Chenxi Wang, Rain Capital & Blake Bisset, Stanza Systems | AWS re:Invent 2022

This is texturong TV. Hi everyone. We're back here with our coverage of reinvent 2022.

We are at the wind at our video station and I'm really so happy. You know, one of the nice things about being out in person again is getting to see people in person. So this lady right here chancy Wong I'm ashamed to say I know her I'm not ashamed to say she might be ashamed to say and I know her a very very long time.

She is a well she's currently Be CEO founder of rain Capital. But before this chancy has been a analyst a VP of security of VP of strategy officer a marketing and and and an academic and a PhD and a public board member and I could go on and on and embarrass, but I won't but she's a really really smart woman in a very nice nice person. So anyway, I'm happy to call her a friend Jen.

See welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having us our pleasure.

Well, and that brings up us. Of joining chancy United a is Blake Bessette or visit there you Senator or us and that's gonna tell it's a little bit about his background in a second too. Actually.

Why don't we get your background out of the way like oh Lord Okay, so In terms of what's relevant here. I suppose I did a few startups ended up selling one of them to Google back in 2010 spent about five six years at Google working in reliability and security mostly YouTube Chrome things like that and then was a head of reliability engineering for Dropbox for a while then went to work with a friend of mine called now Murphy at Microsoft doing production reliability and security engineering for Azure and then worked on all of production infrastructure engineering for their air gap and secret clouds and so forth and so on after about three years there the two of us decided that we had a really great idea and we would you know, jump ship and and go work on that for a while. So that's he's there time the co-founder of a new company called stanza.

Yeah and SDA and Za. Yep. That's right.

Just like the column or the song Those sorts of things. Yeah. I love it.

Excellent. We're going to jump more into that in a minute, but I really wanted to kind of hear from chancy a little bit and I'm sure chance you'll weave you in so well chance wait. It's interesting times again, right it is and you and I've been through more than several Cycles.

In in the in the world economy Tech economy. Look some may say this was due to happen, right we were getting a little bit of irrationally exuber we were yeah, we were headed house. Yes and a large part of it also as I think because of covid a lot of companies man up or personed up for covid.

Because digital transformation he gave us a false sense. We accelerated digital transformation so much. And is that the new normal rather when you take your foot off that pedal a little bit to do to give air to some other things?

Yeah. It's only natural. But what's your take on it?

You're well, you know having been at the conference here, you know for two days looking at what's interesting the the sessions and the floor what I walk away are two things and you and I have been in the Tech Community for a long time and we started both in security right and went into devops and Cloud. So if I think back in no, maybe 10 15 years back cloud computing was just starting right and people are talking about putting my data putting my application in the cloud. But really what is happening now since then is we are Not only putting out application data in the cloud.

We're really adopting this new development methodology. Right? So the whole thing about constant continuous deployment and continuous integration and automation all coming from this mindset of cloud computing.

Right and and that is now proliferating in companies and especially those that are on the Forefront of tech transportational digital transformation. And that is what I saw on the show floor, right a lot of Dev Centric Innovation, right? So because we are software is eating the world.

So we want accelerate that Journey. So a ton of innovation about making development easy and making development more readily consumable no code automation. And reliability right making making the infrastructure reliable making the the whole stack more reliable and that's what the takeaway is.

No security is reliability in Securities quality. Yeah, so It's a great question what I actually that the the trend I'm seeing is security is part of the infrastructure, right? If you treat security differently, you know you and I security people we always say you don't vote Security on you build security.

And what does it mean to build it in? It means it is part of the infrastructure, right? And that's really where we need to be and I think I'm finally beginning to see that no doubt.

Yeah, we made so much progress. So, you know, I have a similar taken like you you've been around too. So yeah, you just call me old is that but that's how many people wearing NASA hat from the last shuttle watch just saying, but I want it but that be said you're right, you know, we just did our devops experience event in October last month for two months ago now maybe and You know, the thing was devops everywhere, right?

Because software has eaten the world. There's no doubt this whole digital transformation without so it's software. com 8 or 9 years ago, which was Devin Ops it's security so it's deaf secops and it's SRE right side reliability engineering is our parent part of the Ops piece of it.

Is the platform platform engineering right? So it's reliable reliability security and automation all together in the platform engineer, right? It's all so it's not as so I'm not a strict interpret this interpretation of devops person.

I'm more than umbrella, but it's all part of this whole way. We do devanops and devops. you know, and then the other thing is yeah, we're here at Amazon with the cloud but we can't lose look the edges happening.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Really?

Yeah iot devops of things we call it at this event. It's it's it's it's part, you know, if software is eating the world devops is digesting it right and I that's where I am, but it's serving it up on a plate right absolutely in bite-sized chunks, but it's a more some more mature version of this. How's this playing out as you look at new Investments and your current portfolio?

What do you think so and this brings me to why we're here today, right? So we are a lot of us are at this conference because we see the front edge of innovation here. Right and AWS is certainly leading the the wave and and companies like stands are in others are writing this wave to really engineer the future.

Right? And so what we like about some of these new innovation is that it's really it's decoupling certain things, right? You decoupled the core application from the entities of it.

The illities are security your life bullety other realities, right? And so that developers can focus on what they do the best and others can focus on like reliability what you do the best but it is so Ultimately in the graded so that it's not bolted on rather. It's through apis through real-time data exchange so that you can do real-time actions or time response.

So yesterday on the floor, I was talking to this guy who's um, he's ahead of engineering for a fairly large company and he was looking at feature flag and development. Right and he's saying that even with a lot of things that I have today, I still have errors and and foreseen issues within my infrastructure. I don't know where I came from right?

I have to like really peel back the layers of onion to understand and so we were having this debate about how do we understand from the you see something at the application signal at the application lay, how do we translate that all the way down to infrastructure and really troubleshoot it and do real-time response and that's the type of Agility that that we we're looking for as innovators, right? And that's why I'm so excited about what stanza is doing. So I'm gonna have like talk a little bit about well.

Yeah, but big shoes Blake is how do we how do we make sure some of the Innovation that happening in Google and Microsoft that coming out and and serve the Greater Community, right? So I'm that's that's really I mean, that's our mission, right, you know, you know this of course, but we're looking to make reliability a something that's not just the privilege of the biggest tech companies in the world, but something that's accessible to anyone who's building software, right and the, you know to that end we're focusing on Building this in a way that is accessible to people who it's a paradigm and a sort of that the the metaphors of this are things that are intuitive to them right? Because if you if they don't understand they don't can't interact with the way that they're used to if they have to go out and use all this other stuff.

It doesn't work for them. Right? So we're we're I you're probably familiar with like the the Dom the document object model for browsers how you know, front-end developers interact and control, you know, so we're building something that's essentially the the Dom for production.

Right? So you're all your your infrastructure systems can be, you know, queried and access through this and then layer on top of that specific solutions for key problems in the reliability space that you know folks encounter. So one of the first places that we're working on is like flow control for systems, right so that right right now people have to a ton of problems where they have to build back pressure through their entire infrastructure, you know, when they've got say a database problem.

Or maybe your Kafka cues or something's you know, not not quite lining up right not processing properly and instead we can very easily signal all the way out to the edge as you talk in your mobile device or whatever, you know, these kinds of issues that are occurring and you know reroute or you know adjust or maybe we spin up additional capacity or you know, if you maybe it's something as simple as we can get to the point where we can prevent these problems entirely right rather than like relying on Signal we can say, oh we see that someone's loaded up a cart full of you know items and now we guarant we assume they're going to want to make a purchase at some point. So we go and we warm up their lambdas ahead of time so they don't have a 10 second delay, you know the stack right? So I get it.

Yeah an hour audience is the audience for this right? We got people out here. This is what they're doing.

Yeah. Here's my question to you. I think one of the problems we have today is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to data.

Yeah and metrics on our reliability sure whether you using Prometheus or Open not Lightspeed open Telemetry or yeah, or you know name grafana always six and we're we're being inundated and probably you're using all of those. Yeah. This is what we're seeing people have, you know data dog and they have honeycomb and they have yes and they have you know, I mean and it's just not to mention the old APM stuff and all right that stuff, right?

Yeah and the problem the signal to noise ratio of it. It's not optimal. Absolutely.

No we find and we see this all the time in incidents after reports things people have the day that they need to solve just happen and looking at I even nobody's looking at or you have data but you can't get inside out. Yes, right because it actionable we call this intelligence. Yeah, right, you know the Turning data into intelligence and turning intelligence into actually, you know a recommendation of how to proceed yeah action to take and also I think ult Only not just recommendation, but maybe at some point turn that into code that you can deploy right away into the infrastructure to do all the remediation all the rollback or whatever, you know actions you need to take right and and that's really the future.

I think. Yeah, and that's part of what we're trying to do here is build because of this this, you know this what we call the poem production object inventing model. There's just like the Dom equivalent it allows us to consume from all these different systems.

Like we're not here to replace your ability to build other observability, right we want you to actually get the functionality out of those tools that was advertised you bring the attention economy, you know that lets you know, what you should be dealing with right now and how you should be dealing with it. And and in fact give you you know, maybe an automated way to do that or you know a better set of recommendations to choose from because we do want to keep this human centered like the human is At the end of the day very important to making the right decision in these cases to fully automated system can can lead you astray. Right?

But you you are building like taking data from systems. Then you building certain Primitives, right? Exactly and then the reliability engineering team or the security team or the platform engineering team can rely on these Primitives to make decisions and take action.

Yeah, we can level up the folks that you already have. Right? If you don't have a team like that, you know, we can help.

Product Engineers who have a you know production responsibility to make the same kind of crystallize the the wisdom the good patterns into you know responses, they can take effectively or if you do have very, you know, folks who are you know, very accomplished in these areas. We can make them capable of handling more systems. We can make them they're ramp up time when they join a company to you know, shorten that time to Effectiveness.

So and this is all you know, really? I think something that companies are going to have to get their hand around because you we are not able to scale the people the way that we need to scale them like that well and it brings up something else though to that, you know, we'll roll out here with 55,000 of our closest friends. but really Oh when we look at the market as a whole this still a lot more Computing resource a lot more Computing.

Yeah, not in the cloud in the cloud. Yeah back here. Yeah, we're still at the we're not halfway through this journey, even so relatively a third of the way a quarter of the way.

I mean, there's a lot why companies haven't even gone. Yeah and everything's heterogous even people who are fully in the cloud or spread across a bunch. Oh here.

I got ECS here. They're starting right multi-cloud. I think is is here to stay right if you large Company If You JP Morgan, you're not gonna put all all your infrastructure in one Cloud you have just for a lottery for a lot of reasons.

But the thing I'm looking at is folks who are traditionally on premises heavy right how fast they are moving to the cloud and how fast they are adopting these New Primitives and and really Allen for those of us who have been through many Tech Cycles. This is Rita call Computing is one of the rare opportunities for us to actually rebuilding do it. Yeah, right our infrastructure, right?

And when that when else we're gonna get this opportunity again, so but let me finish just If you get this opportunity to rebuild you have to do things. Right, right, we didn't do things right on premises, right? We did security later.

We did reliable only later and now called it organic. That was okay to make that work. You know, we have to meet people where they are.

So your point like there's so many companies that are you know, mixed between on-prem and cloud or mix between different clouds and so forth and that's the like a typical feeling I think with a lot of approaches people take where they there's there was this kind of we're going to provide systems with lots of guardrails. And you know, it's sort of like the the Apple, you know, kind of model of we're gonna tell you what you want and you're gonna do it this way, right? And that really the adoption doesn't work things, right?

You have to be able to say, all right. Here's something you can adopt piecemeal. Here's something you can adopt for your most critical user flows first.

We can provide you immediate results from you know, these you know, instrumenting and and actuating the most important parts of your business and then you know grow from there in the way that makes sense. So as you do this rebuild as you, you know, architect your systems in a way that sets you up right for the future, you know, you can we can help smooth that along the way that you're getting the value out of what you're trying to do. I got to tell you the longest 15-minute interview you wait, there's more Like I need you to talk to our audience there for people who say hey this sounds like something I want to find out more about maybe some.

Okay once give them an on-ramp here. What would how did they in? You know, how did they engage stanza?

Oh why? Okay, so probably the the best thing right now anybody who's interested in joining like our customer Advisory board or reaching and getting a early preview and what we're wearing on preview. Yeah there it stands out that systems.

Yes, right. Yeah stands so they could they could contact hello. It stands at that systems and that will put them into that community of folks are interested in these kinds of problems and you know, we can help solve them together because you know, we we're very convinced, you know, we have seen these things built in you know, very Advanced ways and and a lot of very exciting companies.

It's not out there, you know, everybody else yet, but you can't just import that you have to build the needs that these companies have and the way They're working. Right so we bring the principles but the tooling needs to be you know different even where we're trying to accomplish the same goals so that we need folks to be part of that community and help us make the right calls. Tanza dot system.

Yes system systems. Yes systems within and hey Blake. I wish a lot of luck with Santa you're gonna think that God.

Well not don't wait till next year these weird all the time. So you can come on anytime just like I'd love energy it is so great seeing you. I will see you.

Well at the very least I'll see you in April for RSA. Yeah, we're doing deaf SEC Ops Monday of that week again over there. Hopefully though will be better this year.

We yeah, I think we'll probably do something before that too. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Okay. I love it. But we're going to take a break right now.

We're here in Vegas. We are at AWS reinvent. We'll be back in a moment.