Aiven’s New Offerings and Free Tier – Jonah Kowall, Aiven

This is Techstrong tv. Hey everyone, welcome back Tong tv. I apologize.

Voice is a little off today. I've Jon. Jonah is with Ivan, a ie.

Just the way it's spelled on his shirt. Jonah, welcome, welcome back to our studio. Yeah, thanks.

It's great to be back here and uh, yeah, you've expanded a lot and there's a lot of things going on here. Yeah. Excitement, Always something here.

So, Jon, we, we've interviewed you, we've interviewed other from Ivan before, but not everyone gonna familiar. Yeah. Why don't give Ivan.

Yeah. Ivan Source projects and a scalable cloud service. So this includes databases, data streaming, and other types of infrastructure.

Uh, when it comes to DevOps and technology, we do some observability, but it's all about open data platforms across lots of clouds. Absolutely. And, um, we'll, we'll come back to that in a second.

Sure. Would Jonah tell people a little about you? Sure, yeah.

So my career kinda, I started out, grew into analyst role at Gardner and did that for a few years and then I went to the vendor side where I've been for the last, uh, 10 years or so. Um, working 10 years. Yeah, about that.

Yeah, exactly. Between Ivan. Yeah.

So I run product management. I'm the VP of product management. I building a global team to manage and scale our platform and our products that we offer today on top of the platform.

And its, it's pretty interesting do the infrastructure side to be able to handle the scale and scope that we have. So it's 11 products is a lot of products to be Managing. Definitely.

And we're building, so it's, we're working on right now. So yeah, it's So beyond that, you've also been traveling a whole bunch, you know, as part of work, but why don't you share with our audience kinda what, what is some of the new things, what's happening with Ivan? Yeah, for sure.

So, uh, one of the most interesting things we recently launched is what we call bring own cloud. So a lot of what Ivan does is we provide cloud, we provide our services across uh, nine different clouds and customers can run on any one of those clouds, any of the regions that they support. And there's a lot of, uh, flexibility there.

But what we've recently launched is a much more enhanced version of Ivan running inside your cloud account. So for example, if you were a company with a big commitment contract with what's Google? Uh, we can run inside account and infrastructure bill and Um, For sure, yeah, I mean it helps a lot with compliance.

It just makes the discussion easier cause you own the infrastructure and the data and everything that's running versus some other company technically owns it. We still manage, it's fully, we do all the backup and scaling and resiliency and everything like that, but you technically own it, the infrastructures in your account. So make some conversations a Choice And then obviously, uh, use that towards their commitment with the cloud provider, which gives them better pricing for all their other workloads.

So it just gives them a lot of uh, you know, flexibility, Goodness all around. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things about Ivan though too is huge supportive open source communities, open source software in general.

Let's talk about that a Little bit. Yes. Yeah, so I, I mean the reason I joined the company about eight ago is cause I'm big contributor to projects I saw you year.

I work on community, represent the project at Ivan. We actually have over engineers dedicated to working upstream open source only. And part of our uh, approach is that we provide completely open source upstream projects.

We just handle all the scaling and management and everything like that. So when we need a feature, for example, right now Kafka's really popular. It's, it's one of our most popular services.

Uh, right now. One of the challenges is in the open source you don't have a scalable tiered storage or low cost storage option. So our team, cause we have people that are maintainers of Kafka sponsors, this works on it, builds it with the community.

We're working engineers from LinkedIn, apple and Uber on building this upstream. And then everyone the community can use it versus some other companies build proprietary versions of that upstream. Upstream versus building something for Ivan isn't for community.

And then that my mind. Yeah. Source But tricky cause absolutely we build something and we even have Ivan open source projects for things like um, governance around Kafka and our competitors actually use those open source projects in their offerings, which is totally allowed and fine, but they don't contribute much back.

They just it, which is fine. I mean it's designed for everyone. Use everybody, Right.

Everybody does what's best for them. Yeah. It's just not the Spirit.

Yes, I agree. And it doesn't make it better for everyone, which is the open source and so important to us. Sure.

I gotta bring up another subject. We didn't talk about it off camera, but Sure. As a project, as a product manager, look I can't take steps about AI these days.

How is AI generat AI your product Plans For sure. So there's a couple of different areas. We were actually pretty early, uh, in the preview version for Vertex, the Google ai, we work with them closely.

So we've been building couple of different areas where we're planning inside our products. Uh, one is specifically around our documentation. So part of my team is also I own technical documentation and we can do a lot of things by embedding that our documentation site to not only make search more effective but examples, gimme an example of this, show me how I would combine this service and that service provide code snippets and do things like that.

So we're using it for that use case. The other one is also on the support side. Obviously get lot of support tickets and a lot of questions and we're also applying AI there to provide better customer service and customer support inside the products themselves.

We actually just launched a few days ago extension for which is popular database that's extension that allows customers to use Postgres as a vector database, which you then use for training things. Likem. Yeah, exactly.

For training and open search, which is another uh, open source project that we offer. Uh, there's also work and additional use cases around training LLMs with that data, that part of platform you'll see a lot more it on the open source side for open. Cool.

Lot going on on that front. So just between you and me, forget about anybody watching how is all this today or is it more of bet for the future? Um, so I think it's a really useful tool.

Mean you're creative person. I'm a creative person by using these types of technology, it helps us in spurring creative juices and getting us thinking and and sort taking a new angle on something so anyone that's creative in any way, whether it's writing code, uh, producing videos, writing documentation, how am I gonna interview this candidate? How should we do our interview?

Right. It's super helpful just as a creative tool. And so I think its really powerful for pretty much anyone in any situation, but it's tool and it doesn't do everything and its not It's magic used.

Used it, I've used it. Job description. Yes.

Press release writing even I'll a blog article and in and what it comes up with. Yeah. And I've also used for helping manager just a of us here are, uh, helping coming up with career frameworks, things I should think.

Job description. Absolutely. Yeah.

Let move to another area. Your Always. Alright, So it's no secret layoff.

People are worried. Uncertainty know our markets see it with my friends calling me from jobs. Sure.

How is this affecting? Cause open source is somewhat, it was in Yeah. Source.

Somewhat you'll Yeah. I mean some affects us all, but how, how is this most recent cycle you think affecting open source communities, even the Ivan business? Yeah.

So, uh, I mean we did some downsizing on our side, but it was more to make room for new leadership. We're now hiring like crazy. So I can tell you that between product and engineering, I'm hiring, uh, 40 people Wow.

In that area. And in our sales side it's, it's almost double that amount hiring, uh, between April of this year, April of next year, which is, so we're doing quite a bit of hiring. We're just shifting.

We're being more concentrated on how we're spending and what we're doing. Uh, so I think if anything, it just helps people rethink their strategy and focus on the things are gonna in revenue and growth. It's different environment and it's harder.

One of the things and one of the reasons why we launched that new version is specifically for cost savings and how are companies gonna look at, you know, reducing their cloud bills, optimizing their consolidating vendors. These are all things that we're days of tightening like we're having now. Yep.

And I think that that's pretty natural and as a product organization, we have to think about how we focus on those challenges customers are having so that we meet them there. And that optimizing and cost, price, performance, anything that we can do to help makes a big difference in their plans and what they're doing. So.

Right. No, that's, that's, that's exactly the kinda stuff customers wanna hear for sure. Help more efficient, how can I squeeze outta Excellent.

We're almost get information on, I obviously go Ivan aecom or like the website where ramp Credit services, you can basically do whatever you want. It's the full access to the platform and then you put in a credit card and provision more and keep using it. Uh, and then of course you can get in touch with someone if you want a different deal or bigger deal or something like that.

So there's a lot of, uh, lot of flexibility, but we're completely self-service. We believe in product growth, but at the same time we also a lot capabilities to serve large enterprises. So we try to do both and, and yeah, that's, that's our focus.

That's Excuse.