our software proven and,
(28:57):
and really loved by ourcustomers. And the next piece of
it, the use cases, or the usecases really came to us again,
because you know, openstandards. We have Major League
Baseball is a big customer ofours. And as an example, you
know, they're a hybrid company.They have stadiums all over
North America, and data centers,you know, the overall definition
(29:21):
of even what a data center is,is just stretching and changing
as we speak. And that's, youknow, as we get closer to the
edge and as the demands of whatcompute and storage need to do,
because the optimization of thearchitecture itself requires it.
We just wherever the workloadneeds to be, we're fine with it.
(29:42):
So Cloud repatriation, yes. It'shappening also from just a
application perspective, orthey're like, well, we we did a
lift and shift because we wantedto get rid of the optics of
having a data center and thepeople right, and then they
recognize holy moly, there is orI should say the cap
expenditure. And there's anincredible operating expenditure
(30:03):
in the cloud. And there'sdefinitely a break even point of
when you recognize that, withthe miniaturization and advances
in technology and advances inchip power and the shrinking of
storage, you can do all thosethings in house for a lot
cheaper. And there's, you know,myriad cases where you can look
(30:24):
those up online and just see allof the money that's being saved
across the board. And weourselves, have done some really
cool work in that regard aswell. So the stuff that Major
League Baseball is doing is ahybrid cloud, we partnered with
Google on it. And it's justincredible to see all that's
enabled at the edge sitting ontop of Mojo's provisioned
servers, and then it bursts upinto GCP 7.2 terabytes of data
(30:49):
per game. And they've just gotan amazing amount of really cool
data that's pulled in there forall of their fans to interact
with. And see in real time, youknow, how far Aaron judges home
run went when he hit his 62nd.One, you know, so it's just
amazing all the things they cantrack even the speed of the ball
as it spins off the pitchershand and, you know, more data
(31:12):
than you can imagine, getsloaded up and, and used by fans
every game. So yeah, it's theit's the use cases themselves
that have really brought thissometimes cloud repatriation,
sometimes just natural, newbuild, you know, Greenfield
space where we have to changethe way the solution is
(31:33):
architected, to really get theoption, the optimal footprint to
deliver the best experiencepossible to our customers.
Ian Evans (31:41):
Yeah, wait, I was gonna add in quick thing on
that, you know, we alsounderstand that, in order to
have a successful product thatworks well in, in a hybrid
setting, or, you know, in aprivate data center type of
setting to automate differenthardware, you really need to
make sure that people that arecoming from the public cloud,
(32:03):
find the tool relativelyfamiliar, you know, so from a
DevOps perspective, you know, wewanted to make sure that we
weren't introducing somethingthat seemed foreign or you know,
monolithic, it's kind of thatlike, fine balance, you know, we
want to make sure that we keepit very simple. We also want to
make sure that it's alsofamiliar, and, you know, if, if
a DevOps person is working onour system, and they prefer to
(32:27):
use Ansible, they can useAnsible, they want to use
TerraForm, they can certainlyuse TerraForm. So we want to
keep it very open in thatrespect, as well, you know,
bring your own tools, bring yourown servers, you know, flexible
platform, you know, very muchcommon in terms of things that
they would see, within thepublic cloud, a lot of the terms
are the same. So we reallyworked hard to make sure that
(32:48):
the tool is recognizable topeople that are coming from
those environments, but also,you know, very, very much usable
when they're using both of thoseenvironments at the same time.
Eveline Oehrlich (32:58):
Great points. Excellent learning. Super. All
right. Last question. And thishas nothing to do with any of
what we've talked about. Well,maybe I'll leave it up to you,
gentlemen. What do you guys dofor fun?
Mike Wagner (33:13):
Oh, boy. So I guess I'll go first. I love music. I
mean, I jokingly, Ian and Ialways joke around that this is
all just a front for us to beable to put our album out once
our company goes public. So butwe'll see. Right. So I've been
(33:35):
playing bass for many years. Andso that's that's something a big
hobby of mine, for sure. I alsoplay chess. And I have five
kids. So that Oh, really busy.Yeah.
Eveline Oehrlich (33:49):
Yes. Excellent. And you Ian.
Ian Evans (33:52):
Yeah. So we might have some similarities in terms
of things we like to do for fun.I mean, music is a big thing for
me. I've done it for a long timeI play bass, I play guitar. So I
enjoy that. I also just reallyenjoy working within the
community. So a lot of my timemy free time is spent on you
know, things we talked likephoton connects Community
(34:14):
Improvement Project, I want tosee how I can improve outcomes
for people in the community. AndI'm always looking for
challenges, you know, thingsthat have been challenges for a
very long period of time.Nobody's addressed those. I love
those types of things. So when Isee them, I tried to address
them. And if my background inwhat I've done in my background
can help push those thingsforward within the community.
(34:38):
That's one thing I spend a lotof time for on and then the
other ones are animal welfare.I'm very much involved in the
community when it comes towildlife and sustaining that and
ensuring that you know, there'ssome involvement in the
communities involved insustaining the natural wildlife
ecosystem here as well.
Eveline Oehrlich (34:57):
Excellent. Gentlemen, this has been
Fantastic. You guys haveenriched my life significantly
today. And I hope you've enjoyedthis conversation as well. Thank
you again, for all of thelearning and the sharing. And
your last part they are on whatyou do for fun.
Ian Evans (35:15):
It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.
Eveline Oehrlich (35:18):
We've been talking to Michael Wagner, co
founder and CEO of benify. AndIan Evans, co founder and CTO of
mattify. Gentlemen, again, thankyou very much for your time
joining me today on humans ofDevOps podcast and have a great
mattify journey, I'll say.
Mike Wagner (35:35):
Thanks very much.
Eveline Oehrlich (35:37):
Yes, humans of DevOps podcast is produced by
DevOps Institute. Our audioproduction team includes Julia
pape, Daniel Newman, Schultz andBrandon Lee. Shout out to those
colleagues of mine do awonderful job also at their day,
and recording and making surethings are well. I'm humans of
DevOps podcast executiveproducer Evelyn earlyish. If you
(35:59):
would like to join us on thepodcast, please contact us at
humans of DevOps podcast atDevOps institute.com. I'm
abolutely. Talk to you soon.
Narrator (36:12):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the humans of
DevOps podcast. Don't forget tojoin our global community to get
access to even more greatresources like this. Until next
time, remember, you are part ofsomething bigger than yourself.
You belong
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