Kit Merker, Nobl9 | AWS re:Invent 2022

This is texturong TV. Hey everyone. We're back here live at the win in our Tech strong TV suite for reinvent.

I'm hoping our mics are that good that all the other conversations are getting filtered out of here. We have multiple meanings going on, but I'm really happy to be joined by my friend here kitten merker kid. If you don't know is one of the original Folks at Noble nine.

Right. Is it co-founder? I mean did they said well origin of retroactive co-founder, right?

Yeah, but I look I remember the day kid told me he was leaving Jay frog and going to this startup with his friends and Snowball nine and kid first of all, welcome. It's great to see you my friend great to see you in person and not seeing you in a green room. It's yeah, I have like a real background here.

It's not big. It's not fake. It's a real one.

So look, I'm not going to talk about the Ferraris. I'm not going to talk about the Social Media stuff. We're here to talk Noble nine.

Okay, um, actually before we get into the big Noble Nine business check announcement news today. I want to talk a little bit about you and Noble 9, you recently changed sort of roles titles at Noble nine. Why don't you eat talk about that first sure.

I mean, so now I'm the chief growth officer, which is I think kind of a kind of a cool title. I was the the col before and I think one of the things in your, you know early company or we're now three years into this journey little shy of a hundred and plays about 90 employees or so. Very engineering product focused company.

You don't really have a big staff to take care of the little Nitty Gritty. So I ended up doing a lot of other things. I was taking care of a lot of legal stuff Finance HR and then on top of that, you know, really my passion and my focus is on the community on Partner status, right customers helping really grow the usage and understand and so I you know, we were thinking about how we would scale the company.

We had a conversation in leadership team and they asked me to take it on and I said cool. I'll do that. But I want to do it my way and so my focus now is gonna be on product-led growth community-led growth Partnerships and then you know all the traditional sort of marketing activity.

We put a booth we have a booth here at reinvent Booth four five one not cheap. We put together a new card game called page 3 AM responder ignore that, you know and very focused on not just like marketing but really, you know, it's education. It's helping people solve problems.

It's reaching people where they are and it's been a very cool I'd say, you know partnership I have with the other exacts at Noble nine because we really didn't put it in a traditional it would kind of did it our way, you know, right and that's been a cool change for me. Means A. Little maybe a little bit more time on the road next year which I'm okay with that too.

Yes. Absolutely. You'll see me on the road.

It's gonna be a busy road year. I think I think so. You could come down to Florida anytime.

I'll be I'll be there. Absolutely. Yeah, so My question or my thought was when I saw all this coming down is is sales part of that organization or is that a separate organization?

So right now I mean talk about it as this big, you know organization. So Jen ordonias or VPS sales. She's been with us since almost the beginning actually and Jen has been just amazing.

She's she's running our sales team and I think now, you know, the sales process for us. A lot of times has to deal with procurement. Let's be honest, you know, we're selling to mostly Engineers or engineering managers.

We sell it to some more senior Executives, but most the time they're really looking at the technology buying process, and I don't know if You you know, everybody knows right technology purchases, especially in Enterprises is a team sport. Yep. A lot of people involved a lot of evaluation of its bottom up.

So what you really want to have and this is I think where we're her and I partner I look at the growth from the bottoms up perspective. How do we get more people using it excited involved in open source, using our open source methodologies or our open source tools or using our product and then she comes and looks at and says listen you guys need to make sure it's got support make sure you got the security and privacy and that you've got all the different capabilities you need and Enterprise level and now we're seeing this expansion into these different these different teams and there's certain really see the benefit of slos right she comes in and makes sure that they've got you know the kind of commercial footprint in place. So we have a very strong partnership the other thing that her and I do together a lot is Just say me.

Oh, man. I wish I had a blog or I wish I had a white paper for this call. I was just on and I go okay, I go back to my computer and I go right here you go.

So that's gonna be something that'll hopefully change you gotta it's hard being the guy who writes a man. You know, it's it's funny. I I tell a lot of people this story when we started Noble nine.

I set a goal for myself to publish a piece of content every single week. So every Tuesday it was a thousand words every Tuesday. That was the Mantra and it shocked people because they thought well, that's a that's a crazy part.

That's pretty but yeah, what I found is a lot of content teams marketing teams Etc. They build a big content backlog and for me personally a large backlog slows my productivity. I actually think of it like what's going to be current?

What are we doing? Now? What exactly you what you thought put on the background?

Let's go. It's not it's not interesting today. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah, so I still enjoy I do a lot of writing, you know, I have a few tricks up my slave but grammarly, you know helps you get stuff out the door. But yeah.

You know, we've played with some of those. Yeah Ravi the Robot author. I don't do anything.

I haven't done. Well, I wish we always just to see what's out there. Yeah, I'd be happy to use some AI for some for you know, the interesting one I've seen is people are using dolly for their blog images.

I think that's a cool one. I might start doing there there is I look I I like playing with all the yeah, but anyway, You spoke a little bit about open source and free offerings big news. Yeah on your card game and everything out here was you guys make made an announcement, right?

Yeah today. Well, why don't you tell them I'll tell you so it's pretty cool. We we have a Perpetual free edition of noble 9 so up to 20 slos which is actually a good amount to get you started to be honest.

It's not like oh try, you know, try five you can run it forever. There's some limitations on the product of course, but it's it's a full fully featured SLO platform you get to see the full power of it open slow compatibility, you know, all the data sources data dog, New Relic Prometheus. Cloudwatch, you know everything that you would want to get your slos up and running and it's not time limited one of the things we found.

We were kind of offering a time-based trial is first of all, 30 days isn't enough to get observability data, you know, we launched a product called replay which allows you to bring data in much faster. I think we talked about it before and so being able to now get the data let it run have it be in place. And then once you graduate above 20s lows or you need other support or other capabilities you but the other thing we threw into the mix on top of the free tier, we actually doubled the number of slo's included in our net what we're not calling teams Noble 19 teams Edition.

It was previously called hydrogen, which was a cool name but a little confused. What is yeah, so we have Noble nine teams Edition which now, we just double dslos from 25 to 50 and Noble nine Enterprise which has, you know, sky's the limit but it starts now at 150 slots in the same price. So, you know, everybody's under a lot of pressure financially and we were able to find some savings to pass on to customers.

We went in contact at all our customers let them know it. Hey, we just we just doubled up. So that's really cool.

And then on top of that one last little piece we launched this thing called slow. Me which is a new documentation site with how-to guides walk Etc. We put that out there today along with it.

Our theory was well, we're gonna have a bunch of free customer signing up. And by the way before the press release we had a bunch of people sign up they found it somehow on site because we're not ready for Thanksgiving. So we got people logging in now they have this really guided tour easy how to guides we already had I think a great Documentation Center Tech writing team is amazing, but now it's very focused and very easy and that I think is going to help people not just learn about slos and the abstract but that's very concrete and that's that's what Engineers want.

That's what developers I want to go and get their answer get started. Try it out see the value and then they can worry about how they're gonna you know, navigate the organization and all that. Yeah.

True. Thanks, please. First of all, you said the website and people can go do it, but we got to tell them.

Oh, yeah, what's the website? com, that's no BL not that's right. That's right.

And obl number nine calm as the best jumping off place to find it if you go. To the blog there or there's a link to the resources. There's a soak Academy link there.

com slash slow Academy. Slocademy. Okay, that's an easy way to get to this little academy directly.

But you know, what if you sign up now for Noble 9 for the free edition, you'll get an email that it gives you all the education need. There's an in product links to everything. So just get started there.

Try it out and you know, we'll happily help if you have any issues. We also are offering community support and our community slack as part of open SLO. And our support team has been instructed that.

Treat the free customers just like everybody else. So, you know, I wouldn't expect anything less from you course. I'm gonna put you on the spot, please.

So I got people watching this out here who we're gonna say. Yeah, I've heard about this. That's alright SRE thing.

I know a little bit about SLO. You know, but I I really don't know what it is. Right?

I don't you know, what's the difference between that solo and SLA and I always think of noble nine as the company. That's Broad slos. To Market.

Well, I think we expected them so you Paid me well now. oh better, you know but you guys really kind of popularized, you know slos and why they're important and everything else and slow confident and everything else you did but for our audience Maybe Who Don't they don't know. So I I have a new way of explaining it to people a little bit.

So I'll try that out. But the most basic level SLO service level objective. What we're talking about is I'm running a service, you know, maybe it's a video streaming service maybe so we'll check upload for mobile for banking.

Maybe it's I don't know selling tickets to a popular musician, you know, there's lots of places that we need to keep these Services running or if you have a monopoly on the ticket the people people pay attention to things when they don't work, right? So then the questions like well, how do you make it run perfectly? Well, that's actually the wrong question.

You can't make it run perfectly. We have to accept that. In fact, nothing we do is perfect in software computers or anything else and we've actually got a pretty cool thing, which is we know how to hit the refresh button, right?

So here's here's a couple ways to explain it. So imagine this You go to website and behind the scenes imagine that there's a spinning wheel. It's got a hundred slices on it.

Right and 99 of those slices. Say the website loaded properly. What is the last slice say didn't load it says spin again.

Oh, really? Okay and again and this is the trick to the whole SLO concept is that if you give somebody a bad web page, they're gonna blame themselves. They're gonna hit refresh and guess what?

It's probably gonna work the next time and that's just one that's two nines right 99% But imagine it's, you know, two and a half three four nights, right? You could have a much more reliable service. The other thing I was talking to somebody and they said, you know Noble nine is kind of like a fire alarm and I said, well, it's kind of like a fire alarm except lots of people on fire alarms actually fire alarm is not that complicated because the room is not burning.

Nobleman is more like a fire alarm, you know building that's already on fire, but those fires are okay you have maybe it's glass blowing. I don't know what where you have fires, but maybe you have a forward, you know, smelting metal or something. You have a hot room that's got fires that are normal and we try is differentiate between fires that are normal and fires that are abnormal much harder problem.

And that's what we're doing is we're aggregating all these signals from your logs metrics traces across all these different platforms letting you define what normal looks like and let you take your platform and your services. And keep them in that normal constraint. So you're not getting constant false alarms.

But at the same time when something's urgent, it rises above the noise and I think this is this is really the critical thing with slos and it really changes. I think the relationship that teams have they get overloaded the amount of data. They have the size of their observability bill all this stuff and what they need is focus they need to put their resources and energy on what truly matters.

Which is different for everybody so it can't be a cookie cutter kind of solution. It needs to be something that you can grow into and learn and build an organizational competency around how we differentiate. between real problems and problems that will spin again.

Yeah. Yeah just spinning it. Yeah start with spinning again thinking zero double zero.

Don't talk to me. Oh, yeah. Don't spin again down here.

Like no anyway kid man. It's great seeing you. I'm glad you guys are doing great.

I love the new role for you. I think you're born for that role. Thank you so much.

So you're gonna rock and roll not a doubt in my mind you I get come see you and any time you want my job now. Excellent. Look, I'm gonna hold you know, hey, we are here in Vegas for AWS reinvent along with 55,000 other people.

Well, by the time you're watching this off, we'll be back home, but we want to give you a flavor of what's Happening Here. Big news from Noble 9 today. Check it out.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back with some more. Thanks Alan.